Hunting Nighthawks:
On the Road with Edward Hopper
I sensed trouble. The couple in the restaurant looked fine enough. But she slumped and stared into the distance, and his torso leaned jauntily as if he didn't notice her detachment or care. I suspected they wouldn't be together much longer. I had no real reason to believe this. I couldn't even make out their faces. Besides, they were in a painting: Edward Hopper's Edward Who?pper And who was Edward Hopper? Born in 1882 to religious parents of Dutch descent in the Hudson River town of Nyack, New York, Hopper grew up loving water and boats, which appear in many of his paintings. He reached the ungainly height of over six feet by the age of twelve, resulting in the usual story of a teacher asking him to sit down when he already was. Maybe because of his freakish height (he topped out at about 6'5"), Edward grew withdrawn and remained taciturn throughout his life. Also possibly related, he developed a gift for expressing himself through drawing. [Hopper's late painting Two Comedians] [Frauenthal Theater Interior] The Persistence of Memory A Dream The Call [Indiana Capitol] * * * [Swope Museum front] Washington, DC: Approaching a City [Approaching a City by Edward Hopper] [Edward Hopper, Self Portrait, 1903-1906] [Mecca] The Out-of-Towners The In-Towner The About-Towner
New York Restaurant.
Maybe I felt that way because Hopper's paintings are notorious for showing people isolated from each other and from society. I saw that most notably in his masterpiece Nighthawks, a scene of four lonely souls loitering around an all-night diner counter, which I had pondered often in my hometown Chicago where it hung.
But maybe I interpreted his works that way because I was an aging bachelor and struggling artist who felt unappreciated, much like Hopper, who only became famous for his oil paintings in his late thirties and didn't marry until age 43. I had often been called "intense," "cynical," and other epithets that implied I related to Hopper and his remote characters more than did most; maybe I was even like Hopper or a Hopper character. Or maybe I was falling for the cliché that made Hopper bemoan, "The loneliness thing has been stressed too much."
Was I an unhappy misanthrope, a lone societal castoff, or did others feel isolated in a Hopperesque way? I decided to survey people as an excuse to see in person Hopper's paintings in 47 towns spanning the United States.
I would have no trouble approaching strangers because I'm more loquacious than the notoriously reticent Hopper, though I certainly sympathize with his feeling that folks aren't going to understand when you express yourself in speech or art. My interpretation of the supposed isolation in his paintings was that he captured how unknowable anyone's inner self is. My journey and interviews were attempts, invitations even, to bridge that gap, to offer my inner self and allow others to share theirs with me. I hoped to write about people's answers and my experiences, so that my art would mirror Hopper's, who said, "I never tried to do the American scene. I always wanted to do myself."
(If you have a friend who doesn't know or like Hopper or Nighthawks, ask them to read this entry.)
Maybe you don't like Hopper. That's OK, but you can't deny his influence on the popular culture around you. Nighthawks has been reproduced substituting 
movie stars, Santa and his reindeer; and even dogs playing poker (I couldn’t find an image of those, but I've seen them). His 
House by the Railroad was (allegedly) the inspiration for the house in 
Psycho--as well as 
Giant and
Addams Family. He's inspired other artists to base work on his like Tom Waits's album (and performance) 
Nighthawks at the Diner, shots from Steve Martin's 
Pennies from Heaven and Stuart Dybek's short story "Nighthawks." He's also inspired other artists in how they see the world and create their works. Earlier Impressionist paintings' urban scenes of vibrant street life, swirling colors and thick paint he trimmed down to static folks, broad colors, and flat surfaces. It's like the difference between flowers by 
Louis Sullivan and his student 
Frank Lloyd Wright. This would lead to straight renderings of color fields, Abstract painting
. Many, including John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, have been inspired like me to write by merely musing on his paintings. Poet Laureate Mark Strand's slim book Hopper is by far the best of these.
At eighteen, he left for New York City to study art, and afterwards traveled to Europe three times, returning with his Impressionist-style canvases showing his fascination with the unique light and sordid street life he saw there. One such canvas sold in the famous Armory Show of 1913 that introduced European Modernism to America. But he didn't sell another oil on canvas for ten years. Meanwhile, he took up etching, and a show of those at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery sold out. Rehn put up a show of Hopper's watercolors. That show nearly sold out, and Rehn remained Hopper's lifelong representative after that. Now established as a fine artist with a dealer, Hopper turned his efforts back to oil paint and coupled the luminescence of his watercolors with the urban scenes, minimal compositions, and human figures of his etchings. He had found his mature style and subject: oil paintings depicting America and its people.
He moved into a studio atop 3 Washington Square North in lower Manhattan in 1913 and called that home until he died there in 1967, though he later spent summers at a studio he had built in Cape Cod. In 1924, he married fellow aging art school classmate Josephine Nivison, a painter in her own right. 
[Portrait of Jo by their art teacher Robert Henri]
She was as short as Hopper was tall and as social as he was retiring. Jo's journals and their visitors' tales told of constant bickering and savage fights. Yet they remained married until death did them part, and she posed for every woman character in his mature oil canvases.
He and Jo saw a wide variety of the film and theater that New York had to offer. The visual storytelling of these mediums seems to have influenced how Hopper portrayed scenes on his canvases. Some commentators suggest he got ideas for his settings from plays. Many have likened his paintings to film stills, and many film images have been based on his paintings.
Like Jo, I had been an actor in my twenties, so I loved Hopper's theatrical tableaus and the stages on which they were placed, such as theaters, old buildings, travelers' way stations, and coffee shops. It would be a joy for me to seek out similar scenes in the towns I was headed to.
When I was eighteen, my parents and I visited my uncle Ed and his family who lived in a suburb of Toledo, Ohio. I had befriended a budding painter in high school, so I asked if on this visit we could take in the art museum, which we had never done. There, I caught sight down a long row of galleries of a beautiful old-time theater, where people were taking their seats. I would be starting that fall majoring in Theatre at Northwestern University, and it looked like some performance was about to begin, so I went to check it out. As I walked closer, I realized that it wasn't an auditorium after all, but a painting hung perfectly to trick my eye into thinking that it was real.
The painting was Hopper's 
Two on the Aisle, and the mini-drama that the characters played out, with a man glancing sidelong at a single woman while his wife looked down at her chair, made me sense that Hopper noticed the same things about life that had drawn me to the arts and theater in particular: that everybody led a secret, internal life invisible to those around them. People feel unknowable and therefore alienated. As an actor, I was charged with embodying the inner lives of characters. As a painter, Hopper was charged with portraying scenes in a way that captured hidden meaning. Seeing Two on the Aisle vaulted Hopper atop my list of favorite painters, and finding it in Toledo made me realize that revelatory art works would pop up in unexpected, out-of-the-way places.
Later, in college, a friend gave me a calendar of Hopper paintings, and I noticed that many hung in just such overlooked places: San Marino, California; Montgomery, Alabama; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Lincoln, Nebraska--among others.
If Hopper could home in on what was most important about a scene (as I felt he had in Two on the Aisle), maybe the clichéd interpretation that his scenes and characters epitomize a uniquely American form of isolation held a key to our culture--our communal inner life.
"Although Muskegon, Michigan was and still is far from major art centers, there are cases where remarkable foresight has put this museum ahead of its time."
-Sign under painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner obtained by Muskegon's Hackley Art Museum one year after the artist's death and decades before his first retrospective.
And so I found myself searching for clues as I stared at a New York Restaurant in Muskegon, Michigan.
True to its title, the painting depicts a New York restaurant. Slightly right of center, past the back of a woman's red hat, the face of her patrician male dining companion tilts toward his food. A waitress to the left of the man turns toward him the big white bow on the back of her apron, like a present to be untied. In a dim booth at back, a dark couple silently looks in different directions. Balancing the waitress's white uniform is a mysterious black figure running the length of the right edge that I thought might be Hopper himself. It turned out to be an uninhabited rumpled coat and hat on a rack.
The colors are muddier and the composition a little more cluttered than Hopper's later light and airy paintings. But the sunlight was undoubtedly his, streaming through the café window to the right of the dining couple and brightening not only the waitress at center, but also the table at the painting's far left edge. This was also his first oil painting depicting Americans going about daily life in a modern city.
Hopper said, "The idea was to attempt to make visual the crowded glamour of a New York restaurant during the noon hour. I am hoping that ideas less easy to define have, perhaps, crept in also." So, despite later protestations, maybe he hoped to express the characters' isolation. The plane of the central couple's table is sharply tilted toward the viewer and white on a dark background, making it seem to float--as if an absence or a void existed between the two figures, something unsaid perhaps.
The security guard at the museum's front desk (whose nametag read "Bill") was a bear-like man, with a large ruddy face below thick white hair. When I explained my project and asked him where the painting hung, he exploded out of his chair and pulled me by my elbow. Since he was still at the ready by my side, I asked if the painting related to life in Muskegon. "Well," he warmed up, "this whole museum does. It was given to the town by Charles Hackley. He was a lumber baron who showed up with seven dollars in his pocket and died here worth $12 million. Most of the lumber that was used to rebuild Chicago after its great fire sailed out of Muskegon's harbor." He added in a whisper, "There's a lot of old money here."
"Is this the museum's most famous painting?"
"No," he said, and dragged me over to a large painting by the American regionalist John Steuart Curry. The painting resembled a 1930s ad for milk or meat. 
[Tornado Over Kansas, John Steuart Curry]
It shows a tornado coming across an open field toward a farmer with swelling forearms. The farmer's waifish but stern-faced wife holds open the cellar door for their children, who clutch animals as if Christian beneficence personified. "When kids come in on school trips, they always tug my sleeve, 'Mr. Guard, Mr. Guard, where's the tornado picture?'"
Duty called Bill back to his desk, and I was left in front of the painting with a grandmotherly woman with wispy white hair, the strap of her purse dangling over a forearm like a maitre'd holding a dinner napkin. She was orbited by two school-age girls who played with their fingers to keep from touching the art. When I approached and asked her if there were any place in town like the one in the painting, the woman clutched her purse a little tighter, and murmured, "No, not any more." Then she ushered the girls out.
Just then, Bill's clacking heels approached, and his big padded hand grabbed the back of my neck.
"I have a friend who can get you a deal at his motel tonight," he informed me. I politely refused and ducked into the museum store to look for a post card of New York Restaurant. Bill followed. I had worried about getting people to talk or help with my project. Now I had to worry about getting them to stop.
The store was sold out of the card, so Bill hustled off to requisition one from storage. But not before introducing me to Sonya, the cherubic, middle-aged, African-American woman behind the counter. "He's working on a book about Hopper," Bill whispered conspiratorially as he left. Sonya flashed a winning, serene smile that bore his exuberance with the patience of a mother towards her child.
When I asked her about the Hopper, she sighed, "I have to confess, it's not one of my favorites. It's more like in a big city. I used to live in Chicago, but I moved back here. In Chicago, you’ll be walking downtown and you know you're annoying people who are trying to walk faster. They don’t say anything, but you can feel it. Muskegon has the best of both worlds. People are friendlier here, but it still has a lot to offer culturally."
Bill came back not only waving the card, but also towing a spry, gray-haired woman he had recruited to be part of the project. She weighed me through big, slightly skewed glasses, which she gingerly adjusted with the tips of her two middle fingers.
"Hi," she croaked and announced her name in a voice redolent of ash and gravel. "Micki. I moved here from Detroit and worked in this store for eight years. What do you wanna know about Hopper? I love his work, and New York Restaurant is certainly one of the more popular works here. When it went to a show in Japan, it was chosen for the cover of the exhibition catalog. All of my children have prints of it, and they live now in Denver and California. I think everyone can relate to his paintings. The things are recognizable, and he puts you right there. You can imagine that you are in his paintings. You can imagine what the man and the woman in New York Restaurant are like."
"Is there a place like that in Muskegon?"
"No. There used to be. It was called 'On the Avenue' and had big windows, with the café curtains and a banana tree plant and a fireplace. But you don't see those places any more."
I thanked her for her time and paid Sonya for the card Bill had fetched. Then, I set off to get a feel for the town.
Long ago, the area's Ottawa and Pottawatomie joined the French in annihilating other local tribes until the French asked them, too, to move on. In the middle 1800s, easterners came to log. During Hackley's lumbering era, Muskegon boasted of having more millionaires than any other town in America and was called "Lumber Queen of the World" and "the Riviera of the Midwest."
But when Hackley and other barons used up the local forests, the economy faltered, and Muskegon wooed industrial factories. The booms during two world wars were offset by lulls during The Great Depression and the 1970s, and Muskegon when I visited was a rustbelt city rebounding as best it could. Civic leaders pinned their hopes on a former lakeside industrial scrap yard rehabbed and re-dubbed "Heritage Landing," with new buildings for businesses, condominiums, and restaurants.
Also out by Heritage Landing was a lighthouse, like Hopper often portrayed, and Muskegon is one of the few Midwestern towns that boasts several. This one lay on the end of Muskegon's pier. A mere 100 yards across the water, I could see the pier of the city of North Muskegon, but no bridge connected the towns. "Sometimes a ferry runs between the two," Micki had told me. "But that's not in operation right now."
Muskegon's most famous lighthouse lay out at the tip of the bay jutting into Lake Michigan, in Pere Marquette Park. 
In April 1675, the famous French explorer spent a night here two days before his death. Now, teenagers cruise the triangular parking lot blaring rock and roll out of convertibles, and people of all ages swim from the grand beach, stroll the dunes or pier, or visit the retired submarine Silversides.
As I circled back from Pere Marquette into town, I passed a sign for Art Cats Gallery. I decided to stop in and see what a Hopper stand-in would experience as an artist in Muskegon. Also, the name of the gallery reminded me of Hopper's wife, Jo, who often included cats, especially her beloved Arthur, in her paintings. Until she married Hopper, that cat was her only companion. But Arthur soon after wandered into a cold New York night never to return.
Art Cats' owner, Louise, was firing pots when I walked in, but she stepped from the linoleum-tiled studio in back to meet me under the low ceiling of the carpeted showroom where thrift store shelves held furniture, paintings, sculptures, and jewelry. She had the air of an aging beauty. Her long legs were jammed into jeans caked with clay, an apron draped her torso, and her hair was wrapped in a sporty kerchief. From the studio came the sound of music by Seal, and, soon after I asked if she had a second to talk, there emerged a longhaired man in a black biker T-shirt who leaned silently against the doorjamb throughout my interview.
Wiping away some plaster from her cheek, Louise grinned at my question about the arts scene in Muskegon and answered, "Progressing," as if there was nowhere to go but up. "The area from here to Pere Marquette Park used to be a thriving arts colony in the days when Buster Keaton lived here. Then it became a factory city, blue-collar." Even as she said this, my throat was tickled by the tang from the paper mill smokestack on the waterfront across the road.
"Now, there aren't a lot of galleries in Muskegon," she continued. "I've lived here 15 years and just opened the gallery in December. A gallery on Apple Street only lasted three days. There is a hard-core group of arts supporters here, though, and it is a nice museum that the Hopper's in. Muskegon is 'in transition' now. There's been an influx of people from other areas with more interest in culture. People are hungry for something more like what we offer rather than regular stores."
I left her to her kiln and continued back downtown, where the recently renovated Frauenthal Theater was open. This 1,800-hundred-seat theater is the prize jewel of Muskegon's downtown. A crew was loading in a touring Broadway production of Grease to be performed that night, so I found a side door open and entered.
Gilt pillars lined the walls, and a huge crystal chandelier hung from a recessed cupola in front of the sweeping balcony (Hopper's usual seat). The Frauenthal looked like the theatre in Hopper's
Two on the Aisle, and I was seeing it from the same oblique vantage point he painted that painting from.
I walked from the Frauenthal to the storefront coffee shop on the next block that Bill had recommended that morning. "Ask for Kim," he had added with a wink. "She's a friend of mine."
The place had the musty smell of an old general store, which it once was. Thickly painted white shelves now held books, knickknacks, coffee, and antiques. At one of the big wooden tables scattered about, a college-aged girl bent close to her homework, and at another a longhaired man read a self-help paperback plucked from his backpack. On the stage, rigged up in the front window that once displayed store items, a baby-faced kid with a buzz cut and earring played guitar and crooned with his eyes closed. He had plenty of feeling and a guileless rapport with the audience, like he was just thinking out loud. His lyrics spoke of Midwestern landscapes and artistic dreams.
I worked my way to the back, where at the serving counter I found Kim. She looked solid beneath her billowy salmon shirt under loose overall cut-offs. Her pale cheeks flushed with sunburn or intensity, and her brown curly hair quivered as she fixed me with her stare and answered my question.
"I started this place to overcome isolation," she declared, "to get involved more in the community. I am trying to bring people together who are disconnected. With the Web, I've had some people meet in here after meeting online. People twenty-five to thirty-five are using the Web to be social rather than antisocial; they're starting to go out more and get involved in the arts. You might see a group of high school kids in here and a family and some senior citizens--all at the same time. One of my best customers is ninety-two and lives in the retirement home, but she still paints watercolors and they're good. But I'm really into mentoring young people. Anyone who asks to play, I give 'em a chance."
Kim had to serve some new customers, so I sidled off and listened to the music. When the musician sat his guitar aside between sets, the girl doing homework picked it up and sang a song she had written herself. Her voice was as sweet and clear as any I have heard, and she sang from a depth alarming in someone so young, holding the whole café in thrall and inspiring our spontaneous applause afterwards. She shrugged off the appreciation and went back to work.
Kim beckoned me over and introduced me to a thin, sunken-eyed woman and a grade-school girl. "This is Mary and her daughter Diane." Diane was reading a book off the shelf because (she said yawningly), "I've already gone through all the ones in the library." Kim had been telling Mary about my interest in isolation and prodded her, "Tell him about your sister."
Mary rolled her eyes and said, "Oh, her. She moved out to the country a couple years back, and now she won't visit me in the city. She says there are gangs downtown. She knows there's no gangs here; she grew up here. I think she's just gone country, too much time alone. She's getting real conservative." After that, new customers broke up our group, and I headed to the restaurant in my hotel for a late dinner.
My waitress was a petite young woman with a pixie nose, sun-freckled cheeks, and bushy copper-colored hair. I grabbed two crayons from their holder between the salt and pepper shakers and started to sketch her on the butcher paper tablecloth. I can't draw; words are my medium. But I had captured the color of her hair. I looked at the two crayons I had picked: "rose" and "brown." Back in the museum, I had spied a particularly lovely Whistler painting titled A Study in Rose and Brown. The title was a pun by Whistler on the name of the model, Rosie Rendell, and the painting's predominant color. The project was creating startling coincidences.
I went upstairs to my room, which had a Formica dresser and boxy bed, both bolted through industrial carpet onto the floor. Above the bed was a poster reproduction of a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, giving the room a frisson of high art. I opened the curtains onto the endless asphalt parking lot of the 24-hour supermarket across the way. The lot's mercury lamps flooded through my hotel room window to radiate me, a lone traveler staring out the window of a nondescript hotel room. I wasn't just studying Hopper paintings. I was living in them.
The next morning, I went for a getaway breakfast at a Hopperesque diner. I was seated beside a group of white-haired women in their Sunday finery who I had heard in line talking about the sermon they all had just sat through. Noticing that I was alone, they kindly engaged me in conversation. When I told them why I was in town, they perked up.
"Ooh!" shouted one spry, sharp-chinned woman, raising her eyebrows and adjusting her white knit shawl. "What do you want to know? I'm a docent at the Hackley."
They were just such nice ladies that I couldn't bring myself to disturb their Sunday morning breakfast by asking about Hopper and isolation. Instead, I said that I wanted to tell people about the fine art in smaller towns; that Muskegon, Michigan might actually have a New York Restaurant. They were very glad to hear it. One woman insisted I look up her brother in New Haven, Connecticut, when I went there to see the four Hoppers in Yale's collection. The project was gaining momentum.
Out in the parking lot, I ran into Miriam, one of the women from that group, by herself. She had kept quiet during our earlier talk, but the pouting lips on her round face made me think she had strong opinions. Maybe because she was alone or because I was getting ready to leave town, I drew the courage to ask her outright, "Do you feel that people in your community are as isolated as Hopper's characters?"
"Ooooh yes," she replied without hesitation. "Emotionally isolated," she emphasized. "We have this community spirit, but inside I think each of us is lonely."
With that, her friends called her back over, and we went to our separate cars. Before I drove away, she came back to my open car window, put a warm wrinkled hand on my arm, and looked into my eyes. "Please," she said. "Please tell them about us."
Forty-seven towns. Over one hundred Hopper paintings. Nearly a thousand interviews.
A mere four-hour drive from Chicago, Muskegon had been a trial run. Without too much investment, I could see whether people were interested in Hopper's art and my question. But Miriam's plea made me feel that I had an obligation to see this through.
Little did she know it, but she launched me on an adventure that would take me backstage at New York's Museum of Modern Art; into a bank president's office; on a tour of the strictest town in America with the former mayor as my chauffeur; inside a major corporation's headquarters; onto the campus of posh Phillips Andover prep school; and down an endless road of dingy travelers' hotels, restaurants, and roadside attractions. I would meet a man who was a freelance art curator and got into the business by going blind; a Yale professor who hosted a dinner party to discuss my subject; a woman who was an up-and-coming star on the national fine arts scene; a man working as a greeter on the deck of the very ship where he had been the crew's dentist 40 years previously; a homeless man who was a big art fan; and a million other people with stories as compelling as the characters in Hopper's paintings.
The weekend after visiting Muskegon, I took another four-hour drive, this time south.
I woke up in Indianapolis in a highway motel and partook of the free continental breakfast in the lobby. The tiny room was bisected by a Formica-covered reception desk, with thin industrial carpet laid over the hard floor. One humming fluorescent tube in the middle of the ceiling threw light that grew dim by the time it reached the concrete wall slathered with white latex paint. There stood a table of food. Tiny fruit flies swirled around bananas in a bowl next to plastic-wrapped Danishes, coffee maker, orange juice pitcher, and cereal dispensed from a retired lemonade churner.
This was hardly the kind of hotel lobby I came to Indianapolis to find. But then, the one I came to find was in the Hopper painting Hotel Lobby that hung in the Indianapolis museum.
That lobby was spacious, with wood trim, thick carpet, and tasteful furniture. In it, an elderly man stands by a seated older woman. In an early sketch, the man's hand touched the woman. In the final painting, Hopper separated the two. Across the lobby from them lolls a young blond reading alone. This was painted in 1943: most men her age were overseas fighting. A bellboy behind the counter is all but invisible.
Indianapolis is one of only two towns west of Washington D.C. to have more than one Hopper painting in its art museum. Beside Hotel Lobby in the museum hung New York, New Haven, and Hartford, named for the rail line that ran past Hopper's Cape Cod house. (Hopper sent the museum a note stating, "If any serious objection arises regarding the title, it can easily be changed.")
Dawn light broadsides a house on a bluff above railroad tracks, 
making the hillside grass and trees burn at their fringes. The scene resembles the farmhouses, fields, and sky I drove through to reach Indianapolis from Chicago.
As I pondered the paintings, over waddled a man in jeans with a large shoulder bag slung over his starched shirt. The graying, rust-colored beard covering his chubby cheeks made him look like an aging red squirrel. I asked him about Indianapolis's Hoppers and isolation.
"Ooh, boy." He shook his head, so I switched to an easier question.
"How long have you lived here?"
"Almost 35 years," he chuckled flamboyantly. "I've been through the times when you wanted to be from Indianapolis; you didn't want to be in Indianapolis. People were all moving to the suburbs. And really there was no downtown any more. Now that's all changed, and the downtown is very active. Musicians and artists are moving to the Fountain Square neighborhood. Not quite New York, but at least they're characters that give a city flavor."
He wrinkled his brow. "Now, ask your original question again."
"Do you feel that people in Indianapolis are isolated like Hopper's characters?"
"I don't think so. This community is quite cohesive. Unlike in Hopper's other paintings, I feel like those two in Hotel Lobby are talking to each other. In this city, everybody talks. 'Hoosier Hospitality' is something we're known for."
"Do you know any lobbies like that in town?" I asked.
"Not those typical small twenties- and thirties-type places. Those kinds of intimate places still may be left in New York and Chicago. But I think intimate spaces here are gone."
He continued his viewing, and I was left thinking that the characters in the hotel lobby that he considered "intimate" were anything but.
Soon, an older woman wandered into the gallery. Her legs were blanketed in a tweed skirt, and a green badge pinned to the mud brown vest covering her satiny shirt proclaimed "docent." I asked if people in Indianapolis were as isolated as Hopper characters. She breathlessly demurred, "Oh, I can't say."
For a town where "everyone talks," no one seemed to want to answer my question.
"Well," I asked, "as a docent, what would you tell people about these paintings?"
"It looks like a hotel you just wouldn't want to stay in," she despaired. "You have four people, and nobody is paying attention to anyone else. If there were a human touch, it would make all the difference in the world. I find myself avoiding a lot of Hoppers. They make me feel lonely."
"Are there any old hotels like that downtown?" I inquired.
"Not any more. There was one: Forty-ninth and Meridian. I think they made it into apartments." She nodded goodbye, and I headed downtown, hoping to find a Hopperesque hotel lobby of my own.
The International Association of Architects designated the gray block Scottish Rite Cathedral "one of the seven most beautiful buildings in the world" shortly after its completion in 1929. 
The Indiana Theater is a rococo confection on Washington Street, and the 1909 Murat Theatre is a vision from the tales of Aladdin.
Minarets launch up from the Murat's light-and-dark striped walls riddled with windows flaunting leaded glass images of a curved sword dangling a crescent moon and star. 
This ornate piece of Morocco dropped on New Jersey Street is a perfect Hopper subject: breathtakingly beautiful and horrifyingly out of context.
Right across from the Murat stands the 1897 Renaissance Revival-style German cultural center, the Athenaeum (changed from Das Deutsche Haus due to World War I anti-German sentiments). 
The building was designed by Bernhard Vonnegut, grandfather of writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr.--probably Indianapolis's most famous son besides David Letterman, who once bagged groceries and spouted weather forecasts here.
Now, Indianapolis has made itself famous as the nation's amateur athletics capital and home to the world's largest single-day sporting event: the Indianapolis 500 car race. The college basketball tournament also often comes here, where basketball fever is known as "Hoosier hysteria," inspiring Hollywood to name its film devoted to high school basketball Hoosiers. (The origin of the word "Hoosier" is unknown, and there are dozens of theories about it.) 
[Hopper drew this illustration]
As I walked the city's open spaces, flat terrain, and sparsely populated streets, the place felt as if the air had been sucked out. This may explain "Hoosier hospitality:" in this atmosphere, even the least interaction with another person qualifies as entertainment.
I started my search for a Hopperesque hotel lobby at Circle Center, the retail mall that is the focus of Indianapolis's downtown renewal. A tourism information booth was set up in the glass-encased Indianapolis Arts Garden, where skywalks converge above the busy intersection below.
There, two African-American women sat between two potted palms at a table displaying handouts for local arts organizations and day-of-show theater tickets. One woman was large and dark, in her mid-thirties, with straight hair, big glasses, and a dark blue dress. Her lighter-skinned junior partner wore a lightweight flowery blouse and had corkscrewed hair atop her head. They didn't know of any hotel lobbies downtown like I sought.
"Are you from Indianapolis?" I asked.
They looked askance at each other. "Born and raised," the older one answered.
"Do you think that people in Indianapolis are isolated?"
The young one giggled and responded, "It is cliquish. I think that people are more in cliques than they are isolated. Like there's neighborhoods: the Riverside area, the historic area. To a certain extent, I think it is isolated. But I think that's human nature.
"What about the African-American community? Are they isolated from the Whites?"
The older one shook her head. "I just never thought about it, 'cause I mean I interact with everybody, so…. I don't really stick to one race. You just go. And I say everybody's pretty much open and together."
The young one tittered again, "Unless they're in their clique. You know?"
I was glad to hear them confirm the tourism office's claim that Indianapolis is proud of its African-American heritage. Ransom Place, the traditionally black neighborhood just west of downtown, is home to jazz joints where The Ink Spots and Wes Montgomery got their starts. Weekly "Jazz on the Avenue" concerts are still held at the Madame Walker Theatre Center, named for a local African-American woman whose hair care products made her America's first female self-made millionaire.
Up the street from the tourism office, I spotted two men sharing a bench. One was gangly, with white hair and a red face. He wore blocky wraparound sunglasses, a car dealership shirt, and an Indianapolis 500 cap. The younger one was a stocky, dark East Indian wearing slim shades and a polo shirt.
When I asked if people were isolated in Indy, the old man looked off to the side, twisting a silver watch back and forth around his wrist. Then he growled in response, "Nah, I wouldn't say that. There's a lot of different neighborhoods in the city. There's a neat old neighborhood over on the east side called Irvington. West side is Sawville, which is where I grew up. It was originally settled by Germans, Polish. Now it's mainly black. I live in Speedway, which is the little burg that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is located in. There's quite a few race fans live there. There's a little burg up on the canal called Rocky Ripple that is sort of a town unto itself within a town. Then of course there's the outlying suburbs. Brownsburg is in another county, but it's still part of the metropolitan area. Carmel and Fishers is a really fast-growing area."
At this, the young man chimed in with statements that curled up like questions. "Right now? Cities in the outer parts? are growing so fast that, where most towns it would take ten years? they're doing it in two. They're full in a year, and all the sudden the schools are too small. I've seen it, and I've only been here two and a half years. I was transferred here for a job with a big car dealership. After a year, they decided to close. But we liked it so much we just stayed. I was born and raised in Orange County, California. I was telling this guy that? Today? Perfect beach weather. Only there's no beach."
"So the outlying area is growing faster than the city?" I asked.
The younger man snorted. "The city's done."
The old man reined him in. "I wouldn't say the city's done, but I think we've got as much population inside Marion County as we need. Seven, eight hundred thousand people: that's enough as far as I'm concerned. This town in 30 years has just completely reinvented itself. It's really grown up. Every big town has its problems. They do a pretty good job here of trying to recognize the problems and take care of them."
"This one is too new," I pouted about a hotel that looked like a 1960s office building. "This one is too old," I lamented about a "European Luxury Hotel" that waxed a little too opulent to be Hopperesque. But I exclaimed, "This one is just right," when I found the Ramada in the former American Fletcher Bank building. Like Hopper's Hotel Lobby, it was festooned with dark wood, brass railings, dim lamps, and a little clock on the wall. Unlike Hopper's lanky male desk attendant, the Ramada's greeter was a plump young woman. When I told her of my search, she directed me to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in the old train depot.
"They've got railroad cars you can stay in," she chirped. "You should see if they'll let you go in one."
[Crowne Plaza lobby]
I reveled in finding both Hopper subjects in one place: a hotel lobby and railroad tracks. A low brick extension in back that formerly covered passenger platforms now sheltered the plush Pullman railcar hotel rooms that I aimed to see. I asked the young goateed manager behind the front desk if I could tour one.
"Well, someone has it booked soon, but if you're only going to be a short time..."
I was handed the key to car #001, also named for Charlie Chaplin. Film fan Hopper would approve. Being number #001, the car hunkered at the end of the track. I ascended the narrow metal stairs feeling like a President going to campaign from the train's back platform.
Inside, the room definitely evoked Chaplin: decorated in black and white and filled with canes, bowler hats, and other memorabilia. Modern sprinklers and fire alarms had been added; otherwise, the car seemed frozen in the heyday of American train travel, Chaplin's films, and Hopper's scenes.
A wiry old man with a bushy white mustache trundled in with a small bag wedged under one arm and a big suitcase in the other hand. He looked just like the man in Hotel Lobby. His eyes widened in alarm when he saw me.
"Excuse me," he objected. "Is this your room?"
I apologized and scurried out. I felt like I had found my room--one from Hopper's world. I seemed to have entered Indianapolis's Hopper paintings and made contact with one of his characters. I strolled out through the hotel lobby.
From Indy, I followed the rails about an hour's drive west.
I didn't have high hopes for my visit to Terre Haute. Comedian Steve Martin called it "the most nowhere place in America." 
Mr. Martin, who owns two Edward Hopper paintings, might be surprised to know that Terre Haute's Swope Art Museum is home to Hopper's Route 6, Eastham. But then, the town surprised me at every turn, maybe partly because my first dealing with someone from there was a museum employee e-mailing back about where I might interview residents who knew the painting, "Most people in Terre Haute have never been to the Swope. It's really out-of-towners like you who know about our collection."
I arrived at dusk on a Saturday night and headed for the one local brewpub, hoping to find some people to interview, even if they didn't know anything about art. To bypass a long wait, I accepted a seat in the smoking section. In the booth across from mine sat a wiry young man with a goatee, smoking a cigarette and wearing a loose-fitting yellow button-down shirt. He nodded in greeting as if we had met before. His tanned female companion flashed a flirtatious smile beneath dark eyes. I covered my confusion and aloneness by digging into my Caesar salad.
When the man left the table, the woman leaned over and asked with a foreign accent, "Can I ask what you are doing in this town?"
When I explained why I was there, she said, "My husband is an art curator."
I wondered, "At the Swope?" Nope. He returned and explained that he worked at a local college, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He introduced himself as Matt and his wife as Alexandra. She excitedly told him I had come to see the "Edward Hooper" at the Swope. He ignored her mistake.
"Are you from here?" I asked him.
"Born and raised. I left though and came back. I can tell you all about this town." He sidled forward and drew hard on his cigarette, obviously eager to share his views.
"Route 40 through town was the National Road, and Route 41 followed the Wabash River, so Terre Haute became known as the 'Crossroads of America.' Eugene V. Debs was born here and began the American Socialist Party here. Because of that, Terre Haute has a larger liberal contingent than its neighbor cities. In the 1920s, it became known for prostitution and gambling. Mob guys from Chicago would vacation here. Vice was the major local industry. Then in the sixties, some local ladies decided to sweep the city clean. Since the 1970s, it has been less plagued by vice, but also less patronized by business. Now?" he concluded with another long drag on his cigarette, "Terre Haute isn't so much isolated as forgotten."
"You're obviously not from here," I said to his wife.
She again looked down and batted her eyelids. "No. I am from Colombia."
Matt interjected, "We met in California: one of my times away. When we wanted to start a family, we came back here. Grandma's baby-sitting right now."
Matt tsked when I asked about the art scene in town. "The town's most famous painter was a realist watercolorist named D. Omer Seamon. He chose as his nickname, of all things, 'Salty'. 
Salty Seamon's wife was the only previous curator at Rose-Hulman, so I'm mostly in charge of where to hang the huge selection of Seamon watercolors the college owns."
Alexandra nudged Matt, and he said sheepishly, "We have to go back to put the baby to bed. Grandma's about at her limit."
I drove back to my motel and retired, marveling that the first resident I interviewed was in the arts and wondering what surprises I would find sightseeing the next day.
I started at the obvious place: "The Crossroads of America," the brass sign at Wabash Avenue and Seventh Street. Circling outward from that, I learned that Terre Haute was home to two theaters Hopper would have loved: 
the 1922 Indiana and the 1914 Hippodrome--the oldest surviving vaudeville theater in the U.S. 
I also discovered half-numbered streets (7½, 10½) and Square Donuts, 
which actually serves square donuts.
Terre Haute's unique museums included one devoted to the child victims of Nazi doctor experiments and one honoring the hometown author of Indiana's state song "On the Banks of the Wabash," Paul Dresser. Dresser's brother Theodore Dreiser never Americanized his name or attitudes and wrote epic novels detailing the perversions of capitalism. Hopper read Dreiser's books and called them "a little too Midwestern" but later said they were "all right."
Dreiser's fellow enemy of capitalism, Socialist Eugene V. Debs, lived in a tiny white-sided farmhouse here that was now a museum bristling beneath the towering rust-marked concrete dorms of Indiana State University. 
As this typographically challenged sign notes, Debs ran the activist railroad union, and he refused to support World War I. But that didn't hurt his candidacy in the next election of 1920, when he garnered nearly a million votes while jailed for those pacifist activities.
After passing the factory where 
is made (founded by Herman Hulman, whose largesse earned him co-billing at Rose-Hulman), I parked downtown and wandered the streets, deserted on a Sunday morning. 
Everywhere stood examples of the adaptability of America's small towns. Lawyers worked out of old restaurant spaces. A former retail storefront had been converted to a bookstore in whose display case rested a book of Hopper reproductions, as if a mysterious hand had foreseen my visit. I headed to the Swope and the Hopper that had drawn me here.
A surprisingly fine example of Hopper's work, Route 6, Eastham was newly cleaned when I saw it. (The Swope's building also had just undergone extensive renovations. Echoing the museum employee's warning, one of the out-of-town construction crew called the Swope "one of the best-kept secrets around.") Slightly larger than two feet by three feet, the painting shows a white clapboard farmhouse on a flat stretch of highway. Such New England farmsteads are nicknamed for their buildings: "big house-little house-back house-barn." The apparently pastoral subject is given a dark undertone because the farm is devoid of people or tools and the scene is dominated by the paved highway. A triangle of pale yellow wildflowers at bottom implies that the viewer stands across the highway. The conflict is whether to appreciate the simple beauty of the outdated farmstead or head down the long bleak modern road.
I asked the fiftyish woman sitting at the museum's front desk if she was from Terre Haute. She folded her arms across her turquoise T-shirt, which was draped with a lightweight lilac sweater. "I'm from here, but left." The Crossroads of America seemed to be the crossroads of its residents' lives: many people who left here returned. "Married military." She spoke in clipped phrases after bouts of silence during which she withdrew deep into herself. "Lived in California, Hawaii, and the Far East. I came back because my parents were in failing health. Fully intended to move back to California, but it didn't happen that way. So I'm here. And lo and behold liking it," she said, raising an eyebrow. Apparently Terre Haute can surprise even the natives.
"Do you know much about art in general or this Hopper painting?"
She narrowed her eyes. "I actually majored in Art."
"Is this anything like how you paint?"
"No. I got hooked on flowers. Flowers and artichokes. I like the feeling of isolation in Hopper's spaces, especially when he puts people in them. A lot of visitors think it's a regional piece, from the local area."
"Do you think people in your community are as isolated as Hopper's characters?" I asked.
"Absolutely not. I thought I would feel that way when I came back, but I don't. I wouldn't feel isolated except maybe in Siberia. We have a lot of culture that comes in to Terre Haute; we have a lot of culture that exists in Terre Haute. Earlier in life, I had to have the excitement of big towns; now, I prefer small towns. My kids don't live around here. I like the proximity to the airport. I can be anywhere I want to be in a short time. I like that you can drive so many neat areas around here. As an example, we went up to see Ernie Pyle's home and museum. You look at that house and you see a Hopper subject."
I left her to her duties and went to see the rest of the collection. Though the museum was small, and whole time periods and art movements that would be given a wing or a room in other museums were here given only a wall, the collection held several pleasant surprises. The Swope's Grant Wood painting Spring in Town was chosen to represent Wood in the Whitney Museum's 1999 survey of twentieth-century American art. Robert Motherwell's excellent Caprice #4 is named for the caprice that produced a beautiful spray of pitch black on a field of pure white.
I was not familiar with Gordon Samstag, but his painting titled Young Man Desires Position caught my eye. 
It shows a young man in a dark suit slumped into a chair with his portfolio at his feet. Samstag said it was an art school classmate who dropped by after a day of frustrating calls on artist wanted ads. "The title," Samstag said, "was intended to point out the twist to which the art student is subjected after leaving art school." Hopper was subjected to the same "twist," working illustration jobs after art school and not becoming appreciated as a painter until he was forty.
Back in front of Route 6, Eastham, the demographically pure family had materialized: man, woman, son, and daughter. The father was wiry and tanned with a full beard on his creased face beneath a seed company cap. The small wife had pasted a smile beneath her quickly blinking eyes. The parents introduced themselves as John and Linda and the children as Joy and True. I told them about my project and asked if they were from Terre Haute.
"We're much more rural than Terre Haute," the dad drawled.
"So that looks like your house?" I joked.
"Well, it kind of looks like where I grew up," he conceded.
"What do you think of this piece?"
He squinted at it. "You can tell he likes his subject; it's all clean lines and bright colors."
I was surprised at how succinctly he articulated the allure of Hopper's paintings. A lot of art critics had wasted a lot more words trying to explain it.
"I see here," he continued, "a mind that sees in rural lifestyle advantages but also an intellectual loneliness. It's a combination of an attraction and a repulsion. There's obviously something about Hopper's art or person that you are intrigued by," he mused, turning to me.
Nodding emphatically, his wife assured me, "I can see you're going to have quite a spiritual brotherhood with the paintings of Edgar Hopper."
I hadn't realized before visiting Terre Haute how susceptible Hopper's simple name was to variations like hers and Alexandra's from the night before.
"It's nice to have friends," John summed up, shepherding his family out the front door. "Even when they're dead."
John's wording startled me. I hadn't thought of my journey as chasing Hopper's ghost, but maybe he was right. I wouldn't have been surprised to find Hopper's spirit wandering Terre Haute; I found so many other surprises here. Like in Hopper's paintings, it is astounding how much can be revealed by even a seemingly simple scene. A lot more is going on than you would guess at first glance at this "nowhere place."
John's answers awakened me to a belief I held that partly motivated my undertaking: people will give of their deepest selves if you ask them questions more meaningful than their preference of laundry detergent or politician. It also made me think that I might find more level-headed views of Hopper from average folks than from art critics.
Hopper's subjects can mostly be divided into three groups: women, city scenes, and landscapes. Critics have disparaged his paintings of females as voyeuristic, as if you are in the painting, implicated in a drama. They also have noted that his city buildings look more animated than his people (who often have indistinct faces). And his landscapes have been called nostalgic. All three points have been made derogatorily. But critics damn Hopper and his paintings for one reason: his paintings make us uncomfortable. They make us squirm. They make us sad. They hit home. And I wanted to know what "home" people felt being hit. No one had asked the American people, the kind of people you might find in his paintings, whether the isolation depicted in Hopper's works was reflected in their lives. I thought that was a better measure of his legacy than what critics said, even his biographer.
Gail Levin wrote the definitive biography of Hopper. I am indebted to her for what I know about Hopper's life. But I also saw an opportunity for a new look at Hopper. Her biography portrayed Edward as a controlling, violent man--so much so that the New York Times headline for the book review was titled "Mean Man with a Brush." Hopper's wife Jo was portrayed as decidedly dramatic, argumentative, and looking toward posterity. So why base a biography on her journals? She had every reason and inclination to paint herself as a hero and Edward as a monster. And would anyone want their spouse's view of them to be the legacy of their life?
Hopper, a frugal and slightly paranoid man, bought a ledger in which he kept track of every painting he was working on and how much it sold for when done. 
After their marriage, Jo started a similar ledger. Many critics have wondered why she needed her own.
I was not just on a mission for Miriam in Muskegon. But also for Edward.
One of the most famous photos of Hopper was taken by Arnold Newman at the studio in Truro. The photographer later related that he had trouble getting Jo to leave him and Ed alone to shoot. So he asked Edward outside, far from the house. As you can see, Jo still tried to get in the act, calling out to them from up the hill. Newman, being an artist, pulled back the focus to include her form on the horizon. He came for a celebrity portrait and left with an image that captured poignantly the experience of being Edward Hopper.
Combined, Hopper's etchings, watercolors, sketches and oils number over 1,000. I had to limit my search to oil paintings on canvas after 1922 that hang in public museums. I excluded private collections because my interest was in what the average American felt, and I wanted the painting to hang in a place where any average American could go see it. I also started from 1922 because I felt when looking through his work (and most art historians agree) that Hopper's mature style really began then, with New York Restaurant. This left me with 47 cities.
To fund the trips to see the paintings, I kept my day job as a medical editor and divided the country into regions that I could drive around when I had enough money and vacation time: New England, The Great Plains, Ohio, the Mid-Atlantic, California, Texas, Virginia, and a few stray cities on their own. I would be tracking Hopper, who often drove across the country, ogling the people and places. Many times, I felt I had entered his footsteps or paintings. I stayed in Hopperesque lonely hotel rooms. I toured garish roadside attractions. I ate in a million Nighthawks cafes.
The weekend after my outing to Indiana, I already held an airplane ticket to Washington, DC to visit my brother. It had become a passport to more Hoppers. The nation's capital is home to more Hopper paintings in more museums than any other city but New York. This makes sense for a painter who seems to have said as much about our nation as about aesthetics. Hopper wrote, "a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people."
Like many artists, Hopper cared little for politics and left nary a quote about the two world wars that took place during his lifetime. He pointed out, "The terms radical and conservative have almost no meaning as applied to the work of the individual in art…."
The brother I was going to visit is named Irish.
His birth certificate says "James," but if you ask anyone if they know Jim Grandfield, they'll be thinking of my father. Irish and I had been the only two kids in the family to go away to prep school: St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware (called "SAS"). It was such the archetypal prep school that director Peter Weir chose it as the set for his film Dead Poets Society.
Like most people in the area, Irish had a governmental job, but his was not federal. He was an environmental planner for suburban Fairfax County, Virginia, about 30 miles east of DC. He lived nearby in Leesburg, a city where historic colonial brick buildings lined the town square, while out along the interstate, strip malls and suburban housing plats sprouted daily.
When asked about isolation, he stroked a cupped hand down his chin, indicating that he didn't feel qualified to answer. "How? Emotionally? Mentally? Spiritually? Yes, at times. But not as a pervasive, all-encompassing reality as depicted in Hopper's works. DC is not empty enough to allow you to be as isolated as Hopper's characters.
"I know that the 'isolation' that many people relate with Hopper's works does not refer to how crowded our lives and spaces are. But for me, that is a part of the physical isolation that manifests itself in so many of Hopper's works.
"Hopper's paintings reflect a time that is long gone; when there perhaps were fewer than one billion people on this earth, as opposed to the six billion now. There is another key difference in the isolation I sense today. People today exhibit a degree of anxiety and aggression that none of Hopper's characters seem to exhibit."
My brother's housemate was the woman who held the position he just left: Leesburg city planner. She was originally from Madras, India, and her name was coincidentally Jo. She was short with a heart-shaped face mottled different shades of brown beneath a full mane of wavy, coal-colored hair. She answered my question very formally.
"Oh, I don’t think you are [isolated]. I think you recognize how hard it is to get together here and plan accordingly. Even your malls are at least gathering places. Now, am I isolated because I'm from India? Yes, if you mean am I literally far from my family back home. But we stay in touch on the phone, and I visit quite often, and I have plenty of Indian friends here. But you know, there are Americans (and English and others) working in India too. It's no longer just the U.S. that is a melting pot."
Hopper's 1946 Approaching a City adorns a back corner of an upstairs room in the museum founder's mansion that now shelters the Phillips Collection near DuPont Circle. The painting's wide-angle view of a line of buildings brooding above a train tunnel is not Hopper's most romantic scene, but it evoked for me my train arrivals in European cities. Hopper put it this way: "There is a certain fear and anxiety, and a great visual interest in the things one sees coming into the city."
Hopper's dealer Frank K.M. Rehn was, according to Jo, "enthusiastic, altho it isn't a picture that will sell readily." Ironically, it was acquired the very next year by this museum's founder, Duncan Phillips, who championed Hopper. Duncan called Hopper: "A new type of American painter and etcher. He depicts American architectural horror…. Hopper defies our preconceptions of the picturesque and unflinchingly accepts the challenge of American subjects which seem almost too far beyond the scope even of the realistic artist's 'alchemy.'"
Despite his praise, Phillips's appreciation of Hopper was often misguided. Phillips claimed that a "portrait of a locomotive" was from "romantic California" when Hopper hadn't yet been there, and he thought Hopper's 
Sunday was set in the Midwest, when it was painted in Hoboken, New Jersey. Hopper almost called the painting Hoboken Façade. The irony is that Phillips had bought Sunday back in 1926 (the same year that it was painted).
Sunday portrays a bald-headed fellow chomping a cigar and sitting on a boardwalk in front of vacant storefronts bathed in lime-colored sunlight. The perspective tilts the man forward as if the sidewalk wants to shrug him off, but he seems set. It was not on display during my visit.
Standing in the Phillips, I was literally following in Hopper's footsteps. He and Jo visited here in 1937. Jo's only note was that they liked Renoir's 
Luncheon of the Boating Party.
I was visiting early on a weekday, so no one was in the galleries to interview, and I couldn't hang around in front of the painting. I had others to see. So I asked a young museum employee with a ring in each ear and a goatee on his chin if he was an artist. Atop a long neck, his head moved slowly as a snake's as he answered yes, so I asked about DC's art scene.
"Artists here have to live in the ghetto. I'm not kidding. It's the only place they can afford. There aren't a lot of galleries in town; most are right around here."
"Do you think people here are as isolated as in Hopper's paintings?"
"That's what we're about here in DC. We're all isolated. We can afford to be. We're the capitol of the new Holy Roman Empire, so we don't need to deal with anyone else."
When I came up from the underground Metro stop by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, I was met by a DC cop on a bike and two burly guys in steel-gray uniforms with patches on their short sleeves that said "Secret Service." I asked them, "What's this neighborhood like?"
They all chimed in reassuringly: "Oh, it's safe. You don't gotta worry."
Their answer seemed paranoid. (This was before 9/11.) "No," I said, "Are the people who live around here isolated?"
They snorted, "No one lives around here." I looked around and saw only high-rise office buildings. But at the next corner, the White House appeared on my left. "No one lives around here," the cops might have said, "except the country's leader!" And that resident is definitely isolated.
The White House is more correctly for most visitors 
"The Black Fence," for that is what separates you from it--that and a billion dollars in campaign contributions.
In the park across the street, two homeless people were practicing their freedom of speech, displaying signs critical of the government, as if they weren't themselves signs critical of the government. The Greek Revival White House, with its fluted pillars and triangles atop rectangles, is a subject Hopper might have chosen.
I was writing down these observations, and I suddenly swung around to make sure that those Secret Service guys weren't tailing me. They weren't; nevertheless, I pocketed the notebook and headed for the Corcoran.
Hopper had a long association with the Corcoran. In the spring of 1937, his painting 
Cape Cod Afternoon won the museum's first-ever W.A. Clark Gold Medal Prize. Later, he would serve as a judge for that award. In an introduction to a Corcoran catalog, Hopper made one of his rare forays into putting in writing his beliefs about painting: "Broadly stated, art is one's effort to communicate to others one's emotional reaction to life and the world."
The Hopper here was the 1939 
Ground Swell, about three feet by four, larger than most of his. The painting shows a boat with a white sail riding out the slow rolling wave of the title beneath even noonday sunlight. Ground Swell hung by itself on a powder blue wall about five feet off the ground beneath the Corcoran's twenty-foot-high ceilings, so the sky above the boat seemed to go on forever.
In Ground Swell, four boys with tanned torsos stare at a large russet buoy topped by a green copper bell. A girl (easily overlooked) lies across the cabin roof, counterbalancing the boys. Their common focus (a visual "anchor," if you will) brings a tranquil balance to the whole composition. The incredibly pleasing mix of sea green, sky blue, and foam white in the painting cannot be described nor reproduced. The day is bright, the sea is calm, the people are in the same boat, and they have the sea to themselves. How much better could life get in a Hopper painting?
I waited around for other people, but no one was there besides me and the security guard, a lanky young kid with a wispy mustache. His stiff blue coat was too tight on his active body and too short for his gangly arms. The plastic badge over his heart said "Juan." When I asked him if he liked the Hopper painting, he shifted from solemnity to rocking with the enthusiasm of a man singing. "Oh yeah, man; it's a beaut."
"Do a lot of visitors ask to see this?"
"Most of 'em wanna see the 
Sargent [Oyster Gatherers of Cancale]. You gotta see the Niagara [Frederic Edwin Church's depiction of Horseshoe Falls]; it makes you feel like you are right there," he added with a nod.
Being in DC, the Corcoran emphasizes American paintings and themes. I passed Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait of 
George Washington. Beneath the bright eyes and rosy cheeks, dour downturned lips made George look like a hard taskmaster. By Church's Niagara, I saw Albert Bierstadt's 
The Last of the Buffalo, which portrays a Native American killing buffalo, with five or six already on the ground. The sign beside the painting claims that Bierstadt was being "ironic" in portraying Native Americans killing off the Buffalo when in fact European colonizers killed off both.
While Hopper was judging an art competition for the Corcoran in February 1951, he was struggling with the flu and his own painting First Row Orchestra, which I headed off to see over at DC's Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall.
The mall stretches from the Washington Monument
at one end, to Capitol Hill
on the other: from the founding of our country and its myth of "I cannot tell a lie" to the modern day ruling class selling to the highest bidder. The large number of ex-military people who work in DC, and the city's emphasis on appearance, make it work-out-obsessed, and the green's sandy paths were overrun with people jogging.
This mall is as close as you get to a public square in this so-called "city," (really a "district"). You might say DC is only "approaching a city." It is not a state; that's for sure. During my visit, I saw people with gear that sported the slogan "taxation without representation." It is an administrative center, where representatives from all other cities come to form a temporary city. John Kennedy called it, "a town of Southern efficiency and Northern charm."
Jeff, a fellow writer and SAS classmate of mine who grew up in the DC area as the son of a diplomat, called it a "transient town." "Hopper and isolation in DC?," he said. "How about Hopper and segregation in DC? It's a very segregated town, with no industrial heart. Industries have traditionally attracted immigrants who build a sense of community, which might serve to counteract the tendency towards isolation. America itself, with its ethic of rugged individualism and independence, seems a breeding ground for isolation. Washington is a place of power, but the job of running our country seems to be a lonely one."
As Jeff noted, the United States's very founding is linked with isolationism: the colonists and ensuing immigrants isolated themselves from their former cultures, towns, families, and homes. This led to further isolation in the new culture, as citizens cocooned themselves in enclaves based on those former cultures, nationalities, and allegiances.
Our history is also full of examples of the "do-it-yourself" ethic and ardent individualists: Henry David Thoreau; John Brown; Jesse James; Mormons; Davidians. Today, we have shore to shore to ourselves and so are neither used to nor good at sharing. We have no welfare system and fewer societal safety nets as each Congress passes. Perhaps what unites us Americans most is exactly our fractionalism.
I found Hopper's First Row Orchestra in a deserted gallery within the Hirshhorn Museum. In the painting, four theatergoers huddle at the far end of the front row's plush seats. Hopper and Jo usually purchased balcony tickets to save money, but a visiting friend bought them main-floor seats shortly before Hopper painted this canvas. For lifelong spendthrift Hopper, this experience made a big enough impression to serve as a subject for an oil painting. First Row Orchestra doesn't seem as dark in mood as other Hopper paintings, but doesn't seem as compelling either.
The Hirshhorn also owned a 1951 Hopper oil called 
City Sunlight. It shows a woman seated at a round oak table and resting an arm on a windowsill as she stares out into Hopper's beloved sunlight. Most consider this one of Hopper's lesser works, and it is almost never displayed.
However, a couple of Hopper's better paintings are displayed a couple of galleries over from First Row Orchestra. In
Eleven A.M., a woman on the edge of her overstuffed chair stares at the city outside her window. She is naked except for her pointy red shoes, which glow supernaturally atop the lime green carpet. Her auburn hair eclipses her face except for the nose. The painting, suggestively erotic, originally showed at a Valentine's Day opening 1927 in Rehn's gallery.
Hanging by its side was Hopper's 
Hotel by a Railroad. In it, an older woman sits reading in her pink satiny slip, her gray hair limp. An erudite man in a vest, delicately holding his cigarette far from his face, stares out the room's unusually large window overlooking railroad tracks onto which he might easily throw himself. The two are alone in separate thoughts, as isolated as the woman in Eleven A.M., if not more isolated by virtue of being alone together.
Seeing as I was in the same room with another person, a beefy man, gentle and bearded, I asked him if he liked the painting.
"I like Edward Hopper, yah," he said.
He said he was in town for a conference. "I am an American, but I moved to Canada in 1970 and have lived there ever since. I'm a Sociology professor at a university in Toronto."
(Note to self: When writing a book about the sociological implications of Edward Hopper's paintings, ask a sociologist.)
"He's a highly sociological painter," he continued. "One of the things that attracts me to him is that depiction of obviously lonely people. American individualism is what it is. The isolationism of the 1950s and the Cold War. Nobody looks at one another. In First Row Orchestra, they're sitting close together but she's reading a program, he's looking somewhere else, and the man in back is not looking at anyone."
"Would a Canadian paint this isolation?"
"Well, famous Canadian artists are famous because they live in New York. If you mean, 'Are Canadians more collectively oriented?' The answer is yes. My wife and I come back frequently, and the country that I come back to is not the country that I left," he lamented. "I hadn't seen these particular paintings before, but I saw them from around the corner and knew they must be Edward Hoppers. I like all of his. It's high bourgeois taste," he snickered and extended a puffy paw for me to shake goodbye. "Good luck with your sociology study. Nothingness is really quite interesting, but, you know, not everything's a statement."
After him, a plump fortyish woman entered the gallery and closely studied the Hoppers then stepped back and sighed. When she turned to answer my question whether these paintings related to the town, I saw that one eye bulged out and the other was closed.
"I don't think Hopper's paintings have anything to do with what goes on here. Everything here is political; it's groups. It's striving for power. To the extent that they exist here, people like this are forgotten. It reminds me of people you would see in New York.
"I was going to another exhibit, but I just can't pass one of his paintings. In Hotel by a Railroad, there's so much mystery. What is going on between these two? And in Eleven A.M., what is she looking at? What does she care about? Is she expecting something or did she just leave something?
"I have a poster of Hopper's paintings of storefronts, 
Early Sunday Morning, up on my wall at work. Everybody sees something different in it. One fellow said, 'From an engineer's perspective, that drawing is completely off. The point of stress on the building would go right through the window.'
"I find his paintings very appealing because of the light. I think that's what appeals to people: it takes a moment from a day they remember as being extremely striking. The moment, the moment, is crystallized.
"I traveled to New York to see the big retrospective. It turns out that the curator of that exhibit graduated the year before me and was someone I knew."
"Gail?" I asked.
"Yes," she exclaimed. "Gail Levin. She has the life I wish I had. I don't study these things; I just enjoy them. I'm just a government employee. This is where I would rather be, but I only come here on my lunch hour. Actually, I haven't been here in a while. I meant to write a letter to the director. They had a number of exhibits recently that have really disgusted me. They had one here that was an entire room filled with what was basically a dress. 
It was kind of like, 'OK, that's pretty.' Whereas you can, and we have, spent hours in front of these paintings talking about narrative and color and everything."
After the Hirshhorn, I headed to the National Museum of American Art (NMAA), home to Hopper's People in the Sun and Cape Cod Morning.
Hopper imagined the scene in People in the Sun as taking place in Tucson, Arizona. The characters lift their heads as if to enjoy the sun, but their clothes prevent them from soaking in the warmth. Something Puritanical prevents them from doffing their clothes and/or running off into the field. One person does not look up: a younger man alone at far left in the back row looks down at his book. His huddle implies a communing with ideas; literature has provided him a contentment the others are missing.
In 
Cape Cod Morning, a woman, boxed in by a bay window, leans on a chair back and stares into a sunlight so selective she seems to be being radiated--by divine knowledge or atomic annihilation we don't know. Edward wanted the sun to be "straight in her eyes." It is the most expressive face in any of his paintings. The woman's arms seem to clutch the chair rather than merely lean on it.
As Jo posed for Cape Cod Morning, she asked if Edward wanted her to be thinking of a French poem. He protested, "That woman doesn't know a word of French." Edward also was unhappy with Jo's hair--"too like a mop"--and went rummaging through popular magazines to find the hairdo he wanted. In a later interview, when asked which of his paintings pleased him more than others, he picked up Cape Cod Morning in reply.
The NMAA was closed for renovations, so I couldn't view the paintings or interview locals in front of them. The paintings were out touring America, like me, and like Hopper himself loved to do. I caught up with those two paintings on their tour a year and a half later. When I did, I also saw yet another Hopper that the museum had meantime acquired: 
Ryder's House.
It might have been able to be acquired because it is not a great example of Hopper's work.
I doubled back to the National Gallery, one of the places where this project started. A high school field trip sent us to the Smithsonian Institution, with strict instructions what science museums we had to attend. My painter friend Bruce tapped my shoulder before we left the bus and grumbled, "Come on. We're going to the National Gallery of Art." There is nothing like spending a day looking at a broad spectrum of art with someone who really appreciates it to inspire you, and I came away with my own growing fondness for art and a desire to see and learn more.
That first visit, Bruce taught me the basics: composition, balance, color, etc. But I couldn't have picked out a Hopper from a da Vinci. Since then, I had taught myself about artist's techniques, individual styles, and how their work related to other artists and to their societies. And I had identified Hopper as one who called to me.
The National Gallery holds Hopper's 1939 
Cape Cod Evening. It is a textbook example of Hopper's disconnected figures. The dog not listening to the man calling it implies that his masters don't listen to each other either. There is no sidewalk, walkway, or driveway. Jo and Ed's house on Cape Cod was similarly isolated, and the relationship in the painting seems an apt view of Jo and Edward's often stormy marriage.
I stopped back at the front desk and inquired where I might find Cape Cod Evening hanging in the cavernous museum.
"It just went into storage," the sentry informed me from behind thick security glass. He was a stocky middle-aged African-American with a bushy mustache and night-dark eyes. His manner was officious but seemingly trying to make me feel unthreatened. As a result, I of course felt on guard.
"Could I call to see whether I could arrange a viewing?"
"Sure," he grunted and pointed to a phone on a table outside his booth. After several calls, I was connected to the woman in charge of such things. "We can't arrange a viewing on such short notice," she protested, but I did wheedle a token quote out of her. "Being a national gallery," she stated, "it's fitting that the Hoppers are here because he's so identified as an American painter."
In DC, even the art galleries act like they hold military secrets. I had to leave DC and get back to Irish's. I headed out of the National Gallery, walking beneath the huge Alexander Calder mobile suspended above the atrium,
each element isolated, swinging precariously above our heads, but all in balance so that it doesn't fall. It seemed a lot like these United States.
My first big tour took in the town and region most important to Hopper's life and art: New York and New England. In addition to living in New York City from age 18 until his death, Hopper later in life summered in South Truro on Cape Cod in a studio he and Jo had built. As a student, he had painted at the New England sites that were de rigueur for artists at that time, such as Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Ogunquit, Maine.
From Maine lighthouses to New York's tenements, he surveyed the landscape and took his subjects from what surrounded him. Some of his most famous paintings are his New England lighthouses, like in 
Captain Upton's House, Lighthouse at Two Lights, and Lighthouse Hill. He also painted other coastal vistas like in Bootleggers, Ground Swell, The Long Leg, and 
5 A.M. In industrial towns, he mined scenes like Freight Cars, Gloucester; Dawn in Pennsylvania; Sunday; and
Office in a Small City. He captured on canvas quaint New England scenes like Portrait of Orleans and 
Sun on Prospect Street. On Cape Cod (an isolated piece of land jutting into the ocean), he was drawn to isolated houses like in Cape Cod Morning, Cape Cod Sunset, Mrs. Scott's House, Rooms by the Sea, Ryder's House, and 
Cape Cod Afternoon. He also portrayed lonely landscapes like Camel's Hump; Corn Hill, Truro; Cobb's Barn and Distant Houses; Hills, South Truro; New York, New Haven, and Hartford; and Portrait of Orleans
. In old-money enclaves, he found the grandiose old houses he portrayed in paintings like Pretty Penny, Second Story Sunlight, Rooms for Tourists, and 
House by the Railroad.
Hopper wrote of the paintings of his friend Charles Burchfield (though he could have said the same about his own): 
[Charles Burchfield's Street Scene]
"Our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-Gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eye-searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps--these appear again and again, as they should in any honest delineation of the American scene."
Not only did New England provide subjects for his canvasses, but it seems to have tinged his view of things. He was a reticent and conventional man from an area full of such people. Perhaps the region's conservatism contributed to his paintings' sense of isolation. He often portrayed the local houses and their residents as isolated or sheltered. One such painting he titled 
Two Puritans. It seems he used such subjects to represent the aloofness and stifling morality of the region--and by extension the country's.
Of course, Hopper's hometown of New York City provided many subjects, too.
Nighthawks was suggested by a local restaurant on Greenwich where two streets meet (by some accounts a coffee shop called the Dixie Kitchen). 
Similarly, 
Automat was inspired by a place on Broadway near Washington Square, and the famous storefronts in Early Sunday Morning were nearby Seventh Avenue shops (a title Hopper considered using).
Chop Suey was based on a second-floor Chinese restaurant on Columbus Circle where he and Jo used to eat before attending theater shows. Walks along Riverside Drive inspired his paintings House at Dusk and 
August in the City (I saw the most likely candidate for the house in that painting at Seventy-seventh and Riverside),
while Sunlight on Brownstones was taken from near there in the lower West Eighties. The titles of other paintings of his give away their New York subjects: New York Office, The Circle Theater; Sheridan Theater; Room in Brooklyn; From Williamsburg Bridge; Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt's Island); and Macomb's Dam Bridge (now the 155th St. Bridge in Harlem).
Like New England's conservatism, New York's massive impersonality and anonymity may have filtered through to his paintings. One critic noted that New York City has "often served as a symbol of the nation as a whole."
Hopper's studio was in a building that is now the offices of New York University's Social Work Department. NYU took over the building near the end of his life. Jo wrote, "The war of Washington square is going on. …nefarious NY University has obtained a lease on our house and is trying to throw us all out [from] where everyone has turned up at one time or another: Eakins painted a portrait, Paderowski gave a recital, Dos Passos wrote Three Soldiers, Guy Du Bois, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Eleanore Mylie, Frank Harris, The Dial born in the first floor, etc." But Hopper managed to live there until the end of his life in 1967, and Jo died in the apartment the next year.
I nervously asked the co-ed at the front counter whether I could see the studio, and she sighed with the world-weariness of a New York cop, "Take that elevator to the top floor; studio's on your right." The elevator seemed old enough to be from Hopper's days, though they didn't have one, which Jo so lamented that she immortalized it in a picture titled 40 Steps up to Chez Hopper.
The room had the Spartan, light-filled feel for which Hopper's paintings are famous. A huge slanted skylight sifted sunrays onto the white plaster walls and bowing wooden floor slathered in gray paint.
Here, out a sooty back window latticed with black wires, lay the view that he immortalized in paintings like City Roofs; My Roof; Skylights; and 
Roofs, Washington Square. Here, dominating the studio's front room, squatted his huge printing press through which he rolled the etchings that launched his career, and here also loomed the ten-foot-high easel built by Hopper's own hands shortly after moving in here. 
This top-story studio was a perfect perch for a voyeuristic painter like Hopper, and here out the front windows remained the view of Washington Square that he painted in his canvases Shakespeare at Dusk and 
November, Washington Square. Maybe he used people he spied below in the park or sidewalks as models for characters in other paintings.
Here also huddled the tiny fireplace, untouched, above it a portrait of Hopper by Jo. 
And here, in a little nook between the back and front rooms, sat a dorm-room-sized frig and zinc sink. A tiny decrepit oven rested behind the other door. These appeared to be the same appliances as were left there when Jo died.
As soon as I stepped into the front room, a stubby woman with curly gray hair blocked my path and glared at me through her oval spectacles with her hands on her hips. "What are you doing here?" she barked.
"Researching a book on Edward Hopper," I stammered.
"Well, I have an issue with you being in here. I'm meeting with a student. Who said you could be here?"
Taken aback, I blurted out the last in the string of people who had told me it was OK. "The receptionist out front." Almost immediately, I realized my mistake.
"Come with me," the stumpy academic said, like a third-grade teacher curling a finger before her eye, and we marched back out to the Latina in a silky orange mini-skirt working behind a shoulder-high brown metal divider who had pointed me to the studio.
"No one is to be allowed into that room when I am having a meeting with a student," the older woman chastised the younger. The trollish social worker waddled on back down the hall, and the Latina receptionist shrugged.
The NYU takeover of the studio was complete.
The Whitney grew out of the Whitney Studio Club, begun in 1918 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who championed Hopper. Jo jealously felt Gertrude had other designs on Edward, too. He became one of the earliest members, and in 1920, the club gave him one of his first one-man exhibitions. Reviews were underwhelming. But the Whitney made his Early Sunday Morning one of their first purchases. They also sponsored a nighttime studio that the poor bachelor Hopper could attend for free to sketch nude models. (The woman in charge of the classes said Hopper never missed one.) Hopper remained devoted to Gertrude and her museum throughout his life. He said, "I guess they considered me a safe man to deal with."
On the Whitney's second floor, in a white-walled room whose hardwood floors resounded with heels clacking like cue balls, I stood in a gallery devoted solely to Hopper's paintings. Here were 
Seven A.M.: a storefront eerie in the thin morning sunlight; 
Early Sunday Morning: "The most famous row of windows in American painting," Hopper's biographer Gail Levin rightly notes; 
South Carolina Morning: Hopper's only painting with an African-American character; 
A Woman in the Sun: a merciless depiction of a nude woman having her morning cigarette; 
Second Story Sunlight: a disorienting view of a second-floor balcony holding a buxom young girl and an older woman; and
Cobb's Barn and Distant Houses: a Cape Cod landscape.
It was like entering a different land: Hopperville. The sun is always brilliant. Houses are kept immaculately in the era in which they were built. No words are ever exchanged. People do normal things like eat, go to theaters, work jobs, and lie on beaches. But they never seem happy about it. They almost seem not to know why they do it or even that they are doing it. Occasionally, you glimpse the neighbors. But mostly when they don’t know you're looking. You hang inside, too, and hope nobody finds you here, on the lam from a crime you committed somewhere else and long ago. And a boat always stands ready in the harbor to steal you away.
Everybody knows somebody who lives in New York. And I arranged to meet my friend Julia, a poet and painter from the Bronx who I met through my brother, Irish. One day at work, a young co-worker had a bad headache, so Irish drove her to the emergency room. She died that night from a condition so rare that the doctors claimed she may well have been the only person in the U.S. to die from it that year. That co-worker was Julia's daughter, and at the funeral Irish gave her my number as a fellow writer. We traded e-mails and phone calls for three years, but I had never set eyes on her before our meeting at the Whitney lobby.
I spotted her exactly how she said I would: "I'll be the only one wearing a big white floppy hat." Julia had the big unjudging eyes of a deadpan comic and a narrow face, sanguine and brown, that reminded me that she often mentioned her immigrant Italian parents. I sought out her thoughts as a painter about the Hoppers.
"You get a sensation of being alone," she calculated about all the Hoppers in the gallery. "In Early Sunday Morning, you would know all of the shop owners. It's a town we all recognize, and you can still find hints of it in our cities. I grew up in this place. But I wonder: will the next generation have the same response?"
Julia noted about Second Story Sunlight, "You can't be seeing the house from where you think you're seeing it from. You're raised up. So we're standing in a building across the way in the second floor leaning over our own little balcony. He moves things around to make the paintings work." She shrugged and added like someone who has done the same for her art, "You make things up in order to make it right. That's why the painting is on the wall there in Woman in the Sun. Your eye makes sense of the light falling equidistantly from that painting. It doesn't read as incorrect that that painting's the source of light. There's something so wrong about it and you wonder, 'well what is it?' Everything is just wrong about it. This is not a facial expression," she concluded about the woman in the sun. "But it tells you about her," she nodded slyly, "It tells you a great deal."
"We're in town to study these too," she cooed. "I'm supposed to give a mini-lecture in conjunction with a film about him at the art institute in Kalamazoo. We had a visiting curator, and he boldly titled his lecture, 'The Ten Most Significant Paintings of the Twentieth Century,' which of course is the way to get yourself into trouble right away. He picked Early Sunday Morning as one of them. He talked about how it was American Realism, but it bridges to more abstract ways of looking at things.
"I was just saying to Tom that, 'cause I've seen them mostly in reproductions in glossy books, they look much harder, less painterly. I think Hopper always kind of goes, 'unh'." She makes a fist to show how solidly Hopper places his shapes.
Tom finally jumped in, "The way in which he placed things is so much more sophisticated. It's like the way the Orientals look at balance. He has such big spaces that are not busy. You have maybe two main figures. It's difficult to achieve balance with such big spaces. There's a confidence in his drawing, and drawing is so important. They [Hopper's paintings] really open up the more time you spend in front of them."
The woman frowned, "There's a very old film interview with him. He totally sounds like he's inarticulate. But he isn't; he just doesn't know what to say. Maybe one of the fascinations with him is that he's such a mystery. In America, we don't like that much."
"I'm no expert," he shrugged when I asked about the paintings. But when I clarified that I was interested in how they related to New York, he exclaimed, "That's my town! A little different than Hopper's towns." He spoke with the clipped phrases of an entrepreneur spouting business aphorisms. "That's very New York," he asserted. "Claustrophobic."
I pointed to Early Sunday Morning. "That's Seventh Avenue."
"New York?! If it is, it's not there any more."
"Do you feel people in your community are isolated like these characters?"
He screwed up his face. "Contrary to how it might seem, New York is kind of a lonely place. Despite being around people constantly. Generally it's got a neighborhoody feeling--possibility of. I don't think of Hopper as really gloomy. I guess they do seem isolated, but you get the sense of a community somewhere around them. Seems that there is an environment around them of people, and that's what they are isolated from." He bobbed his head goodbye and bounced off to the next gallery.
"Can I ask you about these paintings?" I asked.
"About Hoppah?" Used to having her opinion solicited, she continued without waiting for me to confirm. "Lonely. Sad. You kind of find yourself in the middle. And that's hahd in any situation. The middle…," she paused for dramatic effect and demonstrated with her hands, "opens out." Then she flicked a smile and stalked out.
No one walked into the gallery for a while, so I approached the security guard. He had a long, gaunt face the color of burnished teak, and he answered enthusiastically with a slight accent. "Everybody loves Hopper. I hear people comment. That woman," he whispered conspiratorially, pointing to Woman in the Sun, "was his girlfriend. She lived in Europe. That was why Jo was so jealous. Jo didn't like him to use other women so she posed for him." This is an interesting theory, but by all accounts Jo herself posed for all Hopper's figures.
"When we had the big show of Hoppers, we had like a half a millions [sic] people come here for that. This guy [Hopper], he gets visitors from all over the world. Everybody that comes to New York wants to see Hopper. They got this tourist book comes in different languages, right? And they look at Hoppers in there, and I have to tell 'em, 'what's in the book is not out.' They get very disappointed. They say, 'Boo hoo. Where's the Hoppers? No Hoppers?! Boo hoo.'"
Directly opposite the elevator back to the lobby hung Hopper's Soir Bleu, an early work from his days in Europe that shows garish revelers in a Paris bar. In 1907, Hopper wrote to his mother from Paris of the Carnivale "the broad sun displays their defects--perhaps a neck too thin or painted face which shows ghastly white in the sunlight." Though painted before 1922 and therefore not on my list to study, Soir Bleu emerged from the pile of paintings inherited by the Whitney as one of Hopper's more popular and significant works.
An older couple stood discussing it. He was appareled in a tie and coat, and she flaunted a long elegant dress and flashes of diamonds on her wrists, ears, and heart. She also bore a badge saying, "Volunteer." I told them of my project, and she raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, you're a writer? What have you done?"
"A couple hundred book reviews, film reviews, travel pieces, cultural commentary…"
"Oh," she cut me off with a flick of her wrist, "you've done nothing yet. Where have you found the most Hoppers?" she wanted to know.
I may have done nothing, but I had done some research. "Well, your institution received the Hopper estate, so naturally they have the most in their collection."
"Really?" she squealed. "For the longest time, we didn't have any Hoppers up. I'm at the membership desk downstairs and people would come specifically and say, 'Where are the Hoppers?'" Turning to Soir Bleu, she pontificated, "The clown is very lovely. And the blue in the sky: the night we went out on the roof of our hotel and looked out over Montmartre, the light was a little like this. I can't believe so many people say he did the same thing over and over again. You go and see the repetitiveness of some modern artists. I'm just sick of people talking about Hopper's paintings' loneliness. Because that's not the big thing."
Her husband interjected, sounding like a British military officer from an old-time film. "I'm interested more by the drama."
She steamrolled over him, "I don't think you really say, 'what is this woman thinking?' I really don't care. The woman's just another element there for balance. So many pictures I look at, I just want to add something to. But not Hopper."
"He's a great composer," I commented.
"He is a composer," she chipped, surprised by my word. "This is music."
"The music of the spheres," the man declaimed, pleased with his cleverness.
"No," she undercut him. "Music of the rectangles."
I went down to the lobby to meet Julia for our farewell. As I waited, I stood next to a person I recognized from photos but couldn’t place. Then I realized: the photographer Annie Liebovitz! I did not think quickly enough, but I should have pretended to have no idea who she was and asked her to take my photo since I was alone on vacation in New York. When Julia arrived and I told her my idea, she rightly noted that Annie probably would have found an excuse to decline. But for a while I had hopes of receiving the cheapest Liebovitz portrait session ever.
Julia had proved as charming and New York brassy in person as in her e-mails. And her practical understanding of how Liebovitz would have dealt with me was something only a New Yorker would think so quickly about. In fact, seeing Annie was part of the charm of New York: celebrity seeking. But I was seeking Hopper. And normal people's thoughts about him. Enough attention has been paid to celebrities and their opinions.
Though an average person, I was made to feel a celebrity when I visited New York's prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). When I called to arrange a viewing, I was told that their Hoppers were all in storage; the museum was given over to a series of installations in the galleries. My heart fell. "Did you want to see them in storage?" the voice on the other end of the phone asked. "I was just about to ask that," I answered. The idea had, of course, never occurred to me, but I wasn't going to turn down the opportunity.
Susan, the woman who escorted me to storage wore a black turtleneck beneath a black-and-white checked coat, and her short black hair formed a shell around her head. Above her round cheeks, dark eyes bugged out due to her glasses' thick lenses or her infectious energy. "Take as much time as you need," she said cheerily on the elevator.
We made our way back to a space that reminded me of my college theater set-building shop. Twenty-foot-tall white walls led to a concrete ceiling humming with fluorescent tubes recessed in trenches. The racks of works that lined the back wall were like an index to twentieth-century art.
"Is that a…?" I began.
"Warhol, yes," Susan said offhandedly.
"And?"
"Yes," she assured me, "Rauschenberg."
We ignored the hundreds of museum-quality works looking over our shoulders to focus on the Hoppers that had been pulled out of the stacks by a worker Susan introduced as Elizabeth. Elizabeth wore blue jeans and thick-soled black shoes. Blond disheveled hair straggled down to the shoulders of her black sweater. When she learned I was from Chicago, she said that she grew up in Wicker Park, Chicago's Polish neighborhood.
"Are you Polish?" I asked.
She merely whipped off her black oblong glasses and leaned her face into mine, as if her craggy nose and strong jaw were evidence enough.
Elizabeth had placed two of the Hoppers upright on a cart and hung two others on the wall. This surprised Susan as being beyond the call of duty. The paintings were House by the Railroad, Gas, Night Windows, and New York Movie.
Hopper's 
House by the Railroad was the first work to enter MOMA's permanent collection. It shows a house that the Addams Family might have lived in, and Norman Bates did: Hitchcock allegedly based the house in Psycho on this painting. Hopper's image of a hulking white house looming out of a featureless landscape above railroad tracks is also supposedly the source of the houses in the movies Giant and Days of Heaven.
Gas 
shows a bald attendant in tie and vest fiddling with bright red gas pumps silhouetted against the evening sky that makes the tiny white boxlike office glow like a Swiss cheese lit from within. Jo said Ed was after "an effect of night on a gasoline station. He wanted to do one for years."
Night Windows 
shows the backside of a woman in a hot pink slip glimpsed through a second-story window in a brightly lit room behind a dark urban façade at night. Sharing the room with her suggestively are a corner of a bed and a radiator.
New York Movie I did not know of before starting this project, but it is a Hopper masterpiece. A contemplative female usher stands bathed in lamplight at the back of a movie theater. A stairway beside her leads up. (A punning "Ascension of Mary?" Three glowing lamps above her head mimic halos). She upstages the murky film on the screen behind her that everyone in the audience watches. Only viewers of Hopper's painting see the real drama, which is her in the theater. Not only is the film image on the screen a New York movie, the scene as a whole is a New York movie, and the usherette is the star.
"This is great," Liz raved, "getting these out. We never get to appreciate them because we're always processing them. I certainly love him as a painter. He's so much a part of our training, as American artists. He's part of the pantheon. These are like flash cards. This gal in New York Movie: I've known her since I was a kid. It was such a surprise for me to haul it out again. I really like the fact that when they're on the wall, the paintings maintain their scale. I really think that's something nice about Hopper: his paintings have an internal scale based on a certain kind of looking. In installation, they appear bigger. Their impact on the viewer really does magnify them. "
"Are the Odilon Redons gone yet?" Susan interrupted.
"They're just packing them up now," Elizabeth replied. "I'd love to see them, but what about him?"
They eyed me for a moment. "We'll have to take him with us." I mentioned that I had just seen a Redon show in Chicago, and Susan boasted, "I bought tickets to that, then I broke my foot. But I still flew to Chicago and hobbled around that show because I was not going to miss it."
Whereas I was banished from Hopper's studio, at MOMA I ended up getting a private viewing of not only the Hoppers, but also dozens of gorgeous Redons.
MOMA Nowhere
MOMA has other classic Hoppers that I didn't see that day. Railroad Sunset shows a railroad station's black outline looming in front of a sunset that traipses down the spectrum colors: robin eggs, fires, lemons, mints, and plums. MOMA Front [Hopper's East Wind Over Weehawken] Purchase, New York: Barber Shop Armonk, New York: When is a Painting not a Painting? New Haven, Connecticut: Gown and Town [Yale Dorm] [Yale Theater] Boston, MA: Very Very [Granary grave] [Andover school green] [Andover Town Hall] Northampton, Massachusetts: Pretty Penny [Sylvester's] Williamstown, Massachusetts: Morning in a City [Williams College art museum] [Williamstown in a postcard] Manchester, New Hampshire: Bootleggers [Andrew Wyeth, Braids (A Helga Portrait)] Brooklyn, New York: Macomb's Dam Bridge Montclair, New Jersey: Coast Guard Station [Montclair Art Museum] [Downtown Montclair] Newark, New Jersey: The Sheridan Theater [Newark Museum] [Newark Today] West Palm Beach, Florida: August in a City Cincinnati, Ohio: Prospect Street, Gloucester [Lockland, Ohio, my ancestors' hometown] The Bar I Visited Dayton, Ohio: High Noon I was reminded how polite and deferential Daytonians were when I stood in front of the painting to interview people and no one came over, as if only one person at a time were allowed to look at it. Finally, I approached a blond ponytailed girl. She wore a white T-shirt that said the name of her college and "2001 Australia." Every other cloth that she wore was also white: shorts, socks, and shoes. Her striking light blue eyes were upstaged by crooked lipstick beneath. Downtown Dayton, Days Gone By [Dayton Malleable Metal Factory] In the far corner of the narrow room hummed a cooler filled with Wild Irish Rose bottles and Busch beer cans. The man next to me sported a cheesy toupee. Down from us sat a gray-haired African American guy, wearing a floppy black Kangol hat. The cook made it four single males in the diner. Written in white chalk on a green board was a sign advertising the "Tyrone Special:" a pork chop tenderloin with gravy, parsley potatoes, buttered corn, and bread for $3.89.
Also missing was 
Office in a Small City, which shows a man sitting at a desk staring out at his office window. His dazed expression and slack posture suggest that he has no idea how he got to that desk job or how to get out. The huge square windows on either side of him ape huge blank eyes, glassless and vacant.
"Hopper's one of my favorites. He gives me actually a very nostalgic feel. I find in him a innocence. They seem to bring back a calmer, more peaceful time, a time that unfortunately is gone. One picture I really love: Sunday Morning. I know that it's supposedly down on Seventh Avenue near St. Vincent Hospital, but that to me reminds me of the house that I was born in in Manhattan. I was born in 1940. When I was very young, we used to go out to Long Island on Saturdays and Sundays for shrimps, and I can remember the Mobil sign, and the flying Pegasus like he's got in his paintings [Gas]. There is also the lady at the cafeteria all by herself [Automat 
]. I've done that. I've been by myself in a cafeteria just having a cup of coffee. Or sitting at the end of a counter at night. I love New York at night. And in the rain. He really captures that feel."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art lobby roiled with babbling rising up to the vaulted ceiling and people wearing ethnic costumes like in the U.N. across town. I asked the East Indian woman in a smartly cut business suit behind the information desk, "Where can I find the paintings by Edward Hopper?"
"I don't know who he is."
"A famous American painter."
"Go up to the American wing."
There, I asked a stocky, gray-haired Slav wearing a gray suit trimmed with ornamental braiding that made him look like that most New York of occupations, a doorman, which gallery had the Hoppers.
He raised one bushy eyebrow. "He's not here. He's over in Twentieth Century."
"The woman at the front desk said he would be here," I explained.
"Do me favor," he said curtly. "Go back to front desk and tell woman she is donkey."
Ahh, New York charm. That's what I came here to find.
The Hopper paintings I came to find were Lighthouse at Two Lights, perhaps the pinnacle of Hopper's series of lighthouse paintings; 
From Williamsburg Bridge, which shows not the bridge from afar as the main subject of the painting, but three nondescript building tops as seen from the bridge; and 
Tables for Ladies, in which a waitress leans forward into a restaurant display of grapefruits as perfectly yellow as her blond head or round as her breasts falling forward into her uniform. The title comes from a sign common in the early 1900s. Before then, a woman alone in a restaurant was most likely a prostitute. But, as single women increasingly came to the city to work, restaurants put up such signs to let women know they were welcome and men know the women were not soliciting. Hopper said of the painting, he "wanted the vulgar color of cheap restaurants." In detailing the life that she and Hopper dreamed up for the characters, Jo called the "very blond fine looking waitress all in white" "Olga." The cashier was "Anna Popebogales," and "Max Scherer and his wife Sadie" sat at the table in back.
I was joined in front of these three paintings by a thin older woman wearing cat eye glasses whose erect neck trembled slightly. Her bearing and glittering watch and earrings gave the impression that she wore a diamond tiara. She answered me with a little girl's voice, made even quainter by her soft "r"s.
"Do I think Americans are isolated? Not today. We're thrown with people all the time, unless you're a writer or something like that. But I think there's a strong identification with that isolation in his paintings. It certainly touches a node that you can identify with. And also the time period: things were so simple. You could see a simple lighthouse and building and not be surrounded by McMansions or billboards. I mean, Long Island, you know, doesn't look like that any more. So I think there's a kind of sentimentality in that scene. In that, 'These were the good old days.' This is not the way things look at all. But it captures the mood that he wanted to capture. Also there's a sensual element in this one [Tables for Ladies]. This very lovely young woman leaning over, very suggestively, is really the center of the picture. You have to go hunting for the tables."
After her, up walked a young Asian woman and a rugged man with a papoose in which a tiny baby slept on his chest. The man had earnest blue eyes, and wore a diamond stud earring. His thin lips pursed above a firm, blond-stubbled chin. The diminutive woman had flawless skin and wore her hair in ponytails. She was from Tokyo; he was from Louisiana.
"I was [in New York] for a conference," he explained, "and we extended our stay so we could see some museums."
She declared, "Hopper's one of my favorite painters. It's the light and the drawing. You know it's him. And that's a really hard thing to do. His human figures are more like landscapes, like mountains and trees."
He countered, "I like Edward Hopper because there's a static, cool quality, a lack of passion, even when you're looking at something that's full of life. He freezes the moment perfectly. In the lighthouse one, it looks like August, which is a good time of year, but also I'm feeling, 'Summer's going away.' There's something darker coming. It's funny because August is so oppressively humid and hot; people are just desperate for summer to end. And it's more like there's an eagerness and anticipation that in October there'll be a respite."
"There are times that you look at how light plays against different objects at certain times of the day, and you isolate. You say, 'Oh my god. I would never believe that if I saw that in a painting, yet there it is in actuality.' I mean, there are times that I look at the sunset, and I think, like with that sunset section in the painting [Lighthouse at Two Lights], 'My god, there's green and purple and everything sitting side by side.' And yet there it is."
Laurie, a New York theater director married to Sean, one of my many Northwestern theater major friends who moved to New York after graduation (and herself now a friend of mine as well), agreed to meet me to the Met and offered some direction on interpreting Hopper.
"The most honest thing an artist can do," she began, "is present something. Hopper simply presents us with an image, but we're left with all of these emotions. He's a very pleasing painter, but he's obviously manipulating you somehow. Look at From Williamsburg Bridge. The tallest window is the one that has the person in it. He's not just saying, 'Here's a building.' He's trying to lead your eye to that person--who you can't see on a postcard reproduction. That's why you go to see Hopper's paintings in person."
"You could say," she continued, "Lighthouse at Two Lights was a film set and instead of sunlight those are klieg lights broadsiding it. The director said, 'Make it look like autumn.' You can tell the exact rolling nature of the hill in Lighthouse at Two Lights: where there's a dip, etc. You also get a feel for the wind. I can see all this but I couldn't do it. Like I can't swim but I can teach you how."
What can you say about New York that it hasn't already said about itself? This is one city that I won't even try to summarize. New Yorkers love it here. And hate it. And they know the rest of the county hates it. And loves it. Where else could you come for so much culture in one city? And where else could you walk down a street and have a thief crash through a storefront window and take off down the cross-street, as happened right in front of me that day? The best and worst are distilled in this pressure cooker of a metropolis.
As the security guard at the Met showed, not even fellow New Yorkers are spared the wrath of New Yorkers. On the other hand, New Yorkers aren't as ornery as they're often made out to be; they've just seen everything. If you entered an establishment panicked because you had been shot, it may be your first time being shot, but it's not their first time seeing a shooting victim. So they seem to you not to care enough.
Of course, New Yorkers softened somewhat after the WTC attack, but like everyone else they soon went back to their old ways.
"Americans are probably more isolated than they want to be," she asserted. "A lot of people don't really like being alone. I don't mind. It's a good thing to be able to hang out by yourself and not freak out. A lot of my friends, they won't even go to the bathroom by themselves, much less go to the movies or out to dinner. America is not like how Hopper shows it. The mainstream, they need people: they need the constant stimulation from people, from TV, from radio. I could sit in a room quietly with a book, but I have a friend who'll talk on the Internet, watch TV, listen to the radio, and talk on the phone—all at the same time. Talking with somebody online when they're sitting at home by theirself is way different than going out to eat with somebody or going to the movies because, although you're talking to a person, you're not really 'talking' to a person. You're writing letters: really short ones, with really quick response time, but it's not anywhere near the same thing."
About Hopper, she noted, "You can always recognize his paintings. Some of his paintings, nobody looks happy. But nobody looks glum, or on the verge of doing anything awful. In each painting, the emptiness is always dark, and wherever the person is is always light."
I looked outside our lit room at the early fall night, already pitch black. We were exactly situated as she had just described.
"We might be a Hopper subject right now," I told her, "and we're sitting around the corner from a real one. On the bus ride back from the city, I saw the house along West End Drive that Hopper had painted in East Wind Over Weehawken. 
That painting is in Philadelphia."
"Will you see that one?" she asked.
"I'll see them all," I answered.
The Whitney has not only the most paintings by Hopper, but also one of the largest collections of information about him in their library. I had naively thought that I might be able to look through Jo's journals and decide for myself what portrait they painted of Edward. But they had been sold to a private person, which I would not find out until the very last city I visited. I did discover that every museum has a file related to each work and each artist in their collection. These files became the source of much of what I learned about Hopper and his paintings. I was starting to become as curious about who Hopper was as I was about who the American people were. I was surprised that much of what I found had been overlooked by art historians and critics.
I found in one museum's file a "new" Hopper (OK, technically, a note written in his distinctive handwriting). I found personal letters from Jo and Edward, or even just from museum-goers, that offered back story on Hopper's paintings. One museum's file contained a curator's chart clearly showing how Hopper's perspective lines (those "train tracks" 
leading to a single point where all items in a painting vanish) converged at different places, disorienting the viewer slightly and visually isolating each subject in his paintings. Julia was right: he got things "wrong" to get them the way he wanted.
I had learned from my painter friend Bruce how an artist sees and thinks. 
Whereas viewers may see scenes of isolation, an artist sees compositions, colors, lines. They are concerned with the realities and restrictions of putting gooey pigment onto a flat canvas and trying to represent an image of meaning to others. Painters divide a flat, two-dimensional surface into a tic-tac-toe board. Putting important elements where the lines intersect leads to a balanced combination. Bright colors take more of your attention than dark. Think of having to balance a see-saw with a small red ball of heavy lead on one side and a big blue balloon on the other. 
Shapes also demand balance. For example, a downward triangle at the top of the canvas would be balanced by an upward one at the bottom.
Color is ultimately what makes all of these trompe l'oeil effects trick you into seeing three dimensions on two. Color theory is a deep subject worth looking into if you admire art, but basic concepts include complementary colors and cool and hot colors. On a color wheel
, the primary colors are red, blue and yellow. Their complementary colors are directly across from them, a combination of the other two primary colors. Hot colors often contain red, while cool ones contain blue.
Having visited the two cities (DC and New York) that combined held nearly half of the Hoppers I needed to see, I began to notice more Hopper's artistry and less his isolated scenes and characters. Many consider his compositions some of the finest in 20th-century art. Hopper divided the canvas into thirds and put important elements of the composition at the lines dividing the canvas into thirds, either vertically
or horizontally
. Hopper also connects these thirds by having one element span all three, like this lighthouse. 
Hopper's paintings are textbook examples of simple, well-balanced compositions. Turn his paintings upside down; they still look balanced. 
Hopper often put part of an object in the foreground (at the very bottom). This gives you a visual element, an anchor, from which you can read the "depth" of the rest of the objects in the painting. It also adds to the feeling that you are in the painting and in its drama. You might be standing on these stairs at bottom left. 
Hopper often inserts "ladders," a series of horizontal lines that lead vertically. In 
Room in New York, that seems to add to the feeling that the characters want to crawl out of their situation; they could use either the door or the window. A museum worker also noted that these ladders look like film cells. The windows in other paintings not only look like they are framed by film sprockets, but also seem to be viewed in the fashion of one convention for movie beginnings in the 1920s, where the camera floats to a window and then (magically, it would appear to an audience of that day) enters the room.
Some of his paintings have visual puns or implications: a radiator, fire, and bed in a room with a woman in her slip in 
Night Windows; a row of round fruits by a buxom waitress leaning forward in 
Tables for Ladies; a banana and a bowl of red fruit behind a lone woman in 
Automat. A piece of paper on the floor in 
Office at Night begs the question whether the woman in the tight skirt will bend over to pick it up. Someone said that the Christmas (EX-MAS) lights in 
Drug Store (EX-LAX) look like enema bags and that the pennants in the window represent port and starboard flags on a ship.
Some forms in his paintings look like other things: the foliage in Hills, South Truro mimics the shape of a dog with a tail up and mouth open 
; a hill in Camel's Hump resembles an alligator's head 
.
His titles often included puns, too; Two on the Aisle was painted right after he got a married and could be read as "Two on the Isle" (a record I found in the museum's files actually spelled it that way). Morning in a City could be "Mourning in a City" as the woman is alone, and the painting was done during World War II. Thus, Morning Sun might be read "Mourning Son."
And then there are those "mistakes" Julia pointed out. Columns lead nowhere and office walls end before the ceiling 
; doors are unnaturally high 
; beds are too small to sleep in 
; shadows fall longer than possible 
.
The glass in is paintings never has reflections. 
This is how we think of glass, but not how we actually see it. Windows paradoxically provide a physical barrier but a visual opening. Similarly, we look past the clutter of streetscapes, though they usually have people, cars, trash, and even kiosks. Hopper's scenes don't.
His characters' faces are indistinct. 
They are not meant to invite narrative or musing about their lives. But this backfired, as their very anonymity or isolation is what makes people yearn to know their thoughts and feelings.
There are no Hopper paintings in Nyack, New York, just north of New York City and across the Hudson River from wealthy suburban Westchester County. Rather, there are several, but none that I needed to see. The ones here were from very early in his life, and they hung on the walls of the home in which he was born and in which his older sister Marion lived her whole life. The house was scheduled for demolition, but locals stepped in and made it a museum. Today, the artist's birthplace is itself a work of art: Hopper House is on the National Register of Historical Places.
Just as Hopper's paintings make us think of a time gone by, the house is definitely of a different era. Originally built in 1858 by Edward's mom's dad, Hopper's father Garret moved in after marrying the owner's daughter, Elizabeth Smith, in 1878.
Some aspects of the house looked like elements from houses in Hopper's paintings: green full-length shutters on white clapboard siding. Broad planks of blonde wood covered the floors, and white plaster moulding outlined the ceilings. A steep imposing stairway barreled down into the front door. Mounted over the fireplace was one of Hopper's paintbrushes, a gift from one of his friends. Nothing on display here was donated by Hopper himself. He didn't much care for Nyack.
The room to the right of the front door was added when Edward was born and now held the reception desk, where a smiling blond woman in her sixties sat talking to a square-jawed young man who held a motorcycle helmet. The women introduced herself as Pat. The man never gave me a name, but said that he was an actor in New York City who had come up to Nyack for the day.
When I told them why I was visiting, Pat gushed, "People in Nyack aren't isolated. In Westchester, yes, people are isolated. We moved from there because we wanted more of a feeling of community. Neighbors said, 'Nyack! How the hell do you get there?' You know, to them, when you're talking over the river, you're talking another world."
About Hopper's work, she frowned, "It can be, I think, overwhelming."
"I just think Hopper's the greatest," the actor dove in. "There's so many layers of isolation, physical as well as emotional. The idea of people living in proximity over the course of an entire life, whether married or a family or a small town. The internal estrangement, the not-understanding, and the existential isolation. I've experienced that my whole life: the idea of being around so many people but being alone."
"Part of what I see Hopper saying," he raved, "is, 'America is so big, I'm just going to show you this small part.' Even if it's just a piece of a train track so there's the idea of distance or travel or something that can't be captured. People tend to want to attach certain events in Hopper's life to the ideas in his paintings. But when something becomes universal, it really has to stand on its own. When you turn to exposition, intuition evaporates: those things you're not defining but you are experiencing get lost when you try to formalize it in language. My dad was an artist for the first part of his life, but now both my parents are classical musicians."
"No wonder you're a thinker," Pat nodded.
Someone stopped in and asked Pat for directions to a local business. At this break in the action, two short, round-faced women approached me from the gift shop.
"Can you tell us which of these prints looks more like the real painting?" one asked. "We heard you say you were writing a book about Hopper." They showed me two posters of Hopper's 
Rooms by the Sea. I pointed them to the one that was paler, in general a good bet: Hopper's paintings in person have a thin sheen of paint that is almost see-through.
They introduced themselves as Maria and Leslie, sisters. Maria was shorter and pregnant. She wore glasses and spoke in sweet little-girl tones. Leslie was taller, with round shoulders and a husky voice. They said they had to leave right then but offered to address my question later that night at Maria's house after dinner.
A card on Hopper House's front desk informed me that it was the one hundredth anniversary of actress Helen Hayes's birth year. She lived just a few houses north on the other side of the street in a house she and her husband playwright Charles MacArthur called "Pretty Penny."
At the urging of his dealer Rehn, Hopper painted a canvas of Pretty Penny just before World War II. It was the only work he ever did on commission. Pretty Penny (now in the collection of Hayes's alma mater Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts) was also painted on the spot, whereas Hopper almost always painted from memory in the studio. When I saw the house that day, the front yard's pine tree prominent in Hopper's painting was noticeably bigger. It had also been joined by a line of other pines and a high brick wall with security gates and cameras to thwart prying eyes.
Pat at the desk had told me, "Story about Pretty Penny was that Helen and Charlie were looking for houses here, and they called it Pretty Penny because it cost so much: $38,000. She threw great parties and gave everyone who came a rose. Rosie O'Donnell just bought it for one or two million. She owned all the way to the river, and she sold off to the river. The town wanted to have a historic district and she really didn't want it. She would not allow people to come down to the river."
Down the street from Pretty Penny sat a house where Carson McCullers, author of award-winning Broadway plays like Member of the Wedding, had lived. The house is a worthy subject for Hopper, with gables, bay windows, and a mansard roof. As I regarded it, a station wagon parked in front, and a woman got out carrying a load of laundry. I asked if she lived in town, and she said she lived in the house.
"People in Nyack aren't isolated," she insisted. "Just the opposite. We moved here because it's got such a thriving nexus. It is Main Street," she concluded, and took the laundry inside.
While I waited for my evening date at Maria's, I investigated Hopper's hometown.
A huge, horrific condominium had just gone in on the waterfront down the hill, and development was rampant farther from the river, on the road into town from the Interstate. Otherwise, Nyack was still in many ways a quaint river community centered on the business district up from the docks. The Broadway and Main storefronts provide a gathering spot, and on the mild Fall Saturday that I visited, they were overrun with bikers, either motorized or self-powered. Garret Hopper was a dry goods dealer, and that storefront still stands on Broadway.
I ducked into one of the three used book stores on Broadway. The owner bore an intimidating stare that felt like he had been cultivating his whole life. He told me that he chose his college because "my high school counselor pulled me out of class and wanted to know why I wanted to go a place so liberal and activist. That only made me want to go there all the more." Actually, he spoke with the aloof tone of a high school counselor as he told me about local Hopper lore.
"The storefront that Hopper used in Seven A.M. is at Broadway at the corner of School. I used to have that shop. A local minister received when Marion Hopper died a series of paintings on wood shingles that were said to be by Edward. They were just awful. They were unsigned, but that's what they were. I told Gail Levin this and mentioned that they were in a shop up on Franklin Street, and she was out of here like a shot. She didn't believe me about my former shop being the one in Seven A.M. But she did go after those paintings."
I went to see for myself the storefront that might have been in Seven A.M., and I have to admit it looked very like the one in the painting. 
But there's a danger in trying to find a one-to-one relation between something in art and something in real life.
After my tour around Nyack, I made my way to Maria's, where she and Leslie and I were joined by Maria's husband, Grey--a lanky fellow with a balding forehead. He wore a yellow oxford shirt and punctuated his resonant speech with a sharp laugh and a forearm shooting upwards. Pregnant Maria sprawled on the couch beside him, while Leslie and I parked ourselves in separate chairs opposite.
"What you are doing has very few precedents," Grey said, "What'd you call it: 'anthropological art criticism?' It's that--slash--travelogue--slash--Working by Studs Terkel."
"Exactly," I responded. "I actually graduated from Northwestern with a degree in an obscure major all about oral storytelling: The Oral Interpretation of Literature."
"Ha," Grey roared. "I have a Theater degree from Northwestern."
We gossiped about teachers we knew in common and learned that I had seen a show in 1989 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that Grey had directed.
Grey continued, "It's almost like this kind of joke Hopper is playing. 'My paintings will hang in all these different towns. And someone is going to come along and have to figure me out by traveling all around.' Hopper didn't stay put. And that was part of his message. 'I'm gonna do urban; I'm gonna do rural; I'm gonna do coast.' People in his day were trying to figure out 'How do I live in the city?'"
Leslie noted, "His rural is never as lonely as being alone in the city."
"But that's the thing about the city and the country," Maria pointed out. "It's dislocation. And that's the American dream, in an odd way."
Grey said, "Hopper's rural stuff is like the country store in Seven A.M."
Maria turned to Leslie, "That's the place where I told you I looked at the painting and said, 'I know that place'."
Leslie objected, "But it's not … true. That cannot be (what do you call it?) 'certified.' Nobody knows exactly where something was painted."
"Hopper," Maria observed, "had a woman that was very devoted to him and that he also loved. He did exactly what he loved in his painting. He had his car, did his travels. He had a house, Washington Square, the most stimulating environment to be in at that time in the whole country, and in Cape Cod, the most empty, beautiful space you could ever want. Wasn't he a really happy guy? Yet the paintings don't depict that kind of euphoria, or even marginal happiness."
Grey said, "Forget about happiness. Contentment is the deeper, richer thing, and you see that in him. Sunshine is pretty happy."
Maria said, "Yeah, but it's kind of missing that soul. The people in his paintings: Where's the spirit? If it's there, it's murky and it's way down in."
Leslie said, "I think he just wanted to record things, moments."
Maria said, "I think he was very Zen, in the sense of that moment, that light, that building, that day."
Leslie said, "You don't have to solve the human dilemma in a painting. You can report or reveal this lonely side of being a human being and isolated, and it doesn't necessarily have to be negative or sad. It just is."
Dear Mike: Well, I've been to two cities, but one was the biggie: New York. Some great interviews and experiences. What a treat to be in a room full of Hoppers after preparing for the trip by studying his works only as reproductions in books or online. I got into his studio! I am not religious, but I occasionally feel in certain places of power that I am surrounded by "beings" ("energies?"). I felt it often in Ireland, my ancestors' land. Well, I felt it in Hopper's studio alright. If Hopper wasn't there, at least his stuff still was: the oven and frig looked like they hadn't been touched since Jo's death. And she seemed to be there, too, inhabiting the body of this academic bulldog who kicked me out before I could see everything I wanted.
I tried to find the place used as a model for Nighthawks and saw only one building on Greenwich with the proper configuration (most likely the original is torn down). The owner was annoyed with me for asking but said he knew the place and his wasn't it. Isn't it just like a New Yorker to know the answer to an esoteric question, but be so provincial as to be upset by an unfamiliar face in his restaurant?
Oh I almost forgot. I got let backstage in MOMA. They took me with them to see some Odilon Redons they were packing to send to a show. It was great to admire art with other art lovers. Not just lovers but experts! I am becoming an expert in Hopper, but also adding a lot to what I already have studied about art history and a ton of other subjects. By the end of this I should be handed an honorary PhD for my dissertation on Hopper and isolation. The problem is which department would grant it to me. Art History? Sociology? History? Cultural Studies? Creative Writing? Oh, well. After hearing of all my interests, this foreign doctor at work called me a "generalist," and I've been flattered ever since to think of myself as the "last great generalist."
I just came from a meeting with a woman and her sister who I met at Hopper's birthplace, and her husband graduated from Northwestern, like I did. The project is opening doors. Let's hope I'm not suffering beginner's luck!
Best,
Kevin
I hoped Purchase would be similar to the road to it off the highway, which rolled up and down other towns' hillsides past large-lawned mansions. But, in Purchase, I came to a crossroads beneath an X of electric wire from which hung a single old-fashioned streetlight. A turn one direction would take me to PepsiCo's headquarters. The other way led to the commuter college SUNY-Purchase. These are the town's only residents. "Nobody lives in Purchase," a SUNY-Purchase student warned me, "except maybe the volunteer firemen."
The Hopper I had come to see was at SUNY-Purchase. I followed the signs to the art museum and found myself driving diagonally across a deserted parking lot the size of several football fields. Presumably on weekdays when classes met, they needed this much parking. But on the Saturday of my visit, I parked beside only a handful of other cars huddled at the far corner near the museum's entrance.
Up a flight of stairs loomed an endless sea of brown industrial brick and concrete. 
Punched into the walls were occasional doors or windows, to indicate "buildings." One of these admitted me to the museum of art. People in chef coats or black waiter uniforms scurried around white tablecloths ringed with fine china that stuffed the lobby; someone had rented the museum for a party that night, the only place in town to gather. Broad, brown iron stairs in a skylighted stairwell led me one flight up to a large square room whose white walls were crammed with paintings. The Hopper on the far wall dwarfed them all--literally. At nearly five feet by six, 
Barber Shop is one of his largest canvases.
The painting portrays a barber shop in a city basement, an architectural "hell" deepened by Hopper's addition of a landing between the street and floor. A beefy female manicurist sits at the painting's center, idly reading a newspaper. Behind her, eerie otherworldly sunlight slices the wall clock in half. In a shadow at right, almost overlooked, the barber shaves a man lying prone in the barber chair.
A couple came up the stairs and into the gallery. The man amply filled his green flannel shirt, which was covered bib-like by his white beard. The woman had hair like a stiff gray scrub brush. She was draped in several wraps and shawls. I asked if they were from Purchase. The woman looked at me like I was crazy.
"No one lives in Purchase. We're from Rye Brook."
I asked what they thought of the painting.
He proposed, "It must be a dark day because of the dark outside."
"What?" she shrieked and glared at him. "Look at the light hitting the interior." He clammed up and dug his hands in his pockets. She snickered, "Ask any husband and wife and you'll get this." Certainly I would have with Hopper and his wife Jo, who often picked fights with each other.
She continued, "The sun is pouring in. How is that much light getting in if it's that dark at street level? It's like from a movie. The railings, which should be a detail, are in fact crudely painted. And the white wall, which could be just a background, is very detailed." With a glance at me, then her husband, she let us know that they would be moving on.
Barber Shop didn't sell for twenty years, perhaps because it was so large and was finished during the Depression when few could afford big paintings. Or maybe it was, as John Updike called it, "a relatively unsuccessful painting." It was still around in the 1950s when it was bought by this museum's founder, 
Roy Neuberger, who started the investment firm Neuberger Berman.
Neuberger was actually an acquaintance of the Hoppers. In his biography (which came out when he was 94 and he puckishly called So Far So Good), he told of how he accompanied Ed and Jo to the opening party for an exhibit where one of Hopper's painting was shown. Neuberger recalled Jo complaining that he fawned over Edward when she was just as good an artist. Neuberger considered it "one of his strokes of luck to have been able to obtain [Barber Shop]," and he called Hopper the "greatest master of mood since … Vermeer." "I collect art," Neuberger wrote, "because I love works of art…. [F]or all the real pleasures I have enjoyed in knowing artists, it is the work of art that means the most to me." Hopper would agree. Maybe Hopper's preference for art over humans explains why his scenes are as sparsely populated as Purchase.
Outside the museum, a loud rhythmic clacking came from the plaza, and I expected to find construction machines there. Instead, I walked through a gauntlet of skateboarders zooming their wheels across the inscribed concrete squares that carpeted the campus. At the plaza's far end, the union, called "The Hub," overlooked a valley. On the opposite hill stood townhouses from the next village over. On a Saturday night at a commuter college, I shared the union only with the cast of a theater show on a break from rehearsal. The Hub seemed worthy of being a Hopper setting but hardly worthy of its name.
Eventually, a girl with jet-black hair and plum-colored mascara sat beside me, crossing her legs to display high-heeled black boots that choked each calf. I asked if she could tell me if the people in town were isolated.
"No," she said. "I can't. There really is no Purchase. There's the campus, I guess."
As she spoke, her head tilted back and forth between clock-face positions ten and two, and she fanned her outspread fingers to emphasize certain points.
"I really like being a student here. There's no football here or stuff like that. There's not even a mascot. The campus is very open to everything. Everybody's doing their own thing. Everybody is nice to each other. You don't always get that outside the campus.
"I like Westchester. But it's very fast-paced: people either keep up or they don't. Anyone who comes here and finds things too quick or too hard doesn't last too long. There's a big gap in finances between the upper classes and the lower classes. The Clintons live near here," she added, to back up her point.
She wrinkled her brow, and concluded with, "People do get isolated when it gets cold. It gets really cold here."
I returned to my car and zipped across the parking lot corner-to-corner again. When I reached the light at the main road, I headed straight across to the grounds of PepsiCo's headquarters, which also houses a fine sculpture garden on what was once a polo field. As with the campus, I had the garden to myself on this non-workweek day. However, unlike the mundane SUNY-Purchase, the sculpture garden was fantastical. 
A huge garden trowel by Claes Oldenburg seemed half-buried in a giant's sand box. On the middle of a lake, a metal hoop miraculously balanced on the water's surface. 
And, as if by magic, I spied in one office that some employee had hung on the wall a print of Hopper's painting 
The Long Leg. Maybe Purchase's part-time residents related to Hopper's isolated characters. I wished Purchase had a gathering place other than the museum where I could interview some townsfolk, like a coffee shop, or even a barber shop.
I pulled back up to the traffic light at the crossroads that defines Purchase. When the light changed, I turned back onto the main road and headed out of town, passing the shuttered firehouse.
(When it's in a corporation's collection, it turns out.)
Armonk is another virtually unpopulated town. It doesn't have an art museum. The Hopper painting here hangs in one of the town's many corporate headquarters. Hopper toiled for years illustrating business offices for magazine articles, and (as President Calvin Coolidge famously said) "the business of America is business." I thought it would be interesting to view a Hopper painting in a business setting. The corporation agreed to show it to me, but later asked that I not mention them.
Maybe one effect of American culture being so linked to business culture is that the cult of professional secrecy and suspicion makes individual citizens reticent and isolated--like Hopper characters. It felt ominous to have to pick up a pass at the front gates. Especially when the guard called me by name when I rolled down my car window.
I naïvely assumed that the painting would be in the lobby. It's not. But the staff was gracious about making it available for me. Mary (not her real name), who arranged my viewing, met me in the lobby. She was striking, with graying auburn hair and bright green eyes that rivaled the emerald brooch pinned to a large plaid shawl swirled around her shoulders. She escorted me to a conference room. Inside, a muscle-bound security guard chucked his chin at his younger assistant, saying "I'm not touching it alone," and they rested the painting on a table.
The corporation asked me not to describe the painting. However, I can tell you that Mary observed that (like many of Hopper's paintings) it looked like a still from a film noir. She also identified the sources of light.
"You're a pretty astute observer," I noted.
"I majored in Art at SUNY-Purchase. I couldn't deal with the insecurity of Art, so I ended up getting a degree in something else. I took a totally unrelated job here. But when they found out about my background, they asked me to be in charge of their art collection too." She chuckled, "I ended up working in Art after all."
Back at the lobby, Mary and I parted ways. She headed back to her office, and I headed to my office for that day: Armonk.
Armonk is not officially a town. It is a "hamlet." Downtown consists of two intersections dotted by a post office, fire department, and a smattering of stores. I stopped at a breakfast joint with a little deli counter up front offering low-fat muffins and bottled lattés. Like in Purchase, I was told that few people lived in Armonk besides the firemen. Luckily, one of the firemen turned out to be the cook behind the Hopper-era short order grill in back. He cheerily bobbed his head and shrugged as he agreed to be interviewed.
"You don't mind, I gotta make a omelet [sic] while we talk," he shouted above the drone of the grill's smoke hood and the radio blaring U2's "Street With No Name."
"How many people live in Armonk?" I asked.
"Not many at all." His boy-next-door face smiled uneasily above his white apron as he answered my questions. "You can't walk down the street and not know somebody. I've lived here my whole life. I grew up knowing the whole damn town. My father was in the fire department and so am I, and that just adds to it. I love it here. It's expensive, but it's homey. Armonk's started changing because a lot of new people are coming in who like big expensive houses."
"What's the relation of the corporation headquarters to the town?"
"As far as I know, it's very good. They do a lot of stuff in the community. They donate money for parks and stuff. They give stuff to the firehouse."
"Are people in your community isolated?"
"Nah. Everybody here's friendly. Well, they all want to be left alone, which is isolated. They want the peace and quiet of the country. I think a lot of 'em are; a lot of 'em want to be. You just gotta get away from the hustle and bustle. Now, you'll forgive me, I gotta finish this omelet and wrap it."
Back on the edge of town I stopped at Armonk's pride, Schultz's farm: a broad, low-eaved garage filled with tables of produce, jams, knickknacks, and (I was told by many) the best donuts for miles.
"So, is there really a farmer Schultz?" I asked the squat, gray-haired woman behind the counter.
"I'm Mrs. Schultz," she cackled and swayed back and forth slightly on her hips. "I've lived here all my 48 years."
"Are people in your community isolated?"
"Not any more," she spoke rapidly. "Things are faster now. There's a lot of new, stock market money here. I guess you gotta be out in the market to get that. I don't know who's making it, but they're making it. The houses they're building here, the cheap ones, go for seven hundred thousand. Now, they're trying to save local places, like Leatherman's Cave. He was a loner; lived in that cave; did very little talking. Everything he wore was leather; he walked a round trip of 300 and some odd miles up to New Haven and back, and he'd always show up each place the same time. Little kids used to throw rocks at him and tease him because he was an odd person. There's other history here, too. George Washington used Armonk as a Revolutionary War militia headquarters in 1779. I guess this area has always been headquarters to something. Now it's corporations."
The first thing I did when I got to New Haven was take a phone number out of my pocket and make a call. I knew no one in town, but the man who answered agreed to meet me for coffee and suggested a rendezvous site: the legendary bookstore-cum-coffee shop Atticus across from the campus of Yale University. Yale was home to four Hopper paintings I was here to see--more than any city besides the nation's capital of DC and the art capitol of New York.
Rooms by the Sea depicts the view out a door open seemingly directly onto the ocean. Jo noted: "could be called 'The Jumping off Place.'" 
Rooms for Tourists shows a Gothic house looming out of the dark night, cinematically lit by lamps on the lawn and street; only a fool would inquire about rooms here. 
In Western Motel, a woman in a full-length dress formally twists toward the viewer on a bed before a picture window outside which a long-hooded car noses into the scene. The final Hopper here, Sunlight in a City Cafeteria, 
portrays a café, with a cadaverous woman at one table and an equally pale man smoking a cigarette at another. Both stare into space, unable to connect. Hopper wrote to the painting's buyer, "I think it's one of my very best pictures."
Atticus roared with clattering plates, avid conversations, and babbling waitresses rushing around wearing T-shirts that read "censorship causes bad vision." Books and tiny café tables ringed the walls beneath bright fluorescent light. I took a seat at the epicenter of activity, a tiny square diner counter surrounding the grill. I could have plucked War and Peace off a shelf and read it entirely in the time it took to get served.
So I interviewed the sallow-skinned, blond girl in her early twenties sitting next to me and staring into space. She was a Yale student, and when I asked her major, she replied flatly, "Security Studies." I had heard that Yale was a breeding ground for CIA agents, and I suspected that she would fit right in when she said that European nations are "happy our troops are there. Really." She pleaded the Fifth on my question about isolation in terms of United States policies abroad but did comment about isolation in New Haven.
"I don't know a lot about New Haven, and that might be a good sign that we at Yale are set apart and isolated. And Yale is, what, the fourth largest, uh, richest, university in the entire world? They could do a lot more for the city's economy. Some people say, 'Yale is reaching out.' But once you drive about ten minutes from Yale, you don't see that."
Her boyfriend nodded his dark eyes from below a bulging brow and a floppy white tennis hat. When I asked if he, too, was a student, he balked, "No. No no no. I'm from about 20 minutes away. I think people in New Haven are isolated. Socioeconomically: the haves and have-nots are separated. You see at Yale incredible disparity: the best of the best and worst of the worst, right next to each other, crossing paths down the street. You see people near campus who obviously (well it's terrible to stereotype but you kind of assume) don't go to Yale. And the people literally just passing them are probably going to go on to do something like be a scientist or something. And it's amazing how they both live right in the same area, but one is just so far away from the other. Yale's a very strange place.
"You're always isolated in some way," he continued. "Emotionally, people are isolated from one another because you can never really truly completely connect with another person. Even if you have good relationships, people who love you, you still can be feeling isolated from what goes on around you. They don't know who you are. Lots of people, you figure they're happy if they smile. But they're hiding their minds."
Just then, the man I was there to meet arrived. On my very first stop on this journey, a woman in Muskegon, Michigan, said her brother Joe in New Haven was a Yale professor and a big Hopper fan and would love to talk to me when I came to visit. He was about sixty, a tall man with big ears and watery blue, loyal-dog eyes. A lifelong bachelor, he spoke with an earnestness that made me suspect he was eager for company.
Over his hot cocoa, Joe confided that New Haven was dying. "It looked like this place [Atticus] would go bankrupt when it first opened. That's when they got the idea of selling some food. Now they sell more books too. There was a lot of opposition to putting this and the British Museum right here. The city threw a fit and tried to put up obstacles because already Yale takes such prime property tax-free. Actually, Yale is protected from taxation by the constitution."
"Connecticut's?" I asked.
"No, the U.S. Yale was founded long before we had a country. And the constitution says very explicitly that all contracts and agreements entered into in the colonies would be honored in perpetuity. And Yale never paid taxes."
I was anxious to hear Joe's answer to my question about isolation in Hopper's paintings, but he thought it unfair to conjecture about the psychology behind a work of art. "I just think that Hopper does everything so well. My sister came out from Michigan; the day after Thanksgiving, we saw the Hopper show in New York City together. I liked the painting of the lighthouse so much that Esther bought it for me. Also there was Rooms by the Sea. And she just really fell in love with that. And I said, 'Well the painting is in my backyard.' At that time I lived… I'll show you where I lived. Literally back-to-back with the art museum. So I thought, 'Well, gee, that'd make a good present: get her a reproduction of that.' And they had a nice reproduction of it in the gift shop right out on the main floor. The American paintings are on the third floor, and I kept going back and forth between the print and the original trying to make up my mind, ya know. The guy who was tending shop there finally said, 'Can I make a suggestion? Your sister's not going to be able to go upstairs and look at the original.' So I said, 'That's right.'" A broad smile split his face, and his eyebrows raised in glee at this stratagem.
We went to pay at the cash register/bread counter where traffic bottlenecked as friends stopped to visit by the front door. Joe greeted a portly older gentleman with a garland of gray hair surrounding his round bald head, and they set to commiserating. When they separated, Joe lamented that the co-op building in which they both live was going bankrupt. "Nothing downtown can hold its value."
Yale's campus, with its castle-like buildings, was at its most atmospheric that November day. The slightly chill air that smelled of soap and hung heavy with gray cotton-ball clouds lent a gloom that felt at home at such Gothic colleges. 
Joe took me into the main library, normally open only to Yalies. Dimly lit, with cold stone walls, it felt like a distillation of the campus as a whole: medieval, secretive, privileged, erudite, and slightly menacing.
Next, Joe took me to his residential college, an institution Joe explained was unique to Yale. Students lived in residential colleges with a master who meted out privileges and punishments, and each college sponsored events like lectures and concerts. Joe's college was 
Jonathan Edwards, named for an early Eli (that's what Yale students call themselves). Edwards wrote an essay in the 1800s titled "The Glory of God" that was about spiders, so residents in this college are called "Spiders." Spiders adorn all the college's objects, including the dining plates and utensils.
Over the back wall, Joe pointed out the art museum. "I told you that I lived back-to-back with it." On the other side, he pointed out 
Skull and Bones, a secret society made famous by George Bush the elder. Members have to leave a room whenever the society's name is uttered. One journalist with a sense of humor asked a question with the name in it during a presidential press conference. Sure enough, George left. With no windows on its soot-darkened graystone façade, and its windowless front door padlocked shut, it looked worthy of the campus nickname for such a society: a "tomb." It was as eerie as Hopper's huge, outdated, unpeopled mansions.
Afterwards, Joe offered, "I hope you'll have dinner with me and a group of my friends tonight. I told them about your project. After five or so, it's not going to be possible to do anything around here anyways: too dangerous."
"How do you know all these people?"
"They're just friends. I've lived in New Haven a long time; most of my life. I arrived in 1966. It's a good place. I had dinner last week with a friend who loves Hopper. Turns out someone else I know owns a couple Hoppers. Drawings, I think. My other friend is an artist in a big way. He's a medical illustrator and was commissioned to paint a dinosaur mural on the front of the natural museum. He says he doesn't know a lot about Hopper. But he knows a lot about art."
We rendezvoused with the dinner guests at Joe's apartment, which felt like it had been preserved from the 1950s, stuffy and dim. Joe whisked me into his study to show me the Hopper poster he had on the wall: 
Lighthouse at Two Lights. Joe's guests entered and took what seemed like their usual places. A tall man with five o'clock shadow sat in a chair, while a baby-faced East Indian sank into one end of the sofa. On the other end of the couch, a short, wiry, rough-trade character missing a few teeth and all his hair leaned his chin on the shoulder of a ruddy guy with short-cropped hair and one earring.
We all headed over to the basement Thai restaurant where Joe had made reservations. I asked if they all lived in New Haven, and the lanky artist with five-o'clock shadow said, "No, but we all come to New Haven to socialize." Joe introduced him to me as Michael, who Joe mentioned earlier was painting the mural at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. "Joe is the glue," Michael nodded. "Joe is the reason we're all in New Haven tonight."
One of the pirate-looking couple quipped, "Oh, yeah; otherwise, we just go outhouse tipping." His partner tried to offset his sarcasm by assuring me, "Each of our small towns has socializing places and meeting places, even if only a pizza parlor. And we're very close to New York: only an hour forty-five minutes by train."
"Yeah, but that makes the area attractive to commuters," the East Indian launched into a story about recent changes in his small town. "I was walking my dog down the road where I live. Well, now there is a new subdivision at the end of the road. This huge four-by-four went by, and the driver beeped and waved his arms. He was upset that I was walking my dog along the road, which I have done for years--before his subdivision was there. And I was taking a lot less space than the four-by-four."
No one had much else to add about isolation or Hopper, except Michael, the artist. "There's something that seems 'unearned' by Hopper. I don't see him struggle. I think Hopper found a formula for something that worked and then stuck with it. A friend of mine owns a couple of Hopper watercolors. In those, I see Hopper doing more interesting stuff than in his oils."
I had told the group earlier about Joe's sister giving me his address and how I had developed a large network of friends in my many studies, travels, and jobs. Seeing me talk to George, who they all knew well, the East Indian said, "Wow, he really does know everyone."
As I drove to the hotel, I was warmed by memories of the dinner conversations and laughter. Joe displayed the same generosity that his sister had when she gave me his number. In my motel room, I experienced again the feeling of being in a Hopper painting. Joe and I had started the day at a tiny café table in Atticus, mimicking the two characters in Hopper's painting Sunlight in a City Café. Now, I was ending my day by being reminded all at once of the other three New Haven Hoppers. I was in Rooms for Tourists, in a motel like a Western Motel, and (New Haven being a port town), I was in Rooms by the Sea.
That night, I dreamt I was in a coffee shop, going over my notes from the trip so far. It was an incredibly bright day, and I moved from the too-bright front window to the shaded section in back. As I read my notes, two people came up and sat at the table I had been sitting at. I could not see their faces clearly. It was that thing that happens in my dreams a lot, where it feels like there is something in my eye, and I can’t get it out, yet there is something I need to see. I wanted to be able to write a description of these people before I interviewed them for the book. I tried to remember what city I was in, but again when I looked around for a sign or a barista to ask, I could not see clearly. Just isolated bits of wood counter, linoleum floor, fluorescent lamps, and window sunlight with no detail across the road. I started to panic that they would leave before I could interview them. I decided to approach them. But when I stood up, my walk over to them was unsteady because of my limited eyesight. When I got to their table and asked them their thoughts of Hopperesque isolation, the man replied smoothly, "Excuse us, but we're having a private conversation here." I apologized and crawled along the linoleum to my booth. The black metal post on which the table was anchored looked like a life saver on which I could seize. I woke up clinging to the post and squeezing my pillow in the same fashion. I wrote down this dream and now am staring out my hotel window into the featureless New England night.
Andre Gide, who Hopper read and enjoyed, noted in his journals, "If upon opening that door I were suddenly to find myself facing--well the sea…. Why yes I should say; that's odd! Because I know that it ought not to be there; but that is a rationalization. I can never get over a certain amazement that things are as they are, and if they were suddenly different, it seems that they would hardly amaze me any more."
Boston was a key town in the anti-slavery movement, and the Black Heritage Trail (an alternative to the more famous Freedom Trail) wends past the former middle-class homes of successful pre-emancipation free blacks, including Uncle Tom author Harriet Tubman's house and the first school for blacks, the African Meeting House. There, I asked the guard about Hopperesque isolation. His name was Richard, but it might as well have been randy: red hair stuck out in all directions from his head, and auburn stubble rambled across his chubby cheeks below eyes glinting like knife blades. My friend Julie who had moved to Boston from Chicago the year before warned me that everybody here seemed "very very: whatever they are, they are intensely." The young guard was (luckily for me) very, very opinionated about Hopper and isolation.
"That's an interesting thesis," he began, reminding me that Boston was also a college town. "We are isolated in the U.S., and Boston is one of the worst places for it. I sympathize with people who come here and talk about how mean, how downright mean, Bostonians can be. They're grumpy. Bostonians cut you off in traffic, and it's true road rage, in that it's inward. If you cut someone off in New York, at least they'll scream at you. People here don't even look at you. I'm someone who looks people in the eye and says hello when I pass and is suspicious of someone who doesn't, but I've given up trying because people on the train give me dirty looks.
"I think a lot of people look at Hopper's paintings and feel isolated for reasons having nothing to do with Hopper's motivation for painting. I see Hopper painting the Depression. He's painting the development of the city, modernism. In the 1920s and '30s, a lot of New England was small-town: frumpy guys in fedora hats alone filling up their cars with gas, and beautiful blondes who are all lonely and depressed. I see Hopper's characters as obviously disturbed. I wonder if people originally saw his paintings as pretty.
"What's great about Hopper's paintings is what they don't have: no glass in the windows, no cars, no trash. You could eat off of that street. In his one of people fully dressed in suits, 
they're just baking! It's a harsh, awful light. There's no atmosphere. It's like those pictures of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, just direct shadow."
In closing, he noted, "We could be in a Hopper painting right now. It's perfect light for him." I looked up to see a cloudless November sunset descending on the narrow streets outside. His lamp-lit desk stood out in the otherwise dim entryway of this historic building. "If he was painting you and me talking, he'd be out there, and the night would be surrounding the building and there'd be a little bit of light around us. He'd be looking in and it'd just be you, a person talking, looking at something else." 
Whereas randy Richard insisted that people in Boston were mean and standoffish, I came to him from an interview with a local who had introduced himself when I took the boat back from where the Freedom Trail ended near Bunker Hill. The public transportation system back from the Charlestown navy yard at the end of the trail was a boat. As I fiddled with my camera at the back of the ship, I was approached by a jowly, white-haired man who resembled local politician Ted Kennedy.
He wore a dark blue business suit with a patterned blue tie over a crisp white shirt.
"Are you visiting our fair city?" he asked forcefully, pointing to the camera around my neck.
"Not only visiting; writing about. How do you feel about it?"
"I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole," he grumbled and pursed his lips disapprovingly. Then his face softened into a smile. "Nah. That's just what we tell visitors because everyone who comes to Boston wants to live here. It's a great place." His blue eyes looked out over the water as he answered my question.
"I don't think we're as isolated as we're made out to be. A lot of places' reputations here are based on outdated ideas. In South Boston, there were problems when busing was introduced back in the 1970s, and that gave it a certain reputation. But it's twenty years later. Things move too quickly to stay isolated. Those people are not there anymore. There are a lot of new kinds of people coming to Boston: Vietnamese, Thai, Orientals. They can live cheaper than we can. They open up the possibility of living in neighborhoods we no longer think viable. I'm lucky. I have a lot. I've lived many places, Somerville, then Beacon Hill, where I met my wife. We bought in South Boston, then moved to Winchester when it was time to raise a family. I'm not a neighborhood guy. I like to go do my job, come home, spend time with my family, and work around the house so I don't have to pay someone else to do it."
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was "very very." With an entrance fee of twelve dollars, it was by far the most expensive that I had to visit. The museum's fee, size, and opulence were reminders of the culture-keepers, the "Boston Brahmins," who funded this institution.
And the Hopper paintings here were "very very" indicative of Hopper's main themes. 
Drug Store shows a brightly lit storefront on a deserted street at night, like the restaurant in Nighthawks. "EX-LAX" is prominently displayed across the drug store's eave, helping it stand out as it would if you needed EX-LAX. Hopper changed that to EX-LAS from fear that the painting would not sell. Instead, the sympathetic buyer insisted Hopper change it back to EX-LAX.
Room in Brooklyn shows a woman alone in her apartment in a chair looking out a window onto endless red brick tenements. Hopper claimed that this was the only work in which he included flowers, in a vase on the table beside the woman. "The so-called beauty [of flowers] is all there," he said. "You can't add anything to them of your own."
When the museum bought the painting, Edward's handwritten note of thanks said, "There is not a great deal to be said … It was largely improvised." Recognizing Boston's reputation as an academic town, Hopper added, "It is agreeable to me if any student should wish to copy the picture." Jo explained that Hopper "thought the [Brooklyn Bridge] would clutter up the picture. He loathes clutter so left out the bridge (and more or less Brooklyn…)."
Up walked a thin, red-haired, older woman, arms crossed over her chest in a protective X. She eyed me through large square glasses. "Hopper's paintings could be Anywhere USA," she answered my question. "They certainly look like the buildings here. Maybe they remind us of home or our favorite drug store."
"You've probably run out at night to a drug store like this," I suggested.
The woman waved away my comment. "It's all CVS now," she bellowed. "You drive."
The museum guard--a portly fellow in his thirties, his face mashed into a sour, world-weary expression--insinuated himself into the conversation.
"This Hopper does make you feel like our city," he said. "It's very depressing. All his paintings are very depressing. That's what I like about them."
About Room in Brooklyn, he said, "The room's so neat, you know it has to be a rented room. She may be contemplating throwing herself out."
I said, "Her look out is a look in. She's looking across the street at buildings just like hers."
"She's unhappy," muttered the red-haired woman.
"No she's not," the guard grumbled.
"She's not unhappy?!" she asked incredulously.
The guard barked, "No. I was talking to him. She's not sitting in a building that's anything like those she's looking at. She is looking down on the others, so hers is taller. And her room has a bay window as opposed to the flat ones across the way. She's sitting in a building from the early twentieth century, looking at brownstones from the nineteenth. She's looking at the past."
"Well," the woman joked, jerking a thumb at the guard, "you found the right person for your research. He's smarter than both of us."
"No," said the guard, pointing to the painting. "He's smarter than all of us."
A tall, fiftyish woman approached next, prim and imperturbable, as square-shouldered as a football player. She wore a mole overcoat and held a handbag in both hands in front of her lap.
"Oh, no," she answered emphatically, "we're not isolated. Boston is very connected." She spoke as if she were the authority. "If I was an instructor, I would point out to students that this is more an example of the inner world of the painter: alone, isolated, and desperate. I don't think of the people of Boston like that. They're exciting, filled with life. There's a big student population here, a lot of energy, a real sense of community and support. It's a sports town (take it or leave it). It's also a big bank town. I work for a bank, and we have lots of outreach programs."
"Boston is also becoming known for computers and Internet companies, right?" I asked.
"But that's new," she objected. "It's not, I think, the way Bostonians think of Boston. If there is an isolated community, I would think of that as being it. They're new."
She stalked away. Maybe newer Boston communities are isolated because older Boston communities are closed off.
I had arranged to meet up with Deborah, an acquaintance of mine back in Chicago, a clothes designer in her early twenties who moved cross-country to Boston where she knew no one. But she was intent on being independent.
Of Room in Brooklyn, Deborah decided, "She does look lonely. She has flowers to make herself feel not so alone. Either she bought them herself, which is lonely. Or someone bought them for her and is not there, and that's lonely. I get the feeling she's ill and house-ridden. Or maybe it's just that women in those days weren't allowed to go out. Her dress may be black and she's in mourning.
"I can imagine a lot of Bostonians alone in their rooms. Everyone in Boston is in their own little world. They never meet your eyes. Boston is a hodgepodge. Most of my roommates have come from elsewhere: Indiana, St. Louis, Florida. Many come for school and stay."
I also caught up with my SAS classmate Meg, who had been working in Boston for 11 years. We met at the Boston Common, still a gathering place after being used in old times to graze settlers' cattle and house British troops. "Your project sounds fascinating," she said. "Hopper is one of my favorite painters, and I have seen his paintings at the MFA. I'd definitely agree with the popular perception that Boston tends toward the provincial and its residents can be somewhat distant. I find the longer I am here the less I notice (or pay attention to). That Old Boston Brahmin (associated with exclusivity and pretense because, after all, they did come over on the Mayflower, lest you forget) is definitely very much alive and kicking even today."
Boston's first resident was a hermit who lived alone on Beacon Hill. The Puritans who settled on the hill after him were no less cranky about having neighbors. They hanged a woman on the Common for "promoting Quaker beliefs." She's buried in Boston's first cemetery, the Granary, as are Mother Goose and Benjamin Franklin's parents. This is the first stop on the famous Freedom Trail detailing Boston's history and conflating it with that of the country as a whole.
But I was surprised how many things along the Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail conflicted with the myths handed down about them. Massachusetts was the first state to outlaw slavery but also the first to send slave ships to Africa. Paul Revere's famous warning that the British were coming "by sea" actually meant that they were coming via the Charles River, and he never completed the ride named for him—though two other riders did. (History here might get misremembered but never forgotten. Near the end of the Freedom Trail, in Copp's Hill Burying Ground, I found fresh red flowers lain atop a gravestone from 1767.) Maybe our murky understanding of our birth and history reflects our murky notion of what constitutes our community, adding to the sense that Hopperesque isolation is uniquely American.
Hi, Joe. Just wanted too thank you for all your kindness during my visit to New Haven. Tell your friends I really appreciated their comments and enjoyed their company. I'm in Boston now. Walked the Freedom Trail. My third time. I always feel at its end like I accomplished something difficult and spiritual, a cross between the Appalachian Trail and the Stations of the Cross. Harvard here may be our country's oldest educational institution, but I am learning from an even older one: firsthand experience.
Kevin (The Hopper Guy)
[Andover Parade]
Andover, Massachusetts:
Freight Cars, Gloucester and
Manhattan Bridge Loop
The Addison Gallery of American Art is on the academy's campus, though it holds its own with many big-city or university art museums and is available free for anyone who wants to visit. (The day I stopped in, the person who signed in below me was from Ireland.) The museum's founder intended it "to cultivate and foster in [the students of Phillips Academy] a love for the beautiful." It began in 1930 with works by prominent American artists, including Hopper. The two here are both from 1928.
Manhattan Bridge Loop shows blood red buildings along a deserted elevated train platform below a flat sky. An upside-down brown square U (a trolley scaffold) dominates the otherwise empty platform horizon from which a lone figure walks off left.
In 
Freight Cars, Gloucester, Hopper's magical yellow light makes everything holy, both the magnificence of the church in the background and the tawdriness of the freight cars at rest in the foreground. Edward and Grace Root of Hamilton College in upstate New York bought Freight Cars, Gloucester, but it ended up back where it began (Andover is but a half hour's drive from Hopper's beloved Gloucester).
In 1939, the museum asked Hopper for a statement. Hopper wrote back that he had invested "a long time on the proportions of the canvas, so that it will do for the design, as nearly as possible what I wish it to do. Carrying the main horizontal lines of the design with little interruption to the edges of the picture, is to ... make one conscious of the spaces and elements beyond the limits of the scene itself."
"The picture was planned very carefully in my mind before starting it, but except for a few small black-and-white sketches made from the fact, I had no other concrete data, but relied on ... my memory." He grumbled that "[t]he preliminary sketches would do little for you in explaining the picture. The color, design, and form have all been subjected, consciously or otherwise, to considerable simplification."
Hopper made a gift of the two studies for Manhattan Bridge Loop to the Addison. It's listed in the books as "anonymous donor." The book about their collection says, "The museum does not encourage gifts from artists to avoid potential embarrassment, but when an opportunity arose to acquire something from an outstanding artist, custom was bent."
The school's green dominates Route 28 for about a mile on the south end of "town" (the business district), and, from the edge, you can just make out the downtown skyline of Boston. The town of Andover (as opposed to the school Philips Andover, which also just calls itself "Andover" to separate itself from its sister elite school Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire) lies on the banks of the Merrimack River about twenty-three miles north of Boston. Andover was originally settled in 1636 under the Indian name of Cochicewick. The community incorporated in 1646, named after a town in England where many of the settlers had come from. Being on a river, Andover was home from the early days to powder, paper, and woolen mills. Although now primarily residential (most homes go for around $1 million), Andover has a number of companies in defense, computers, and medical products.
Andover is still governed by open Town Meeting, a scene depicted by Rockwell 
but never Hopper. The town's 20,000 registered voters meet at Andover High School to debate and vote on the town's financial and business decisions over the course of two or three nights. The local newspaper boasted that it's "the purest expression of democracy" but warned that the success of the system requires "the active participation of our residents." Tellingly, they added, "electronic forms of communication do not eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings."
"Andover is a commuting suburb of Boston," he explained. "So it doesn't have that urban isolation of Hopper. Phillips Academy defines the social life here, with its events and offerings. I've lived here since 1993. There are a lot of high-tech firms in Andover now. We're a large geographic township but fairly heterogeneous. There are no extremes. At a coffee shop downtown you might get a cross section of townies, especially early in the morning; Phillips kids in the afternoon."
I didn't see any coffee shops offhand, so I backtracked to the Town Hall. The woman working the Town Hall welcome desk didn't want to answer my question, but she gave me a lead on where to go: the Lantern Café. She told me it was probably the oldest in town and most like one I would see in a Hopper painting. It took me five times with her Yankee accent to realize that she wasn't saying "Land End" but "Lantern."
The Lantern Café had somehow managed to withstand Andover's increasing preciousness. Unfortunately, when I walked into the matchbox-sized place, all of the seats were filled, and the people in them glared at me as if to leave no doubt that they wouldn't be giving them up to me any time soon. I backed out.
I had a tight schedule to keep, and Andover's residents were being standoffish. At the academy's 190-year-old bookstore, the store's assistant manager had beamed, "Our store is a community meeting place," and in 1996, local son Jay Leno drew 1,500 people when he signed books there. But she and the rest of the staff begged off saying anything about Hopper, and the place was deserted besides them. Andover felt like a town that combined staid settlers' descendants with newer suburbanites who didn't want to be bothered. The locals had one foot fiercely set in tradition, and another grubbing to make a better future. In that, they mirrored Hopper's characters: in a nostalgic setting but victims of modern life's isolating effects.
Northampton looked like a thriving New England hill town, with a broad road gently sloping up a business district of majestic old storefronts. In a Hopperesque transformation of American architecture, the three-story Greek temple style bank at the corner of Pleasant and Main had been made into a jewelry shop. The Holyoke Mountains loomed all around, and side streets downtown breathtakingly rose or fell away.
Northampton prides itself on being surrounded by five schools: Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, University of Massachusetts, and Smith College, who collectively comprise the "Five-College" region. Many students from all five choose to live in Northampton because it is the largest and most central city in the region.
One of these colleges, Smith College, houses the Hopper painting in town: 
Pretty Penny. It shows the house in Nyack owned by actress Helen Hayes and her husband Charles Macarthur, who wrote the hit play The Front Page. Hopper's dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, knowing Hopper's Nyack upbringing and love of theater, proposed that he do it. Hopper chafed under his first commission since giving up commercial art. The painting in fact looks a little like an ad in an architectural magazine, though Hopper has applied his usual artistry.
The house is viewed from under a pine tree, whose haphazard dark green shadows on the front lawn help frame the house. The stories rise in a series of steps that make the squat house seem taller. By making the square forms on the right side jut forward, while the bay windows on the left side sink back, Hopper makes the house seem monolithic.
It's such a pretty painting that you'd be surprised the drama that went on to get it made. Gail Levin details Jo's extensive entries and other accounts. Hopper said, "I can't do this house. I don't want to paint this house. It does nothing for me…. "
Hayes recalled that Hopper turned up unannounced. "I went to the window and sure enough, there was Hopper, grumpy as ever, sketching our house." Helen said MacArthur "…phoned Frank Rehn and said, 'How did you do that? What changed his mind?' And [Rehn] said, 'Well, Jo and I have been working on him and after having an afternoon of Jo...'" Hayes said Hopper was "like a big hellcat of anger and resentment.... I had never met a more misanthropic, grumpy, grouchy individual in my life, and as a performer I just shriveled under the heat of this disapproval. " By contrast, Jo wrote of Helen Hayes, "It was so nice to meet her, very simple, real genuine, like her work. She's very nice--& friendly & interested. After lunch Mr. McA. kept us at table talking about movies."
After all the trouble Hopper went to for this picture, Jo, the Rehns, and Helen Hayes suggested putting in Hayes's daughter and French poodle, leading to Edward "cussing" the lot of them. After the painting was delivered, though, MacArthur phoned to say how pleased with it they were. Rehn asked twenty-five hundred dollars, more than half of Hopper's sales for the entire year.1
1This story is told in more detail in Gail Levin's Hopper biography, where you can also find more of her Helen Hayes interview.
Like the painting, Smith's campus is filled with pine trees and 19th-century buildings: Greek Revival white pillars set into brick siding. Smith opened in 1875 when Sophia Smith inherited a fortune at age 65 and decided to found an all-women's college. Poet Sylvia Plath was a Smith grad, and displays in the library honor women leaders: birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger; the papers of Gloria Steinem; and the Epistole devotissime of St. Catherine of Siena. A sign on Pretty Penny says, "gift of Mrs. Charles McArthur, LHD Class of 1940." Smith College should have labeled it with Helen's name, out of alumni pride or feminist equality.
Students at Smith live in "cottages" rather than dorms, and self-governing "houses" are still part of the Smith experience for its 2,500 students. Other traditions include Mountain Day, a fall day chosen randomly by the president when ringing bells announce that classes are canceled and students encouraged to go enjoy the outdoors. Ivy Day, the day before graduation, alumnae walk a parade route lined by seniors, and seniors plant ivy to show a connection between the college and its graduates.
When they got called to table, I interviewed a barrel-chested, white-mustachioed man and his pasty portly wife. She wore a sweatshirt with flowers on it. He was balding and wearing a black turtleneck beneath a black Greek fisherman's cap. He said that the people around here were mostly university people or farmers. Northampton lies in a valley that gets runoff from mountains, making it good for farming. Whatever their work, he implied, most locals make a pretty penny.
Pretty Penny was painted in Nyack but ended up in Northampton because a Smith alumna donated it. How Hopper's paintings ended up where they did is interesting to consider. I think that his paintings were accessible to nontraditional art collectors. They show everyday subjects and scenes, not blobs like 
Jackson Pollock.
Another thing in Hopper's favor was that his paintings were affordable in his lifetime and shortly after because his kind of realism was out of favor with art buyers at that time. An interesting subculture is those who need to collect anything, especially art. (One gallery owner confided, "I have been in the collector's circle. I was dealing with art collectors, and, for some, it becomes a life and not just a hobby. They all are trying to scam each other. They want to put their name in front of a painting's name.") The art buyers dictate the price of a painting, but not the value. Nighthawks has always had a grip on the American psyche. But art buyers were convinced that an abstract painting or unmistakable Van Gogh was worth more. Now, Hopper's paintings fetch top price.(1)
Perhaps the most telling example of how his paintings ended up where they did is provided by a lesser work in a less well known museum. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art has 
November, Washington Square. The painting has two dates: 1932 and 1959. That is because he started it long before he finished it. He finished in the year that one of the museum's great patrons was on an art-buying spree in New York. I can't help but think that Hopper's dealer called him and asked him for a canvas, any canvas, and Hopper picked out an old one already half done and finished it quickly in hopes of a sale.
Another great story is Wichita's collection. It includes some of the finest works of certain individuals, including Hopper's 
Conference at Night and 
Sunlight on Brownstones. The buyer was Elizabeth Stubblefield Navas, the former interior designer for the wife of the man for whom the collection is named: Roland P. Murdock. She inherited the money and his charge to keep buying good art and sending it back to Wichita. One local art insider told me he thought Murdock wanted to force-feed high art to the lowbrow plains people whether they wanted it or not.
Many of Hopper's buyers were similarly nouveau riche. In West Palm Beach, the buyer was named Ralph Norton (like a merging of the characters Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton on the 1950s sitcom "The Honeymooners"), and his business bore the cartoon-worthy name "Acme Steel." Neuberger in Purchase was a self-made millionaire. And Helen Hayes gained fame through theater. But many other buyers were old wealth. Stephen Clark was heir to the Singer Sewing Machine money. Edward Root was son of Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of State.
So in many ways, Hopper pleased people of all walks of life. Only those with money could actually buy his paintings. But the range of buyers shows that he was not only a painter of everyman, but also bought by everyman.
(1) Addendum September 21, 2008: I saw a great movie over the weekend: Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? It's about a female truck driver who buys a painting that may be a Jackson Pollock. A noted forensic scientist finds strong evidence that it is: a fingerprint matching one on Pollock's paint cans in his studio; dust on the canvas that matches dust from his studio; etc. Yet the art world refuses to believe that it is a Pollock or (more importantly) even consider that it might be a Pollock. A most telling moment is when a former bigwig at the Met says that art world opinion is worth more than scholarship or science. Also tellingly, a Wall Street investor says that the painting would have more chance of selling if it were signed, even if the signature were a fraud!
Ah, morning in a city. Which is the title of the Hopper painting I came to see in Williamstown and hung just up the road from the diner, on the campus of exclusive Williams College, in a tiny rock octagonal building that looked more like an ancient English church than a house for modern art.
Morning in a City 
depicts a very different morning unfolding. A lone woman stands in a small room, naked, absentmindedly holding a chemise and looking out the room's only window, through which sunlight illuminates her yellow-pink skin in the otherwise dark blue scene. Unlike most of his character's indistinct faces, hers is detailed, with round eye irises and bright red lips. Painted in 1944, she might be alone waiting for her man to come home from the war. The bed offers no haven, as it is way too small for her to fit in. In the building opposite hers, two windows with half-drawn blinds seem to be eyes peering back at her. The painting is about three-and-a-half feet by five, so the woman appears almost life-sized, thus lifelike, and you the viewer are in the same room with her. Unfortunately, no one was in the same room with me. So I sought out others where they could be found during morning in a city.
That employee also answered my question about Hopperesque isolation in Williamstown. "Not at all. Hopper's figures are usually lone female figures gazing out at the city. Besides the obvious (i.e., there is no city to gaze out at), it's pretty hard to remain an isolated, anonymous person in Williamstown. It's a small town, and everybody here knows everybody, including the family history both good and bad. If the world is separated by six degrees of separation, here it's more like three! This is, as I'm sure you've guessed, both a blessing and an annoyance."
The coffee shop was clad in dark green walls and can lights focused on the glass-and-wood display case full of mugs and brews. One room over was situated a lounge with a plank floor where an interesting mix of punks, preps, and woodsmen populated the tables. Around a fireplace in the middle, a group of college-aged kids huddled--my best opportunity for interviews. An Asian guy with spiked black hair and sporting silver oval glasses and a heavy blue wool overcoat sat playing with two long coffee stirrers, putting them in his mouth or drumming them on the table. He told me he was from the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. An energetic, tanned guy with a light goatee and orange fleece vest said he was from L.A. but had lived in Williamstown since graduating the previous spring. Lastly, a bright-eyed, broad-shouldered girl in a big gray sweater who also graduated the previous year and moved back home to Cody, Wyoming was back for Homecoming weekend.
The girl from Wyoming said, "I think I studied Hopper, but I can't remember what my paper was about."
"Do you feel people here are as isolated as Hopper's characters?"
"Yes," she answered. "Everybody here just goes to their houses, even the Williams professors who live in town. Hardly anyone really lives here. Sometimes you wonder if the larger community knows that there's a larger community. And it's easy to forget how very large it is. Our borders run up to New Hampshire and over to New York. It's bigger than Boston in terms of area. But most of it is forest."
"There's a big rift between the college and town," the Asian announced. "The college owns most of the prime property in town. This whole strip they own. And it's the only business area in town. Now, the college wants to build a multimillion dollar performing arts center, and the residents are fighting it tooth and nail. It's kind of interesting because, like we said, some of the residents are Williams teachers. So they're in a tough situation. It's such a small town your neighbor knows your every move."
"There's a lot of historical buildings here," added the kid from L.A. "The locals are wary of what the college will do. I wanted to see what the East Coast was like, but I think I'll go back to the West Coast."
Ever wonder why all museum walls are white. It's to show off the art better. By looking at a white wall, you have an opportunity to rest your eyes and come back to viewing a painting with fresh eyes, a "clean palette" as it were.
Why white? An interesting thing about color is that it consists of both pigment and the light reflecting off of that pigment. In pigments, black is the presence of all colors at once (think what you would get if you smeared all your paints into one blob). So white gives you the chance to look at a color absent of pigments so that you will be better able to see the painters' chosen colors when you go back to looking at the paintings.
The paradox is that in light (as opposed to pigment), white is the presence of all colors (wavelengths), and black is the absence (where was Moses when the lights went out?).
Ever wonder why I am telling you this?
(To rest your eyes.)
I drove down to see the painting in Manchester, New Hampshire, with my friend Chris, who had kindly put me up in his hometown an hour north, Hanover, home to the Ivy League's Dartmouth College. The Hopper we were going to see was 
Bootleggers, a nighttime scene of a boat heaving toward a shore where stand a solitary grand house and a man in a bowler hat. You, the viewer, are placed alongside the bootleggers' boat, possibly an accomplice. The garish moonlit colors and thuggish figures imply that something unsavory is going on. It could be the bootlegging or it might be Prohibition, which Hopper hated and was in full swing in 1925 when he painted this.
I thought that Chris might offer a unique perspective on my question because his job was selling a way of looking at the world. "System Dynamics" aims to solve problems by looking at elements of an equation as affecting each other. When I visited, he was helping to figure out how to keep shrimp populations from being overfished. I asked him to consider the equation that adds up to Hopperesque isolation.
"It all comes down to what is your community," he asserted, turning his gentle blue eyes to mine. His lips, as usual, were tense with calculation. "In the inner city, is your community your gang? Maybe to a churchgoer, the church is their community. What lengths will they go to, to find that? People often look for a community where one does not exist. My wife and I used to live in 
Alexandria, Virginia, right outside of DC. It was a 'planned' suburb, but felt more like a 'contrived' community. They designed everything to be as efficient and pleasing as possible and of course pleased no one. People there buy half-million-dollar homes put up overnight on a tiny bit of land, then have to move further out ten years later to afford what they had ten years earlier.
"Hanover really has a community because of the college. Jane and I are willing to pay to be part of a community of people who are intellectually stimulating. Our neighborhood has incredible people like a retired astronaut, a midwife, and our friend Kadzo, who is one of the most prominent authorities in the field of how elephants interact with humans. Our property in Hanover is close to town, which has the movie theater that's been there since 1958, the pharmacy, and the grocery. People pay a premium for proximity to resources.
"Someone I work with is co-founding a co-op down in Vermont. Their idea is creating this sustainable group, yet they're in the middle of nowhere. They're going to have to raise their own food and all that other stuff. She'll have to drive twenty miles up to her job at Dartmouth then back. The houses they are building are more expensive than the one we bought in town. Not many people who want to live that way can afford to. It's not being done enough to be economical. Our living in Hanover is more sustainable. We can walk everywhere," he rejoiced.
We learned at the history display at the Mill Yard that settlers tapped the Merrimack River in the 1600s to create the first mill, but the town remained a small farming community until it changed its name from Derryfield to Manchester in 1810 and began trying to rival England's industrial center of the same name. Soon, mills lined the river, and the city's population swelled, but in the twentieth century, the mills closed down and they were now rented to boutique businesses.
When we stopped at the information counter at City Hall, we met two gray-haired women who were living reminders of that part of Manchester's history, much as the statue in front of city hall paid tribute to another part: Brigadier General John Stark rallying his troops to victory in the Revolutionary War battle at Bennington by declaring, 
"There they are boys. We beat them today or Molly Stark sleeps a widow tonight." The two women were sharing a split blueberry muffin and a small cup of coffee when we entered. One wore a sweater decked with puppies and flowers; the other sported a cream-colored turtleneck and bright red blazer.
"My mother worked in the mills," the one in the blazer exclaimed when I asked. "She started when she was 11 years old. At 21, she was a widow with three kids, then she married my dad." She smiled and nodded, "I was the second batch."
The other chimed in, "After the mills closed down, we had famous shoe factories. They're building us a new civic center right here on Elm Street, which is important to the people around here. Not us," she smiled. "We're too old. There are a lot of beautiful things about Manchester--you'll find out. We have the mountains; we have the oceans; we have beautiful lakes; and we're near Boston."
"I started working here six years ago," she answered in a husky whisper, "and this is the first time that they have had art in the lobby." She shook her tired, pallid face with a put-upon demeanor, sighing, "I didn't sleep the first night after the curatorial staff hung it here. People are sort of taken aback that it's right there for them immediately.
"It's marvelous. Hopper is one of my favorite painters. You don't have to work hard to understand what he's after. The house in this is a Hitchcock house to me; and the people are very anonymous. I always think the water is moving, that the boat is actually moving.
"I have a fun little association with it," she giggled. "I was involved in the docent program and gave tours to schoolchildren, and I happened to mention that the title was Bootleggers. One of the little boys in the group didn't understand. He associated it with bootleg tapes."
"Do you think," I asked, "people in your community are as isolated as Hopper portrayed Americans?"
"I think isolation is a theme with everybody here. I'm from Canada, but I've been here since the '60s. I love both countries. But there is a much higher individualistic attitude here. I had much more a feeling of belonging up there. Down here, everyone is very challenging. Your egos are much more highly developed. In Canada, our reference was to England, not to a president or a government but to a homeland. Americans are quite different. Even though there's the same language, there's a different philosophy. You have isolated people for lots of different reasons.
"Hopper does capture the isolation, and I think that isolation has become more pronounced as we've gotten into the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. But Hopper was from an era and a generation when people were involved. People are so spread out now. Families are separated by distances. There's so much information now. You can not be in the same pool. You're your own little pool. I think it's pretty awful."
Afterwards, I rooted around the museum, which had a fine collection of paintings by Hopper's contemporary Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth had his first one-person museum exhibition at the Currier in 1939, and developed a relationship with the museum much as Hopper did with the Whitney. Interestingly, Wyeth's favorite model had the same name as the woman at the front counter, Helga, and his extensive series of paintings of her parallels Hopper's exclusive use of Jo as a model. But the museum was as deserted of people as the city's abandoned mills down by the river that Chris and I had visited earlier that day.
So I sought out more employees in the gift shop where they sold reproductions of Hopper's paintings--bootlegged images. The shop's glass display counter and old-time register reminded me of the payout spots in Hopper's diners. Two women tended the counter: Annie was young and blond and pale, wearing a soft cloth dress. She had green eyes, a strong jaw, and a large nose. Maria was old and gray and olive-skinned, wearing a rayon shirt carved into different colors like a stained glass window. Pendulous silver earrings dangled across her patterned shawl. She sat on her stool, while the younger one leaned against the counter.
"When I think of isolation," Annie answered in a nasal tone, "the only thing I can think of: the mills of Manchester. That kind of isolates Manchester, not in a bad.... Well I guess it could be a bad way. People have different opinions on the mills. I think of isolation as distinguishing Manchester as the mill city.
"I never really thought of Manchester as being isolated. I'm from the country, an hour north, nothing like Manchester. I moved down here because I'm going to school here. I love the history of Manchester, the mill buildings, the great old stories about this mill town. I don't necessarily enjoy today's Manchester. This is like New York City for me. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of new stuff: condos, apartment buildings. But I don't appreciate it. They're building a new civic center for basketball and hockey, and that will overpower the whole section. Downtown is crazy on weekends. That's just not me because I'm a country bumpkin."
Maria finally cut in, in a raspy voice. "That center was voted out for so long, but they finally got it through. I tell you: the original people here, I mean really old, they don't want the changes at all. They still talk about the mills closing; they think that's terrible that that happened.
"I grew up in Manhattan," she continued, "so you can imagine what it's like to be in Manchester: old-fashioned in every way. I'll tell you what's different: the air is cleaner. I still haven't gotten over it, and I've lived here about 13 years. When I came up here, I loved the country. But the town? They consider this the big city. To me it's very small town."
"That's funny," giggled Annie. "You see how…"
"So opposite," Maria nodded.
As we left, Chris noted a pattern, as was his job. "Annie was an example of living out what you said Hopper often portrayed: coming from a small town and feeling lost in a big one."
We got back in the car and headed home. On the highway, we passed signs I had noticed earlier: "Liquor store and rest area."
"That seems like a questionable combination," I mused.
"Here in New Hampshire you can only buy liquor at a State-run store."
"I want to get some wine for dinner," I said. "Should we stop there?"
"No," Chris waved his hand before his face. "It's more expensive here. We'll go over the border and get it in Vermont; that's what everybody here does."
Bootleggers, it seems, is among compatriots.
After driving up into New England, I came back down to stay with Sean and Laurie in Weehawken and hit some other Manhattan-area towns. That first day back, I took a train to Brooklyn. A Hopper hangs in Brooklyn.
Like I mentioned above, this is a great example of how Hopper has exported pieces of America from their original locales. Brooklyn's most famous tenant may be the Brooklyn Bridge, which painters love painting because it is supposed to represent the beauty of modern American engineering. Hopper started to paint it in the background of his painting Room in Brooklyn, though he ended up omitting it. Room in Brooklyn hangs in Boston, while a bridge he eventually did paint, 
Macomb's Dam Bridge, ended up here in Brooklyn.
Macomb's Dam Bridge is housed in the Brooklyn Museum, a six-story behemoth along Eastern Parkway, itself a monstrous six-lane roadway. 
The museum is most famous recently for displaying an artwork made with elephant dung. The Brooklyn museum was actually the first to purchase a Hopper painting for its collection. However, it was a watercolor, not an oil. It shows a mansard roof (titled The Mansard Roof), 
one of Hopper's favorite subjects. Mansard roofs were invented in Paris where you were taxed according to number of floors. Landlords claimed the mansard roofs (which cover a whole floor) were actually roofs and not floors. Hopper, with his sly sensibility, would have appreciated the trickery.
The museum's three-story Beaux Arts lobby looked like a converted school, floored in dark linoleum. On the weekday I was there, it was filled with actual school kids, screaming and clambering, slapping each other. I waited a long time in line while the woman at the front desk stared at me and continued her phone conversation with a friend. When she hung up, she deigned to sell me an entrance ticket. I had to stop at the restroom first and found the children in there filling the toilets with paper. The toilet seats were all missing.
Macomb's Dam Bridge shows a pretty landscape, yet a big dumpy gray bridge dominates the middle of the painting. There are actually two arched trusses holding up different parts of the bridge. At left, a concrete pillar with rubber tires around it sits on a long grassy island below the bridge. The river is sky blue, while the sky is mostly white. The water might be so pale partly because it's reflecting the white of the clouds. This composition inverts his usual structure, as the river provides a substitute sky below the bridge.
Brooklyn is notorious as the landing place for immigrant families who couldn't travel far from Staten Island. It's a melting pot, roiling and seething from the mélange of cultures contained within its borders. Much of New York is that way, and a "realistic" view of Macomb's Dam Bridge would have to include many figures. So it's odd that Hopper has left out all the people in his scene of Manhattan. Asked why, Hopper replied dryly: "I don't know why, except that they say I am lonely."
I was not lonely, however. I was viewing the painting with a white-haired woman in a pale blue sweater who was making her way through the gallery. She seemed sweet but a bit edgy. I asked her thoughts about the painting.
"I don't remember it," she said. "I'd have to see it again." We walked back to the painting. "It's very realistic."
Three shrill whistles filled the gallery, and I suspected an alarm had gone off. The woman smiled to calm me.
"It's a little scary. It's my husband. He whistles for me like a puppy dog. It's a little frightening, a little forbidding."
"Yes," I agreed. "You can hear him from miles away."
"No, the painting," she said, flinging a finger at it. "Just forbidding. Isolation: that's exactly what comes through."
Her husband rounded the corner just then. He was a gaunt man wearing a dark blue overcoat. He had heard my questions, and jumped in to answer in a deep round voice as if his throat were coated with oil.
"It's not his usual bright light. It's a distinct lighting situation. We all know that kind of a day where there are those clouds there. I'm looking for some sort of bright light or beautiful situation or something. This painting really doesn't have any. It doesn't strike a special note, particularly when you see something with the eye of a painter. There's nothing stimulating." With a nod to his wife, she skulked behind him and they continued walking through the museum.
Whistling to call to heel your absent wife is one way to overcome isolation.
At the museum shop counter, three older women displayed the borough's notorious brashness. One who was plump and spoke with a European accent I imagined as named Olga. Another was small and dumpy, waddling on one bad leg; I called her Eunice. The third was tiny and well-coiffed, wearing big glasses and lots of jewelry. Her I dubbed Shirley.
When I asked if people here were isolated, they answered en masse as a Greek chorus. "Yep. Yep. Always. Too many people in the city. People are leaving New York, leaving like rats from a sinking ship. Really."
"I love living in Brooklyn," said dumpy Eunice. "I used to want to be only in Manhattan. And then I came here and see that it is very nice. You feel like you are in family."
Coiffed Shirley said, "I met my husband in Brooklyn, many many years ago. He was going to college at the time, then he went away to war. I've lived in Brooklyn for all my married life."
"We originally came from Massachusetts," said Eunice, "and settled in downtown Brooklyn for years. My husband had a parking lot down there. But then it started to go down, and he sold out."
"The neighborhood's changed," groused Olga, and all three rolled their eyes, followed by lots of clucking, head-nodding and frowning.
"Yeah, mm hmm," they all reinforced Olga, so she added, "It's unsafe a lot of areas."
"The city even has changed," said Shirley. "I remember at fifteen, I used to get on the subway, go in with a bunch of girls. I'd go in with my fur coat and dressed up to see a show with my husband--on the subway! Now? Forget it! I make sure that nothing on is good. But I remember as a kid even going in the city. My mother let me do that with a bunch of girls. Now if I had a fifteen-year-old girl I wouldn't let her go on the subway to the city, come home ten or eleven at night. It's safer, but it's still hard. Now? At night? No. I wouldn't go."
Eunice hit her coiffed friend on the arm, "Now it's turning around. Coming up again."
"Yeah," agreed Shirley. "There's lots of change. Buy a house and it's gone back and forth again."
"Downgrade and then turn around and upgrade," Olga ruminated.
"They're buying like sundaes now in some areas," Shirley exclaimed. "But a while back it was just scary. Way way back, it was considered 'the place.' I mean if you could afford to live there. Better that than the other direction. Now it's going back. Now it's very residential. Mixed: everything and everyone. You ought to see what was going on there. Never saw a neighborhood like that. Isolated? If anything, what would be the opposite?"
"Inundated," Olga piled on.
"Oh yes. Lots of people," Shirley assented.
"There used to be a downtown [here in Brooklyn]," jeered dumpy Eunice. "I wouldn't go back there any more now. You'd be shocked! But this is a big city. There's always a different group coming in. They wanted to change the language to Spanish. How could you do that? Every group that comes in had to learn English. I remember my husband's folks came here from another country: Poland. They were proud to be here. She went to school at night just to learn English. Because that's what they wanted in those days. But nowadays the people coming in they want you to change. They may say I'm prejudice, but I don't think it's right. Now you have Russians coming in. I went to San Francisco and everything's in Japanese, and I thought, 'What country am I in?' But that's where the money is. All the Japanese; they are dying for their money."
"Where do you live now?" I asked.
"Sheepshead Bay."
"Oh. It's nice there," said Olga.
"Yeah," sneered Eunice. "Nicer than downtown Brooklyn."
A friend who lives in Brooklyn, a newer resident, e-mailed a different view, "I don't think Brooklyn is a lonely place at all. In fact, something like one of four Americans can trace their roots to Brooklyn. It is the largest borough in New York at 77 square miles and 2.5 million people. And it's one of the most diverse places on the planet. It's also almost completely residential. Then again, just because it's crowded doesn't mean there isn't plenty of loneliness. It's a big city. But it's not really a tourist destination, just a place where people live. There are a lot of neat neighborhoods. Some of the oldest Italian neighborhoods in the country are here. There's arty Williamsburg and Cobble Hill, tony Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, and Prospect Park, one of the largest urban parks in the world. Can you tell I'm a Brooklyn partisan?"
The museum looked like one of the well-sized homes that surrounded it, except the parking lot was slightly larger than the nearby homes' driveways--but only slightly. The main building looked like a converted dentist's office. Greek-revival Ionic columns created a porch on the blond brick front. The campus is also home to an art school, administrative offices, library, and an arboretum. All those institutions under one roof made it too crowded, and, when I visited, the museum was under construction for expansion and the Hopper had been put away.
Though Hopper is often associated with his urban subjects, the Cape Cod landscape here, Coast Guard Station, is a favorite of the staff and visitors. A museum employee e-mailed me that she was sad I wouldn't get to see what she considered an excellent example of Hopper and one of her favorite works in the collection. The day I visited the museum, their store was sold out of the post card version of it. There are no figures in the painting. Instead, the title structure is set on a barren shore, and we see it's dark backside.
The museum focuses on American and Native American art, and one of its biggest donations was from Morgan Russell, an originator of the American movement Synchromism. Being near the mouth of the Hudson, the Museum also has a large collection of works by the Hudson River School and by Montclair's best-known artist, George Inness. A new specialty is 20th-century works by African-American artists. Part of the museum's mission statement is "evolving with our audience's needs." It even added a separate "Diversity Credo."
Montclair is known for its multiracial make-up, and one of its 38,0000 residents was one of the first African Americans to graduate from my prep school back in the 1970s. He was continuing the tradition by working in development for a private school near Montclair. I had met him once at a reunion, so I called him to get some background on Montclair. He answered in a baritone, his words measured but flowing swiftly.
"I don't think it's isolated," he opined. "It's a suburb, but it's only about 19 miles to Times Square. And it's a very participatory suburb. It's more like the Upper West Side than the Upper West Side is any more. The New York Times did an article about race in Montclair; out of a whole series on race, the culminating article was a story on Montclair. It called us an 'urban suburb.' There are a lot of ethnic restaurants; a lot of artists and writers choose to live here."
"I've lived here since 1987. We moved from Park Slope--which is a diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn--to raise our kids here. It's one of the best places to raise kids and the best town for an interracial marriage like ours. It's about 33% African American. It's one of the most diverse, warm…. Well maybe not warm. We argue a lot over school board issues and such, but argument is OK here. At least it's out in the open. Other towns," he chuckled, "consider a class on World Literature a high achievement."
The upper part of town (literally the north end and on a hill) that we drove through to get to the museum had big homes, cafes, book stores, plastic surgery centers, SUVs in the driveways, and people wearing sweaters that read "Dartmouth" and "Bucknell." Downtown, chain stores filled Montclair's old storefronts. We passed a lot of arts-related businesses or organizations. A furniture store was housed in what looked like it was once an art deco cinema from the golden age of theaters that Hopper painted. The Bohemian Restaurant looked like it was named for the ethnicity but now might refer to locals' lifestyle.
When we got to the other side of town, we found shorter streets, smaller rundown houses carved up into apartments, rusty cars, and the Baptist church. We had come here for Sean's favorite soul-food place, but it was closed, so we went next door to a place advertising "original St. Louis cuisine." Posters of St. Louis's athletic teams and African American entertainers adorned the buff-paneled walls. The service was St. Louis slow, too, though, and after waiting 20 minutes without anyone taking our order, Sean and I left.
Just as the Hopper painting here was one that failed to capture my interest, so too was the town.
In Newark, I barely had time to see anything. Sean took me there on our way to the Newark airport, from where I would fly home. But that alone spoke of Newark's identity. It has become a travel and flight hub for the New York area. With much of its civic and business life draining away, what it still has to offer is sheer proximity to a livelier city. That also afforded Newark one of the highest-occupancy hotel markets in the country--a Hopperesque population if ever there was one. It also has the largest Portuguese population in any town outside of Portugal, and those people may feel isolated from their former country.
Founded in 1666 by other exiles (New Haven, Connecticut-area religious colonists fleeing their brethren's wrath), Newark is the third-oldest major American city. Current residents are not isolated from one another domestically: Newark occupies the second-smallest land area of America’s 100 most populous cities. And many ride on the city's Hopperesque 1930s-era subway. 
Ship-loving Hopper might also like knowing that Port Newark/Port Elizabeth is the third-largest commercial container port in the Western Hemisphere.
But the more Newark tries to convince everyone that they have changed, the more we are sure that it hasn't. Their Web site is stuffed full of information like the previous about their famous buildings, people, facts, and new developments. The more they crow, the more we are reminded of how bragging of accomplishments often masks feelings of shortcomings. The city's Web site advises visitors to ask for advice and assistance from the Downtown District's "Safety Ambassadors."
When I actually visited Newark, rather then merely fleeing their airport as usual, I found streets reminiscent of 1950s Life magazine photos: broad streets, murky lamps lending the town an eerie glow; large plastic letters drilled into concrete facades announcing a variety of variety stores: pawn shops, department stores, corner grocers, family-owned restaurants, fix-it shops, etc. 
The new buildings were the bottom-line-driven architecture of late Capitalism. The beautiful old buildings were soot-scarred and crumbling.
One of these was the Newark Museum.
"The art of Europe is finished—dead—and America is the country of the future. Look at the skyscrapers." -Marcel Duchamp, 1915. Written on the wall in the Newark Museum.
Built in 1926, the Newark Museum was donated to the city by store owner and Newark champion Louis Bamberger. A huge entrance court with a café did not prepare me for the museum's narrow hallways that shoehorned into small rooms stuffed to the gills.
In one of these narrow hallways hung Hopper's 
The Sheridan Theater. The painting is tiny by Hopper's standards: about one-and-a-half feet by two. It shows the back of a woman looking over a theater balcony railing. She wears a tight red ankle-length skirt, white shirt, black hat, and black high-heeled shoes. Jo called the blond "a Mae West effect." She is looking into a pit of seats, as indicated by a brass railing to her right and an usher far left talking to someone atop a stairway. Her red-and-white combo is mirrored by the red and white in the rooms above her where the theater opens up. The odd red chandeliers on her level seem like scabs on the ceiling. Is she looking for someone? Has the play started? Ended? Is it intermission?
The guard was sprawled in a chair when we got upstairs to where the Hopper hung, but he obsequiously snapped to attention and spouted information about the galleries and museum that seemed from a required script. He said he had moved to nearby Bergenfield form Nigeria and was surprised to hear of the painting's Manhattan connection. "It's supposed to depict somewhere in New York? I don't know where. So maybe that's why it's not my favorite. But there's quite a number of people have stopped by it for long time. People recognize it." That was all that he was willing to offer, so I turned to Sean.
"There's no end to what's above her. It seems to go up to heaven. There seems to be a lot more light up there. We're in the dark. It seems like a lull in things. Not a lot of activity. And really, I'm surprised there's not more people. The lights are on so it's not during a performance."
When I pointed to what I thought was an exit sign, Sean noted, "I'm not sure that isn't a painting on the wall over the stairs. 1937, it wouldn't be a lit sign I don't think. '37: they're still sort of in the throes of the Depression; that could explain the low turnout; why she's alone. She still has shape to her. She looks put together: black high heels, red dress."
I thought she was wearing a dark gray stole or scarf, but Sean felt otherwise. "You think that's a stole? I thought that was her hair and she's wearing a hat. It's a much more appealing idea if that's a blond in a fur collar. I was thinking she was rather dowdy."
After that, we went to the airport, and I went home to try to make sense of the New England trip's notes and experiences.
New England and New York greatly influenced Hopper, so my experiences and interviews there were important to understanding his life and works. They were also important to my life and work because the region was his home and home to so many of his paintings and towns where they hung. I was starting to learn more about Hopper, his paintings, and people's feelings about them.
I had interviewed everyone from street people to college professors. (Hell, I did that in one town.) Many agreed that isolation could be found in Hopper's paintings and in their hometowns. "This Hopper does make you feel like our city," a Boston museum guard confessed. 
"It's very depressing. All his paintings are very depressing. That's what I like about them."
My painter friend Julia mused about all the paintings in the Whitney's gallery devoted solely to Hopper, "You get a sensation of being alone. … In Early Sunday Morning, you would know all of the shop owners. 
… I grew up in this place, but I wonder: will the next generation have the same response?"
In Boston, a thin, red-haired, older woman, barked, "[Hopper's paintings] could be Anywhere USA."
But an earnest, red-bearded young park ranger along the African-American Heritage Trail in Boston hesitated. "I think a lot of people look at Hopper's paintings and feel isolated for reasons having nothing to do with Hopper's motivation for painting."
A dashing young actor who lived in Manhattan but had stopped into Hopper's birthplace 
in Nyack, New York, agreed. "People tend to want to attach certain events in Hopper's life to the ideas in his paintings," he warned. "But when something becomes universal, it really has to stand on its own."
Though they may quibble whether Hopper portrayed isolation, whether such isolation existed in their towns, and whether that isolation was negative, they nonetheless loved looking at Hopper's paintings. Some enjoyed viewing them for the loneliness they saw in them. But many commented on Hopper's artistry—whether they appreciated it or not.
In New Haven, one of my host's male artist friends carped, "There's something that seems 'unearned' by Hopper. … I think Hopper found a formula for something that worked and then stuck with it. A friend of mine owns a couple of Hopper watercolors. In those, I see Hopper doing more interesting stuff than in his oils."
But most liked his oils. As the Whitney security guard confided, "When we had the big show of Hoppers, we had like a half a millions [sic] people come here for that. This guy [Hopper] he gets visitors from all over the world."
Even a gruff street character in New Haven turned out to be a huge Hopper fan. "[Hopper's paintings here] are really great. You're going to love them," he guaranteed.
The dour Canadian woman at the museum front desk in Manchester, New Hampshire, appreciated that, "You don't have to work hard to understand what he's after."
The woman who showed me the Hoppers in MOMA's storage crooned, "I certainly love him as a painter. He's so much a part of our training, as American artists. He's part of the pantheon. These are like flash cards. I really think that's something nice about Hopper: his paintings have an internal scale based on a certain kind of looking."
The ranger in Boston had posited, "What's great about Hopper's paintings is what they don't have: no glass in the windows, no cars, no trash. You could eat off of that street. In his one of people fully dressed in suits, 
, they're just baking! It's a harsh, awful light. There's no atmosphere. It's like those pictures of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, just direct shadow."
But when it came to discussing isolation outside of the paintings, most people initially denied that they or their town mates were isolated. Maybe it was defensiveness. No one likes to associate their home with negative attributes. And most people viewed isolation (especially Hopperesque isolation) as negative. But after a while, people usually admitted to that they were isolated in some way. And even when they didn't, I often saw ways in which they were isolated.
Geography was one form of isolation. Hopper's home and subject, New York City, had a big-city anonymity that made people feel isolated—perhaps most so there, in the nation's biggest city. In New York's Whitney Museum, a stocky, energetic young man spat, "New York is kind of a lonely place, despite being around people constantly." The young Manhattan actor I had met at Hopper's birthplace realized, "I've experienced that my whole life: being around so many people but being alone."
The man behind MOMA's store counter 
said Hopper's paintings did capture New York as he had experienced it over the course of his 50-plus-year life and that he had often found himself alone like the woman in Automat. 
He also spent all day looking at reproductions of Hopper paintings, so maybe the images merged with his memories. Or maybe his recollections matched the images. Hopper's paintings are like memories we had forgotten, like stumbling on a forgotten snapshot in our keepsakes box that brings welling back up the emotions of the moment.
In the second-largest city I visited, Boston, Ted Kennedy's double on the boat from Charlestown Navy Yard told me everyone wanted to move there when they saw what a great town it was. But many there felt that the "great" city was filled with mean, isolated people. The park ranger had complained, "We are isolated in the United States, and Boston is one of the worst places for it. I sympathize with people who come here and talk about how mean, how downright mean, Bostonians can be." Deborah, an acquaintance of mine who moved cross-country from Chicago to Boston noted, "Everyone in Boston is in their own little world." Perhaps Hopper's beautiful but slightly creepy renderings of American scenes are perfect depictions of our duplicity about whether our communities are isolated or not, for better or for worse.
People in Brooklyn, a large populous New York City borough, muttered that the town was too big to summarize as isolated or not. A friend who lived there e-mailed, "I don't think Brooklyn is a lonely place at all. … it's one of the most diverse places on the planet. There are a lot of neat neighborhoods. Then again, just because it's crowded doesn't mean there isn't plenty of loneliness." The fact that Brooklyn had different enclaves that each had a unique flavor implied that certain people might be drawn to one or the other (and, by inference, feel isolated in one or the other).
Ironically, unlike big-city denizens, people in the smallest towns, the most geographically isolated, felt least isolated. A museum employee in Williamstown, Massachusetts, joked that the town was the exact opposite of Hopper's world 
: "Besides the obvious (i.e., there is no city to gaze out at), it's pretty hard to remain an isolated, anonymous person in Williamstown. If the world is separated by six degrees of separation, here it's more like three! This is, as I'm sure you've guessed, both a blessing and an annoyance." A Williams College student there told me, "Your neighbor knows your every move." Yet the town seemed ideally geographically isolated out in the Berkshire Mountains. The Clark Art Museum was placed there during the Cold War so that the works would be safe from a nuclear explosion because Williamstown was equidistant from New York City and Washington, DC.
An Andover, Massachusetts, resident who had graduated from my prep school protested that Andover (like Williamstown), "doesn’t have that urban isolation of Hopper [because it's a] commuting suburb of Boston."
In Purchase, New York, in Manhattan's wealthy suburban Westchester County, I didn't find many locals who felt isolated--but then, I didn’t find many locals. A more nowhere place than Terre Haute, Purchase was home only to two institutions (one State, one private): the commuter college SUNY-Purchase and the corporation Pepsico. No one lived there—"except the volunteer fireman" gibed a SUNY-Purchase student.
Westchester's Armonk was not even a town but legally a "hamlet" that was also home mostly to corporate headquarters. But Armonk's nowhere was about to be wiped out by housing developments. On the outskirts of town, at one of the last remaining farms, the owner's wife cackled, "There's a lot of new, stock market money here. I don't know who's making it, but they're making it." And after my visit, they used it to buy her farm and make it a subdivision of homes.
Like the buyers of those homes, many people were using geographic dislocation (moving) to find or avoid isolation. The period in which I researched the book was one of the hottest real estate markets in U.S. history. Maria who hosted me in Nyack, believed, "[D]islocation [is] the American dream, in an odd way." My friend Chris, who joined me in visiting the Hopper in Manchester, had overcome isolation by moving to Hanover, New Hampshire. He complained that his former town (DC suburb Alexandria, Virginia) "was a 'planned' suburb, but felt more like a 'contrived' community. … People there buy half-million-dollar homes put up overnight on a tiny bit of land, then have to move further out ten years later to afford what they had ten years earlier."
Some came to a certain town to find others who were like-minded. A town's reputation became a self-fulfilling prophecy for a community definition. The woman at Hopper's Nyack birth home insisted, "We moved [here] because we wanted more of a feeling of community." So did the woman living there in Carson McCullers's old house: "We moved here because it is Main Street."
Montclair, New Jersey, residents proudly told me that the town was unique in that its racial mix all got along. People like my fellow prep school alum moved there because it was known as a place for interracial couples like in his marriage. But it seemed to me that if you lauded the town's races getting along, you were assuming that isolation was a given when races coexist or reside in the same town. That alum admitted that there was still friction in Montclair, but "At least it's out in the open."
Others, like the natives of Armonk, New York, 
weren't moving of their own free will to find a certain community; they were being driven out by real estate speculation. Economic refugees, they were about to be overrun by houses for the wealthy. 
The few people that lived there were changing from the farmer and fireman/short order cook I met to the "stock market money people" the farmer eventually sold to. The line cook said that the new residents, "all want to be left alone, which is isolated. They want the peace and quiet of the country. … gotta get away from the hustle and bustle."
In New Haven, real estate flight from the city had helped to fuel the inner core's demise. Yale is one of the few remaining institutions in the former industrial capital's dying downtown. Though New Haven's wealthiest resident, Yale pays no taxes to the city, damning that town to ruin. My host Joe's co-op apartment building was going bankrupt. "Nothing downtown can hold its value," he groaned.
The Brooklyn boroughs' constant change in character was often due to real estate turnover driving people out of their neighborhoods and/or importing outsiders. It was summed up by a woman, who said people, "Buy a house and it's gone back and forth again. … Downgrade and then turn around and upgrade."
Some transplants didn’t like what they found when they moved to a city. An older woman who had retired to Manchester from New York City rolled her eyes, "I grew up in Manhattan, so you can imagine what it's like to be in Manchester. To me, it's small town in every way." Her coworker was no happier, but for the entirely opposite reason. "This is like New York City for me," giggled a fresh-faced nursing student who had moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, from a small rural town in the state. "That's just not me because I'm a country bumpkin." She was living the pattern many have seen in Hopper's subjects: a country person overwhelmed after moving to the city.
The Canadian woman at the museum front desk in Manchester, 
lamented, "There is a much higher individualistic attitude here [than in Canada]. … Hopper does capture the isolation, and I think that isolation has become more pronounced. I think it's pretty awful."
Another font of isolation was wealth, education, power, and class. These interrelated tangibles that dictate social pecking order were subsumed in one phrase by brilliant French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu when he coined the term "cultural capitol". Cultural capital is what he called having the kind of knowledge and experiences that the wealthy have and therefore relate to and respect. Money alone is not cultural capitol. Few who win the lottery become wheeler dealers; they have the money but not the connections or the same experiential vocabulary as the dominant class.
Many of the towns that I visited with Hoppers were dominated by educational institutions, and education is part of cultural capital. One cannot be self-sufficient without proper schooling. No one is born knowing everything. But the knowledge, skills and views that one learns ally one with a certain class. Certain people appreciate those who know how to leverage stocks, while others admire those who can pick locks. The key is to have the kind of knowledge and experiences that you can parlay into other kinds of wealth and power. And wealth and power created a ruling class, especially noticeable in New England. A prep school classmate, Meg, said, "That Old Boston Brahmin (associated with exclusivity and pretense, because after all they did come over on the Mayflower, lest you forget) is definitely very much alive and kicking even today."
In New Haven, cultural capital was a source of isolation that the locals described as "town and gown." An Eli (Yale student) studying "Security Studies" admitted, "I don't know a lot about New Haven, and that might be a good sign that we at Yale are set apart and isolated. And Yale is, what, the fourth richest university in the entire world? They could do a lot more for the city's economy." Her boyfriend agreed. "Socioeconomically: the haves and have-nots are separated. The best of the best and worst of the worst, right next to each other, crossing paths down the street. But one is just so far away from the other." And a gruff street character groused that he had lost his job because Yale employees didn’t want to lose theirs. "If you step outside the [campus] area, it's a ghetto."
In Williamstown, most residents were connected to Williams College the biggest resident in this tiny village. "There's a big rift between the college and town," a Williams College student said. "The college owns most of the prime property in town. Now, the college wants to build a multimillion-dollar performing arts center, and the residents are fighting it tooth and nail. It's kind of interesting because, like we said, some of the residents are Williams teachers. So they're in a tough situation."
Northampton, Massachusetts, is home to many students from the five local colleges: temporary residents geographically isolated from their homes. In Andover, I was told, "Philips Academy defines the social life here." And the posh prep school there was a way for the wealthy to determine who was let "in" to the inner circle and who was left out. Boston was a bigger, more diverse place than most college towns, but still had a sizeable student population. Deborah, noted, "Most of my roommates have come from elsewhere for school and stayed." A fiftyish woman, prim yet square-shouldered as a football player, who was in fact a banker, but couched her answer in terms of academia, theorizing, "If I was an instructor, I would point out to students that this is more of an example of the inner world of the painter: alone, isolated, and desperate. I don't think of the people of Boston like that."
The studio where Hopper had lived was now part of an educational institution: New York University. The studio was in theory open to the public, but 
a trollish teacher who seemed the very spirit of Jo Hopper's short feistiness, tossed me out nonetheless. I guess she didn't feel isolated enough. Or maybe she was trying to impress me by pulling the trump card of her cultural capitol, the "power" conferred upon her by being associated with a large educational institution. If so, that failed because I got invited backstage at New York City's prestigious Museum of Modern Art. 
But New England and New York's emphasis on culture and schooling created a bond that overcame the inclination toward estrangement. Those who had similar educators shared a language with each other. And I was fortunate enough to have received such an education through my prep school. In Nyack, Maria, Grey, and Leslie welcomed me into their home because they connected to the idea of my project and responded to my question in a Socratic dialog around their fireplace. "What you are doing has very few precedents," Grey complimented me, "'anthropological art criticism.'"
In New York, cultural capitol has more currency than in most towns; thus, celebrity and art can be added to the components of cultural capitol here. Artists are outsiders invited in because they create objects that can be transformed into money. Artists had been known to be able to pay for meals in the finest restaurants by just leaving a drawing. In The Whitney, I had a brush with a modern artist: standing next to Annie Liebovitz in the lobby. But I respected her right to isolation even though she was a celebrity. Celebrity invites people to violate your isolation; they feel they know you through your works and name in the papers, but you don’t really know each other.
Many of those who have cultural capital don’t want to share it. And that might be related to the region's (and country's) worship of the DIY ethic. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Don’t accept any handouts. Of course, that frees you from offering any either. This also might explain the residents' notorious gruffness.
At New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the stubby Slavic security guard who steered me to the correct gallery after I had been given wrong directions at the front desk sneered, "Do me favor; go back to front desk and tell woman she is donkey." This un-neighborliness attitude might explain New Yorkers' feeling that they are isolated; they can't count on the "kindness of strangers."
The Yalie's beetle-browed boyfriend discerned that "Even if you have good relationships, people who love you, you still can be feeling isolated from what goes on around you. They don't know who you are. Lots of people, you figure they're happy if they smile. But they're hiding their minds."
In Armonk, where corporations were headquartered, the locals were warm, while the corporation that held the Hopper and had invited me to see it resorted to asking me not to talk it or about them. In Purchase, the whole town had been divided between two large institutions: a corporation and a state-run institution. Money had bought each half of the town. There was no room for residents.
In Andover, the guy who had graduated from my prep school was the only one to answer my question. Unless you count a woman who patronized me with, "You're only as isolated as you want to be," then waved me off. The grammar of her sentence seemed passive-aggressively damning, given my experience in town. I couldn't get a quote from book store employees or workers in city hall (where, ironically, they all listen to each other in the open Town Meeting. 
And I couldn't get close enough to even try to get a quote at the local coffee shop. In Andover people were isolated. But they liked it that way.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, I found people unwilling to talk, especially the Smith girls. I suppose it's not every day that a guy approaches you asking your feelings. But it shows a suspiciousness that I think is American and due to various ethnic groups not having a common set of cultural nonverbal communication signals. Most Americans arrived from somewhere else, isolated from their original homelands and cultures. A Swede who moved next to a Greek might remain isolated from fear of not knowing what cultural expectations his neighbor had.
A man did say that the locals in Northampton were mostly well off. This might also lead to an isolation typically American and related to my point above. We seem to fear others because it means we will have to share. Again, this is ironic: we all came from somewhere else, and all wealth we have is off of lands seized from Native American tribes.
In a way, this region, which was the country's oldest, was also isolated by its history. Connecting with the past perhaps results in disconnecting from the present to some degree. It was a NEW England. The English thought of it as theirs, and now the locals consider it theirs. There is a possessiveness, a fierceness to the individuals and the mentality of the place. Like the New Hampshire flag warns, "Don’t Tread on Me." The region that spawned the war of Independence is now waging the War of Isolation.
A lifetime resident said that the Internet companies were new Boston and old Boston didn't relate. "But that's new," she objected. "It's not, I think, the way Bostonians think of Boston. If there is an isolated community, I would think of that as being it. They're new."
Manchester still called itself the Mill City and seemed to think of itself as that. But the shoe mills are now inhabited by cottage industries. I visited the town with a friend who embodied that change from manufacturing, a college buddy who consulted in "System Dynamics," which analyzes how elements of a situation affect each other to produce a result. Ideas are the new shoes.
Just as people in Boston were duplicitous about what kind of town it was, I also saw there the paradoxes of the Freedom Trail's myths versus the reality of U.S. history. In Brooklyn, a large populous New York City borough, was too big and shifting to define itself by its past or even cop to an identity in the present. Three older women in Brooklyn jeered, "There used to be a downtown. I wouldn't go back there any more now; you'd be shocked."
The people in Boston were called by my friend who moved there from Chicago "very very. Whatever they are," she warned, "they are intensely." Boston was peopled by those whose self-identities were like theatrical roles into which a Method actor throws himself or like Hopper characters. I saw that intensity, the ferociousness of New Englanders. A Ted Kennedy clone who I met on a boat tried to send me away, "I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole," he said of Boston, and then admitted, "That's just what we tell visitors because everyone who comes to Boston wants to live here."
Maybe Hopper and/or his paintings reflected this regional attitude of alienation. As Maria observed in Nyack, "Hopper had everything he wanted, yet the paintings don't depict even marginal happiness."
Due to New England's population density (and its locals' attitudes), isolation might be a welcome respite from the crush of humanity. And this was Hopper's home. He often said (and some critics have read his paintings this way) that not only was depressing isolation not what he intended to portray but that isolation might be a welcome thing and not depressing at all. When he and Jo were walking along a ridge on Cape Cod viewing a gorgeous sunset late in the fall and late in their lives, she commented that this must be what heaven is like. Hopper thought about it. "Better," he muttered, "No people."
So people in New England said that they did not feel isolated like the people in Hopper's paintings--if you read his isolation as negative or depressing, as most people do. But how honest were people being with me? Anonymity allowed responders to be more honest, but it prevented me from fact-checking whether they actually believed their answers.
My personal interpretation that Hopper was trying to get at the isolation of an inner life versus the outer community was offered only by a couple of people, like the Yalie's boyfriend. Maybe I was one of only a handful of people to interpret Hopperesque isolation (or isolation in general?) as relating to internal life. If so, that made me feel more isolated than ever.
By February, I could wrangle a long weekend off of work, and I headed someplace warm and not near other towns with a Hopper. I got to West Palm Beach in the early morning, before the heat rose for the day. I knew it would rise because the town felt more like a Western desert town than a Southeastern shore one. The city was broad, flat, and sandy, riddled with piney scrub. Newts scurried across the soft, unstable ground. Parallel two-lane highways ran north-south through town, dotted with one-story stucco bungalows whose dusty lawns were lined with bougainvillea, gladiolas, and other brightly-flowered bushes.
Sixty-seven miles north of Miami, West Palm Beach (called by the locals simply "West Palm") is the largest city in one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. Donald Trump called the city's main drag, Clematis Street 
, the "hottest street in South Florida." Clematis was lined with Art Deco theaters like you might see in Hopper's paintings. The department stores had been converted into boutiques, cafés, and bars, including an "oxygen bar," and the Respectable Street Café--the antithesis of Hopper's cafes.
A chain coffee store was the only populated place when I arrived in the early morning and pulled up just behind a BMW with "Palm Beach Polo" license plate holders. Though the temperature already pushed eighty degrees, the reedy blond woman who emerged wore a sweater draped around her shoulders.
At a round table out front, an odd collection of people had congregated. Three older, gray-haired men (perhaps some of the influx of retirees) faced a young man, a young woman, and a middle-aged cop. One older man with his back to me wore a gold wristwatch and studied the newspaper. The girl wore a white T-shirt, and smoke from her cigarette wafted into the thick hair piled behind her head. The young man's beefy arms poked out from his gray sleeveless T-shirt and sunglasses rested atop his slicked-back hair; he also smoked, while nervously tapping his sandal. The policeman's standard-issue buzz cut seemed superfluous since he was balding. He looked an interesting mix of salty and jolly. His badge read, "Tim, serving since 1971." I asked him as someone who had to intervene in all parts of town what kind of city it was.
He whistled, "I've seen a lot of change. This town used to be filled with pineapple plantations. Was a sleepy town when I first came here fifty years ago. Started as the servants' quarters for the people in Palm Beach. It was seasonal to the point that a lot of people laid off the workers and just closed down during the off-season. It's a big city geographically. There's all kinds of neighborhoods."
"Downtown West Palm Beach," he continued, "was the retail district. Then in the past eight years, they revived it into the club district." He smirked and raised a hand to the streetscape. "As you can see." He pointed to three different street corners from his chair, each home to a chain store. "Those all used to be movie theaters, when I was a kid growing up."
"What's your most common call?" I asked him.
"'Disturbances:' domestic, among neighbors. My other most common call is for water violations. We're under water restrictions now for watering gardens, washing your car. People narc on their neighbors. Where are you visiting from?"
"Chicago."
"I'm from Racine, Wisconsin," the youngest man roared, shifting the sunglasses atop his oiled hair.
"I'll bet you're happy to be here instead, now that it's February," I joked.
"Aww," he snarled, "it's a typical East Coast town: from shacks to mansions; land to sea. I'm thinking of moving back to Racine, even though my dad called and said they got 15 inches of snow. I miss the four seasons."
"They're coming to the local theater," the cop quipped. "I'm serious," he said when we all turned quizzical looks to him. "Check your paper."
The man with the newspaper checked and, showing us the ad, said with an Australian accent that surprised me to hear, "No, I'm afraid, that's Smokey Robinson."
When that crowd scattered, I found sitting alone a scrawny, middle-aged man wearing a frayed oxford shirt, jeans, and sandals. His bulging blue eyes took in the morning newspaper from between a close-cropped mustache and wiry gray hair. When I asked his opinion about the town and isolation, he snorted, "no comment," and said, "I've lived here too long. I came down from Canada for health reasons. You want to see behind the facade of the area, you should go over to Peanut Island to see Kennedy's bunker, built during the Cuban missile crisis. You could grab a boat to Nassau and buy a $300 ticket to Cuba. The Cuban sugar barons are now drug lords. They're ruining Haiti and other Caribbean islands, waiting to take over Cuba again. And our government is subsidizing them, like when they established the drug enforcement agency in World War II as a way for DuPont to assure that their artificial materials were bought when hemp could have been used to make better parachutes." He threw up his long bony fingers and groaned. "I know too much. I've been told not to talk about it."
Yet talk he did. "We live in a communist system in the U.S. We have people in charge who have never had a real job in their lives. And they're the third generation to be this way. 'PPNP': 'paycheck, pension, and no performance.' Look at what happened right over there," he cried, and pointed to a bland administrative building on the next block. That's where the ballots were held for the 2000 presidential election."
"After the O.J. trial," he continued, "a student at my daughter's high school was sent home from school, went home and got a gun, and came back and shot the teacher. It's like the trial sent the message that it's OK to do such things. O.J. only got off because he was a celebrity, and our culture worships celebrity. My wife has a theory of 'reflective glory.' People feel like, if they get close to wealth or celebrity, it will somehow rub off on them."
"So with your views, why are you at this chain coffee shop?"
"I have friends who won't go here and can't understand why I do. But it doesn't bother me."
He took a look at my shoes and said, "You look like a walker. Why don't you walk over to City Place? It was meant to revitalize the area. They don't need the revitalization, but there was a lot of money to be made on the deal. A lot of stuff they do the locals don't like." He pointed over his shoulder to a new corporate high-rise sheathed in black glass. "We call that the 'Darth Vader Building.'
The random "urban planning" that he had lamented was apparent on my walk to the mall. Old department stores had been carved into cigar shops and investment advisors. A former gas station now housed a divorce lawyer's offices.
City Place Mall's plaza was surrounded by pastel storefronts framed by beige stucco columns inset with cobalt blue tiles. A hot dog cart's onion reek dissipated in the cool salty breeze coming off of the ocean. What was once a church on the corner of the lot was now the 
Harriet Himmel Gilman Theater, in a literalization of Hopper's (and my) belief in art as religion.
The plaza's fountain was labeled, "interactive," but I got the impression I would be arrested if I came anywhere near it. Sitting on benches by it were two teenage boys who had been sent here from an art class at a nearby school to draw the people milling in the plaza. One boy beginning to get thick black hairs on the side of his pasty face beneath a Tampa Bay Buccaneers cap. His lanky body had a bit of extra muscle, suiting him to be a tight end if he played football for the Bucs.
To my question about West Palm Beach's isolation, he quickly shook his head, and said, "Nah, nah, not at all. People here are pretty close."
"It depends where you go," his smaller Hispanic friend chimed in. His birdlike blink belied a quick mind.
"Yeah, it depends where you go," the first one agreed. "It's real busy downtown but not where I live. Most of the people who live in the neighborhood where I live go downtown to work."
"To Miami?"
"No, West Palm Beach. Miami is a little too far away."
The town's Hopper hung in the Norton museum, named for its founder Ralph Norton (like a merging of the characters Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton on the 1950s sitcom "The Honeymooners"). His business bore the cartoon-worthy name "Acme Steel."
Norton preferred working class West Palm Beach to affluent Palm Beach next door. He bought a house here and purchased the old cemetery, where he commissioned a museum and donated it all in 1941 to be a city park. Norton described his taste as, "reasonably catholic. We were not partial to paintings of any one painter, or paintings of any special type, or any particular period."
The museum was a small, vomit-yellow stuccoed building with Paul Manship's huge bronze sculptures 
Diana and 
Acteon on the back patio to inform you it was a museum and alert you where to turn off Dixie Highway to get to it. The lobby had plate glass doors and industrial carpeting like a movie theater. Also like a movie theater, the air-conditioning was cranked to an embalming chill. The curator with whom I had an appointment had my name: Kevin. He met me in the lobby, a jocular, fresh-faced, fellow with thick black hair so short it stuck straight out on the sides of his tall head. He had modestly tucked his badge into the pocket of his silky blue shirt under his loose-fitting gray sport coat. He walked me to the painting, where he stood with his hands clasped at his waist like a wedding usher, and graciously answered my questions, sprinkling our conversation with positive re-enforcement like "right," "mm-hmm," and "yep." His manner put me at ease and made me feel like a peer in the art world.
August in a City's main character is a statue in the window of a collector's showroom turret. The statue stands with one leg in front, and her elbows out front and her hands clasped beside her far cheek, like someone lamenting. Under Hopper's animating light, it looks almost alive.
"It seems like Hopper commenting on Hopper," Kevin commented, a grin of big white teeth splitting his broad tanned cheeks, "knowing that he felt that the kind of psychological interpretations of his work were so overblown. There are so many Hoppers of women staring pensively out of windows. This one is unique because of the statue, this inanimate but very marvelous figure staring out the window, which I just see as incredibly ironic.
"It would be difficult for me to put it in relation to West Palm Beach. Florida always feels like August," he snorted, "hot and empty. Think about August in the city: nobody's around. They're on vacation or hiding from the heat. All that's left are the objects looking out the window waiting for the people to come home. Perhaps there's also an enjoyment in having the place to yourself, maybe a sigh of relief that the usual crush of people has slowed to an off-season trickle, especially if you are in New York City and especially if you are Edward Hopper."
"There are a good number of preparatory drawings for this particular painting," he continued. "He's such a consummate artist that, as much as he seems to peer into the window of our own psyche as a nation, he's going to get the picture right first and foremost. You know, you can't look at Hopper enough. There's always so much more there than at first sight. There's just no earthly way that anyone would put a sculpture on a table looking out the window. What would you see if you were inside the room? The back of a piece of sculpture." 
"Given the booty in the room," I asked, "was Hopper maybe making a pun on august? With the accent on the second syllable? Or, because it was painted in 1945, he might have been commenting on the absence of humans because so many Americans were overseas fighting World War II."
"Hmmm," Kevin said looking at the floor. "Never occurred to me."
August in a City hung opposite Portrait of a Boy by Hopper's favorite teacher Robert Henri. Hanging to the other side was a painting by Francis Speight, showing a Pennsylvania coal town.
"Do you know Hopper's Pennsylvania Coal Town?" I asked Kevin.
"It was placed here very much for that reason. I think there's a definite sympathy between Speight and Hopper. Not many people know Speight's work."
When I complimented his curating, Kevin humbly responded, "Mr. Norton, our great benefactor, did us a lot of favors. He was very generous."
While the house in Hopper's painting could easily be occupied by the one of the Titans of Capitalism, August in a City hung in a town and museum founded by one.
Kevin left, and I waited for people to interview. It was February, and I was not the only tourist escaping the Northern Hemisphere winter. The first two gentlemen I found to interview in front of the painting responded in British accents.
One man had on baggy jeans, and a white T-shirt clung to the roll of his belly. His dark graying hair was teased up tall in front to hide the fact that it was thinning. On his bulbous nose rested rimless thick-lensed glasses. He pushed a wheelchair that held a frail woman with white wispy hair, presumably his mother. Long slim wrists slipped out from her bright red sweater. She faced away from us during the interview and could not crane around to contribute, though she tried.
The other man stood squat and dark, with shaggy gray hair and a gray beard trimmed neatly along chubby jowls. He was draped in a maroon sweater that flared out over his oval tummy, and his jeans tapered back to his thin ankles. The two men were so similar I thought of them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
"We're visiting from London," the one in the maroon sweater said in a croaky, effete voice. "We saw a big Hopper exhibition in London a long time ago that came from the Whitney in New York."
"It's a great subtext in all his paintings," the man pushing the wheelchair said in a soft deep voice. "Like something terrible has either just happened or is just about to happen. Some of the New York paintings are very like that. Loneliness. All those people in the theater who've arrived very early for their seats and there's no one else there. There's a great feeling of desolation. Those people, those two [in 
Two on the Aisle], have nothing better to do with their lives than get there very early; they've obviously got very empty lives. That's a very popular painting in Europe. I think Europeans respond to Hopper. People get a great sense of American loneliness, which I think Americans don't like to face. There's a tension behind American life which is very often concealed when you are in America. You Americans are not aware of these things."
"Americans are often unaware," the first echoed.
"They don't want to deal with it," his friend chimed back.
"Well," interjected his friend, Tweedledee, "Europeans tend to think the glass is half empty, and Americans think it's half full, right? We've lived through enough in Europe to know the dark side of man. And so we love his fresh approach which looks so typically American. 
But yet there's something so cold and lonely about it."
"Someone sitting alone at a diner," Tweedledee mumbled before Tweedledum continued.
"Melancholy."
"Melancholy," repeated the other, "which is the dark side."
Even I had to admit, "I don't think Americans deal with darkness..."
"Don't deal with death properly," Tweedledum interrupted with a sniff, and his mother again tried to twist her head around to us.
"Well, " I said, "What about the dark reality in this very town that democratic elections were recently bypassed so that the current president could be put into power?"
"Yessss," they hissed together, raising their eyebrows and smiling as they sidled away.
Next to approach the painting was a woman with brown eyes, a diamond-shaped nose tip, and a gold chain around her neck. She wore peek-a-boo clothing: a sheer pink blouse beneath a coat and pants of translucent white gauze. I saw through her black open-toed shoes that she had painted her toenails pink. She answered my questions about Hopper in a languid foreign accent--maybe French or Russian. She pronounced Hopper's name "Hooper."
"They're not warm fuzzy little doggies," she said with stern approval. "They're all lonely. Always a feeling I like. Really good for an American. Not many Americans have great paint, but he is one who is really take my attention. Someone was showing me. They open book and say 'that is Hooper.' I like it! He has a different style; is like style of old masters. 
I don't know this picture, but really good."
When I left her and went outside, the day had grown hot. Off shore, a house drifted past as if in a dream. The Aussie with the newspaper had pointed out on its front page a photo of a mansion being moved on a barge. "It's very popular amongst the wealthy here to move the home that way," he said. A house on a barge seemed a perfect blend of Hopper's themes: architecture, travel, sailing, and isolation. I imagined that I saw in it an august, turreted room full of dusty collectibles and statues.
Out on Dixie Highway, a long line of cars went past, following a large black hearse.
By the spring, I planned to take advantage of the summer travel period. I went off on a big trip through Ohio: Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh (OK, that's technically in Pennsylvania, but it is on the Ohio River). When I told a friend that my summer vacation would be in Ohio, she laughed and asked me why.
I used to describe Ohio as a hobby of mine. I was born in Ohio, grew up there. Most of my childhood memories are from Centerville, a suburb of Dayton. We often drove to visit relatives in Cincinnati, Toledo and Columbus. My dad had a job that took him to the county seats of Ohio's 88 counties (fourth-most in the country). Even after we moved away to Chicago, we would go back to visit childhood friends and relatives. Later, I visited my brother who went to college in Ohio, and I learned about the only major Ohio city I never visited in childhood, Cleveland, when I dated a woman who had grown up there. So Ohio always seemed like a good enough spot for a vacation to me.
But when that friend asked why I was going that summer, I had a new answer.
"Because," I explained, "you can't be in Ohio and be more than 100 miles from a Hopper."
I had learned a bit by taking the first trips for this book. After a couple of solo visits, I had finally gone on a big regional tour, so I had a plan for Ohio and the other upcoming regions. In most towns, I headed straight for the museum. Right away, I wanted to see the Hopper painting and gather interviews in front of it. That was the main thing my book would offer over what other writers might find out sitting at home. On the way out the door, I would interview the person working at the 
front desk; they knew the painting because it hung in their daily work place. After the interview, I would ask them where to go to find other Hopper fans, as well as Hopperesque people and places. If they worked at the art museum, there was a good chance that they knew where to find other people who would know and love Hopper's work. I would also collect suggestions for what sights in town were must-sees. Then, I repeated those queries at the venues to which they referred me.
I made sure to walk around the downtown core. I wanted to get a sense of what the city was like where it came together to do business, where isolation had to be overcome. I also made sure to see some sights that I had picked up from the Web. The Web was relatively new when I began this project in 2000, and there's no way without it that I could have collected all the information I needed and still kept my day job. My experience of each city grew wider at each stop, as interviews led to more recommendations of where to go to get further interviews.
When I started, I wanted to get a wide range of views, so I started by interviewing everyone that I met. I quickly learned that many people 
don't know who Hopper is and don't care to talk to me about the issue of isolation.
An interview NOT granted often gave me clues as much as the ones I did get. I still managed to interview many people on their jobs, on the streets or randomly beside me in the middle of their daily tasks. Part of the point was to follow myself and see where it took me and who I encountered: to discover my own community, even if it was scattered in Diaspora, spread out in cities across the nation.
"I thought they closed it down."
"They had to open it back up while the court decides."
I ran over to the museum to see in person the show that launched the early-1990s tempest about national funding of the arts. I discovered to my disappointment that I had already seen the show a couple of months earlier at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. I had assumed that this show which caused such contentiousness in Cincinnati couldn't be the one that showed without much fanfare in Chicago. But it was.
When I saw the show's photographs at the Cincinnati museum, I had all to myself a gymnasium-sized room full of Mapplethorpe's large portraits and prints of beautiful flowers. 
Snaking back and forth through the room was a long line of gray-haired ladies scowling and clutching purses, waiting to see the folders with the small "dirty pictures." 
"Every time we make the national news, Cincinnati looks like a horse's behind," my cousin lamented. In the same year, they made national news when a little old lady who had freshened someone's expired parking meter got ticketed by a Cincinnati cop. 
Cinci is also where eleven fans were killed in a rush for seating at a 1979 Who concert, and in 2001, there were race riots downtown when a black man got shot by a white policeman.
Hopper's painting here, Prospect Street, Gloucester, is a simple, wholesome street scene, quaint as Cincinnati. A row of sunlit houses stand on a street deserted except for a dark green car hunkered along the curb. Two church tops are visible on the horizon. A flesh-toned sidewalk runs before the houses beside the gray road along the bottom of the painting on which you seem to be standing to view the scene. A museum curator called the painting, "a distillation of the essential American residence street anywhere."
The car in the street is sinister--like one that Edward G. Robinson might drive in a getaway in one of his crime movies. This painting was in fact purchased by Robinson in 1940. Appropriate that Hopper, who loved movies, should have a painting bought by a film star.
In an unusual move, Hopper made this oil painting after rendering the same subject in watercolor. The watercolor version of this scene was painted six years earlier, during the last summer he spent in Gloucester. This oil rendition of the scene always disappointed him.
The Hopper painting hangs right next to Grant Wood's Daughters of Revolution, perhaps the most famous painting in the collection (and also originally owned by Edward G. Robinson). The three ladies in Wood's painting might own three of the houses in Hopper's painting. All look like East Coast blue bloods: with dark, pursed lips, and long, chickenlike necks. Their eyes squint with scrutiny or near-sightedness.
The woman on the right has George Washington's face--literally. Wood painted it in as a joke. The ladies in the painting stand in front of the famous painting 
George Washington Crossing the Delaware, painted by Emmanuel Leutze, a German. Legend has it that this painting represented Wood's retaliation on the Cedar Rapids chapter of the D.A.R. for protesting the German manufacturing of a memorial window Wood had designed to commemorate soldiers lost during World War I. Wood himself painted the words "Daughters of Revolution" along the bottom of the frame. He deliberately omitted the word "American." "On the one hand," Wood observed, "[the D.A.R.] were trying to establish themselves as an aristocracy of birth, on the other they were trying to support a democracy." 
Most people skipped the Hopper as they walked around the gallery. But, finally, a couple approached. The man wore khaki shorts with a khaki-green Ohio University T-shirt. Chunky brown plastic glasses-frames rested on his Roman nose above a whitening beard. Thick hair matted his head and had been combed to one side above his earnest face. Maybe this was standard for Cincinnati, as I could say that of the hairdo of every other man I interviewed. His wife's short hair curled under like a roll mop. She also wore khaki shorts, but with a white T-shirt. She had a plain, hard-skinned Appalachian face and hung behind him.
He said, "Before I saw the Gloucester thing there on the sign, I thought maybe this was a scene from Cincinnati." His voice croaked, like it hadn't been used yet that day, and he spoke in small bitten-off phrases. "It's the older houses. And maybe it's the church with the towers in the background that gives me that feeling. Small lawns. There's still a lot of old neighborhoods [here]. The place that's quiet and peaceful is northern Kentucky. Just seems like parts of that doesn't change at all. Man! It's like going back to the thirties. Not that I was around then. I grew up in '43, and the street I grew up on, the houses didn't look a lot like that, but we used to play in the street. In the 1940s, there weren't any cars. 
[Cincinnati, 1940s]
"I think people are more isolated than they used to be. Maybe as you get older, you get more isolated anyway. Kids are interacting. Well, kids, too, I guess, are more isolated than they used to be. They've got TV and computers and all. They're not all playing in the street."
"It's too bad there's not more Hoppers here. That's a pretty ordinary scene, but with an artist's eye, you can make something really intriguing out of that. I'm an attorney," he turned to me. "I used to work in the U.S. Attorney's office, and we had a case where I represented the postal service, and they had damaged a painting in shipment. And so I got involved in this case, and that's sort of how I discovered art. Funny. When I was working on the case, I would go over to the museum. Man, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. That's how I got interested."
"Are you familiar with Hopper's other paintings?" I asked.
"Yeah. A couple: 'The Diner' [Nighthawks] and a couple others. Who doesn't know the Diner?" he barked. "I'm trying to remember where I saw it. Maybe it was a bar or restaurant that looks awfully close to the diner in the painting. Today, coffee shops and book stores seem to replace what the bar was for our parents. You know, in movies like The Thin Man, bars were where life happened. When you think of it," he concluded, "from the bar to the bookstore's got to be a step forward."
A middle-aged couple approached next. He peered out from glasses above a trim mustache, and his blue-and-white striped shirt bore a metal pen protector in the breast pocket. She had bright eyes, mousy tousled hair, and a long rubbery nose above a recessed chin. She wore stonewashed jeans and a simple white shirt. Like most people I interviewed here, they were a bit suspicious of me and their answers were curt and forced.
"In Cincinnati, you would find this sort of isolated, empty streets," she said. "We consider people keep to themselves in this town. The bell towers look like churches you would find, and there's old housing stock like you would find in this. Though we don't live in an area that's got housing stock this old."
They confessed they don't know Hopper's other paintings, but the man said he studied painting.
"I was told to paint what I saw. I started to paint meticulous bricks. I'd get out my 
small number four brush. The painting teacher came over with a big number twelve brush 
and painted a big square of color and said, 'There! There's the side of the building.' I told him. 'I thought you said to paint what I saw,' I quit that school and went to study with a famous portrait person. I stayed close to art. I painted mostly in Alaska. I like the snow, how it goes from white to blue, 'the lone Eskimo out on the sled,' that sort of thing." With that, the Hopper of the Arctic wandered off.
The next guy who approached rose six-foot-three, with a lean athletic frame, balding and clean-shaven. He wore a dark red T-shirt, and hip eyeglasses peered above his longish nose and pursed lips. (Nevertheless … thick hair matted his head and was combed to one side.) He was soft-spoken, and his shorter stockier friend came over to answer the question instead, talking quietly but almost psychotically fast.
"I've lived here eleven years," he said. "I moved from northern Ohio. The houses [in the painting] do not invite you in. And you don't know what's going on inside. No one's out walking on the street so you don't have any clues. No indication of where you might go. Cincinnati's kind of a city like that: you have to make your own circle," he said, "'Cause you won't be invited in. 
But once you make that, then you have a circle, and it doesn't matter that the rest of it is excluded because it's not a place you want to go anyway. People in general, they're not... very friendly. 'I don't know him, I don't like him.' That's what it seems like is many peoples' attitudes. You're not known and therefore dangerous.
"I've always thought that tradition must be too much to want to change. Because a lot of people I've met came back to Cincinnati from being away and couldn't wait to come back. And that's one thing I didn't understand. It's like grasping onto something that's no longer here. But you think it might come back or something. As long as you hold it in your head, the possibility is available. I don't see it has that much draw, but I've met people who've moved back who are like, 'Ah, Nirvana.'"
"There's a thing that's quite contrary to Cincinnati manners," the first man finally mumbled, "to change. That's a thing you don't do."
On the east side of town, the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) sat regally atop a tall conical hill, perched like one of the castles along the Rhine River in Germany. 
CAM opened in 1886 as "The Art Palace of the West," and its prized 1907 wing was designed by famed Chicago architect Daniel Burnham. The Museum displays many paintings from Cincinnati's "Golden Age" (1830-1900), when art flourished alongside Cincinnati's industries, including world-famous Rookwood pottery and local painters James Henry Beard, Henry Farny, and the unfortunately named Godfrey Frankenstein.
American Impressionist John Twachtman may be the best-known Cincinnati painter, but he died aged only forty-nine, and 
Waterfall, Blue Brook in the Cincinnati museum was the only painting of his acquired by a museum during his lifetime. Twachtman's Springtime (painted while in Paris) was donated to CAM by his teacher and the hometown hero of Cincinnati artists: 
Frank Duveneck. The museum devoted a small gallery to Duveneck, where his paintings haphazardly filled every inch of wall space, including his masterpiece 
Whistling Boy (painted while he was in Munich), which he donated to the CAM.
In addition to past Cincinnati painters, the collection included work related to modern Cincinnati: paintings by living native-born 
Jim Dine; a Joan Miro mural 
that used to adorn the curved wall of the city's chicest restaurant atop a Cincinnati riverfront hotel; and Andy Warhol's huge silkscreen of 1970s Cincinnati Reds baseball star Pete Rose. 
Afterwards, I went looking for some more modern Cincinnati painters: live, local ones. The artsy neighborhood Over-the-Rhine was so named because that's what crossing the canal out of downtown felt like to the newly arrived German immigrants in the mid-1800s, when Cincinnati grew faster than any other American city, and established itself as the leading city in the "West." Originally named Losantiville when founded in 1788, it was renamed in honor of the Society of Cincinnatus, a Revolutionary War officers' organization. An extensive steamboat trade helped make Cincinnati the nation's sixth-largest city, third-largest manufacturing center, and home to the nation's pork-packing industry, which earned Cincinnati the moniker "Porkopolis," though locals preferred Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's nickname "Queen City of the West."
Though now carrying tourists rather than commerce, steamboats still ply the waters of the Ohio River below the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge to Kentucky, 
which at its opening in 1866, was the longest in the world. It was also the first to use innovations that helped its designer eclipse the length of this bridge in his next commission: the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge remains a symbol of Cincinnati, and images of it can be seen today as backdrops for the local television news or hanging in the city's many bars, restaurants, and chili parlors. 
Cincinnati boasts America's largest number of chili parlors per capita. This is the place to order a "three-way" with spaghetti on the bottom, chili in the middle, and cheese on top; four-way gets you onions added and five-way kidney beans.
Located on the northern edge of the central business district, Over-the-Rhine claimed to be the largest national historic district in the nation and to have a "turn-of-the-century" aura. It also retained that era's squalor. Narrow alleys sloped up hills lined with thin, brick-faced row houses. (Nearby 
Findlay Market was advertised as an "authentic, European-styled open-air grocery" but felt more like a flea market.)
A sign for Kaldi's Coffee House and Bookstore advertised live jazz and vegetarian entrees. Inside, beneath an ochre-painted stamped tin roof, the walls held abstract paintings of green and purple blobs with titles like Opening to Bliss. The books cramming the walls had old and worn spines. A glass panel, Chagall blue, studded with white coffee mug shapes, hung over the door above a drawing depicting the regulars. At the bar, two of those regulars, with spines as broken as the books' on the shelves, slumped over their morning coffee and cigarettes.
One was tall and lanky, with curly blond hair. He wore a Newport Blues T-shirt, and a big set of keys dangled from his belt loop. A pair of sleek sunglasses rested on the bartop beside him. 
He looked like a Randy. The other was short and squat, wearing a hemless gray muscle T-shirt. He had a sunburned collarbone, big nose, and pale green eyes. His hair was rambling, graying, and thinning, and his beard was the same. He reminded me of the character clutching his head in Van Gogh's 
Old Man in Sorrow. I called him Hugo.
"Well, Cincinnati is pretty much dead," the lanky Randy declared. "It's not even functioning as a city. It was more of a city twenty-five years ago than it is now. When I moved into Cincinnati there were still, you know, little restaurants that stayed open all night [like the ones in Hopper's paintings]."
"Now, it's an industrial park," squat Hugo chimed in.
"Cincinnati is run by a bunch of fascists," Randy continued. "It's happening all over the country. It's here especially 'cause there's only a county board, run by suburbanites. The only thing they can think to do to the city is make it into some kind of mall. They don't want a city. They have done everything they can to get rid of any of the character, any of the texture, any of the vices. Out in the suburbs, they're doing everything they can to create an artificial world and put their children in an artificial world. 
It's not dealing with reality. It's dealing with a mound of artifice, of money. It's deadening. They drive from their air-conditioned bubble in their air-conditioned car to another air-conditioned bubble and just drive past everything. They know in their hearts," he sneered, "what a cold-blooded bunch they are. They realize that, after a point you get old, and you're gonna be under a trestle some place, and so they live in fear of their self-imposed vision. It's this whole idea about making a family-friendly city, and it's not, you know. It's a city. And that's sort of an oxymoron: a family-oriented city."
"That's what it is," the older one laughed. "It's family-orientated. If you're single, forget it. And they don't understand artists' lifestyle. I have brothers and sisters that don't understand my idealisms. they can't fathom living without insurance or not having enough money for your yearly visit to Disney World. My brother wants me to paint 
flowers," he snorted, "so I can sell things to make money. He doesn't understand that that's just not going to happen. That just shrinks my soul and will reflect in my other work. It just doesn't work that way. Artists [painters] work with solitude," he mused, "finding themselves alone in their studios so much. It's almost like it becomes a religion. We're almost like monks." He paused and took a big puff off of his cigarette. "This is what we're all feeling," he continued, flinging a wrist in emphasis. "It's something about our time. If I'm feeling it alone in the studio, it's not coming from nowhere. And it's not coming from only personal stuff. Artists are seen as people who escape reality," he emphasized, "and artists are people who deal with reality."
"And live in reality," Randy tacked on. "To this day, the artist has the ability to make people connect with their own innate ability to see the world. You look at something that all of a sudden you can see. In the painting of a tree, you can see growth. 
The artist has an ability to squeeze it out of a tube, whack it onto the canvas, and you look at it and go 'WOW, man.' You can actually not only see the paint and the incredibly intelligent clever way that he combined paint, but he shows you the essence of the thing that he was looking at. 
And people no longer see the essence of the world they live in. I mean we've had two thousand years of Christian crap which alienated people to their own bodies in the first place. And now it's gotten worse, with computers. I just recently was at the art academy, and all the money was coming from corporate funding buying new computers for the designers. Whereas, as a painter, I was painting on the same easel they'd had for twenty years. I was probably painting on easels that Jim Dine painted on."
"It's a dilemma throughout society," Hugo mumbled, "because of the way we live. It's not just art. It has to do with what art is a part of. We live in a society where people do not see. They see in totally general terms. Their whole world is full of more and more generic products. 
They move through the landscape at eighty miles an hour. They watch television. Everything is based on not having an attention span.
"Our actual physical senses (let alone the spirit, the intellect, or anything else) are shutting down. Our national civilization, especially commercial civilization, it's just sick. Anybody who works in the area of the visual senses is working against the tide. It's the antidote, at this point, the medicine that society needs. Increasingly, people who function within the system think and organically function like the system demands. So, from the get-go, they have nothing to tell you. The only thing we're doing right now is generating money. It has nothing to do with quality. It has nothing to do with the essential form. It has nothing to do with the philosophy of the function that it's trying to fill. It has to do with generating money. And the problem is, artists buy into that, too. One reason Van Gogh does have power is that people equate it with money."
Randy posited, "Down in New York City on Wall Street, you have some big time stock trader living up in a penthouse full of 
African art. There has to be that balance because the techno-world is so empty. He'll go primitive with his art, but he wouldn't give the time or money to the starving artists down in Manhattan. About the only way you sell art to people is you sell people a sense of their own sickness. So they're involved with it. I've been lucky. I have one collector here in town who really looks at the work and responds to the visual experience."
"Those people are as important to the art scene as anything," Hugo interjected, "the people who know, a good audience."
"Well," Randy nodded, "they're the only thing that's ever been important in the art scene."
Going back is always going back. It's not like seeing an unknown city for the first time. I had to work hard in Cincinnati not to overlook what might have struck me about another town but that I had already come to expect from Cincinnati.
My cousin's son Matt is a teenager living in a small community within Cincinnati. He rode around the city with me as I did my research, and finally it dawned on me to ask him about Cincinnati and isolation.
"I'm in a small town. Everybody gets sick of the same people and places. But I'm afraid to go out and find new people. 'Cause I don't know what will happen. So, I can either sit here and fake happiness with my usual crowd. Or sit here and try to be perfectly happy with myself. Watching you interview people, I see that people say some pretty cool insightful stuff when you stop and talk to them."
I interviewed Sean, the sizable bouncer at the front door, which I had trouble opening because it opened inward. "The only reason we get away with it is that it is the original door," he explained. "New fire codes dictate that doors open outward, but nothing changes quickly in Cincinnati," he shrugged. Sean had a bald head but a handlebar mustache and sideburns above which flashed an earring.
"You know what Mark Twain said about us, don't you?" he asked, grinning. "'When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times.'
"Cincinnati is isolated," he continued, "partly because everybody's in these small communities. They don't reach out and they don't cross over. I know this woman. She went to New York and she's only been there a year. But she's moving back. She misses the circle of friends she has here. Everybody in New York moves on. She said she meets somebody, and three weeks later they're gone 'cause they can't make it in that town. She wants to come back here for a little more stability. That's why it's so hard to move from Cincinnati: you never find any other town so tight-knit. Makes it hard to move to Cincinnati, too.
"Cincinnati is very stable but very conservative. This town made Larry Flynt a millionaire. 
A pornographer moved her shop from the north side to downtown just to get the publicity she knew would follow. Today, I was at an album shoot where twelve naked people were holding a glass of milk in different poses on a rooftop just to make a provocative record cover so that my friend could try to get some free press from Cincinnati's conservative backlash towards it."
I found out just how tight-knit the town was after I left the bar and went to a café nearby. I overheard the counter help joking about being, "butt naked on a roof earlier today."
"For the record album cover?" I asked, and they looked at me like, "Who the hell are you to know that?" I quickly paid and left.
Their response was consistent with the answers to my questions in Cincinnati. Everybody agreed that the people here were isolated and not very interested in reaching out to others. But many viewed that as a positive thing because they had close circles of friends. Me? I'm glad to be going.
But, then, I know I'll always come back. Even if just for end of the world.
You don't soon forget this Hopper painting. As the title indicates, high noon sunlight blasts a white clapboard house set in a field of straw-colored grass. Hopper built an exact replica of the house out of construction paper and studied it at midday under the sunlight that gave the work its title. Hopper delivered High Noon to Rehn in November 1949, and the painting's unusually bright light seems appropriate for the dawning Atomic Age. Like that era's political "brinksmanship," the painting's scene begs a showdown like in the western High Noon (though the movie was made three years later). In the house's doorway, a blond woman in high heels raises her hand to the chest of her open robe.
Jo noted: "Female in stringy blue kimona open in front over possibly naked body, effect sloppy, but such a hot day!" She wrote, "[Edward] has me measured up against a door to see where a taller woman would reach in his picture."
"It was painted in Cape Cod, but it isn't Cape Cod," The Dayton Daily News article announcing the donation of High Noon pontificated, "it's Hopperland." The Hopper painting was the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Haswell, president of Dayton Malleable Metals, who assembled their collection with the help of a former employee of Frank K.M. Rehn: Tom Colt, the Dayton Art Institute's (DAI) first director. When Colt interviewed in the late 1950s, he was horrified. The museum, he said, "had model airplanes, all kinds of things. The garden club hauled in dirt and made gardens in the middle of the galleries."
The DAI almost ended up with a second Hopper. Haswell's fellow DAI collector Otto Spaeth bought Hopper's 
Carolina Morning, and his wife remembered Hopper as "a sort of one-to-one person if you sat and talked to him, which was difficult to do when his wife was around because she was a regular little magpie and was always crittering around and bursting in and when she was around… Every once in a while he would say 'Now Josephine...' or something like that." But, when Mr. Spaeth died, Mrs. Spaeth gave Carolina Morning to the Whitney.
The Hopper painting in the DAI museum was called High Noon, and my return to see it represented an emotional showdown like the final gunfight scene in the 1952 movie High Noon starring Gary Cooper. (Hopper's painting was done in 1949.)
I grew up in a Dayton suburb, and the DAI was the site of one of the most traumatic events in my childhood. My family returned from a visit there once to find my older teenage sister home in bed with her forbidden boyfriend, and a huge family fight ensued. Maybe the horror of what happened afterward made the museum seem like a haven and forever fixated me on visiting them. I'm not a fan of such facile psychological one-to-one explanations, and neither was Hopper.
Interestingly, I discovered in Dayton's museum files of an article by GQ special correspondent Peter Richmond, who shared the same dream as I. "My idea of the good life," he wrote, "wouldn't be to own a Hopper; it would be to live in one." He cited specifically High Noon. "This stillness must be what people are trying to find when they spend enormous amounts of money vacationing at the remote Caribbean resorts or buy whole islands in the South Pacific…. Upstairs beyond waving curtains, her bedroom is dark. There might be someone in it. There might have been someone in it not long ago. There might be someone in it soon. Me, maybe."
When I asked if people in Dayton were isolated, she barked, "I think so. Not geographically, but they're emotionally isolated. A lot of people are in their own world. They don't meet your eyes. When you come to the city, no one wants to be bothered in communities where we're witnessing and things like that. We come downtown on Friday nights to do street witnessing."
It took me a while to realize she meant this word in the way of born-again Christians.
I asked if High Noon gave her a sense of isolation. "Yeah," she said. "When I saw this one, it's interesting 'cause… nothing! Like there's nothing there. What is the point he's trying to make? Sometimes I think the title of a painting has secret meaning. In this case, I think there's significance in the time of day. The light and how it looks. Though I don't know. What's the big deal about?"
With that and a shrug, she went to witness some other paintings.
The volunteer who met me at the door was a short older woman with wispy platinum hair and drawn-on black eyebrows. "Well I suppose sometimes you are," she said about isolation, "and sometimes you're not." Then she smiled and nodded, as if that were all that need be said.
I asked a gray-haired woman wearing pink denim pants and a pink T-shirt if one might see a house like that in Dayton. "Hopefully," she growled, "it would have some landscaping around it."
A petite, green-eyed, college-aged girl wearing a tight silver choker around her neck and two earrings in each ear said that she didn’t perceive people in Dayton as especially isolated but that people in the U.S. were. "My dad went to Italy. He said, out there, people asked him to play cards and stuff. But here, you go in the streets at night, and everybody's shut in their own houses and they don't join you."
A woman from London's West End who said she moved here when she was fifty (I thought she was fifty she looked in such good shape), said that Hopper's isolation and desperation did not relate to her life at all. "I'm seventy-three, love. I've got food in my tummy, a roof over my head, a job to go to, a nice car, and I live in the United States. What more could you want?"
A couple in their late twenties walked into the gallery. The man was lanky, with an overbite and long wavy brown hair. His wispy beard looked soft as an unshaven adolescent's. He wore a black shirt that showed the parts of the earth with the center labeled in large red letters "magma."
When I asked the guy about Hopper, he pulled over his wife, who he said was Valerie and a painter. She was short and had an oddly angular face. She wore jeans and a light blue shirt, and a humble ring rested on her marriage finger.
"I like Dali and the surrealists," 
she squeezed out in a voice that gave the impression of being very shy. "I mean avant garde. Hopper’s not my favorite. I'm not into this almost porn thing. I like this painting though. It's a good painting."
When I asked her if she thought people in Dayton were isolated like in Hopper's paintings, she answered only, "Probably."
Her husband offered his thoughts in a croaky tight voice. "I've seen Hopper's work and Wyeth's 
Christina's World together. They weren't next to each other or anything, but they reminded me of each other. It's a field, and a woman alone, and a house in the distance."
"I hadn't made that connection," the woman murmured, amazed that her husband held new revelations.
I followed a lead Valerie gave me and went to meet Sherry, a woman who was trying to galvanize the Dayton arts scene through her Front Street Galleries. The gallery complex was a few two-story brick buildings with roll-down garage doors painted construction yellow. A railroad line spur still ran down the center of the asphalt courtyard. The steel door to Sherry's apartment sported a magnetic poetry set. 
I knocked, and, though we had never met, she waved me in smilingly as she talked on the phone.
She looked (appropriately) like a portrait subject. She had a heart-shaped face with bright red cheeks setting off her green eyes. Her hair was parted on the left and pulled back into a bun. She wore a pleated dress with a ruffled collar, beneath which dangled an antique necklace dotted with faded purple stones. When she hung up, she answered, talking a mile a minute, as you might expect of a young arts maven.
"Dayton?" she sneered. "It's an incredibly isolated place. That sounds derogatory. And I guess maybe it is. But it isn't. I'm not really the best person to ask because I want to get out of here so bad. Or, well, maybe I am. Actually, I'm going to be moving away at the end of the month. My husband and I are putting our house on the market, and we're going to move to San Francisco." She laughed nervously.
"I think Dayton's being Disneyfied, 
but I think that's happening all over. You and I and our generation have had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) of living through a time when everything was closed on Sunday because you were with your family, and it was the day of rest. Call that a connection to strong religious beliefs or your families or whatever. That doesn't exist anymore."
I asked, "Were you an arts pioneer down here?"
"God no," she scowled, "There have been people here for like fifteen-twenty years. It was purchased in the sixties and, back in its day, it was just wacky. There was a time in the late eighties where, if a kid ran away, this was the place they went," she cackled. "Back when artists started really using the space for studios, it got a little bit more organized. They tried to have a gallery, but that didn't work because they were all fighting amongst each other. I've realized one thing living amongst artists. There are very, very few of them who are not incredibly dysfunctional, on-the-edge-of-society people. 
Maybe it's because they get no support. Artists or people on the fringe see potential that other people don't. Then everyone goes 'Ohh well, now we want it.'
"I have been involved in the gallery hops since I've been here, and the people who run the building have been supportive mainly because I'm not going to attach my name to anything that's going to be crazy or weird. When we did the gallery hop, my husband's aunt said: 'Well, you're going to have just pictures, right?' There's more to art than that. I'm not a museum, but I've given people the opportunity to see something that they hadn't seen in a long time. A lot of people are looking for something over the couch. A friend said to me, 'Sherry, you know why? Because they don't have to think.' When you go to an art gallery, you have to think. 
And your average person just doesn't want to do that. Yet they know that they need to have something hanging on their wall. Consumerism is a past-time in the U.S."
"It's a religion," I offered.
She barked a laugh. "I like that even better. I have chosen to not play to that because it will do nothing for me on a personal level. The sad thing is that the people here who can afford to buy good artwork, won't buy it here. They'll go to New York or Chicago. I had a couple who I kept telling, 'Just make sure it's something you're really going to like.' Because, even if it only costs five hundred bucks or whatever, it's not meant to go in a garage sale or be put away when it doesn't match your furniture anymore. What do they do? They buy something that goes with the wallpaper. 
It's like--'Okay! Hello!' So I think maybe Dayton is just isolating for me. Maybe it isn't for other people."
I asked the blasé woman behind the counter about the local arts scene. "It's weird," she said. "But working. It's scattered, but a lot of artists are thriving. They keep trying to rejuvenate downtown," she went on. "They built a new baseball stadium, 
but it just gives suburbanites a new place to drive to and from. Dayton's the county seat, so it's the center for social services. A lot of people who need help end up walking around the streets of downtown Dayton. Nobody'll mug you, but you'll get a ton of people asking you for money."
Sherry and others had told me artists might be found in the Oregon District. Founded about 1830 when the Miami-Erie Canal opened, the Oregon District was as sleepy as slow-moving canal water on the afternoon that I strolled its brick-paved streets. The lonely sound of a hammer slapping a board rang out.
Along with hip bars, this strip also featured an X-rated book store next door to the Dayton Church Supply Store. 
Hard times make for strange bedfellows. Behind the business strip lay a couple square blocks of quaint old homes appropriate as Hopper subjects.
A college-aged kid, smiling and red-eyed, stopped playing hackey-sack with his friend in the road and accosted me: "Hey man, they told me Oregon District was like New Orleans's French Quarter, Bourbon Street." We both laughed at the notion. Then we gawked as on the opposite sidewalk an Amish man plodded down the sidewalk carrying boxy old suitcases tied with rope. Two boys in black-and-white Amish attire trailed him.
I walked from Oregon District to the other "districts" advertised by Dayton's tourism board, but most were only a block and some just a building. The Cannery "District" turned out to be the Cannery 
Building—a largely derelict old warehouse whose rehabbed portions housed retail stores, restaurants, and loft apartments. The Motor Car District on Ludlow Street paid homage to the fact that several famous automobiles of the vintage that might be seen in Hopper's paintings were made in Dayton, such as the 
Stoddard and the 
Maxwell. The Neon District referred to the neon trim on the Transportation Center and a nearby movie theater.
Across the street skulked a tiny white-fronted diner with an art deco tile tower that was called a twenty-four hour restaurant, but it was only open seven a.m. to eleven p.m. Apparently, there were no nighthawks in Dayton. Nearby stood two Hopperesque 1930s diners. 
Yummy Burger had been modernized, but 
Wympee still had a white glazed tile façade with dark green accents. I chose Wympee.
Downtown Dayton used to hum with industry, most famously as the birthplace of aviation. Local bicycle builders 
Wilbur and Orville Wright developed the first heavier-than-air flying machine here in 1903. They had to go to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to find enough wind for it to fly. The brothers' legacy permeates museums and landmarks throughout the Dayton area.
I grew up to the sound of Air Force jets overhead returning to Dayton's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, second-largest air force base in the United States, where my grandfather used to haul us to the U.S. Air Force Museum. The "Dayton Peace Accords" to end war in the former Yugoslavia were negotiated here in 1995. In a way, I was making peace here too--with my past and the town from which I had taken flight.
The National Cash Register Corporation is still headquartered in the area, as were other national corporations like Mead Paper Company and Lexus-Nexus. I learned this while walking downtown along The Miami River, which looked more like a broad, slow creek. Beside the river meandered a new concrete walkway called Riverscape, where you can rent paddleboats in the shapes of swans, dragons, or pirate boats; throw a coin in one of the fountains; or stop in the concrete garden with an homage to the search engine: a series of benches inscribed with the 
Boolean search words and, or, but, and not. A sign explained, "in 1965 the president of the Ohio State Bar Association contracted with a tiny company in Dayton to create a computer-based system that would allow attorneys to search for legal documents. In only 200 days, the team developed a computer code for a search engine." The company grew into Lexus-Nexus. I had also come to search through data banks: find Hopper AND isolation OR Dayton BUT NOT childhood trauma.
The suburbs now held most of the area's population and an increasing number of the jobs, but Dayton's grand past could be glimpsed through the downtown's present decay and slightly sour smell, like fermenting beer. "When I was a kid I remember downtown was falling apart," Valerie's husband had told me. "It's better now than it used to be. The suburbs [meanwhile] are just full of little castles."
You can travel downtown on Hopper-era 
streetcar replicas trimmed in mahogany and brass. Or you can travel in electric trolleys--one of only five cities where you can do so.
Several buildings were left downtown that you might see in Hopper's paintings. 
The Biltmore Hotel at the corner of First and Main, an anonymous traveler's hotel like Hopper might paint, now housed the elderly. 
Two buildings built in 1902 with the name M.J. Gibbons emblazoned across their tops sported Lions, gargoyles, and arched entrances and now combined to form Arcade Square. The 1866 mansard-roofed 
Victoria Theatre on Main at First, downtown Dayton's only surviving theater, played host to touring Broadway shows and the hometown Dayton Ballet--the second oldest company in the U.S. and by all accounts an excellent troupe. Hopper client Helen Hayes played the Victoria. Now, for $3.95 on summer weekends, you could see Hopper-era movies there like To Catch a Thief, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Casablanca, and Gigi. It was getting competition soon, though. The Benjamin and Marion Schuster Performing Arts Center was going in on the corner of Second and Main, where formerly stood Rike's, the family department store of Mrs. Anthony Haswell, who donated High Noon. Rike's evaded death by transforming into a store appropriately called Lazarus, but even that eventually failed.
I ended my tour of Dayton's brief downtown at Wilkie's Book Store, the oldest bookstore in Ohio, and one of only four in the nation older than 100 years. The city had recently passed legislation to outlaw the bookstore's sidewalk signs, and many thought they were trying to shut them down. Locals and journalists rallied to save the store, and a newspaper column defending the store was posted on the door when I visited. [It has since closed.]
Inside, tables and chairs filled space between sparse bookracks beneath a dropped ceiling with fluorescent light. It was as close as a bookstore could come to looking like a Hopper diner.
The man behind the counter said his name was Jim, and he and his wife owned the store. He was balding on top, but long hair fringed the sides of his head. His face was smothered by a graying walrus mustache. He wore a red T-shirt with the yellow insignia and address of a 
Santa Fe, New Mexico burrito place.
"Dayton doesn't support the arts," he decried. "They have three world-class dance companies here, and none of them gets supported by the city. There's a suburbanized, discounted mentality here. People don't want to come downtown, and they don't want to pay for quality. They just want everything as cheap as possible. The city claims to want to grow, but they don't allow anybody room for that."
"Are any artists in Dayton well-known?" I asked.
The owner said, "There's a number of print-graphics type people, but you don't see much of them here. Some spring out of the old school at the Dayton Art Institute. It closed down twenty-three years ago," Jim said. "I went there. One day I had to go get my transcripts, and found out the entire school has been reduced to two folders.
