Photo of the Day: A View to the Bridge

“The bridge” in question, in this photo from a couple of days ago, on a clear, late autumn afternoon, is the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge—which many residents of the tristate area like myself still think of as the Tappan Zee Bridge. You can see it in the background, in the upper left-hand corner.

I took this shot from a hill overlooking Veterans Memorial Park in Nyack, NY—a good vantage point to see so much of the Hudson River in Rockland County.

Photo of the Day: Carson McCullers House, Nyack NY

Eighty-five years ago this month, a debut novel of unusual sensitivity, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published. The author, the Georgia-born Carson McCullers, achieved wide acclaim for this study of a deaf mute and those who encounter him.

In 1945, McCullers moved into the house in this photo, which I took last month on my way to the Nyack Public Library in Rockland County, NY. 

Here, for the next 22 years until her death in 1967, under increasingly difficult physical and emotional conditions, the author turned out additional novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and autobiographical works filled with compassion for the misfits and dreamers of the world—those similar to herself.

Here also, Marilyn Monroe, playwright husband Arthur Miller, and novelist Isak Dinesen came to lunch in February 1959 (an encounter I discussed in this blog post from 17 years ago).

From a sign outside, it appears that her former home is being renovated by Aurell Garcia Architects, so I did not step inside. It will be interesting to see how it will be used and visited when the process is completed.

Quote of the Day (Hans Christian Andersen, on How ‘All Nature is a Series of Miracles’)

“ ‘All nature is a series of miracles,' said the candidate, 'but we are so accustomed to them that we call them things of everyday life.'”—Danish author of fairy tales, plays, travelogues, novels, and poems Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), “The Puppet Showman,” in Pictures of Sweden (1852)

I took this photo of the Hudson River as viewed from Memorial Park in Nyack, NY, in mid-September 2020.

Photo of the Day: Fall View of Park and River, Nyack NY

This past Saturday, with daylight contracting and fall descending more heavily, I drove up to Nyack, NY. Though longtime readers of this blog know that I have strolled through this Rockland County village filled with lovely Victorian homes a fair amount in recent years, I visited more often in the 1980s, when a good friend of mine lived here.

My friend, who moved down to Florida in the early 1990s, passed away in late May. Though the warm temperatures down south were better for her health during the winter, she had thought of moving back up here several years ago, only to defer the decision because of the pandemic and insufficient income in the changing real estate market.

On one of our many long-distance phone calls, she grew weepily nostalgic about the changing seasons she missed from the Northeast. Unable to pay my final respects after her death in Florida, I thought of revisiting the town that had once meant so much to her.

Veterans Memorial Park, which I managed to photograph just before sunset, seemed a pretty good spot to bring my friend viscerally to mind again. It was just down the street from her home, and from the shoreline she would often push off into the Hudson River with her kayak.

Nyack is a unique community, with a long history and bohemian vibe to go with its picturesque riverine setting. But a place is more than a point on a map or a real estate agent’s listing, but a collection of souls.

In the restless journey of her life, one such soul settled here for a while. Last Saturday afternoon, the sunlight along the Hudson may have faded, but I knew that my friend’s impact on my life would not.

Photo of the Day: Goodbye to Winter in Nyack, NY

Earlier this week, a local TV weather forecaster explained the difference between astronomical spring (based on the orbiting cycle that produces the vernal equinox on March 20) and meteorological spring (based on annual temperature cycles). The two, she noted, did not coincide.

But this afternoon, throngs of walkers in Nyack, NY, considered the two forms of spring in alignment.

At Memorial Park, in this photo I took, people were enjoying the sunshine and the temperatures hovering near 60 degrees. When not strolling with parents or congregating with friends their age, teens were using the skateboard park.

Only 24 hours before, the wind-chill factor plunged precipitously, leading me to cut short my daily walk near where I live in northern New Jersey. That seemed like the last vestige of winter until I came across these large mounds of snow in Memorial Park.

In my own driveway, the last bit of snow from the roughly 30 inches of snow dumped this winter had melted more than a week ago. I wondered how high the snowbanks in this park must have been piled before the intermittent warmer temperatures and rain of the last three weeks had begun to have an effect.

As I looked beyond the snowbanks to the Mario Cuomo Bridge across the Hudson, I felt like waving the winter of 2020-21 goodbye, with a big smile and not the slightest nostalgia. 

Photo of the Day: Sign Noticed in Nyack NY

I took this photo over a month ago in Nyack, NY—many of whose residents, like a great number nationwide, hope to translate this into reality exactly a week from today.

Quote of the Day (Helen Hayes, on How a Star May Unbalance a Play)

“It is difficult, if not impossible, for a star to occupy an inch of space without bursting seams, cramping everyone else's style and unbalancing a play. No matter how self-effacing a famous player may be, he makes an entrance as a casual neighbor and the audience interest shifts to the house next door.”— Irish-American stage and film actress Helen Hayes (1900-1993), On Reflection: An Autobiography (1968)

Helen Hayes—born 120 years ago today in Washington, DC—was trying in the above quote to convey her unique burden as “The First Lady of American Theater.” But she may as well have been talking about the psychic (and often physical) demands of any star carrying a play.

Many stars stagger under this yoke. But Hayes was made of tougher stuff. She got her instinct for acting from her mother, Essie, an actress with a third-rate troupe (“the Liberty Belles”) who hoped her daughter could have the stage career she couldn’t, and her unpretentious manner from her father, a salesman for a wholesale meat company.

Until her mid-20s, Helen was under the control of producer George Tyler, who did not allow her to socialize with other actors. Her decision to join Actors Equity, rather than the producer-friendly union that Tyler favored, the Fidelity League, marked the moment of her real independence.

Not long after this, the sheltered actress met, at one of the parties she began to attend, Charles MacArthur, the playwright-screenwriter who co-wrote The Front Page and Twentieth Century. He presented her with a bag of peanuts, telling her, “I wish they were emeralds.”

It was the least likely of matches—the son of a Protestant minister, he had grown up to be a prankster, a tall, charming womanizer, and friend of the Algonquin Round Table wits (including Dorothy Parker, with whom he had an affair leading to an abortion); she, a devout Catholic, convent-educated, awkward when not on stage, and descended from a Famine emigrant. Despite all of their differences, they were devoted to each other, marrying in 1928.

They represented theatrical royalty, an image reinforced in her maturity, with her roles in Victoria Regina, playing the British monarch from teen to ailing old woman, and The White House, appearing as several First Ladies.

Still, she was frank in later life about the difficulties in her marriage, including the loss of their 17-year-old daughter, Mary, to polio and Charlie’s alcoholic spiral after that. (The couple adopted their other child: James MacArthur, “Dano” of TV’s original Hawaii Five-O.)

Helen and Charlie maintained a New York City apartment and the more palatial “Pretty Penny” (nicknamed, the most common story goes, because of its hefty price tag), in Nyack, in Rockland County. (Rosie O’Donnell briefly owned the Italianate-style estate after Hayes’ death.)

Hayes began her 70-year theater career at age six and made her Broadway debut when she was eight. At age 19, with a fistful of credits, her name was suggested to Eugene O’Neill for the principal female role in his autobiographical play The Straw. The playwright, not knowing who she was, was initially skeptical about her ability or insight into his tragedy—not realizing that her Irish background and her parents’ troubled marriage gave her more understanding of his characters than he could ever imagine.

In time, she demonstrated this affinity—and the playwright revised his opinion of her—after her appearance in a radio version of The Straw. Had he lived to see it, O’Neill would also have loved Hayes in the posthumous A Touch of the Poet, as well as her last stage triumph, the 1971 Kennedy Center production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, when she played the thinly fictionalized version of O’Neill’s morphine-addicted mother. She died at age 92 on St. Patrick’s Day, 1993.

There is another Hayes quote from On Reflection that I am fond of. Decidedly unsentimental, it not only applies to her but also to the nature of creative achievement in general:

“This is the day of instant genius. Everybody starts at the top, and then has the problem of staying there. Lasting accomplishment, however, is still achieved through a long, slow climb and self-discipline.”

(The picture accompanying this post shows Hayes with Gary Cooper in the 1932 screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Despite the restrictions of censors, the two stars are better matched and more vibrant than the two who took over their roles in the 1957 remake, Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson.)