what about the plastic animals?

If I can but reach that bridge

Old Dutch Church

Bridge over the Pocantico

Catriena Ecker Van Tessel, Old Dutch Church Burying Ground

Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

"If I can but reach that bridge," thought Ichabod, "I am safe."

A 1798 outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan forced the Irving family to send their teenage son, Washington, to stay with friends up the Hudson River in Tarrytown.  While living in Tarrytown Irving became familiar with nearby North Tarrytown, a quaint Dutch village. 

Cemeteries make for a good picnic area and Irving would have spent time in the burying ground of the Old Dutch Church, built in 1685.  Behind the church runs the Pocantico River.  Travelers along the Albany Post Road, which is today's Broadway in New York City and NYS Rt. 9 its entire length, would have crossed the river on a wooden bridge a few hundred feet from the church.  The exact location of the original bridge is unknown.  The current day bridge that carries traffic over the river is named after Washington Irving but is not very interesting.  However, if you go into Sleepy Hollow Cemetery there is a recreated wooden bridge, engineered so that your car tires sound like a galloping horse as you drive over it.

Among the graves Irving saw was that of Catriena Ecker Van Tessel, wife of Petrus Van Tessel.  Petrus and his cousin Cornelius were prominent landowners in nearby Elmsford.  The Ecker family was also a prominent Dutch family that had settled in Westchester County.

Catriena died in 1793, so Irving would not have met her but he remembered her as Katrina Van Tassel in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  The character of Ichabod Crane is believed to have been based on a friend of Irving's and the character's namesake was a colonel Irving met while in the US Army during the War of 1812.  The real Ichabod is buried on Staten Island.

Irving himself is buried in a family plot in the adjacent Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.  The original name of the cemetery was Tarrytown Cemetery but it was renamed at Irving's request after his death.  His headstone has been replace several times over the years.  The village of North Tarrytown was renamed Sleepy Hollow in 1997, partly to capitalize on the legend, but mostly to get a fresh start after the devastating closing of a GM assembly plant.

During the warm months there are guided tours of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and the Old Dutch Burial on weekends.  I took the tour of the Old Dutch Burying Ground earlier in October.  Well, I started the tour.  The volunteer guide was a charming and very talkative older gentleman.  He was entertaining but it took us a long time to get out of the church and to the first grave.  Luckily that first grave was Van Tessel's so I wandered off and came back later to photograph it.

It was good fun wandering around those cemeteries.  I had wanted to see the Irving-related sites since I lived across the Hudson in Nyack.  The carved sandstone of the Dutch headstones with their unsentimental view (Mors Vincit Omnia means "Death conquers all") that death is an essential and inevitable part of life is oddly comforting.

Tomorrow, the Day of the Dead, will be dedicated to the scariest, creepiest spot in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.  Seriously, if you frighten easily, or are not strong of stomach you will want to avert your eyes.

Getting into the Spirit

Locust Grove, Ohio might not be large enough to have outskirts, but on the outskirts of Locust Grove is this enthusiastic display of Halloween creepiness.  Nearby I also came across a flock (gaggle?) of turkey vultures feeding on the previous night's roadkill.  Talk about creepy!  And Locust Grove is nowhere near Hinckley.

Tomorrow the secret mission mentioned a couple of weeks ago is revealed as we return to "a little valley, or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world.  A little brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose..."

Harmony Society Cemetery

On the way back last week I drove through the town of Harmony, Pennsylvania.  I had a fleeting thought  that Harmony was somehow related to New Harmony, Indiana.  On the outskirts of town there was a yard surrounded by a weathered old stone fence.  That intrigued me so I stopped for a look.

The yard is the cemetery for the Harmony Society, which was a communal sect from Germany that settled Harmony in 1804.  George Washington passed through, and was shot at, the site of the town in 1753, when it was a Lenni Lenape village called Murdering Town.  Anyway, the Harmonists lasted until 1815 when they sold the town to Mennonites and moved to Indiana to found New Harmony.  The Harmonists then returned to found nearby Economy in 1824. 

Harmonists covered their graves with rocks and did not erect tombstones.  They paid the Mennonites to put up the stone fence in 1869.  The gate pivots on a central axis.  It was a little scary but I did not get trapped inside.

I know what you're thinking.  If the Harmonists did not use tombstones, what's the deal with Johannes Rapp?  Johannes was the son of Harmony Society founder Johann Georg Rapp.  Junior died in an industrial accident.  The gravestone was donated by non-Harmonists, which a nearby sign explained "the society accepted reluctantly". 

In English the epitaph reads "Here lies and rests the body of Johannes Rapp... This stone made of clay will stand here until decay breaks down the salt of the earth to a new body (which) happy of live will arise".

Scary Circleville

Third place pumpkin

Mummy Pumpkin

The Freak Vegetable competition had a Most Unusual Freak category

Fried Bologna sandwich

A few scary items from the Circleville Pumpkin Show.  The third place pumpkin was 302.5 pounds lighter than the champion but it was more photogenic in a morbidly obese way.  In case you were wondering how large the world's largest pumpkin was... A Sharon, Massachusetts man grew a 1,878 pound giant this year.

The pumpkin show was great fun.  The less scary aspects will appear after the election.

Walter, Andrew and Louise, and Sam

Walter Chrysler

Andrew Carnegie and Louise Whitfield

Samuel Gompers

In the Halloween spirit I thought a little morbidity was in order for this week.  Actually, I'm just following Dane's lead.  Walter Chrysler, Andrew Carnegie and his wife Louise Whitfield Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers are all resting comfortably in the same cemetery near Tarrytown, NY.  Read into it what you will but Carnegie and Gompers are practically neighbors for eternity. 

I saw these folks on my secret mission earlier in the month.  They weren't the objective of the mission.  That will have to wait until Halloween itself.

Harlem Piers Park Opens!

View from the south end of the park

People on the pier

Fish cleaning station.

There are several of these unexplained signs

Bicyclists no longer have to divert onto 12th Ave.

Arriving home late Thursday night I noticed that the Harlem Piers Park opened while I was away.  It's a year or two behind schedule, and not all the park is open or finished, but it is finally open.

Currently the best thing about the park is that bicyclists can stay on the bike path and don't have to ride in the heavy and semi-lawless traffic under the Riverside Drive viaduct.  Fairway is across the street, so this is going to be a convenient spot to take a break.

There are plans to have a ferry from Weehawken (that's the ramp in the bottom photo) and to open the southernmost pier to kayaks and such.

Trivia question for the older New Yorker and/or Chuck Barris fan:  In the middle photo, what did those tall apartment buildings across the river replace?

Trip Map

I have returned.  As you can see I made a big figure 8 on the trip.  Except for getting across New Jersey and Pennsylvania I avoided the interstates as much as possible.  The curvy roads of southern Ohio are fun to drive, although I did fear I was going to lose my lunch on one particularly curvy, hilly road.

It was a fun trip with many highlights.  Dania and Chris were brave enough to meet me at the Circleville Pumpkin Show.  I saw a presidential birthplace, a monument to the hollow earth, many murals, many ice cream stands, a giant bucket, burial mounds, steel mills, terrazzo floors, passed through Utopia and half the solar system and helped a little friend across a highway.  All that and more to come, but first I have to report on an actual miracle in New York.

On the Fire Escape

I saw this guy on Jones St.  He stood there on the fire escape staring at me.  It was unnerving.

Skeleton with a Pearl Earring

I forgot the special cable that gets pictures from camera to computer, so I can't put up trip photos until I get home.  This picture is part of the window decoration at Lee's Art Supply on 57th St.

The trip has been fun so far.  I met a couple of Flickrites at the Circleville Pumpkin Show.  Except for tonight in Cambridge my entire time in Ohio has been spent south of I-70.

While driving around the state two thoughts have come to mind.  First, the Obama campaign has lots more money and is way more organized than the McCain campaign.  I've probably driven through a dozen county seats on this trip.  Without exception they all have an Obama-Biden campaign office located in a very visible part of town.  I think I've seen one McCain-Palin office in addition to the local Republican campaign offices.  The same is true on the radio, where Obama must be spending 10-20 times as much as McCain. 

The second thought is actually a question.  What makes a small city cranky?  Most downtowns I've seen have a lot of vacant or underutilized storefronts.  A small number of those cities seem really irritable, with half the businesses having a variant of a "no loitering, no skateboarding, no loud talking" sign taped to the door.  The signs don't accomplish anything other than maybe keeping bored teenagers and vagrants, who likely weren't going to be customers anyway, from frequenting the business.

Time to Play

It has been more than a year since I went out of town on vacation.  High time for a trip.  I'll be driving west into the land of the undecided voter later today.  I shall return no later than next Sunday.

Here's the most insightful election analysis so far this campaign season.