Playing tourist is fun – playing tourist in the company of a historical novelist is even better!
My good friend Jean Fullerton – who writes fabulous historical novels – came for a visit and we went on tour. I always love playing tour guide for a friend. It always makes me look at things through new eyes. It’s so much more fun when those eyes have the sort of knowledge behind them that Jean uses when she’s writing.
Our first stop was the tenement museum.
This is a building that was condemned decades ago and the people just left it. When some historians finally entered it, they found a time capsule which opens the door on the way migrants lived when they first arrived in New York a century or more ago.
You can only visit the museum with a guide. The guides are so knowledgeable – telling stories about the people who lived in the tenement at different times in its history.
In one of the apartments, we saw where a little girl who lived there had written her name on the wallpaper in pencil. It is faded but still survives. Her mother must have been angry at her for defacing their wallpaper – but for us, it was quite a touching moment.
Even more so was the front room of another apartment, which was set up as if had been for the funeral of a baby girl who died after drinking the poisonous swill milk that was all the poor garment workers had to feed their babies. I don’t think I was alone in the sadness I felt for the poor mother who thought she was helping her baby, when in fact she was killing her.
The tour touched on the terrible conditions on the sweat shops of the era, but it wasn’t all sad – some of the migrants who lived in the terrible tenements did achieve their dreams of a better life in the new world.
We almost literally stumbled across a fabulous place by the piers in the East River – where another time capsule was waiting for us.
This was the barque Peking – one of the last of the great sailing ships – preserved now as a museum. Peking and her sister ships plied difficult routes between the old world and South America – routes that were not viable for steam ships.
The sailors who manned her did so in the traditional fashion – working four hours on and four off, 24 hours a day seven days a week for a voyage that would last three months or more. Looking up at the tall masts, I wondered how on earth the sailors could have climbed up there – and clung on – as she fought the treacherous waters and great storms around Cape Horn.
Those sailors must have been pretty tough!
A romantic novelist on tour is a pretty tough beast too – we avoided the paps (who might not actually have been waiting for us – but you
never know) and made it to Macy’s.
For some reason, the store had decided to put some racing cars in the middle of the ladies handbags and accessories.
That seemed a strange idea at first – but it did give the men something to do while the woman shopped.
It was a fabulous week on tour – Empire State Building, The Metropolitan Museum and New York’s finest men in uniform (in town for Memorial Day). Both of us came away full of ideas… after all, it was a research trip. Honestly!
