Though
a half million disembarked at the conclusion of the conflict, all too many
others never made it home. It is they, as well as all the others who perished
in American wars, that we remember and honor today—and pray that their supreme
sacrifice may never be repeated.
The actors
and crew can be seen in the background of this photo. I didn’t want to move
closer lest it aggravate production assistants who would, of course, loathe distractions
on the set of this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's acclaimed short story
collection.
Why did
the producers choose Sparkill, an upstate New York hamlet so small (less than 1,400 people) that if you sneeze,
you’ll miss it? Beats me, except that the state must have offered quite a
financial package to attract this business.
A local
businesswoman warned me before I drove up from Northern New Jersey that it
might be difficult to find parking near her store because of the movie
out-of-towners. So it proved, but I didn’t mind walking the few extra blocks.
Movie
location shooting can be tricky. Whatever publicity and dollars that might
accrue to the town often don’t mean much to local businesses that have to cope
with what sometimes turn out to be annoying and protracted disruptions of their
normal routines. What shows up on the screen may not be worth the turmoil.
My town,
Englewood, NJ, was the site of two Woody Allen movies, for instance. In Annie
Hall (1977), you can see the marquee of the then-still existing theater,
the Plaza, for up to a minute. Two years later, his script for Manhattan
called for what was evidently a satiric take on a Nazi rally. But you’d never
tell from the final cut: there’s only a scene of Woody and Tony Roberts driving
back into New York as evidence of something more.
It was a
more dismal outcome than another movie shot there the same year, the Peter
Falk-Alan Arkin farce The In-Laws. Any time I know it’s on TV, I can’t
wait for one of its maniacal car chase scenes, shot at the
southern end of my block, with my longtime church clearly visible in the
background.
A much
different experience unfolded in autumn 1999, when Robert Redford shot many
scenes for The Legend of Baggar Vance in Savannah, Ga. While on
vacation, I watched him on two consecutive days directing stars-in-the-making
Matt Damon, Will Smith and Charlize Theron in a courthouse scene. Onlookers
cheered wildly each time the actors waved at them in breaks.
Savannah was especially popular with filmmakers in the Nineties, with Forrest Gump also being shot there. But residents I talked to back then seemed to have especially fond memories of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Despite what many might have thought from his Dirty Harry scowl, Clint Eastwood
evidently personified geniality, posing for pictures with many star-struck
locals.
Ten years
ago this past May, as part of the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench on the Road”
project, the novelist attended a public ceremony commemorating an
individual who was part of the vast diaspora resulting from the forced “Middle
Passage” from African freedom to American slavery.
The
project took its name from Morrison’s 1989 observation about the lack of public
places “to think about…to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of
slaves.”
This
roadside monument honors Cynthia Hesdra, a former slave who became a
successful businesswoman and property owner in Nyack. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she aided others from the South in achieving the liberty and
opportunity she had come to enjoy.
The Underground
Railroad involved the transfer of an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people to
freedom—a mass movement in which countless ordinary citizens performed extraordinary
deeds. They changed America forever by defying legally sanctioned, government-sponsored,
shameful racism.
Visitors passing
through Nyack would do well to ponder how Cynthia Hesdra did her part, and how
each of us could do ours now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The formal name of this body of water is the Tappan Slote
(derived from the Dutch sloot, or “trench” or “ditch”). But it is also
called the Sparkill Cut (with “kill” coming again from the Dutch, for “creek”).
The names are a remnant of the first European settlers in this section of New York
State.
The industry that arose in this area depended on
water, starting with this creek, the only water passage north of New York City
which allowed sloops to get on the western side of the Palisades ridge. Across
the street from this spot arose a textile mill where, during World War II,
ripcords
for parachutes and ribbons for good conduct medals were manufactured.
Well, that was my intention, anyway. But as I got up and walked around, I quickly realized that the local meteorologists weren’t kidding when they said that the temperatures had dropped 10 degrees from yesterday.
And those winds—maybe they weren’t as bad as yesterday, but
they were whipping around the riverside enough to make it harder for me to grip
my camera as I took photos.
Obviously, this wasn’t an ideal day to experience this
stretch of the Hudson River. (The fishermen often out in force were not to be
found. But even now, the setting has a raw beauty, with the waves lapping up
against the sharp rocks and the town of Piermont, with their row of shops and restaurants,
waiting expectantly off in the distance.
It would have required an aerial shot to convey the pond’s
curve, but I was still taken enough with it to take this photograph.
I photographed the exteriors of several of these houses,
but I decided to highlight this one because of its combination of so many of
these elements.
This two-story brick structure in the Queen Anne style,
finished in 1887, includes a center gable above the main engine door. In its
tower, manual wound bells still alert members of calls. It has been on the National
Register of Historic Places since 1982.
A plaque on the left side of the building gave me a
more recent sense of this volunteer company’s tradition of sacrifice. On the
morning of September 11, 2001, after the World Trade Center was attacked, one
of the company’s members, Welles Remy Crowther, working for a financial
company, was credited with leading about a dozen survivors to safety before he
died when the towers collapsed.
Two other volunteers—Harry Wanamaker and Joseph Stach,
Jr.—were FDNY lieutenants who spent considerable time at Ground Zero assisting
in recovery. They died of 9/11-related cancer in 2010 and 2018, respectively.
This structure on North Broadway in this village was
begun in 1813 and dedicated the following year. The oldest church in Rockland
County, it first housed the Methodist-Episcopal Church of Nyack. Later it
served as a Unitarian Sunday school, then a non-denominational church. Now,
after restoration several years ago, it is listed on the NY State and National
Registers of Historic Places.
If the afternoon light is particularly pale here, it’s
because I took this photo in late December 2014, looking down from a height in
Nyack, a village on the banks of the Hudson River upstate in Rockland County,
NY. 
