Around the World in 80 Days, Part II

By Temple Ligon
January 24, 2014
 

On March 15, 2012, the second day of my trip around the world in 80 days – the first morning, actually – I was still in the United States. Two of us, Passepartout #3 and I, were rolling through Washington as we considered having breakfast maybe by Philadelphia. Lunch we knew we’d have in New York City, our destination. 

When Amtrak rents out a sleeper for two, the meals are part of the fare. In our case, since we boarded after 11:00 p.m. in Florence, S. C., we were invited to breakfast – a late breakfast. An early lunch might have been part of the deal, too; I can’t remember, but when you are only an hour or two from everything in our world that’s civilized, a k a Manhattan, you might as well wait.  
The food was fine, no objections, but this ride was no rolling convention of food and wine enthusiasts. The best train food for the money I ever had was the first-class section of the Chunnel train, connecting London and Paris by going under the English Channel. First class ain’t cheap, of course, but if you are running around Europe on a two-week first class Eurail pass, you are told what you have is strictly European travel, no British; however, the price of the ride on the Chunnel train is cut in half for Eurail customers.
 
I mention all that about the Eurail pass and two weeks on the continental rails because just that little bit of travel puts the United States to shame. One rationale to travel around the world in 80 days, taking the same steps Phileas Fogg took in Verne’s book, is to illustrate how poor we Americans have it when it comes to train travel. The economics can be debated another time, but for now let the word go forth: Other than maybe a short section of the Northeast, we Americans seem to quietly accept one of the world’s worst passenger train systems.
 
There. Got that off my chest. Now, back to the glorious trip.
 
Passepartout and I pulled into Pennsylvania Station after Passepartout heard the whole history of Pennsylvania Station, built about a hundred years ago, and its lessons learned from the Baths of Caracalla, completed in 217. Architect Charles McKim was hired by Pennsylvania Railroad President Alexander Cassatt, Impressionist Mary’s brother, if I have that right, and Cassatt said what was happening over at Grand Central Terminal was beginning to suggest the Pennsylvania Railroad might end up with No. 2 status. Cassatt declared, expletives deleted, he wanted the greatest train station in the world.
 
He got it. McKim took railroad funds and visited Rome to study the remains of the Baths of Caracalla. With baggage handling and passenger ticketing and crowded tracksides, all the challenges getting to the train on time or getting to the taxi hassle-free, it’s worth noting how the Romans did it just to take a bath. McKim made himself understand how the citizens got in and out of the building on a crowded day and how the slaves scurried about without interrupting the citizens and how the citizens could take what they probably called the sequence. First, take an hour or so in the library to exercise the mind or take an hour in the weight room to exercise the arms; then get oiled and scraped to cleanse the skin; then step into the caldarium (the huge hot tub) to open the pores and melt off the sweat; next immerse in the tepidarium (warm water pool); and finally chill out in the frigidarium (cold water pool) or relax in the natatio, the swimming pool in room temperature water.
 
Rome had several such baths at the time, the height of the empire. It was great to be a citizen and not so great to be a slave. Still, McKim learned his lessons from almost two millennea earlier and put them to use at Pennsylvania Station, what became the greatest train station in the world.
 
By 1964, sad to say, the Pennsylvania Railroad had decided their Pennsylvania Station was no longer economically viable, and the station was torn down to make way for Madison Square Garden. The protesters, a list of who’s who and who’s having lunch with Truman Capote or John D. Rockefeller III, failed to stop the demolition, but they formed the core of the American preservation movement.
 
Passepartout heard it all between Washington and New York City, so when we walked off the train and worked our way to baggage claim, she almost spit on the tracks in disgust.
 
We surfaced the way Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully said we would: Through it one entered the city like a god… One scuttles in now like a rat.
 
We joined the taxi queue on Seventh Avenue while we discussed our early afternoon moves. I said we should go straight to our hotel, the Carlyle at 76th and Madison, drop our bags and get over to 5th for the museums and Central Park and eventually South Carolina’s J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology and the target of plenty of controversy.
 
What then?
 
I told Passepartout if she hadn’t been to Rao’s, a mafia hangout a few blocks above Central Park, we should pull her inside our cultural ring. As for me, I had never been to Rao’s either, and we were staying at the Carlyle, about as far from a Holiday Inn Express we could possibly manage.
 
We walked over to 5th and took a right to go up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We didn’t have the time to tour inside, but I did drag Passepartout  a few feet down 84th, across from the Metropolitan, to see #3, a short residential building by Raymond Hood, the architect of Chicago’s Tribune Tower and most of New York’s Rockefeller Center in collaboration. The address on 84th had a view back to the northern front of the Metropolitan, and the address kept my fond memories alive. I stayed there on the sixth floor, the entire floor, when I ran the ’79 NYC Marathon. I had a maid who came and went in the maid’s elevator, but otherwise I had the flat all to myself for two nights.
 
My friend was in school with me at Rice in Houston, and her father was a hotshot at Citicorp who had recently moved to NYC and bought Doris Duke’s old place, my base of operation for the marathon weekend.
 
Can’t always get those kinds of accommodations and especially at that price. Keep trying.
 
Passepartout and I walked up to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum on 89th, where she had never been. Like at the Metropolitan, we didn’t have the time to go inside, just peek inside.
 
We kept to our route and we found Lancaster’s Dr. Sims around 100th and 5th or thereabouts. He’s standing full-size in bronze on a large platform on the edge of Central Park with descriptive narratives on both sides. It’s far more than what he gets on the Statehouse grounds in Columbia, at the northwest corner overlooking Assembly and Gervais. He did, though, practice medicine on women who had little choice before the Civil War. After the war he took what he learned on slaves and opened the world’s best-known women’s hospital near the corner of 100th and 5th.
 
When we made it to Rao’s in East Harlem we found the front door unlocked, so we entered to order espresso or whatever was offered while we cased the place. Nothing was offered, nothing at all, and the gruff-guy authority figure in the white apron told us the place was closed and we should leave. I asked if he could give me a card, and he found one at the receptionist’s counter while he pushed us to the front door. I wondered about the possibility of reservations, and he said they were no longer taking reservations for 2012. This was March 15, 2012, mind you.
 
We took a taxi to the American Museum of Natural History between 77th and 81st on Central Park West, Margaret Mead’s home office, where Passepartout missed the day’s last show in the new planetarium. No matter. She still got to see the building.
 
Proud South Carolinian that I was, I wanted Passepartout to see my No. 2 statue, also on Central Park, this one at the southeast corner overlooking the east steps to the Plaza Hotel and the Pulitzer Fountain where F. Scott and Zelda frolicked. A big deal, a really big gold-leafed sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, General Sherman sits in his saddle at the corner of 59th and 5th, arguably the most prestigious real estate in the world. The rest of the world reveres Sherman because he taught us how to end a war. Burn them out. Go to their backyard and their support. Run down the rear-element profiteers and torch them, the guys making all the money off death. Hit the largest cotton storage in the world in Columbia, South Carolina. After all, they were the first to secede. They started it.
 
In the mid-’40s Spartanburg’s Jimmy Byrnes was all over Washington, particularly after the death of President Roosevelt in early 1945 when Vice-President Truman knew little and Byrnes had been in on most of the decisions. Byrnes knew what had to be done. Burn them out. Firebombing Tokyo and dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki brought the war to an end. They started it. Lessons learned from Sherman.
 
Passepartout asked to get back to the Carlyle for dinner preparations. I was prepared, I thought, so I stayed downstairs at Bemelmans Bar, where Ludwig Bemelmans painted the walls. He is probably best known as the illustrator in Madeleine, the French schoolgirl story. Across the hall at the Carlyle’s ground floor is the Café Carlyle, for decades home to Bobby Short, now occasionally on Mondays where Woody Allen’s jazz group plays. Neither Bemelmans nor the Café is appealingly priced. That runs off the riffraff, so – I must say – the bar crowd is about the most attractive in town.
 
Passepartout #2 met up with us at Bemelmans, and the three of us kept our appointment at the Four Seasons Restaurant, Park and 52nd inside the Seagram Building where our South Carolina buddies Mary Rogers and Will were waiting at the bar in the Grill. In the world of power lunches, the most desirable destination is the Grill at the Four Seasons. Most of the tables are under permanent reservations. Smart money has lunch in the Grill and dinner in the Pool Room.
 
Knowing the rules, we had aperitifs at the bar in the Grill and adjourned for dinner in the Pool Room. Between the two we walked past Picasso’s 1929 stage backdrop for Le Tricorne. We also walked by doors to private dining, but we couldn’t decide which was JFK’s when he entertained MM at the Four Seasons before she entertained him that same night at Madison Square Garden by singing Happy Birthday, Mr. President. JFK and his family, by the way, kept a suite at the Carlyle all the while he was president. Brother Bobby kept the suite as his official New York address when he was in the U. S. Senate.
 
All was well with the Four Seasons, so much so we put together a table for 12 on the Thursday before this past Labor Day, which was also during the U. S. Open Tennis Championships, the real reason the table filled up. At the last minute I couldn’t make it, but Passepartout #2 could. Passepartout #3 married and moved to Kent, UK. Also, Mary Rogers and a different Will showed up, as did her friends the parents of the moviemaker responsible for Beasts of the Southern Wild.
 
Point being, you never know who else might be at the bar at the Four Seasons. Make sure they can pick up on your South Carolina accent.
 
 
(To be continued…)