Travel Blog

A story in yesterday’s New York Times told of how New Hope, PA – on the banks of the Delaware River – was becoming popular with Hollywood celebrities and wealthy New Yorkers. Living upriver in Phillipsburg, NJ, I knew the town as a kid and then, working as a feature writer at the Trenton Times, I drove through it a lot as a young man. In fact, I was house-sitting for a colleague in New Hope when Hania arrived for the first time from Poland. So I probably have the town to thank for helping to ignite our romance. (It was a more charming introduction to America than Trenton would have been.)

New Hope used to attract writers and theater people, thanks in part to its playhouse. S.J. Perelman bought a farm not far away where, he wrote, he raised turkeys, “some of which I exhibit on Broadway.” But the surrounding towns, especially on the New Jersey side, remained unchanged. Now, apparently, even they are being infused with spillover glitz. An article in the weekend Wall Street Journal was about a new mixologist in Stockton.

I understand while lamenting the region’s new popularity. I was never attracted to the Hudson River Valley because the Hudson, like the city it flows into, is too big and impersonal. The Delaware is stitched with narrow, erector set bridges – some of which I worked on in college – and in summer it’s dotted with innertubers. As I write in my memoir, the landscapes are not as dramatic as in many parts of the country, and the towns are not as picturesque as those in Europe, “but there’s a quiet, unportentous beauty to the place that suited my temperament, no doubt because it had helped shape it.”