There are those who call themselves members of the L Street Brownies, the famed South Boston polar bear club that makes its home at the James M. Curley Community Center, and then there are the hard-core types like Jack Dever. Beyond the group’s annual New Year’s Day dip, the 70-year-old L Street Brownies president has […]
Riding the rails is as thrilling today as it was way back when. Here are Yankee’s picks for New England’s best passenger trips (check Web sites for seasonal schedules): 1. After a 36-year absence, passenger rail service has returned to Maine. Amtrak’s Downeaster connects Boston and Portland along a 114-mile rail corridor. 800-872-7245; amtrakdowneaster.com 2. […]
New England trains are part of this nation’s collective memory and in this train book review, a collection of midcentury images are waiting to be discovered.
The 2011 Biathlon World Cup comes to Aroostook County Maine starting Feb. 6. This is a huge sport in Europe and will be televised into millions, yes millions of European homes. Bill McKibben in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Yankee Magazine covered this story (below) on Aroostook county, Maine becoming the Biathlon World Cup capital […]
Edith Wharton got it all wrong in Ethan Frome. That tortured farmer from Starkfield, Massachusetts, took a suicidal sled run down an icy slope and, tragically, lived to regret it. Perhaps most tragic was that Frome’s thinking on sledding was flawed from the start. He looked at it as a way to end his days. […]
7:30 A.M. WHERE THE SUN RISES FIRST Sunrise from Cadillac Mountain reveals a coastline carved with a crooked knife. From that famous vantage on Mount Desert Island, the coast of Maine comes out of the dark. It’s a complicated affair of peninsulas and coves, a jigsaw of rock and water, a play of motion and […]
The audience for art is small. The readership for art writing is even smaller. But at the risk of driving what few faithful readers Just Looking has to another art blog, I am devoting this final posting of 2009 to an interesting dialogue that has been taking place between Boston Phoenix art critic Greg Cook […]
Drawing is the most immediate and intimate of art forms, at once direct and often tentative or preparatory. Modernist master Paul Klee called it “taking a line for a walk.” Traditionally drawing has tended to be a linear pursuit in graphite or pen and ink, but in the prevailing pluralistic aesthetic of the 21st century […]
The Williams College Museum of Art has mounted a series of late fall exhibitions that celebrate and provide context for its 1878 William Morris Hunt masterpiece “Niagara Falls,” a symphonic oil of one of America’s iconic landscapes. Hunt (1824-1879) was a Vermont native who became a celebrated Boston portrait and landscape painter. A Strong Impression: […]
Scenes from an unexpected ice storm in December 2008 that caused remarkable hardship for thousands of New Englanders without power and heat.
Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) Subscribe 1. A handcrafted wool stocking ($30) makes the stuff inside more special. Swell Company, Parsonsfield, ME. 207-793-2700; swellcompany.com Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) Subscribe 2. Inspiration sticks to the fridge if you’ve got a colorful, quirky magnet ($5.50). Curly […]
Touro Synagogue, the oldest temple in America, is a Newport, Rhode Island treasure.
