WHY GO: Ridgefield CT is a feast for all five bodily senses – sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste – and one more: the sense of humanity. This town of 25,000 is home to Connecticut’s only National Park, which also happens to be the only National Park in the country dedicated to an American painter. There […] Read more
Viewing: Malerie Yolen-Cohen
May 16, 2019
WHY GO: It’s a safe bet that parents who drop their kids off at Binghamton University in Binghamton NY don’t generally stay to see the city sights, but they’d be missing out. Once maligned as blighted and abandoned, Binghamton – newly branded with the zingy “BING” – is undergoing a resurgence, with new art galleries […] Read more
May 15, 2019
WHY GO: There’s a reason that millionaires during the Gilded Age built castles and hid out on the 1,800 large and small islands that dot the St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands NY. It is exquisite here – and closer than you might think. You can drive to Clayton NY, one of the larger […] Read more
May 15, 2019
Though you have other options, you’ll want to book a river-view room with a balcony at the only upscale hotel right on the waterfront in the Thousand Islands (and the only 4-Diamond hotel in the region), the 1000 Islands Harbor Hotel in Clayton NY. The show outside your window changes throughout the day, but sunrise […] Read more
April 25, 2019
WHY GO: Called “The City That Lit the World,” New Bedford MA, once the planet’s premier whaling town, claimed more millionaires than any other city in America. From the 1820’s until whaling’s demise in 1925, when the last whaling ship sailed out of New Bedford Harbor, this city dominated the industry. More pure, smokeless spermaceti […] Read more
April 24, 2019
WHY GO. Fairhaven MA wasn’t a company town; it was a lucky town. Henry Huttleston Rogers, President of six (out of 13) Standard Oil Trust Companies (who happened, also, to be a major benefactor of Mark Twain), was overly magnanimous when it came to his hometown, endowing it with public buildings that rival those in […] Read more
April 9, 2019
In 1858, prominent philanthropist Robert Sayre, chief engineer of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, a director of Bethlehem Steel, and trustee of both St. Lukes Hospital and Lehigh University, built his Gothic Revival stone mansion high on a hill overlooking his gritty enterprises. First Impressions of Sayre Mansion Turned into a boutique inn in the 1990’s, […] Read more
April 9, 2019
WHY: The Lehigh River cuts the town of Bethlehem PA in two – with the hulking bones of Bethlehem Steel and Lehigh University on the South Side and the stone Germanic Colonial buildings of Historic Moravian Bethlehem on the other. Bethlehem Steel, which you may recall from Billy Joel’s song, Allentown (“Out in Bethlehem they’re […] Read more
April 1, 2019
WHY GO: A monument to American Industry and Ingenuity, Lowell National Historical Park, in Lowell MA, 30 miles from Boston, is unlike any other U.S. National Park in that it takes up sections of a still thriving (or, as the case may be, reviving) city. This unconventional National Park was established in 1978 to tell […] Read more
April 1, 2019
If you had to be holed up somewhere, you’d be lucky to find yourself at the charming Groton Inn in the small pastoral boarding school burg of Groton MA. A Colonial-style roadside lodging, this brand new iteration stands on the footprint of what had been one of the oldest inns in America with the same […] Read more