Slumming it

Dad was here over the weekend, down from visiting my uncle up in Boston. As opposed to last year, when I was living in the shithole also known as Harmony Hall (n.b. - incredibly enough the whackjob is, according to reports, still there), I have enough room to put him up for the whole duration of his stay, thereby saving him several hundred dollars. Same will be true for my mum when she comes; a week in a New York hotel does not come cheap.

Anyway, owing to work the amount of time I could spend with him was limited, but we did manage to go down to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which recreates (to the extent that it's possible) a set of tenement houses from the 1870s and 1930s, with a view to giving one an idea of what life as an immigrant to New York was like at the time. It was quite well done and rather informative, though as my Dad and other historians will tell you, perhaps the one thing that nobody quite grasps is just how bad most places used to smell until comparatively recently. This place didn't have internal plumbing, and I doubt that the people who run the thing want to have their guests coughing and gagging for air, so that much is, probably rightly, left to the imagination.

At the other end of the scale, we also had a look around Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace slightly further uptown and a world away in social terms. Roosevelt was, and is, the only native New Yorker ever to be elected president, and he was a truly remarkable man - naturalist, soldier, explorer, politician and educator, the sort of gentleman polymath that we don't really see any more these days.

Dad's gone back up to Boston now and I'm still slaving away in the library, though I was cheered by the visit of Isaac Young, late of Miyagi and now of this parish (well, sort of - he's at Cornell Law school), clearly in need of a bit of civilisation after a couple of months in the wilds of Ithaca. I myself will need to pack my survival gear - I'm off upstate this weekend for a wedding, one of K's friends, all the way up near Syracuse. Still - the weather has turned colder lately, and I'm even hopeful that we might see some autumn foliage. If not, then at least I'll finally manage to get out of the city and explore even a small part of the US for a change.