Hudson on a Tuesday Afternoon

THE UPSTATE NEW YORK TOWN of Hudson is an extraordinary repository of 19th century residential and commercial architecture.

Its main drag, Warren Street, is a mile-long stretch of clapboard and brick buildings — mostly row houses, many with storefronts, but there are also some grand freestanding homes from the town’s 1860s whaling heyday. There’s virtually nothing more recent than the year 1900 to mar the street’s historic purity.

For decades, Hudson had been an economically depressed community, like many Hudson Valley river towns that lost their industry in the 20th century, and its back streets still have their fair share of poverty.

I hadn’t been in Hudson for some years and had heard there were new shops and restaurants, a whole lot of renovation and restoration, and that real estate prices had gone up alarmingly since I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article in The New York Times about spending my weekends doing recreational house-shopping.

Antiques are Hudson’s stock in trade, and there are dozens of tony shops full of fine furniture and art (priced to rival NYC), architectural salvage and vintage clothing. One would think they might be doing some brisk business in the week before Christmas, but last Tuesday afternoon, most of them were closed. Likewise the restaurants.

Hudson is a weekend community, it seems; it does not have the population to support businesses in mid-week.

But the town itself is an open-air museum for the old-house lover, and it was fun to explore the shops that were open, including the impressive multi-dealer Antique Warehouse on Front Street, chock full of stuff that made me wish I had a new house to furnish. And what I saw through the shuttered storefronts made me want to go back again to Hudson…on a weekend.

 

Van Morrison’s Belfast

IT’S AN EASY TWO-HOUR BUS RIDE from Dublin to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I traveled last week to fulfill my original goal in planning an Ireland trip in the first place: seeing Van Morrison in concert in an intimate supper-club setting at Belfast’s Hotel Europa.

Belfast is Van’s hometown, and I (mistakenly, as it turned out) thought he would surely give his all for a local crowd. But there seemed to be more Americans there than any other nationality. I met people from Arizona, New Orleans, Texas, Oregon, Chicago.

I’m a longtime fan of Van’s and had seen him perform half a dozen times, so I knew the show could be either a transcendental experience or just him, as they say, “phoning it in.”

Rock chick with a Belfast blowout

This one was probably more the latter, with a couple of exceptional moments. Van did the requisite 90 minutes and ran off with barely an encore or a thank you, without properly introducing his fantastic band or even his daughter, Shana, who joined him onstage for one number.

Still, I had a blast, seated at a convivial table of mostly Americans, plus one Swede and one Irishman, in a room holding just 350 people.

I spent only a day-and-a-half in Belfast, a city with some truly grand Neoclassical architecture interspersed with harsh modern structures, staying one night in a stylish boutique hotel called Ten Square and moving the next night to the Europa.

My Belfast explorations took the form of a daylong pilgrimage to spots Van has written about in his songs over the years, about two miles from the center of town in gritty East Belfast. I walked there from my hotel, passing some of Belfast’s major Victorian landmarks, crossing the Albert Bridge over the Lagan River under dreary skies.

Roughly following a self-guided walking tour laid out by a local development organization, I headed for Van’s humble birthplace on Hyndford Street, where he lived until adolescence, evoked in a long spoken-word piece on the album Hymns to the Silence; Cyprus Avenue, mentioned in more than one song, lined with stately homes he aspired to as a kid; and bucolic spots like the famous “hollow” of Brown Eyed Girl, and Orangefield, the park that inspired a gorgeous, romantic song on Avalon Sunset.

I wasn’t in Belfast long enough to fully understand its history of sectarian conflict, now mostly calmed, or pick up on the cultural differences between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK (the border my bus had sailed across was a sticking point in the Brexit talks while I was there, the TV news about nothing else). I didn’t have time to investigate Belfast’s restaurant scene or the galleries in the Cathedral Quarter, apparently the arty part of town.

But I saw plenty. Come let me show you what I did get to see of Belfast.

Above, an Art Nouveau relic, the first thing I photographed on getting off the bus from Dublin.

Lovely intact Georgian terrace (or, as we say in Brooklyn, early 19th century row houses), above.

The recently renovated Ten Square Hotel, across from the 1906 Town Hall, below (which I read somewhere is a “shameless copy” of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral — not a bad thing to copy).

View of Great Victoria Street from my third floor room at the Europa, with the world-famous, putty-colored Crown Liquor Saloon, an 1885 extravaganza of tile work, etched glass and carved wood, on the corner.

Originally a Victorian ‘gin palace,’ I was looking forward to a gin and tonic, but The Crown doesn’t do cocktails — only beer and whiskey.

The Soviet-style Hotel Europa was once known as the most-bombed hotel in Europe, or perhaps the world. Its new history began in 1994, after “The Troubles” subsided.

Next door to the Europa, the 1895 Grand Opera House survives!

Below, buildings of interest seen as I wended my way toward East Belfast.

The enormous St. George’s Market, below, is used several days a week for produce and such.

The 1869 Albert Memorial Clock, below.

Views from the Albert Bridge, below, one of many bridges over the Lagan River. Belfast was once a shipbuilding powerhouse. The Titanic was built there, and the Titanic Belfast is a massive new tourist attraction. Not for me, however — I was on my way to Van Morrison’s birthplace!

East Belfast, below, was quiet on a Tuesday morning in early December.

My first Van-related site, above: the beautiful grounds of the still-extant Elmgrove Primary School, a leafy contrast to the barren surrounding streets.

Above, “the hollow”

You remember:

Hey, where did we go, Days when the rains came?
Down in the hollow, Playing a new game…

Hyndford Street, above, was deserted. Number 125 — the “two-up, two-down” house of Van’s first 16 years — is marked by a discreet (that is to say, minuscule) brass plaque.

Down on Cyprus Avenue
With a childlike vision leaping into view
Clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe
Ford and Fitzroy, Madame George

I really enjoyed my stroll through Orangefield Park, above, even calling up the relevant song on Spotify, plugging in my earbuds, and listening to it as I walked. Dorky but perfect.

On a golden autumn day
You came my way in Orangefield
Saw you standing by the riverside in Orangefield
How I loved you then in Orangefield
Like I love you now in Orangefield…

Then I hopped a double-decker bus back to Donegall Square, above, in the city center (only because I couldn’t get a cab to stop).

There was a Christmas market going on in front of City Hall.

I felt like I’d really been somewhere — not just to the other side of town, but to a different era, and I came back with a prize: a deeper appreciation for the source of the music I’ve so enjoyed over the years.

In Dublin’s Fair City

THERE ARE 850 PUBS in Dublin — down from a peak of 4,000 in centuries past, when every other home, thanks to enterprising beer-brewing housewives, became a ‘public house.’ That’s one of the fascinating factoids I learned on my first-ever visit to Ireland’s capital city.

My cousin Susan and I visited quite a few of those pubs, with an emphasis on the historic, and sampled their fine products. I’m now a fan of Irish whiskey, neat (Red Breast, Yellow Spot, Teelings) and of Guinness, which I thought I wouldn’t like, but after a day of tromping around Dublin’s cobblestone streets and mingling with the Christmas-shopping crowds, I found it just the revivifying, delicious thing.

When it’s on draft at an atmospheric, 300-year-old Dublin pub, where they pull it at just the right angle and let it sit for a specified length of time before topping it off, and serve it at just the right temperature, one can easily begin to understand why Guinness is a national obsession.

Three-and-a-half days in Dublin — a place I’d long wanted to visit — was all good. The city is civilized, safe, friendly, easy to navigate. We had several outstanding meals without half trying. Our hotel, Staunton’s on the Green, in a Georgian townhouse, was centrally located, gracious and comfortable.

Days are short in Dublin this time of year, with the sun coming up just before 8:30AM (!) and setting at 4. but we packed them full.

We toured Trinity College, top, with its 400-plus-year-old library, The Long Room, surely one of the world’s great interior spaces, and saw the Book of Kells, a millenium-old illuminated manuscript, as well as the original harp that became Ireland’s national symbol.

We saw hoards of Bronze Age gold jewelry at the national archaeology museum; took a gleefully touristy nighttime “literary pub crawl” led by a pair of funny and talented old pros; heard live traditional Irish music with fiddles and flutes; visited the small Irish Jewish Museum, poignant in its modesty; got a sense of Oscar Wilde’s posh childhood on Merrion Square and George Bernard Shaw’s working-class birthplace; tried on hats in millinery stores; ventured to Dublin’s medieval Christ Church Cathedral; found ourselves on the main shopping drag of Grafton Street (not especially interesting) all too often, and on the main drinking drag of Temple Bar just once, which was enough.

On Day 1 of our visit, when the bright, low winter sun cast long shadows on the manicured lawns of St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin was uplifting. On subsequent days, when the sky was bleak and gray and damp (exactly the weather I expected), it wasn’t quite as, though the city’s over-the-top holiday lighting goes a long way toward making up for the hours of dark.

I enjoyed the streets lined with late 17th and early 18th century flat-fronted brick townhouses with tall paned windows, and especially their multicolored doors under arched fanlights. There’s a goodly amount of spectacular Victorian commercial architecture in Dublin, and an unfortunate amount (well, any amount would be unfortunate in my book) of brutally misguided 1960s and ’70s building, with which the city is now stuck.

Is Dublin a beautiful city? Yes, though a visit at another season would probably make me  even more emphatic on that point. Have a look at my photos below, and see what you think.

Festive lighting in the shopping district compensate for the long hours of winter dark 

Above, our elegant high-ceilinged digs

Above, St. Stephen’s Green, the city’s largest park, on Day 1

Above: Trinity’s campinile; our cute tour guide in the gown once required wearing for all students; the college’s awe-inspiring, wood-vaulted Long Room; the legendary ancient harp that is  Ireland’s national symbol (more prevalent than the shamrock, even)

Below, a sampling of Dublin’s old-school pubs, including Kehoe’s, Toner’s, O’Donoughue’s

Late-day walk past Dublin Castle to the Cathedral, below

The River Liffey, by day and by night:

Weird scene near an illuminated statue of Wolfe Tone, leader of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, below

Classical Revival doors galore, with columns and fanlights, below

Single-story 19th century rowhouses in the Portobello neighborhood, below, and the birthplace of George Bernard Shaw, one of  four Irish Nobel laureates in literature 

Funky storefronts I couldn’t resist photographing:

There are numerous independent bookstores in Dublin, including the beauty below.

We twice tried to get into the 1920s Bewley’s cafe, below, never succeeded. Long lines.

Oscar Wilde’s plays were performed at the 1871 Gaiety Theatre, above, still operational. 

There’s Wilde reclining on a rock in Merrion Square, below, and a Victorian fountain in Iveragh Gardens, right behind our hotel.

We had the requisite Irish breakfast a couple of times, and Susan sampled Irish stew in a pub, but mostly it was fancy foodstuffs in a ‘modern Irish’ vein. Butternut squash seems to find its way into everything.

Above, at the canalside Locks restaurant, recommended by a self-described foodie we met, a precious one-inch fried fish ball in a butternut squash “velouté” (sauce), on a 12-inch plate, as a starter, plus an exquisite cod and mussel main. 

Below, the lunchtime scene at Fallon & Bryne, Dublin’s answer to Dean & DeLuca but with a wine cellar and upstairs restaurant as well as a gourmet food hall and cafe. Note the chunks of butternut squash in the green salad.

Hearty Irish breakfast, vegetarian edition, at Taste Food Co., below.

Below, Etto, a chic storefront restaurant near our hotel, where they were able to squeeze us in at the bar without reservations because it was 5 o’clock. That’s butternut squash risotto with chanterelles, extremely comforting with red wine.

Below, the grandly sited archaeology museum, one of four segments of the National Museum in Dublin. We marveled at the modernist-looking 3,000-year-old gold jewelry, skipped the mummified “peat bog men.”

A museum on a considerably smaller scale, below, dedicated to Ireland’s ever-dwindling Jewish community. The upper level was a synagogue, closed since the 1970s.

More festive lighting, nighttime scenes, a random building and your goofy blogger, below. That hat is just so me — too bad it cost 300 euros.