James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 3

East Boston

We were recently surprised to learn that the East Boston Immigration Station had been demolished. Billed on its opening in 1920 as Boston’s Ellis Island, the hideous yellow box wedged into Logan Airport at the tip of Jeffries Point in Boston Harbor processed around twenty-three thousand immigrants before […]

Stambul

For someone brought up on Christian churches, East or West, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, the simplicity of the great Islamic mosques of Istanbul can be both over- and underwhelming.

We’re reminded of a church across Market Street in San Francisco, where the saints’ statues crowd the aisles as thickly as a New York subway station at rush hour. Or the top of the Duomo of Milano, with its hundreds of wise old men in marble raining benedictions down on the city.

Of course, no one really knows what any of the truly ancient saints looked like, so the chances are, you’re praying to a likeness of the sculptor’s father, best friend, or wealthy patron. Still, western churchgoers always seem to be begging some ancient saint or mother figure to intercede with an impatient God.

But then you arrive in the Sultan Ahmet Camii or Blue Mosque in European Istanbul, and all you find is a huge, empty cavern. Beautiful carpets, fascinating tiles and lights, a lovely altar of sorts, and nice stained glass windows (although the Venetian originals are long gone). But no human likenesses of any kind–you just have to do your own talking to God.

Architecturally speaking, the dome itself is the main event, of course. At the time of construction, when Ottoman Turks ruled the world, the domes of these mosques represented an astonishing achievement of world-class science and mathematics. Give or take an earthquake or two, they have withstood the test of time just as well as most great western cathedrals with their long, airy naves and flying buttresses.

In a fascinating bit of history, the basic design for these grand buildings came from the Byzantine Christian church across the park from this mosque, the Aya Sofia. And the Kaaba in Mecca is said to have been built by Abraham, the father of both the Jewish and Christian faiths. It makes one wonder about all of the wars fought and still waiting to be fought between Islam and Christianity.

Still, even a Christian looking for a saint to talk to can’t help but admire the beauty and simplicity of an old man reading the Qur’an and gazing out a window at one of the great human cities of the world while kneeling next to the only decoration in the room, a functioning grandfather clock. Time might be passing, but you’d never know it.

Sleepers

We’ve now traveled by sleeper coach train through every major west European country except Spain, and it’s uncanny how the experience has reflected the culture of the train’s country of origin. The French sleeper was dignified and correct, if a bit prim. The Italian was a wonderfully stylish mess. The German was dour and efficient, with the Austrian just a little less of both.

The Hungarian and Romanian suffered from the tattered Balkan version of a Stalinist hangover. The Turk yearned for an ancient empire—with ancient, mostly broken-down, Victorian facilities to match. The Bulgarians came off faintly sinister and intimidating. The Brits were just so British—with a Scottish accent and a bacon sandwich on the way to Edinburgh.

The most intimidating station might have been Budapest Keleti—only because we alit in the middle of the night on a dirty, rock-strewn path with surging crowds and not a single civic light to point the way. The Ceaușescu government might have tried its joyless Stalinist best to overwhelm the masses with București Gara de Nord, but by then we were used to Eastern Europe and took it in stride.

The nastiest border crossing had to be Bulgaria’s Giurgiu Nord, where the guards yanked a passenger off the train for a faulty visa. The young man sank to his knees in the rainy mud and begged until they forgave him (a little tip for the underpaid civil servant, maybe?) and let him slink back onboard.

The most disappointing station proved to be Istanbul—if only because the tracks outside of town had been ripped up, and we all had to transfer to buses. Not exactly how you expected to arrive on the Golden Horn in one of the most glamorous cities on earth.

By far the best—and zaniest—experience occurred on our very first night together on a sleeper, back in 1992 on Glinda’s first trip to the Continent. It was New Year’s Eve, en route from Paris to Rome on an Italian train, but we were too jetlagged to check out any celebrations and fell asleep. Just after 12:30 AM, we awoke and, with nothing better to do, set off to wander the corridors.

In the dining car, we found a wild employee’s party, with the staff and engineers guzzling champagne by the bottle and wolfing down a buffet with all manner of delicacies. To our surprise, they welcomed us in, handed us a pair of bottles, then pointed at the food and ignored us. We were midway through stuffing ourselves full of shrimp, oysters, and foie gras, when the train screeched to a halt after running into a stray cow on the tracks. The engineers stumbled drunkenly off the train, shouting, gesticulating, and clearing away the unfortunate animal, then clambered aboard and went back to their jobs. All in an Italian night’s work.

In an era of jet travel, when fifty Euros and an hour will get you anywhere in Europe, we don’t know how much longer the European sleeper coach experience will be available. All of the trains we traveled still fill the cars, but the luxury is a relative matter, and it’s really all about nostalgia and the throbbing melody of the rails. Who knows how much longer people like us (and a smattering of adventurous Japanese tourists) will be around to foot the bill?

One thing is for sure—we will never travel by train without checking out The Man in Seat Sixty-One. Mark Smith is a gold mine of information for train travelers worldwide, and we have consulted him for years.

Galveston

The Galveston Seawall was always a little raunchy, but on the evening of September 13, 2008, we were still sorry to see the Balinese Room and its pier vanish into the jaws of Hurricane Ike.

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We used to walk from the nearby USS Flagship Hotel on Pleasure Pier (also wrecked) and guzzle on the Margaritas, supposedly invented here in 1948 by the bartender Santos Cruz for the visiting Peggy Lee (and named after her). Today, all that remains are an occasional wooden pile and a stray memento along the wall.

Opened in 1942 by the mobbed-up, bootlegging barber brothers, Papa Rose and Mr. Sam Maceo, the Balinese Room featured Sicilian food, exotic drinks, illegal gambling, and entertainment as varied and famous as Frank Sinatra, Burns and Allen, or the Marx Brothers. My jitterbugging mother-in-law Louvelle never missed a chance to strut her stuff on the big-band dance floor here when Guy Lombardo came to town.

In 1951, the well-connected club gave rise to one of the greatest all-time excuses for corruption. When hauled before a committee of the Texas Legislature, Frank Biaggne, the Sheriff of Galveston County, explained that he couldn’t shut down the notorious venue because he wasn’t a member and couldn’t get in the front door.

Sixty-four consecutive nights of Keystone-Cop raids by the authorities failed to find a single incriminating chip, until, in 1957, the Texas Rangers finally figured out the scam. Led by Captain Johnny Klevenhagen, the 17 men of  Company A found a mother lode of gambling equipment stashed at the already defunct Hollywood Supper Club. In one night, they tossed more than $2 million in chips, machines, and tables into the Houston Ship Channel–and sent with them one of the more colorful niches of Texan history.

Galveston remains a favorite spot for seafood and drinks, but after Hurricane Ike, it will never be the same. Of course, visitors like us might have said the same thing after the 1900 Galveston Hurricane that killed thousands and caused even greater havoc. Yet after the initial shock from Ike,  the locals don’t seem unduly fazed. Like the true Texans they are, they’ve just picked up and moved onward into the future.

Saint Andrews

The sunrise is the same, and the bunkers on the 17thhole look as fearsome as ever, but otherwise, there isn’t much to recall from journeys with my mother to the Old Course in Saint Andrews.

Mom was an accomplished amateur golfer by the time we started trekking northward in 1963 for her annual turn on the Turnberry-Troon-Gleneagles-Saint Andrews circuit. Even though she played on my father’s corporate memberships, Dad had long given up competing with her and had hung up his clubs. So she enlisted her 11-year-old son as a travel companion and pretend-caddy, and off we went.

In Saint Andrews, we climbed off the train on a rail line that no longer exists at a station that has since been turned into a touristy pub, the Jigger Inn. The railway hotel where we stayed is now the massive Old Course Hotel, no more Scottish than the Pebble Beach Inn of Monterey, with solidly American fare in its Sands Grill and expense-account glitz décor in the lobby and rooms. None of the wearisome, but oddly comforting, inconveniences I recall from the anachronistic Victorian retreats of my youth.

Money, it seems, has arrived in Saint Andrews to stay, and railing against modernity has a King Canute feel to it—Canute being the Saxon monarch who sat his throne in the North Sea surf and commanded the waves to recede. The waves ignored Canute, and the modern world continues to dumb down and average out all the kinks that used to make life so interesting—and maybe so miserable—for so many.

Yet maybe all I’m sensing is a nostalgia for the remarkable woman who bore me. The daughter of a hillbilly schoolteacher from Tennessee, Mom ripped out her roots in Akron, Ohio, to become the chief organist of a Protestant cathedral and first flute in the symphony orchestra. In World War II, she landed a job as a high-ranking officer in the Women’s Army Corp, and afterwards conquered Gimbel’s as the senior buyer for Ohio.

In the fashion of the times, she gave all that up to mother her three children, but before long, she had moved to Europe and transformed herself into a superb painter, golfer, and chef. It didn’t matter what you tried, she always said, as long as you set out to become the best at it.

As Ella Winter famously remarked to Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again.” And nothing brings back that sentiment like a trip to the newly manicured Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Saint Andrews. Yet I somehow doubt that Mom would have cared. She would have simply led the charge onto the next mountain in her path and transformed it, as she always did, into a minor molehill.

Scotch

Before we settle down to a wee dram of Talisker 18-year, peat-smoked, oak-matured, distilled and unfiltered, single-malt Scotch whisky, a handful of definitions:

Whisky—A spirit made from grain (as opposed to grapes for brandy or potatoes for most vodkas). The feedstock for a whisky distillery is in fact a low-alcohol beer (mash), while the feedstock for a brandy operation is a dense wine. Any grain will do for whisky, but the queen of Scotch cereals is barley, with wheat and rye as her handmaidens.

Scotch—All kinds of legal requirements here. Made in Scotland, of course, and aged at least three years, using no additives beyond grain, yeast, caramel coloring, and the finest Scottish water. From 40% to 94.8% alcohol, although most whiskies max out at either 68% (the strength in the cask) or a diluted 46% (you can drink a lot of the real thing without losing your mind). The only whisky legally produced in Scotland is—you guessed it—Scotch.

Malt—Barley is soaked and then dried to start and stop germination. This converts the starches into sugars, which the yeast feeds on to produce fermentation and alcohol. Traditionally, the grains were spread out a foot deep on a special Malting Floor that allowed air and smoke to percolate through and flavor the resulting mash. You can still find a few of these floors in operation.

Single Malt—All Scotch is processed in batches in copper pot stills, as opposed to continuous (column) stills, which are illegal in Scotland. “Single” means that the whisky in your bottle comes from a single batch. Blended whiskies can come from a blend of batches and might or might not include grains other than barley. Trust the label—in Scotland, they canna tell a lie (about Scotch anyway).

Peat-smoked—Peat is a strange material, created when vegetation piles up over millennia  without adequate drainage to dry it out. It is cut in fireplace-sized bricks out of bogs all over Scotland and Ireland. There was a time when the smell of burning peat was as pervasive in the Highlands as the eternal mists from the latest rainstorm. Today, few people heat their houses with the material, but it is still burned in the malting process for its smoky flavor. Highland Scotches tend to reek of peat, compared to their less pungent Lowland cousins. Try a dram of Laphroaig if you dare.

Distilled—One of those processes that makes you wonder how the ancients came to invent the toys and foods of the modern world. Alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water, so when you boil a mixture of the two and draw off the steam, the percentage of alcohol in the finished product rises. Most Scotch is distilled twice.

Unfiltered—Lowlanders from the East sometimes cold-filter their final product, whereas Highlanders generally prefer the unfiltered original. It might build strength and obstinacy, but we’re less sure about wisdom.

Oak-Matured—All Scotch, blended or unblended, is stored and matured in white oak casks that have been fired for flavor. Casks are re-used—an occasional treat can even be found in whiskies finished in used port, sherry, or (our favorite) rum casks.

18-Year—The age refers to the youngest whisky in the bottle and is strictly enforced. That means this whisky has been growing and maturing for longer than someone’s children.

Talisker—Both distillers and bottlers name their whiskies. Talisker, founded in 1830 by my mother’s McCaskills and located at Lat 57 17′.9N, Long 06 21′.5W (according to their label), is the largest distiller on the Isle of Skye. This qualifies them as a Highland Scotch. In the Eastern Lowlands, Scotch is a big business, with slick, massive operations to feed the worldwide export market. The Highlands are as wide-ranging, eccentric, and individualized in their approach as any French or Italian wine-growing region.

Dram—An ancient apothecary measure, the drachm, derived its name from the Greek and then gave the Scots this synonym for a small drink—the word “small” being up to liberal interpretation by your always friendly and helpful Scottish bartender.

Wee—A Scottish word for “small” that sounds like a touristy cliché—except that everyone seems to use it without a hint of self-consciousness.

And now finally!!! Time to shut up and drink it down…

Macbeth

King Mac Bethad mac Findlaích might have burned to death his first superior (Gille Coemgáin) and beheaded his second (King Duncan I), but as medieval Scottish political leaders went, he was no more vicious or ruthless than the average. Nevertheless, by the time William Shakespeare had finished turning Mac Bethad into Macbeth, his reputation was destroyed forever.

Not to mention his poor Queen Gruoch ingen Boite. Yes, she married Mac Bethad after the burning of her first husband Gille, but there wasn’t a hint of seduction or madness in her history—certainly nothing as off the wall as a Lady Macbeth.

From Shakespeare to Mel Gibson, Scottish history has been twisted, turned, and flat-out invented to serve the purposes of short-term propaganda. Shakespeare in particular was an expert at coddling the ego and aspirations of his sovereign. He produced the tragedy Macbeth sometime after 1605, just as the Scottish King James I was ascending the English throne. As a Catholic Scotsman in a country full of angry English Protestants, James needed all the help he could get.

The truth is that the standard for most kings of Scotland ranged from brutally incompetent to dismally ineffectual—and it wasn’t entirely their fault. The clan system was always the true locus of power in what was already a geographically ungovernable country. A king was lucky to rule more than half of the country, much less die in his bed.

So… In Scotland, you never know where history ebbs and legend flows, but one accounting has it that Mac Bethad met his end at the Peel of Lumphanan west of Aberdeen in the Eastern Lowlands. Duncan I’s vengeful son, the future King Malcolm III, drove Mac Bethad’s army off the fortification and then beheaded him on what is now called Macbeth’s Stone (underneath the tree in the top photo).

Or so the story goes…

Smithfield Market

Is it just me, or is there something a bit off about the English staging their public executions across the square from the oldest and largest wholesale butcher’s market in London? Admittedly, Smithfield boasted one of the larger open spaces in town, and executions were one of the more popular forms of entertainment available to the masses, so the huge crowds needed accommodation. But still, it seems a bit tacky.

For the 200-plus Protestant Marian Martyrs burned at the stake here by Bloody Mary Tudor in the 1550s, the point seems to have been to focus their final cries of agony on the nearby gate of Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great. For the swindlers and forgers boiled in oil and the poisoners and thieves hanged and burned over the next several centuries, religious spite seems to have been less of a factor.

One of the strangest deaths occurred in 1381 when the 14-year-old King Richard II and a handful of courtiers confronted thousands of the rebels then overrunning London as part of the Peasants Revolt. The king beckoned forward the insurgent leader Watt Tyler, who insulted His Majesty, demanded refreshment, then got into a tussle with the courtiers. William Walworth, the Mayor of London, stepped forward and stabbed Tyler to death. Somehow, the boy King got control of the situation and led the mob off-stage, adding to his very brief reputation for wisdom and bravery.

The most famous execution on the site featured William Wallace, the rebel patriot (if you’re Scottish) or marauding killer (if you’re English). The English King Edward I, known as Longshanks, seems to have developed a particular venom for Wallace. He pardoned and negotiated with virtually every other Scot who ever rebelled against him, but insisted on hanging, drawing, and quartering the unrepentant Wallace. The English crowds in attendance were overcome with a delirious joy.

By the 19th century, Smithfield Market had descended into debauchery and mayhem. A man could sell his unwanted wife (seriously!) in the morning and use the proceeds that night to wade through the throngs of prostitutes in Cock Lane. As one observer noted: “Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed, there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place, West Smithfield Market, for cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, disgusting and shuddering sights, and every obnoxious item that can be imagined; and this abomination is suffered to continue year after year, from generation to generation, in the very heart of the most Christian and most polished city in the world.”

Today, more than 150,000 tons of meat pass through the market doors, all of it classified as ‘dead’ (as opposed to ‘live’). One of the more grotesque features is a butcher shop that will sell you ‘Human Meat’—beef trimmed and cut up to resemble human body parts. Everything for your dinner party from fingers and penises to entire torsos. Fitting as it sounds, given the area’s history, it all seems just a bit tacky.

Smithfield

Is it just me, or is there something a bit off about the English staging their public executions across the square from the oldest and largest wholesale butcher’s market in London? Admittedly, Smithfield boasted one of the larger open spaces in town, and executions were one of the more popular forms of entertainment available to the masses, so the huge crowds needed accommodation. But still, it seems a bit tacky.

For the 200-plus Protestant Marian Martyrs burned at the stake here by Bloody Mary Tudor in the 1550s, the point seems to have been to focus their final cries of agony on the nearby gate of Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great. For the swindlers and forgers boiled in oil and the poisoners and thieves hanged and burned over the next several centuries, religious spite seems to have been less of a factor.

One of the strangest deaths occurred in 1381 when the 14-year-old King Richard II and a handful of courtiers confronted thousands of the rebels then overrunning London as part of the Peasants Revolt. The king beckoned forward the insurgent leader Watt Tyler, who insulted His Majesty, demanded refreshment, then got into a tussle with the courtiers. William Walworth, the Mayor of London, stepped forward and stabbed Tyler to death. Somehow, the boy King got control of the situation and led the mob off-stage, adding to his very brief reputation for wisdom and bravery.

The most famous execution on the site featured William Wallace, the rebel patriot (if you’re Scottish) or marauding killer (if you’re English). The English King Edward I, known as Longshanks, seems to have developed a particular venom for Wallace. He pardoned and negotiated with virtually every other Scot who ever rebelled against him, but insisted on hanging, drawing, and quartering the unrepentant Wallace. The English crowds in attendance were overcome with a delirious joy.

By the 19th century, Smithfield Market had descended into debauchery and mayhem. A man could sell his unwanted wife (seriously!) in the morning and use the proceeds that night to wade through the throngs of prostitutes in Cock Lane. As one observer noted: “Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed, there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place, West Smithfield Market, for cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, disgusting and shuddering sights, and every obnoxious item that can be imagined; and this abomination is suffered to continue year after year, from generation to generation, in the very heart of the most Christian and most polished city in the world.”

Today, more than 150,000 tons of meat pass through the market doors, all of it classified as ‘dead’ (as opposed to ‘live’). One of the more grotesque features is a butcher shop that will sell you ‘Human Meat’—beef trimmed and cut up to resemble human body parts. Everything for your dinner party from fingers and penises to entire torsos. Fitting as it sounds, given the area’s history, it all seems just a bit tacky.

Rubha an Dùnain

My mother’s McCaskills collided with their dreary little bit of history in 1832, when they were evicted from their village Rubha an Dùnain on the Isle of Skye and booted off to North Carolina to make way for flocks of more docile and profitable sheep. Thus arrived on Skye the outrage known as the Highland Clearances, which over the next several decades would see the wealthier Scottish landowners deliberately depopulating their country in order to increase their personal fortunes.

It baffles the imagination that the Highland clans for centuries had proved so utterly ungovernable, yet with the breakdown of the clan system after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, they passed so meekly into the night. But they did, more or less, and Scotland lost hundreds of thousands from the best educated proletariat in Europe. Even today, the Highlands are one of the least populated areas in the world, with 500 individuals owning more than 90% of the land.

One odd twist of this history occurred when the Highlanders who refused emigration took their native ferocity into service in the British Army. Regiments like the Black Watch became the shock troops of the British Empire, as fearsome and feared throughout the 19thcentury as any SS Panzer or Special Forces unit of the 20thcentury. From Waterloo to Lucknow to Magersfontein, the human wave attack known as the Highland Charge swept all before it.

For centuries, the Isle of Skye had borne the brunt of the most vicious warfare between the MacLeod and MacDonald clans. In one episode, the MacLeods caught 395 MacDonalds in a cave on the nearby island of Eigg and burned them to death. The MacDonalds retaliated by trapping the MacLeods at worship on a Sunday morning, barring the doors to Trumpan Church, and burning the lot to the ground.

In this mess, my mother’s McCaskills had hired out to the MacLeods as a form of coast guard, warning them whenever the MacDonald boats approached. Yet by the late 18thcentury, the clan system and all of its nastier rivalries had been swept away. The McCaskills of Rubha an Dùnain were rendered superfluous.

Removal usually involved burning the roof timbers of a cottage to prevent the tenants from reoccupying it. In at least two instances, the landlords forgot to remove a sick and elderly grandmother from her bed before burning her house down around her. Eventually, the sight of entire villages in flames, their citizens left to fend for themselves in the bitter Scottish weather, proved too much for even a 19thcentury Victorian stomach. But by the time the Her Majesty’s Government stepped in, an entire way of life had vanished.

Today, the once impoverished village of Rubha an Dùnain is a ruin at the tip of a barren peninsula, a rough three-mile trek over private MacLeod land from an end-of-the world campsite in nearby Glenbrittle. The locals all remember the McCaskills from the stories handed down through the ages. Yet as nasty as our Scottish finale might have been, it’s hard to feel sorry for the Americans who emerged from the ashes.

My own branch farmed tobacco in the Carolinas and Tennessee, then joined the northward migration of the 1930s Depression to work in the rubber factories of Akron, Ohio. This week, their descendant came full circle via Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Bruxelles, to stay in a four-star hotel and gaze out over the water and wonder at the vagaries of history.

Some small justice in that?