MASSACHUSETTS, CONNETICUT & RHODE ISLAND

Day 70/3 Mon Aug 11
MASSACHUSETTS (Boston, Springfield, Salem, Worcester)

ROCKPORT
The Paper House, Rockport. This was the summer home of Ells Stenman, built in 1922. It is framed in wood (and now covered in 2024). The insulation consists of 215 layers of paper. Wallpaper consists of tacked squares, and everything else (including many pieces of furniture) is made of rolled newspapers with a small amount of glue on one end, but then varnished. Everything looks like brown sticks. Just walk in, there was nobody around. Free. It was also a long drive. Bizzarium
Hammond Castle, Gloucester. Built by John Hammond (1885-1965) between 1922-26, he was an inventor (400 patents mostly in radio and remote control). He realized his legacy would not be his inventions so built this castle as a museum. It sits just above the ocean, has a nice garden and is a sprawling mansion built of stone with many architectural styles. Inside is an ecclectic collection of everything. Well worth the high price. $20, $15 reduced.

SALEM
Ropes Mansion and Garden. Built in 1727, it was inherited by the 3 Ropes sisters in 1893, renovated and turned a historic house in 1913. It is a typical 2-story white clapboard house with period furniture. The garden is wonderful with geometric flower beds. Original plants include the rhododendrons and a copper birch. $12, $10 reduced
The Witch House at Salem. This 17th century house was owned by Jonathan Cowenm one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. It is two-story, has low ceilings and period furniture. Not so interesting. $12, $10 reduced. This neighborhood has many old houses of historical importance. 
Salem Witch Museum. In a wonderful old church, there are two parts: 13 stage sets with actors portraying the trials and upstairs, exhibits on the image of the witch and Europeand witches. The Dark Side. $17.50 reduced.
Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Consists of several buildings: Customs House, Narbone House (one of the few 17th century middle-class homes remaining), Hawkes House, and the Derby Wharf (800′ long in 1762, it was extended by 1300 feet to accommodate all the trade, initially with the Orient and then more local. By the 1800s, it imported raw materials (lumber and coal) and produced textiles, shoes and much else. The wharf once had 15 wharehouses and many workshops, all gone now). There are many storyboards to read. The neighborhood was Irish in the 1800s and then Polish and Russian in the early 1900s. Free
ON McDonalds in Salem. I mooched better wifi from the M&T bank.

Day 71/4 Tue Aug 12
I drove part way to Boston very early to avoid traffic and waited at a McDonalds until things opened in Boston. Boston is a nightmare to drive around – there are many tunnels that have low clearance and are only for cars. To get to Cambridge required going around 2 tunnels and lots of detours. 

BOSTON
Bell in Hand Tavern. Started in 1795, this is America’s oldest tavern.
Union Oyster House Restaurant. Just down the block from the Bell in Hand, this opened in 1826 and claims to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant. The original building dates from 1716-17. A lovely rotating “doll’s house” of the restaurant was in the window.
Samuel Adams Brewery. The tap room was huge. A statue of Samuel Adams is in the square outside. Walk through a narrow park with several glass towers each highlighting a Nazi concentration camp.
Boston City Hall. A brutalist reinforced concrete building. Architectural Delights
Omni Parker House. Founded in 1855, the current structure dates to 1927. The hotel was home to the Saturday Club, which met on the fourth Saturday of every month, with members Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and The Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, diplomat Charles Francis Adams, historian Francis Parkman, philosopher, educator and abolitionist Amos Bronson Alcott and sage-about-town Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Charles Dickens resided in the Parker House for five months in 1867–1868. The hotel introduced to America the European Plan that charged only for the room, with meals charged separately and offered whenever the guest chose. It created Massachusetts’ state dessert, Boston Cream Pie. John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for Congress at the Parker House in 1946 and also held his bachelor party in the hotel’s Press Room there in 1953. The hotel currently has 551 rooms and suites
Old South Church. The church started in 1669 and this building in 1875. It was closed.
Trinity Church. This is a very imposing stone exterior with a high bell tower and copper roof, Inside is a large square church with most of the walls frescoed. It dates from 1753. $10, $8 reduced.
500 Boylston Street is a 1.3-million square foot postmodern building completed in 1989. The first six floors are retail and small office space. Above that there is a 19-story office tower.
The building’s distinctive design includes carved rose granite cladding with two-story windows, a vaulted copper roof line, and strong exterior column detailing. The main building entrance through a courtyard. Architectural Delights

Prudential Tower. The 2nd-tallest building in Boston, it was completed in 1964, and is 749 feet (228 m) tall, with 52 floors (surface/roof height),
The tradition of using the window lights to support local sports teams and events began in 1964 for the United Fund, “GO B’s” to support the Boston Bruins during the Stanley Cup playoffs and “GO SOX” or a “1” during important World Series and postseason games.
In the 1999, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018 Major League Baseball playoffs, the building’s tenants turned on and off their lights to spell out “GO SOX”. The tower appears in nearly all pictures of deep right field from the left field line, and is prominently featured in most broadcasts from the park. A normal display of 91 foot tall letters takes over 140 man-hours, covers 18 floors of the building, uses 165 additional window lights, and 260 window block out panels. Over the past few years, the Prudential Tower has been illuminated through LEDs). It has a 50th-floor observation deck Architectural Delights
South Station. Made of granite, it is another great Boston building.

CAMBRIDGE
John W. Weeks Footbridge.A lovely stone arched pedestrian bridge over the Charles River. It connects downtown Boston with Harvard. It opened in 1927 and was renovated in 2015 at a cost of $3 million. 
Harvard Art Museums. Three floors cover an incredibly wide range of art from Greek and Roman to ancient China and very modern contemporary art. Several galleries are named after the Sacklers of Percocet fame. There are two van Goghs, Monets, Degas, Gaugan, and many others. Free 
Harvard HouseZero. This small house was closed but from the outside, all I could see were metal frames over all windows that create a passive solar effect. It aims to reduce energy used to heat and cool buildings to nearly zero. Architectural Delights It is a wood-shingled building with zero carbon emissions, zero electricity required from the grid, zero electric lighting needed during daylight hours, and zero fossil-fuel-driven heating and cooling. It is an expensive test facility—a laboratory—not a model home. Nearly five miles of wiring capture 17 million data points per day to quantify how each of the innovations used in the reconstruction work best. The data flow from the system of windows and shades in response to inputs about temperature, rain, wind direction, and indoor CO₂ levels and airflows.
Many tons of concrete mass were added in the floors between stories during its renovation, as heat sinks to stabilize daily temperatures from night to day, and seasonally across frigid winters and scorching summers; fixed shading was added to window exteriors; and the existing windows were replaced with new ones that open and close automatically, as directed by a controlling algorithm running on the house’s “brain”. In summer the windows, which operate on very little electricity, open at night to cool the space whenever there is a temperature drop of 10 degrees or more, and then close before people arrive in the morning. Basement batteries store power from the photovoltaics on the roof, so the building is expected to cost almost nothing to operate.

Kresge Auditorium. Part of MIT, It was named after the Kresge Stores (corporate predecessor of Kmart).

The auditorium is defined by an elegant thin-shell structure of reinforced concrete, one-eighth of a sphere rising to a height of 50 feet (15 m), and sliced away by sheer glass curtain walls so that it comes to earth on only three points. Thin-shelled concrete technology was innovative for the times; the dome is proportionately thinner than an eggshell. The dome weighs only 1,200 short tons (1,100 t) and it is clad with copper. 
It contains a concert hall (with seating for 1,226 people), plus a lower level that houses a small theater (seating 177).
Every seat in the concert hall has an unobstructed view and free-hanging acoustic “clouds” that absorb and direct sound and contain lights, loudspeakers, and ventilation.
For many decades, the Little Theater was the primary on-campus small performance space, and was heavily overscheduled. Architectural Delights
Ray and Maria Stata Center is a 430,000-square-foot academic complex designed by architect Frank Gehry for MIT. It opened in 2004. Above the fourth floor, the building splits into two distinct structures: the Gates Tower and the Dreyfoos Tower.
The building has a number of small auditoriums and classrooms used by the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. Noam Chomsky, Ron Rivest, and World Wide Web Consortium founder Tim Berners-Lee have offices in the building.
A wide main passage runs the length of the building on the ground floor. A weekly fresh produce market. hacks (student pranks) include a “fire hose” drinking fountain, a giant slide rule, and full-size replicas of a cow and a police car.
Major funding for the Stata Center was provided by Ray Stata (MIT class of 1957) and Maria Stata. Bill Gates donated US$20 million.
Robert Campbell, architecture columnist for The Boston Globe, wrote a glowing appraisal of the building “the Stata is always going to look unfinished. It also looks as if it’s about to collapse. Columns tilt at scary angles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curves and angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That’s the point. The Stata’s appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity of the research that’s supposed to occur inside it. Architectural Delights

Museum of Bad Art, Brookline:In the Dorchester Brewing Co, it has 800 pieces of art from thrift stores, yard sales and curbside trash distributed throughout the bottom of the bar. Most pieces have a critique that are hilarious. Bizzarium: 

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. With fantastic architecture by I M Pei, it has the usual propaganda. There is no mention of the conspiracy theories surrounding his death and nothing about him being a sexual predator. $20, $18 reduced.
Old Scituate Lighthouse. Built in 1810, it is a white octagonal block bottom and a brick square top. In the War of 1812, two daughters of the light keeper prevented the British from sacking the town. In a 1813 naval battle, the captain declared “Don’t give up the ship” that became the motto of the US Navy. A long stone breakwater extends from the LH.
Maritime and Irish Mossing Museum. In a 1739 house, this small museum tells a lot about moss. Starting in 1847 and peaking in 1870, moss was collected from the beaches, dried and stored in moss sheds and the one here may be the last in the US. The museum has collected a lot of sunken ships and maritime artifacts that are spread around outside and inside. It was then sold for its carrageenan used then to make pudding and clarifying beer and now used in toothpaste, moisturizer and yoghurt.
By 1870 there were close to 100 Irish families. You can trace the roots of the whole influx back to Irish mossing.
Irish moss, formally known as Chondrus crispus, grows on the surface of undersea rock formations. Harvesting is traditionally done by hand, using a 12-foot rake to pry off the broccoli-like tops of the moss, being sure not to rip out the stems or “holdfasts,” which would prevent the plant from growing back. Mossers tended to travel alone on their 16-foot dories, usually for two hours before and after low tide so that the water is shallow enough to scope out algal prospects.
Proper preparation of Irish moss is just as critical as its harvesting. During Ward’s time, mossers dried their harvests on the beaches, a process that took several days. Weather was also a game-changing factor. Fresh water breaks down Irish moss in a process known as bleeding, turning it to a useless mush. If it was going to rain, they would have to put the moss in a pile and cover it with a tarp. $5

PLYMOUTH
Forefather Monument. Built in 1889 to commemorate the members of the Mayflower, it has an imposing stone plinth with a large statue with her right arm raised on top. Four seated statues with the sayings: Tyranny, Liberty, Peace, Prophet, Conquest, Mercy, Youth and Justice. Under each is a stone bas relief showing embarcation, landing, bargaining with the Indians and a man writing at table.
I saw Plymouth rock and the Plantation when I was here in 2008. 

CAPE COD 
Highland Lighthouse, North Truro. Erected in 1857, it is made of brick and 66 feet tall. It is not the original site as it was in danger of falling down the cliff due to beach erosion so was moved  over 18 days in 1996. It has tours given by the National Park Service
Race Point Beach. This vast beach is backed by dunes. 
Historic Provincetown Main District. 1000 buildings with shops, restaurants, art galleries and historic buildings. There is a monument to the Pilgrims.
ON McDonalds in Sagamore.

Day 72/5 Tue Aug 12.
FALL RIVER
Lizzie Borden House. (July 19, 1860 – June 1, 1927) was an American woman who was tried and acquitted of the August 4, 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. No one else was charged in the murders, and despite ostracism from other residents, Borden spent the remainder of her life in Fall River. She died of pneumonia at age 66, just days before the death of her older sister Emma.
The Borden murders and trial received widespread publicity in the United States, and have remained a topic in American popular culture, depicted in numerous films, theatrical productions, literary works, and folk rhymes around the Fall River area.
Her parents were Sarah Anthony Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden (1822–1892). Her father eventually prospered in furniture and caskets, then became a successful property developer. He was a director of several textile mills and owned considerable commercial property. At the time of his murder, his estate was valued at $300,000 ($10,000,000 in 2024).
Despite his wealth, Borden was known for his frugality; the Borden residence lacked indoor plumbing, and the wealthiest residents of Fall River generally lived in the more fashionable neighbourhood called The Hill. Andrew Borden married Abby Durfee Gray (1828–1892) three years after the death of Lizzie’s mother. Lizzie believed that Abby had married her father for his wealth. Tension had been growing within the Borden family in the months before the murders, especially over Andrew’s gifts of real estate to various branches of Abby’s family.
Murders of Andrew and Abby, August 4, 1892. Abby went upstairs sometime between 9:00 am and 10:30 am to make the bed. According to the forensic investigation, Abby was facing her killer at the time of the attack. She was first struck on the side of the head with a hatchet and then struck multiple times, delivering 17 more hits to the back of her head and killing her. Andrew returned at around 10:30 am. Lizzie called from downstairs, “Maggie, come quick! Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.” Andrew was slumped on a couch in the downstairs sitting room, struck 10 or 11 times with a hatchet-like weapon
On August 11, Lizzie was served with a warrant of arrest and jailed. The inquest testimony, the basis for the modern debate regarding Lizzie’s guilt or innocence, was later ruled inadmissible at her trial in June 1893.
Lizzie’s trial took place in New Bedford starting on June 5, 1893. Another axe-murder occurred in Fall River on June 1, five days before Borden’s trial began. There was all sorts of conflicting evidence. The trial jury acquitted Borden in 1893
Theories. Although acquitted at trial, Lizzie remained the prime suspect in her father’s and stepmother’s murders. Theories abounded, including that Lizzie was rumoured to be a lesbian. Despite the acquittal, Lizzie was ostracized by Fall River society. At the time of her death, Borden was worth over $250,000 (equivalent to $6,073,000 in 2024).
The story of Lizzie Borden has been created and re-created and has taken on the qualities of a popular American myth. The Borden house became a museum and operates as a bed and breakfast with 1890s styling. There have been multiple plays, books, articles, and TV shows made about the greatest unsolved murder, mostly sensationalized.
The Historic Lizzie Borden House. The museum features a variety of tours and experiences throughout the day and evening, including historic House Tours, Ghost Tours, and Ghost Hunts. Reenactments, photo ops, and haunted story times. They also offer Ghost Tours in Boston and the Best Ghost Tour in Salem!
$30, $7 more to see the basement. This was a sensationalized joke and a grand waste of money.
Maritime Museum. Some ship models and maritime paraphernalia. The highlight was a Titanic model and video. Another waste of time. $10, no reduction

NEWPORT
Navy War Museum. I followed Google Maps, which took me to Gate 1 (of seven) of the Newport Naval Base. There were security gates, and I was told I needed special permission. I just wanted to turn around, but they took 30 minutes to do a complete security check by the police. Eventually, I turned around on a road 25 m past the gate. I was told all foreign nationals must go through this. What a waste of time.
A similar thing had happened to me at an army base in Arizona. They turned me around in about 5 seconds. What a waste of time. But it was also dangerous as it brought me into contact with the police. Who knows what they could have found!
White Horse Tavern. Dating from 1673, it is a lovely bar with full dining – wood floors, a bar, and many photographs.
Newport Art Museum. Six exhibits, none exciting. $15, no reduction.
International Tennis Hall of Fame. Another waste of money. I knew most of the history: $ 25, $22 reduced.
Ochre Court. This magnificent mansion/castle is now owned by Salve Regina University, run by the Sisters of Mercy, in 21 historical buildings around Newport. It is a Catholic liberal arts school with 2700 students. Ochre Court serves as the administration building for the university. The main hall is a grand affair, the height of the mansion, with paintings on the ceilings and extensive ornate woodwork. I walked all over; most rooms downstairs were empty. There was a lot of gilt and other extravagant decoration. Free
Mansions of the Gilded Age in Newport were lavish houses built between 1870 and the early 20th century by some of the wealthiest people in the United States – the nation’s industrial, financial and commercial elite, who amassed great fortunes in era of expansion of the tobacco, railroad, steel, and oil industries coinciding with a lack of both governmental regulation and the absence of a personal income tax. The manor homes and city seats were designed by prominent architects of the day and decorated with antiquities, furniture, and works of art from around the world.
Many of the wealthy had undertaken grand tours of Europe, during which they admired the estates of the nobility. Seeing themselves as their American equivalent, they wished to emulate the old world dwellings on American soil, and spent extravagantly to do so, often seeking to one-up each other. Concentrations of such homes developed in the financial centers and resorts of the Northeast, the industrial heartland of the Upper Midwest, and in the rapidly expanding regions of the West Coast, with vacation homes also appearing prominently in Florida.
Newport has several, most on huge properties bordering the ocean. Four are in Nomad Mania’s House and Biographical Series. The Breakers was $32, and the rest was $25.
I entered the lobbies to have a quick look, but didn’t visit the entire house.
The cliff walk is on the edge of the ocean, bordering many mansions.
Chateau-sur-Mer. Its grand scale and lavish parties ushered in the Gilded Age of Newport, as it was the most palatial residence in Newport until the Vanderbilt houses in the 1890s. Chateau-sur-Mer was completed in 1852 as an Italianate villa for William Shepard Wetmore, a merchant in the Old China Trade. 
Marble House, built from 1888 to 1892 as a summer cottage for Alva and William Kissam Vanderbilt in the Beaux Arts style. It was unparalleled in opulence for an American house when it was completed in 1892. Its temple-front portico has been compared to that of the White House.
Rosecliff was built 1898–1902 by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, a silver heiress from Nevada, whose father, James Graham Fair, was one of the four partners in the Comstock Lode. It was a summer home suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. With little opportunity to channel her considerable energy elsewhere, she “threw herself into the social scene with tremendous gusto, becoming, with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish and Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, one of the three great hostesses of Newport.
The Breakers. It was built between 1893 and 1895 as a summer residence for Cornelius Vanderbilt II. The 70-room mansion is on land bought for $450,000 (equivalent to $15.7 million in 2024). Vanderbilt insisted that the building be made as fireproof as possible, resulting in a structure composed of masonry and steel trusses, with no wooden parts. He even required that the boiler be located away from the house in an underground space below the front lawn. The designers created an interior using marble imported from Italy and Africa, and rare woods and mosaics from countries around the world. It also included architectural elements purchased from chateaux in France, such as the library mantel. The Breakers is the architectural and social archetype of the “Gilded Age”.
Fort Adams. It was built in 1857 with 468 cannon and held 2400 troops to protect Narragansett Bay. It has elaborate earthworks (now mostly gone), two ditches and about five bastions. This is just another fort. Self-guided tour $16.
ON McDonald’s in Hope Valley, RI

Day 73/6 Thur Aug 14
CONNECTICUT (Hartford, New Haven, New London, Danbury)
Mystic Seaport Museum, Groton. This open air museum has a central museum (whaling, scrimshaw) and multiple exhibits in individual buildings – cooperage, printing press, mast hoops, nautical instruments, blacksmith, cordage, sail loft, fishing and several homes (meeting house, church, galleries). Some boats include: hydroplane racer (up to 260 km/hour), the Charles Morgan (a whaling sailing ship) and the Joseph Conrad (built in 1905 in Denmark, always a training ship. In 1934, it took 2 years to sail around the world. It is now rusting and looks unkept.). $35, $32 reduced. 
Mystic Art Gallery. One exhibit called Gifts of the Ocean, several exhibits from the local indigenous tribe: baskets, cornhusk figures, pottery, Wampum baskets. $10, no reduction

U.S. Navy Submarine Force Museum and Library (USS Nautilus), Groton. Exhibits on the Cold War and WWII. Great model of nuclear sub, periscopes, African American servicemen, and Trident and Poseiden missles. I did the tour of USS Nautilus (made the first polar crossing, retired in 1980). 

NEW LONDON
Lyman Allyn Art Museum. Don’t miss this great art museum with its enormous art library. American art from 18th century to present, China (traded initially seal fur for tea, silk and porceline, Opium wars and a large Tiffany collection with its astonishing art – glass, jewelry, enamelling, lamps, stained glass windows. $10, $9 reduced
U.S. Coast Guard Museum. Established in 1790, it has roles in fisheries enforcement, humanitarian response, and life saving. Free
Fort Trumbull is a massive granite fort at the mouth of the Thames River. Originally built in 1777, this fort was constructed between 1847 and 1852. It was captured by British forces under the command of Benedict Arnold in 1781 killing 85 soldiers. It was the Merchant Marine Officers Training School from 1939 to 1946 and the Underwater Sound Laboratory at Fort Trumbull. Exhibits include informative markers, cannon and artillery crew displays, and gun emplacements. $6, no reduction
Ocean Beach Park Is on the Thames River and Long Island Sound, and the islands of Fisher’s Island and Long Island can be seen. The long beach has golden sand, boardwalk, mini golf, kiddie rides, waterslides, olympic-size swimming pool, cafeteria, ice cream stand, nature trail, banquet halls, arcade, and often has live music performances.

OLD LYME
Florence Griswold Museum. Showcases the Old Lime Art Colony that started in Florence Griswolds boarding house. Many pieces of art including an entire gallery on cows and impressionists that were lovely. See the great video on the colony and then the restored house with painted doors and 44 painted panels in the dining room. $20, $16 reduced

ESSEX
The Griswold Inn, Essex. Dating from 1776, the entire bottom is a low-ceiling dining room/bar with almost every foot covered by a ship painting. Hospitality Legends:: 
Connecticut River Museum. The Turtle (the first submarine dating to 1773), the War of 1812 (British sank 27 ships, raided the wharehouses and tool all the rum and burned the town of New London), maritime artifacts, ship building and photographs going up the stairs and on the 3rd floor. $15, $12 reduced

Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center, Old Saybrook. In the “Kate”, a museum tells her story, her movies, costumes, personal letters and much memorabilia. Free
The “Kate” is a performing arts venue regularly holding converts. Their are many “stars” on the patio outside.
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress whose career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned six decades. She was known for her headstrong independence, spirited personality, and outspokenness, cultivating a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly playing strong-willed, sophisticated women. She won four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer – Morning Glory (1933), Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story, 
Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn began to act in college and then on Broadway. In the 1940s, she was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen partnership spanned 26 years and produced nine films.
She found a niche playing mature, independent, and sometimes unmarried or widowed women such as in The African Queen (1951), a persona the public embraced. Hepburn received three more Academy Awards for her performances in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). In the 1970s, she began appearing in television films, which later became her focus. She made her final screen appearance at the age of 87. Hepburn died in 2003 at the age of 96.
Hepburn famously shunned the Hollywood publicity machine, and refused to conform to societal expectations of women. She was outspoken, assertive, athletic, and wore pants before it was fashionable. She married once, as a young woman, but thereafter lived independently. A 26-year relationship with her co-star Spencer Tracy was hidden from the public. With her unconventional lifestyle and the independent characters she brought to the screen, Hepburn came to epitomize the “modern woman” in 20th-century America and influenced changing popular perceptions of women. In 1999, she was named the greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute.
ON McDonalds in Old Saybrook. 

Day 74/6 Fri Aug 15
NEW HAVEN
Late in the day, I lost my notebook so the following if from memory. 
Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana. Dating from 1925, this now is a modern restaurant with a lovely interior – large booths and many photographs of the old restaurant.
Louis Lunch. Dating from 1927, this is a very small brick building between two parking lots. It was closed for the month of August – to count their spoons. Looking through the windows, it is a small place with with a bar and the kitchen open. Three choir chairs were to one side.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. A square 6-story building with a facade of 75 marble squares surrounding the six levels of stacks separated by glass. The most recent exhibition on Islamic literature just ended. What was on display was a German Gutenburg bible form 1590s. This is a fraction of the books the library has. It has a very sophisticated fire system that avoids water (purges all the air out of the stack area or injecting a gas into the stacks. Architectural Delights
Ingalls Rink. The Yale hockey team’s rink. It has a novel architecture with a swooping hip roof. There aren’t many seats. Architectural Delights
Yale University Observatory. This open for public use of the telescope only on Tuesday evenings at 7 (dusk on clear days) starting August 26.
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. One of the world’s great museums on 3 floors. The third has great dioramas, rocks and crystals, and an interesting exhibit on how humans see compared to dogs (see only yellow and green), sharks (grey scale) and birds. Other exhibits include difference between humans and primates, human evolution and a lot on dinosaurs and evolution. Free
Yale University Art Gallery. Four floors of art – African art, European, American, Iraq (Babylon and Nimrud) and Neo Europa, a Roman ruin in NE  Syria that I had never heard of (and could not be visited when I was in Syria. The modern art section has several Picassos, Kandinsky, Dali, and several masters (Monet, Degas, van Gogh). Free
Yale Centre for British Art. Only the exhibit on the 4th floor was open – Five Centuries of British Art, little of which I liked (stars were Reynolds, Gainsborough). Free
Pirelli Tire Building. Built in 1962, it was sold by Armstrong Rubber to the next door Ikea and laid idle for 30 years until purchased by Hilton and is now called the Hotel Marcel. It was completely renovated to be environmentally neutral – solar panels, new lights, heat exchangers for the laundry, a new envelope, electrical kitchen. All is detailed by a small set of plans on the far right. The front lady at the desk told me a lot. Architectural Delights
PEZ Visitor Center. I had never heard of PEZ before so this was all new. This sugar candy was invented in 1927 in Austria and came to the US in 1970. It is famous for its many flavours and thousands of kinds of dispenser designs. $5, $4 reduced but only if paid in cash. Well-being: Factories.

BRIDGEPORT
National Helicopter Museum,Stratford. A tiny museum loaded with models and photos of all the old helicopters, It was 1933 before one was invented that could actually fly for long. It was dependent on building a turbo engine that was light and could produce enough power (invented by the same guy who invented jet engines and others). The docent was a retired pediatrician and a wealth of information. Donation.
Barnum Museum. Temporarily closed
Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo. I didn’t go.

NEW CANAAN
The Glass House. Philip Johnson’s House, only seen by tour booked online or booked at the studio five minutes from the house. The exact location is a secret. A condition of the municipal government was to maintain this system to avoid over tourism. Also on the 49 acre site are a sculpture museum, the Brick House (a guest house), a small studio, a ghost house (and ancient cabin covered with moss) and others. $25, $30 on Saturday and Sunday. I elected to stay in the area overnight and take the 9:30 tour the next morning. The Glass House is small, completely glass walls (curtains only for temperature control) and has minimal furniture. House and Biographical Museums
Johnson house, New Canaan. Home designed by Philip Johnson is now a designated landmark offering tours, gardens & a cafe. Architectural Delights

The Glass House (or Johnson house) is a historic house museum on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan, Connecticut, built in 1948–49. It was designed by architect Philip Johnson as his own residence. The New York Times has called the Glass House his “signature work”.
The building is an example of minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997. It is now owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is open to the public for guided tours, which begin at a visitors center at 199 Elm Street in New Canaan.
The house is an example of early use of industrial materials in home design, such as glass and steel. Johnson lived at the weekend retreat for 58 years; 45 years with his long time companion David Whitney, an art critic and curator who helped design the landscaping and largely collected the art displayed there.

The house is mostly hidden from the street. It is behind a stone wall at the edge of a crest in Johnson’s estate overlooking a pond. Grass and gravel strips lead toward the building. The house is 56 feet (17 m) long, 32 feet (9.8 m) wide and 10.5 feet (3.2 m) high. The kitchen, dining, and sleeping areas were all in one glass-enclosed room, which Johnson initially lived in, together with the brick guest house. Later, the glass-walled building was used only for entertaining. The exterior sides of the Glass House utilize charcoal-painted steel and glass. The brick floor is 10 inches (25 cm) above the ground. The interior is open, with the space divided by low walnut cabinets; a brick cylinder contains the bathroom and is the only object to reach floor-to-ceiling.
The Glass House contains a collection of Bauhaus items including furniture designed by Mies.
Johnson is quoted as saying that his idea for Glass House grew from “a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick.” Mark Lamster, in his biography of Johnson The Man in the Glass House, notes that this was plausibly Johnson’s attempt to “intentionally re-create the ‘stirring spectacle’ that was the burning of Jewish shtetls he had witnessed driving through Poland with the Wehrmacht”. Historian Anthony Vidler went further stating that the Glass House could be read as “a Polish farmhouse ‘purified’ by the fire of war of everything but its architectural ‘essence'”.
The pastoral landscape surrounding the buildings was designed with manicured areas of gravel or grass, trees grouped in what Johnson called outdoor “vestibules”, and with care taken in the shape of the slopes and curves of the ground.
Philip Johnson (1906-2005). Johnson spent three years designing the structure, which was originally one of two buildings (along with the brick guest house) on what was then an 11-acre (45,000 m²) tract.
The Glass House resulted in recognition for Johnson, not just in architectural circles, but also among the public at large. The house was featured in Life magazine. “What really sets Johnson apart is his aptitude for publicity.” The Glass House “established Johnson as the titular leader” of Modernist style in 1949. “If it was Mies van der Rohe who provided the real inspiration for the Glass House, it was only Johnson who could have built the house and lived in it himself. Johnson’s career began when he turned himself into the Man in the Glass House. In an instant, he became the austere apostle for modern architecture—or rather the modern apostle for austere architecture.” As Life magazine put it in 1949: “Except when entertaining, Johnson lives alone, servant-less and accompanied only by weather, paintings and books.”
The building created such a stir that at one point a police officer was posted nearby to keep out trespassers. It was once one of the most famous houses in the United States. Its celebrity may have done more to make Modernism palatable to the country’s social elites than any other structure of the 20th century.”
Before beginning his architectural career, from 1934 Johnson was a follower of the radical populist Louisiana Governor Huey Long, and, then, after Long was assassinated, of Father Charles Coughlin, an extreme anti-Semitic priest who detested President Roosevelt. Johnson became a correspondent of Coughlin’s newspaper. During his trips to Germany, Johnson wrote a positive review of Mein Kampf, submitted articles where he decried the “decline in fertility…of the white race”, described his visits to Hitler Youth camps, and gave favorable coverage of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Johnson Ian Volner wrote in his biography of Johnson that when being associated with Nazism was no longer advantageous for the architect he was able to “cover his tracks, [by] burning the bulk of his incriminating letters and articles in the brick-clad fireplace of his landmark Glass House.” In 1940, with the war looming, Johnson abruptly abandoned journalism and fascism, and entered architecture school. He was investigated by the FBI for his earlier contacts with the Nazis, was eventually cleared for military service, and served in the Army until the end of the War.
For many Yale University architecture students, it was considered a rite of passage for decades after the house was built to sneak onto the property and see how long they could walk around until Whitney discovered them and told them to leave.
After Johnson. Johnson wanted to preserve his estate as a public monument “with the aim of cementing his legacy”, even building Da Monsta as a visitors pavilion. After Johnson’s death, National Trust officials decided instead to build a Visitor Center in downtown New Canaan.
The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997. The house was the place of Philip Johnson’s passing on January 25, 2005, at the age of 98. Johnson passed ownership of the Glass House to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which opened it to visitors in April 2007. The trust expanded the size of the property, buying adjacent lots which extended it to 200 acres (0.81 km²). The Brick House, the guesthouse next to the Glass House, was closed in 2008 and underwent a $1.8 million renovation starting in 2023. The Brick House reopened in May 2024.

Johnson’s rambling estate also includes 14 structures Johnson designed, including the “Brick House” (1949–1950), which serves as a guest house, the Pavilion on the Pond (1962), Painting Gallery (1965) with 20th-century American art, Sculpture Gallery (1970) with 20th-century American art, the Study (1980), the Ghost House (1982), the Kirstein Tower (1985) (named for Johnson’s friend dance choreographer Lincoln Kirstein), and “Da Monsta” (1995).

The Painting Gallery building is built underground with an entrance modeled on Agamemnon’s Tomb. Large-scale 20th-century paintings by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman and more are displayed on a system of three revolving racks of carpeted panels. Johnson and Whitney acquired a large collection over 40 years, but much was donated to the Museum of Modern Art during their lifetime. The gallery still includes an 8-foot tall portrait of Johnson by Andy Warhol, which repeats the same pensive image of the architect nine times in a grid format.

Tour groups are limited to 15 people and include a 3⁄4-mile (1.2 km) walk through the estate. Tours begin and end at the Visitor Center in downtown New Canaan, Connecticut (across from the train station), where vehicles transport each group to the site near the New Canaan–Stamford border. “Standard” tours last 90 minutes and flash photography is not allowed. There is a pure glass tour that only visits the house and is an hour long. Extended tours last two hours and cost more. Tours at twilight and “personalized” tours are also offered.
The poor energy efficiency of the Glass House has been discussed as well.

STAMFORD/NORWALK
Stamford Museum. I arrived at 16:30 just before closing and elected to not pay the $18 fee paid at a gate on the entrance road. 
Bartlett Arboretum & Gardens. A forest with multiple gardens (azaleas, bog, wildflowers etc) and trails (all less the .25 miles long). Free
ON McDonalds in Port Chester

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