San Antonio, Texas: Corn Hill [The Alamo] [Espuma] Dallas, Texas: Lighthouse Hill [Dallas Museum of Art] San Francisco, California: Bridle Path Tempe, Arizona: House by a Road [ASU Art Museum Gallery] [Tempe] Tucson, Arizona: The City [U of A Campus] Wilmington, Delaware: Summertime [Wilmington downtown] Norfolk, Virginia: New York Pavements Richmond, Virginia: House at Dusk [Monument Avenue] [Virginia's Constitution on side of Richmond warehouse] Lynchburg, Virginia: Mrs. Scott's House Minneapolis, Minnesota: Office at Night [Local friends in front of the Walker's Claes Oldenburg sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry] [Hopper's Corn Belt City] San Marino, CA: The Long Leg Santa Barbara, California: November, Washington Square [State Street preacher] [State Street landscaping] Montgomery, Alabama: New York Office Utica, NY: Camel's Hump Chicago, IL: Nighthawks [Hopper's Excursion into Philosophy] [Hopper's East Wind Over Weehawken hangs in Philadelphia] [Hopper's Summer Evening] [Hopper's Four Lane Road] [Hopper's Apartments Houses hangs in Philadelphia] [Hopper's Summer Interior] [Hopper's Dawn in Pennsylvania] [Jo Sleeping] THE END
"Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts." -John Steinbeck
"Remember the Alamo" was a battle cry in the 1800s to spur U.S. troops in the Spanish War. Now it is a battle cry encouraging tourists to come visit the Alamo's hometown: San Antonio.
San Antonio lined its trickle of river with concrete paths, transforming it into the Riverwalk, where bars and specialty shops beckon. The buildings and grounds of the 1968 Hemisfair (World's Fair) were cobbled into a museum campus. Quaint old adobes were preserved in the part of town where Santa Anna quartered his troops before storming the Alamo and were now home to boutique shops. A downtown plaza housed what the city hailed as "the largest Mexican market outside of Mexico." The city built a large football stadium that hosts only one game a year: the Alamo Bowl.
But perhaps most savvy of all was that San Antonio preserved the nearby missions, including the Alamo. 
San Antonio takes its name from the Alamo's official name, Mission San Antonio de Valero. The 1718 founders were from a town in Mexico whose patron saint was Saint Anthony of Padua, and alamo was Spanish for cottonwood tree--many of which surrounded the Alamo.
In December, 1835, Ben Milam led Texan and Tejano volunteers against Mexican troops in the Battle of Bexar, which was what San Antonio was then called. In late February, they were surprised by the arrival of General Lopez de Santa Anna, self-declared dictator and "the Napoleon of Mexico." On March 6, 1836, he attacked the Alamo and killed its 189 Texas "patriots" (only eight were native-born Texans).1 They had held out for 13 days, partly because crossing the cold desert had Santayana's troops bedraggled by the time they arrived.
Legend holds that Col. Travis drew a line on the ground and asked any man willing to stay and fight to step over--all except one did. That one lived. The facts surrounding the siege continue to be debated. But people "worldwide" (the handout insists) continue to remember the Alamo as a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds. It opened as a museum in 1968, and more than three million people visit annually. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) preserve it with no funding from the government.
The Alamo was now just a series of low stone walls held together by adobe. Davie Crockett's rifle, powder, and balls are on display, as was a Bowie knife, named for Sam Bowie who died here [pronounced "Booey" by the locals]. A sign on the Alamo walls read, "Only the sturdiest of pioneers came as far as San Antonio, isolated by at least three weeks travel from either Mexico City or New Orleans." GTT was often seen painted on the front doors of houses in the South. It meant "gone to Texas." One Texas pioneer called the state "a heaven for men and dogs, but a hell for women and oxen."
1One underlying cause of the battle was that the Americans wanted to keep their slaves, which they couldn't do if ruled by Mexico, where slavery was illegal. Ironically, one of the few survivors of the battle was a slave.
She had big blue eyes and a slightly graying ponytail pulled tight on the side of her tan leathery face that bore no make-up. Her Alamo-themed jewelry included a multicolored pastel Alamo brooch, a lapel pin with "Alamo" spelled in rhinestones, and hoop earrings in the middle of which hung metal cutouts in the shape of Texas. On her white shirt hung a nametag that read "Paula."
"When Texas was their own country, er, republic," she began explaining to me, Mexico offered you to buy land real cheap, and these people were having problems in their countries. A lot of people were running away from debt. So they just skipped out from their creditors and came here because they couldn't come get them. [laughter] We had a lot of Irish that came during the revolution. There was nine of them that died here in this battle. They didn't know Texas was in a revolution. But they found out. [laughter] You know, the Irish, they want to fight anyway. A lot of them got over here, though, and they couldn't make it because the Indians marauded so badly. It wasn't until Texas became a state that people really started coming to live here in Texas. Then the United States Army could actually come here. And they started setting up forts and fighting to get those Indians out of Texas.
"There's so much history about these guys. One boy that died here in this battle was born in the Alamo. Look at the names. The real Texans were Mexican. They were born and raised right here on the missions. The rest of the people had come over here, and then they called themselves Texans. A lot of people, they come here, and the only thing they've ever seen is John Wayne's movie. And that's with Mexicans outside the walls, only white people in here. Texas actually is a large conglomeration of a lot of different cultures, kind of like the way the East is. But this revolution really kind of cemented them together under one cause, and it kind of just carried on over into statehood. That's where Texas pride comes from.
"San Antonio," she pontificated, "is actually a multicultural city. Some areas, they do stay to themselves. But there are multicultural offerings, the arts, and theaters, and all the things like that. And then there's our big fiesta. What that is, is a celebration of freedom. We start it on April 21st when Santayana was defeated. One day we celebrate the way the German culture would celebrate freedom. The next another culture. The big finale is everybody just celebrates it their way.
"We have people," she despaired, "who don't realize. They'll try and take a piece of the bar, or they'll just want to write their name on it, and that is a felony. We just had to arrest a young man. He's 20 years old. And he was actually going to college to become a minister. And he just walked up and started working a piece and jerked that piece of wall out. And he was arrested and prosecuted. Like our Rangers told him, too, 'You're becoming a minister. And what is one of the Commandments? "Thou shall not steal."' 
We are very serious about preserving this site. Anybody comes in here and they make fun or laugh or think it's just nothing but a joke, I ask them if they could, please, leave. I can't make them leave, but I can ask them. I just go up to them and say 'Apparently, you don't understand what's happened where you're standing. A little over a hundred men died right where your feet are,' and it humbles them. It will straighten them out.
"It's been hit hard since September 11th. Real hard. I'm lucky that here none of us are going to be laid off. We still have enough people that have gotten over the fear of coming to a monument that's so well-known that they are coming back now. We're not going to let them terrorists ruin our lives. They want you fearing. The day of the attack, we did not close. We were like, 'No.' The whole city closed down. We were the only thing that was open. We just go, 'No, we will not bow to terrorists.' We're going to show them no matter what you do, we're going to win and be open. And people were very surprised that we were open. Some started to take a little wrong attitude about us. But then they realized this is what we need to do. Like I always tell everybody, 'I cross that line everyday.' [laughter] Everyday when I come to work, I walk across that line and I says, 'I will defend the Alamo to the death.' And that's the way most of us do feel that work here. It does that to you. It really does."
"[Texas is the] place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least." - H.L. Mencken
On the way back into town from the missions, I stopped at Espuma Coffee and Tea Emporium in a converted old house with wood siding painted pastel orange, where I interviewed two Hispanic ladies working the counter. The short, stocky, older one was stuffed into a gray long-john T-shirt and had a round face with big dark eyes. The younger one bore a tan-and-teal sweater that complemented her dark brown skin.
(Philip Sheridan put it more bluntly: "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.")
The older one stared blankly at my question, "I have no clue who Hopper is."
"I'm sure you do," the younger one countered. "Nighthawks," she pointed out, "is his famous one of the café at night."
"Oh," the older one glissandoed. "That's one I know. Yeah, that's it; that's San Antonio," she sighed. "It's like that within your own family here. I speak for myself. I live on the street, and literally my brother lives one house over on the other side. I wouldn't know. I never see him.
"I grew up in that neighborhood. I know my neighbor. But we don't mix. We don't socialize." [Her coworker nodded.] "We know who each of us are. 'Oh yeah, I know them.' But if someone asked me, 'What do they do?' I don't know. You know everybody, but you isolate yourself from them.
"Personally, I venture out on my own. So I came this far, to this neighborhood where I work. And I will continue to venture out. [but] As far as the average person here, they're very close-minded. I tell people where I work, and they've never been there." 
"You mean," the younger one asked me, "like everybody in their own space? Like they might sit right next to each other but be separate? I don't think I've ever thought about it like that. I think of it as people are close-minded. Like, 'me me me.' Their lives are not changing. I find it not challenging for a big town. Usually," she added, "when you do meet someone who has been somewhere, like different cities or states or countries, they're not from here." ["They're not originally from here," the older one echoed.] "My parents are very different [than me]. They're not that familiar with Texas. They don't even know what we have here. I really do like the downtown area, but I think it's for tourists. That's not for the locals.1
"You can get ethnic food here now," she brightened. "We're not picky, but people here won't try it. We don't even have a place that shows independent films. And even then, it's like two or three films. Because people don't want to have to think here. They want to pick one and just go. They stick to what's known."
The older one agreed, "Right, exactly, with everything, culture, everything. They don't cross that line."
1"San Antonio is for tourists" is the tourism board's motto.
At a used bookstore, I interviewed the woman behind the counter. She was heavy-set, with long dark hair flowing from her spherical head. She had on a red flannel shirt over a multicolored tie-dyed T-shirt on which rested a dog tag collar with no dog tag on it.
"Well, being born and raised in San Antonio, I can tell you: we may be number eight or nine on the population list, but everybody knows each other." She nodded a lot and raised her eyebrows to reinforce her comments. "Instead of six degrees, here it's like three degrees of separation. My mom's from here, and if I'm talking about someone, it'll be, 'Oh is that so-and-so's daughter?' It's like that. If I'm in a hurry, sometimes it's a hassle because everybody knows everyone; I know I'm going to run into two or three people [I know]. You can't just blow them off because they know people you know. You have to go, 'hey, how's your mom?'
"Culturally, it's not as diverse in some places. This town is All-American. People cut the lawns and yell at the neighbors. I fear that it will eventually become more isolated. People are moving farther out (especially people that are not from here). It's becoming car culture. And people I've met who are from there, I tell them to meet me somewhere, and they say, 'Oh, we don't go downtown.' And I'm like, 'Oh, my! Why not?!' It's kind of odd. I don't go out where they are. Because I don't recognize a thing. They're all strip malls. They all look the same. I get lost."
Local Hopper wanna-bes might have a studio at the Blue Star Arts Complex, a pair of narrow warehouses carved up and adapted into artists' spaces, separated by a narrow tract of crumbling, weed-poked asphalt. I found a gallery owner named Joan, sixtyish, with moussed gray hair, green eyes, a big Irish nose, and bright red lipstick. She broke off her conversation with an associate and set aside an oversized pot of large red flowers on a big square glass coffee table so that we could see each other as we sat in chrome tube and leather Marcel Breuer chairs. 
"I think," Joan cooed, "isolation has more to do with who you know. Thinking about my neighbors: he's a retired doctor from Mexico. She's from New York. They stay in their home all the time. You never see them. My other neighbor says maybe she's buried in the back yard. But that's the way their life is. It's extremely isolated. But that's their choice.
"The other thing is that we have a high population of Mexican-Americans. And they certainly are not isolated people. They embrace. They are very family-oriented and party-oriented. I always say about San Antonio, 'we don't need an excuse to have a party.' We have a fiesta all the time. And that has a lot to do with the city having so much Mexican culture."
To my question referencing Nighthawks, her associate Rick jumped in, "Oh yes, where you're looking through a glass window, right?" Rick was a wiry bundle of energy with thick hairy forearms. He was draped in a gray sweater and gray wool socks with brown loafers. Avid green eyes peered out from his constantly-moving head. "Are we as isolated as that, in character? You could maybe say that. But there's a small group of people in this city that aren't isolated. People have a tendency to call San Antonio a large small town. There are people that are very worldly, that have traveled and are very well educated. But it's a minority."
"I was in Dallas," Rick continued. "Living in Dallas and seeing all the culture that is offered to the citizens, and then coming home to San Antonio, it's kind of a shock. I think this city protects itself from what's going on in other cities, which could be viewed as isolating itself. In Dallas, you're always meeting new and interesting people. Here you can, but it's not as easy. The way I describe San Antonio is it's always slow to react to anything, any trend. I think a lot of people [here] are military and that's conservative." 
"Hm," Joan frowned. "That's interesting. I've never connected it to retired military. I always connected it to a cow town. Not a cow town but ranching. It's just a different way of life. You have a lot of people with ranches. And oil. And you have hidden little treasures, and they really don't know what they've got. They don't even know what they're worth here in this city."
Rick barreled on, "We have a lot of blue-collar business. So there are a lot of neighborhoods within this otherwise tourist city. And the industry here isn't like what you see in other large cities. Southwest Bell moved their headquarters here, and moved a lot of people in from Kansas City or wherever. And those people are moving back because the city doesn't have enough to offer them. One guy that moved here from L.A. I knew personally, and he said, 'Where is the stuff I was enjoying in a bigger city?'"
Paul at Blue Star's San Angel Folk Art wore black plastic glass frames and had tan skin and short hair. He modeled a blue shirt. "My family moved here 13 years ago from Mexico." He spoke fluent English with no accent. "This store is devoted to Mexican folk art and to those people and arts that are indigenous to the area. It is not devoted to those who just want to get a little more color in their lives. 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."
"San Antonio is important because it is a border land. We're over fifty percent Latino now. If you're getting at San Antonio, you have to look at that."
San Antonio's downtown municipal market had been transformed into El Mercado, which hailed itself as "the largest Mexican market outside Mexico." Paula had told me, "I remember being a little girl when I came here to Texas, and I loved going down to the market, because you could buy all kinds of items that were from Mexico. It's like you're stepping back in time into you're in another country. Green pastel arches on the Mercado's adobe siding led to a curved Spanish tile roof. Young boys snapped firecrackers on the pavement. A 12-year-old girl in tennis shoes Irish step danced to the South American Andean (NOT Mexican) music that played out back on speakers and from live musicians. Tattered flags atop the building looked like the flag must have looked after being shelled, shot, and wind-whipped in the Alamo.
At a store called Angelita, I spoke with the large woman behind the counter while she tidied in bright pink lipstick and black eye shadow, draped in a light gray smock above which hung a silver choker. "No," she answered my question. "I grew up here, and we knew everybody on the block and everybody on the next block. Some of the old [she pronounced it "ode"] neighborhoods you wish were more isolated. My parents live in their same neighborhood, but they no longer go out after dark, and they have to lock their doors. The gangs are really bad in San Antonio. Every citizen should have a gun, and those gangs ought to get the death penalty." With that, I strolled back out past the angel dolls and books on positive thinking.
Noted Texas historian and journalist Frank Tolbert once wrote, "Every Texan has two homes: his own and San Antonio."
By the Mercado, I jumped on one of the Texas Trolleys that whisks tourists around in wooden seats with brass poles modeled on San Francisco's cable cars. Underneath I-10 at Commerce Street, I watched a scene play out that my trolley driver explained. A guy came up in a red SUV and was mobbed by Mexicans who soon walked away from his car. The driver explained that the man was giving them a chance to work, but it was at too low a price. San Antonio was one of the first and main stopping points for Mexicans coming over the border on their way north my driver explained, and I asked, "To Dallas?" He looked at me like I was crazy, "No, to Chicago." The trolley driver sermonized, "people ought to be ashamed of themselves for paying so low. You get a bunch of people trying to take advantage of them," he harrumphed. A Mexican on the trolley chipped in, "I was paid five bucks an hour and worked for four days straight."
The trolley looped around back downtown to all the sights. San Antonio has always been a crossroads and a meeting place (as the missions attest), and now is the eighth-largest city in the United States, hosting seven million tourists each year. The annual Mud Festival was going on, when a mud king and queen are elected to coincide with the city's annual lowering of the river for repairs and maintenance. Hoses were replenishing the meager river during my visit. Ironically, the San Antonio area was originally called Yana Guana, which means clear waters or cooling waters. Texas was named for the local Tahaas Indians, whose name means "friend."
Sea World of Texas seemed out of place in this landlocked town, though the Cowboy museum could justify using the name. It, like the nearby Dinosaur World, exhibited beings that were extinct. Brackenridge Park, a sort of mascot of this town, was a large expanse of open land and woods. It was virtually deserted when I visited on a weekday, but locals assured me that it was filled up on weekends and in nice weather. It was home to a 
golf course, zoo, and Japanese Tea Garden (whose sign read 
"entrance to Chinese Tea Garden").
Downtown had plenty of Hopperesque sights. 
The Kress store had tall, thin windows and five terra cotta art deco capitals projecting from the roof line that held red letters spelling out K-r-e-s-s. Nearby was Hermann Son's Bowling Lanes, housed in a former church.
Ben Milam, who had rallied volunteers to the Alamo had a statue in Milam Square by the Milam Building, a Hopperesque art deco office building. 
The first floor was home to the Milam Diner and advertised, "home cooking, chicken fried steak, chalupas, beef tips with rice." There were no windows, just a shotgun-narrow room with red Naugahyde booths and swivel stools.
There were also many theaters downtown: the 
Aztec, 
the San Pedro, 
the Alameda, the McAllister Fine Arts Center, and the Spanish-style 
Texas Theater, which was now swallowed up by the SBC Building, built around it. The opulent Majestic Theater [locals pronounced it, "thee-YAY-ter"] had pillars sporting Sullivanesque or Egyptian patterns. Next door stood the Cowboy Cleaners, whose logo was "because that's what daddy named it."
The H.E.B. Grocery Company, a Texas institution, bought the old arsenal in San Antonio and made it their corporate headquarters. The name was meant as a tactful stand-in for founder H. Earl Butt. 
Nevertheless, locals often tell you they got their food "from the Butt."
Interesting that Texas institution H.E.B. chose an arsenal as their headquarters. Another Texas institution, Luby's diner chain, which started in San Antonio, was infamous for being the site of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. In 1991, a man backed his pickup into the Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and fatally shot 23 people before killing himself.
One main tourist route is the Riverwalk, which trails the brackish green water of the San Antonio River. Calling it the Riverwalk is misleading if you're used to a river going all one direction. This river forms a horseshoe through downtown. Restaurants have placed tiny metal tables on terraces where you can sit and eat beneath tavern balconies and lush vegetation overhang.
Along the Riverwalk, I interviewed one of the Centro San Antonio helpers. He was in their standard uniform: 
a denim vest and straw hat with a green ribbon on it that read "Centro San Antonio." He was African American with heavy jowls. [As I was writing this chapter, San Antonio took over the title as the U.S. city with the highest rate of obesity.] The corners of his dark brown eyes were heavily veined. He seemed affable, a good fit for the job. Unlike most interviews for this book, which I had to initiate, he approached me. "How are you doing, sir?"
"I'm fine," I rejoindered. "Since you're here to help, can I interview you for a book I am writing?"
To my question whether he thought people in San Antonio were isolated, he answered in a rich deep tone. "No, not since I started this job. Because they're promoting tourism. And now it's easy for people to see the world. People come down to see the Alamo and walk along the Riverwalk."
"We've lived here about a total of eight-and-a-half years. Longer than other places. We moved a lot. My wife's 20 years Air Force. So we've been to California, Florida, Great Britain. Everywhere people are so nice. Before, we lived in Great Britain. It was like five Air Force bases in a small country. But they're very Americanized. They had Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald's, Burger King's.
"But she wanted to retire here, so we came back here. A lot of people move here. It's like the military. You get all different cultures. This job has made me branch out. Even though we've been here so long, we've been on the military base. You don't really have a reason to come downtown. Everything you want you have right there. I have to learn all the names of streets, emergency procedures, what they're doing downtown. I had no clue it was like this.
"You get some people that look at you like, 'we're not used to this.' Because, first, they think we're looking for a handout. I have to tell them these are free. 'They're free? Okay, we'll take one.' Yeah, we get these official badges. When they see that, I'm safe then. They walk up and say 'Do you work for the city?'"
Though it attracts fewer tourists and is not on the trolley line, one attraction in San Antonio is the Marion Koogler McNay Museum of Art. Here hangs Hopper's Corn Hill. In 1620, pilgrims ransacked the Native Americans' stash of corn for enough to plant their crop the next season. The place where they did that became known as Corn Hill and was near Hopper's summer studio on Cape Cod. Corn Hill was painted in 1930 at the beginning of the Depression. Perhaps Hopper was noting that Americans were again (like the pilgrims) forced to steal to eat. Or maybe he turned to easily accessible landscapes because there was no money to go to the theaters or travel.
In the painting, several houses atop the hill are broadsided in salmony sunshine. Two small edifices off to the right mirror the hilltop houses in looking like the kind a kindergartner draws: just a box with a peaked roof. These structures are surrounded almost entirely by rounded and undulating forms in the dunes and foliage. Jo called the painting "Bare spot all sandy, palish sky with 1 long thick cloud. Foreground pale green tall grass salt meadow." Corn Hill originally went to the Hoppers' friend Bee Blanchard, and they visited to find that it had been replaced by a painting of Bee's favorite horse, "Sir Archie."
It also was not on display in the McNay when I visited, but they allowed me to see it in a gallery that was closed for installation. I could stand back and see it from about 25 feet away. At that distance, the perspective and lighting come together to feel natural, especially the sky. Here's a man who understands clouds. And, like with cloud-watching, people seem to see whatever they want in Hopper's paintings.
The woman assigned to show me the painting and files, Heather, was short with short hair parted on the side. Atop her elfin nose, her glasses frames were speckled dark blue and brown, and the sides had jagged edges like flames coming out of her brown eyes. Black pants and a white shirt divided her into equal halves. Like many I met, she had come home. "I had been at a gallery in New York. I came back to San Antonio because I'm from here. I never thought I would return, but I did." Heather's sick son convalesced on a makeshift bed in the next room. While I was pursuing a personal dream to learn about the American people, they were taking care of the business of living.
"If I owned a painting like that [Corn Hill]," she fawned, "I'd probably never want to sell it. It is a very popular piece. When we don't have it up, people always ask. The hills of Cape Cod don't like anything like the landscape around here. So it must touch something that people can identify with. I don't know whether it's a sort of sense of isolation. I don't think that our painting has quite the sense of loneliness as other Hopper paintings, like 
Western Motel. You don't know what she's doing in that motel, but you know it's not happy. I don't know if this fits in with your thesis, but we get so many requests from Germans for this. I don't know if it fits in with that 
German angst or what."
Next Heather regaled me with stories of the Hopper buyers: Sylvan Lang and his wife Mary. "They were really passionate about what they did. The Langs had a Calder mobile. 
They wrote to Calder to try to find out what date it was made. He sent back a little scrawled note that said, 'Yes, I made it, but I don't know when.' That Calder mobile, they had it actually out on their pool. At a party one time someone was showing it to people and dropped it in the pool. The director of the McNay was there and took off his shoes and jumped into the pool and saved the Calder. That kind of passion is what inspired Sylvan to donate his collection to the museum."
As we parted ways, Heather suggested I check out another collection that was a museum highlight: the Tobin Theater collection.1 Donated by Robert L.B. Tobin ("Fritzy"), it is one of the most comprehensive collections in America related to theater history and design. "I often wonder," Heather mused, "people who are in love with theater, if it isn't a way for them to perform. He [Fritzy Tobin] did perform maybe three or four times. But he was a backstage person. I kind of wonder if it wasn't masking a desire to be an actor."
I wondered the same thing about Hopper. Maybe art is a kind of private performance for those too introverted to actually go in front of audiences.
1Heather had related the life of museum founder Mary McNay, which was worthy of a stage play, replete with failed artistic ambitions, forced marriages, and weepy train station goodbyes to a GI husband who went off and got killed in war.
When I think of Dallas, I think of oil. When I think of oil, I think of gas--Hopper's painting Gas, which contains an image of a sign for Mobil Gas, whose headquarters are in Dallas. For years Mobil's building was the tallest in Dallas. In fact, it was the tallest building south of Washington, D.C., and the huge Pegasus statue on its roof presided over downtown Dallas and the entire American South like the one presiding over Hopper's painting.
The building had since been transformed into a hotel and surpassed in height by many more modern skyscrapers, but the city had adopted the Pegasus as its symbol. Pegasus medallions topped the lamp posts downtown streets, and the public sculpture theme in this town was corner statues of variations on Pegasus. The one in front of the preserved cabin of area pioneer John Neely Bryan had on a tie and reading glasses. In front a building at Bryan and Harwood was a version of the statue 
Pegasus and Man by Carl Milles, a copy of which I had seen in the courtyard of the Des Moines Art Center. At the corner of Main and Akard was the Pegasus Credit Union.
Also, when I think of Dallas, I think of 
November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed here. The sixth floor from which the fatal shot was fired (depending on who you believe) was now a museum devoted to JFK and that fateful day. I got spooked thinking that I was about to walk the same steps that someone (allegedly) took that day. The exhibit did a great job of clarifying what was known about that day and the people tied to it--and what remained unknown about it. An exhibit of important moments of loss in the U.S. already had already added the Attack on America September 11, 2001, though my visit was only three months after that.
One thing I do not think of when I think of Dallas is lighthouses. However, that's what I was here to see. Edward Hopper's painting Lighthouse Hill in the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Lighthouse Hill shows a series of darkly shadowed hills topped by a pale yellow lighthouse set against a blue sky. One of the few well-known photographs of Hopper shows him painting this canvas. Jo wrote they "lived curiously for [the] sake of [this] canvas. Lighthouse Hill came out of housekeeping with water from village pump--& the toilet in a shed shared with lobster bait." More so in person than in reproduction, the painting gets across a sense of isolation. Partly it is the separation between the two buildings. Partly it's the anonymizing sunlight broadsiding the white façades.
The painting was so popular that immediately after the DAM purchased it, another admirer wrote to inquire about obtaining it. The DAM wrote back, "neither the owner or the museum would care to relinquish this particular painting." However, someone seemed to dislike it. Lighthouse Hill was one of three paintings scratched by a vandal in the museum. Luckily, the needed repairs were relatively minor. Hopper suffered at Dallas's hands an attack just as did John F. Kennedy.
In the gallery with me stood a freckle-faced teen with blue eyes and a cowlick in his hair, his slight frame draped by a lightweight jacket. He shrugged, "I don't come here often actually. I'm here because my uncle is having an opening in the next gallery."
"I'm really happy for my uncle," he stated. "I just don't like big functions like this. I'll wait a couple of days until it dies down, then let him know I liked it. It means a lot to my grandparents. My grandfather was curator. When I was younger, I would come here every now and then with him. That was usually after we would do our painting. He was an artist, too. My whole family is a little bit surrounded in art.
"My uncle's painting has a lot of symbolism in it, not all of which I understand. It shows my uncle as a child painting, when he was younger. Before my father was born. See that easel in the painting? 
I have a portrait of my grandfather painting my grandmother in a chair, and that's the easel that he used. And that easel he passed on, so that [easel] has symbolism. And then also…" He looked around and then continued sotto voce, "My grandfather's ashes are in the painting. Not a lot of people know about that. We didn't know what to do with them. When this came along, we said, 'that's perfect.'"
When I asked my question, he seemed confused. "Isolated from each other? In Dallas? I don't think they are. I know that some people want to be. But they just put their happy face on and kind of cover up."
His dad called out, and the teen yelled back as if worried he had done something wrong. I felt a little like that myself as his father arrived and glared at me. I apologized for detaining his son and slunk off.
More people came in. Stephanie was short, with a Roman nose, dark skin, and short, thick hair. She wore a suede suit and a camel-hair coat. Her tall husband had big ear lobes that folded sharply outwards, sincere blue eyes, and brief hair flipped up in front, making him look like Fred Gwynn from The Munsters. He was in a tawny tweedish jacket and a bright multicolored tie on a white shirt, very business-like. Stephanie's dignified, gray-haired mother sported a tasteful gray sweater and held her brown coat folded over her forearms. Her thin father had on a blue button-down oxford shirt open at the collar draped in a dark blue blazer. They were joined by a woman who had cellophaned red hair, waxy skin, and a wide-eyed forcefulness that made her seem to be leaning into me.
When I mentioned that Hopper's paintings were associated with isolation, they all agreed with a chorus of "yeah," "absolutely," and "it's amazing." Then when I asked about Dallas's isolation, Stephanie didn't hesitate, "Yes, people are isolated here."
"I don't really think so," her husband dissented. "To me, Dallas doesn't have that cold, urban feel that pervades so many of those paintings. I'm from Minneapolis. My father moved here 30 years ago, and I moved in with him. It's very easy to move to Dallas and be connected to the rest of Dallas because there's so many people coming from somewhere else. Most of the people you'll meet are not native Dallasites. Dallas had such a boom in the '70s and '80s where companies were relocating here. I'm in banking. Dallas is a banking town," he noted drolly. "It has become so. There's a Federal Reserve here. Right across the street. It's a mint; they print there as well." [That's a use for etching that Hopper would have been humored to consider.] 
"There are enough people from out of town," he pontificated, "that it tends to be the kind of town where you introduce yourself. It's not really a typical southern town except in that respect: the warmth and outgoingness is definitely there. Texas isn't really the south; it's very much its own state. It was its own country at one point. It came into the fold just before the Confederacy. Then it joined the Confederacy because of proximity--as well as other issues. But it's really always been its own state. Texans will invariably tell you that Texas is the only state in the union that has the right to secede. It's not true, but they feel that just the same. They want to be able to do so."
"I work for a senior agency," Stephanie finally burst in, "and the older tend to be isolated, definitely. I don't see Dallas as special in that way. The elderly rely on public transportation, and Dallas is not a great town for that."
When I asked the cellophaned drama queen 
("DQ," I thought of her as), who was a native Dallasite, she yipped, "OK," pronouncing it "Kyay. You don't care that I don't know anything about Hopper? Do I think people in Dallas are isolated?" She paused. "Yes." She paused again. "Isolated from what? Jeez, you know, it's something I've never thought about. In a Hopper way? He's very Midwestern. So that kind of fits isolation there. A lighthouse is always terribly isolated."
"But," Stephanie's mom countered, "it doesn't speak to me because it doesn't look like anything that's a part of my life."
DQ clarified, "I was thinking of individuals. You can be in a big city with a lot going on around you (even though Dallas isn't New York) and feel very isolated. Big cities breed a lot of lonely people because you get lost."
"OK," Steph's mom nodded, "I would agree with that. I don't think Dallas is that way, but yeah. I would think that Hopper was going for that."
"But Dallas isolated that way?" DQ mused, "I think socially, no; politically, well..."
"It used to be," Stephanie's dad intoned. "I've lived here for 40 years. And I am a Texan. I don't think it is any more."
"I think it is," his wife jumped in. "Politically. Geographically. When I was a child, people didn't travel that much." She chuckled. "I was twenty-one before I left Texas. Texans like to set themselves apart from the rest of the country."
"There is that," Stephanie smirked.
"Yes," her dad agreed, "there's definitely that."
After that group left, in walked a slight-boned man with a thin face and a gray mustache. A black leather jacket was slapped on his back, and he had a thick gray duckbill haircut. Behind him trailed a stocky Hispanic with a buzz cut who had on jeans and a gray zippered athletic suit with a pull rope through the neck.
The one with the duckbill murmured, "I teach art, so I do know about Hopper." He spoke in short phrases that gave the impression he was shy. "I work with airbrush. And work from photographs. Like photo-realism. Hopper's always someone who I've liked for that reason. He was heavily influenced by photographs. I think he was very much talking to everyday people. He was not talking to only artists. You don't have to be trained in art. It's not that I think bad about him or lesser of a painter than other trained artists. But this is a very clear statement to which everybody could relate."
When I asked about Hopper's isolation relating to Dallas, he shook his head, "Boy." After a pause, he pointed to his friend. "You're from Houston. Have you ever thought about it?"
"I don't think so," the other man stepped forward. "I think the Dallas community is a bit isolated. We're from a really small town a bit out of town, really rural. Where we're from, I wouldn't say that we were isolated. Though you see a lot of houses just out in the field. 
That painting's not un-Texas-like, minus the lighthouse." He in turn pointed back at the teacher. "He might have a different thought about Dallas."
"Yeah," The art teacher posited, "I think Dallas is isolated. There's not really any other places like Dallas. Dallas has a way of really balancing the opera and Red Rock Renaissance Festival real well. And I feel that makes them less isolated. I've seen more like that," he pointed to The Hutter Barn beside the Hopper, the Andrew Wyeth painting showing a lone barn below a moon at dusk.
His partner agreed, "There's a lot of places around this part of the country that build houses and there's no trees around. It makes me feel like it's more isolated because you've got just this single dwelling out in the middle of nowhere. And it's not very comfortable. There's nothing to block the wind."
"I think," the art teacher pursed his lips, "of isolation a bit differently than physical. I guess I think of it as psychological. This [Lighthouse Hill] is physical, but it also could be psychological. The lighthouse keeper, he's separated from other people. And I think in the city, you have that choice. Sheer numbers. You can be surrounded by people. But you can be all alone. And that's your choice. And even though you can be alone, perhaps when you're walking downtown or going through a neighborhood, you have a friend you feel connected to who lives next door or miles away in another part of the town."
Dale Chihuly stained glass flowers. At the museum's core, a series of long stairs and ramps led to side galleries, which provided a 
disorienting flow of traffic--more like an 
Escher than a Hopper. This vertigo was heightened by 
Claes Oldenburg's oversized circus tent spike with the rope wrapped around it beneath the barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Hopper and other American artists were exhibited in the "Art of the Americas" section of the museum, which I naively imagined would hold pre-Columbian relics. I forgot Texas's view of what constitutes "American."
In a Hopperesque marriage of architecture and art, the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection was displayed in a re-creation of their villa on the French Riviera. It was only when I went to Kansas City and saw Winston Churchill's paintings on Hallmark greeting cards that I realized Churchill painted. He was friends with Wendy Eaves, and four of his paintings adorned the walls of a room entirely devoted to Churchill and his paintings. As some kids looked at the paintings in the living room of the Reves Villa, a child asked his mother, "Well, where's the TV?" Paintings were television before there was radio.
The woman who showed me the files dismissed my question with a flick of her wrist, "I'm anti-social. I don't think that isolation is a bad thing. I like the anonymity of a large city."
She had brown hair down past her shoulders, black-rimmed goggles with dark tortoise shell sides, and dark brown eyes. She wore a soft green button-down sweater and black pants. Her watch bore a skull and crossbones.
"I'm glad that people are finally getting around to viewing the light in Hopper's work psychologically. Although when they go too far with it, I'm not happy with that. I used to live in Chicago. There's a Chinese place at Lincoln, Irving, and Damen: Orange something. 
I remember that façade and that place as being similar to Chop Suey."
Dallas's Visitor Center was inside the 
Old Red Courthouse, a huge Richardsonian Romanesque building in the West End. The guy behind the counter there upon learning my hometown croaked, "I like Chicago. On Michigan Avenue, I always see people talking and touching and laughing. We don't see that in Dallas. We're afraid to make eye contact in case someone asks for you for a cigarette. There's no one in Chicago asked me for a nickel. I don't know if they're just not on Michigan Avenue or what. But here everybody was looking for a handout."
The city was named in honor of George Mifflin Dallas, a Pennsylvania democrat who was elected Vice President in 1845 on a platform favoring Texas's annexation. John Neely Bryan arrived from Tennessee and established a trading post on the bluff on the Trinity River. Land title was granted to settlers who worked at least 15 acres and built "a good and comfortable" cabin. Many who came raised cattle, and the state soon became synonymous with cattle ranchers. Pioneer Plaza featured the world's largest bronze monument in tribute: forty longhorn steers being driven through a river by three cowboys on horseback. 
Now a major center for oil and gas, Downtown Dallas at first glance struck me as sleepy and soot-filled. If Texas were a country, it would rank seventh in the world in air pollutants. A tourist Web site directed me to one neighborhood "to get away from the fast pace of the downtown." I couldn't find anyone downtown to get away from. During my morning walk, the streets were deserted. When it was 11:40, there were lines longer than I'd ever seen at every chain restaurant in town. Dallas had four times more restaurants per person than New York City and more shopping centers per capita than any other major U.S. city. By 2:00, downtown was deserted again. Walking or driving, everybody here moved slowly and expected me to do the same.
I found several Hopperesque buildings downtown. 
The Katy Building, named for the MKT (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway) was decorated with painted terra cotta. The old Greyhound bus station at Griffin and Young still had its art deco blue neon dog and lettering. The 1916 Greek-revival Union Terminal was still used as an Amtrak station. The original Nieman Marcus store was in Dallas, with an N and an M on their door handles. As fate would have it, I was there the day he died. A display window already bore a poster "Stanley Marcus, 1905-2002." Business at the store looked dead that day, too.
Outside of the Hopperesque ones, most buildings were modern and faceless. Many featured shiny glass facades, as if they were giant mirrors reflecting the city back to itself. Reunion Towers was formed of four slender reinforced concrete cylinders, topped by three levels of activity, all encircled by a geodesic dome that lit up its round ball of lights at top, looking like its own solar system. 
[Dallas Skyline]
I.M. Pei designed Fountain Place, Energy Place; and 
Dallas Symphony Center. A food court attached to Renaissance Tower reproduced Pei's 
Louvre Glass Pyramid. His City Hall was an inverted pyramid. Starting from a modest ground-floor entrance, each successive story was a concrete square larger than the one below it. The red Pegasus, lit up and spinning atop the Magnolia Building, looked down on it all, like the ghost of JFK or the one in the Hopper's painting Gas. 
Modern architects might find a lot to talk about in downtown Dallas, but I sure don't find anything. One building looked like a rising green glass arrow. I asked two guys passing by, "What building is that?"
"That's Fountain Place," one pushed ahead of his friend toward me. 
"Why do you want to know?"
"I'm visiting from out of town and an architecture fan."
"Are you an architectural terrorist?" the other giggled. "Because we'd love to have you blow that thing up."
Thanksgiving Square was a 3.5-acre site, purchased in 1968, managed by the Thanks-Giving Foundation, a Texas non-profit corporation. The area featured bells, meditation garden, fountain, and a spiral chapel. It was devoted to "honouring the spirit of gratitude to God." Although whose god and what schedule he keeps is open to interpretation. The chapel was open 8:30 to 5:00 Monday through Friday. God apparently keeps business hours. And, though the design attempted to incorporate architectural designs from different religions, there's actually a very specific entrance and a very specific path you're supposed to follow. The mosaic of all world religions included the words "where the people and sheep of his pasture enter His gates with Thanksgiving and his courtship praise. Give thanks to Him and bless His name." Don't suppose by "His" they meant Buddha or any female deity. Not when the next sign read "Love the Lord your God with all your heart." I thought Lord was a Christian thing. Other signs quote Psalms and other Bible passages, but absolutely nothing from other religions. And what justified the Thanksgiving wall of U.S. Presidents?
In an irony that seems like biblical retribution, the Biblical Arts Center featuring all Christ-related images was destroyed by fire.
If you were from Dallas, and particularly from Dallas of many years past, you might call the far end of Elm Street "Deep Ellum." That was indeed what Dallasites still called it, and it was home to many local artists and art groups.
I ducked into the post office there to buy stamps for my post cards. Inside, the only other patron was a lithe, six-foot blonde with big blue eyes and a ratty old T-shirt that read, "as is." I asked her my question, and she locked onto my eyes, talking and moving quickly, "Oh yes. Everybody is. This is what my book talks about. Over the past 45 years, we've moved from an agrarian society to where women are in the workforce and financially independent and we don't have to marry any more. So there are so many more choices, which had made everybody more isolated and made dating more difficult, which is why there is a need for my book and my Web site, which is the world's largest dating advice column. 
I reach a worldwide audience of 1.6 million people. I used to be a capitalist psychologist, which means I was in advertising and marketing. Now I'm in dating."
She proceeded to invite me to her apartment the following night for a presentation. "It's forty dollars. There's a case of wine to go through. We're all going to eat our words. There are 54 qualities you can look for in a partner." [How she managed to whittle it down or up to 54 or arrived at that number, who knows.] "You'll write down ten words that describe your ideal partner, and then you're going to have to talk about why you chose those words and what they mean to you."
I saw her eyes shift down to my T-shirt from the Cincinnati Art Museum. 
"We want someone who is artistic. Well, what does 'artistic' mean? I've traveled the world over to just see the art in the museums all over the world. And the kind of event I want this to be, it's going to be a cultural event. Not a, you know, 'hey baby I want to pick you up and fuck you.'"
With that, she handed me an invite and drove away.
I drifted over to the Deep Ellum galleries, where I interviewed Jeanette, working the desk at one. "Um," she hesitated, "I think the isolation is not the subjects' in the paintings, but how the artist feels." She had a round face with pale, freckled cheeks, dark brown eyes, and brown hair cut shoulder-length and cellophaned purple. She sat in black pants and a tan lightweight shirt with its lapels pulled wide from her collarbones.
"That's probably part of why he's so popular. Because he's able to convey that. The painter we have showing now has the flatness in his paintings similar to Hopper's flatness. His paintings are being equated with Japanese. 
The Hopper at the McNay in San Antonio, I remember. I'm not familiar with the one that is in the Dallas Museum."
"It's fairly famous one of a lighthouse."
"OK," She nodded, "The visuals come to mind."
"So," I clarified, "you think Hopper's paintings are more a reflection of the artist and his feelings than the people in these cities?"
"Definitely," she confirmed. "Or to a lot of other places. Like the suburbs. Like a basic floor plan for a house. Each person thinks of it as their own, but people are walking into the exact same house. And how you can feel alone and be part of a group at the same time?"
The main artsy strip that my friend in Chicago who grew up in Dallas told me to check out was a two-mile stretch of Greenville Avenue. To get there, I had to drive on Lover's Lane, which sounded like it could be a Hopper painting title. On the strip I found the Hopperesque Arcadia and Granada theaters now occupied by bars.
I stopped to CD shop at a music store and asked the young guy behind the counter about my project. He had a mop of black hair and thick, square, black glass-frames. He was clad in a blue sweatshirt with a crazy wavy pattern on his chest.
"Dallas is a very isolated city. We're about to elect as mayor a woman who's racist. But, apparently, nobody cares. I was born and raised in Dallas. I think that Hopper's version of America's isolation was romanticized. People aren't that romantic about the notion of rugged individualism. I thought Hopper was going for that kind of vibe, because the people are there in light and there's darkness all around them. It's kind of like a cocoon. Like he's trying to portray it positively.
"You know, the writer Stuart Dybek, who's one of my favorites, wrote a short story called 'Nighthawks'? In that story, there are people who are all alone, but they've come together. That's what I think of when I think of Hoppers. These people may come together, so they're not really isolated, even though each one seems to be in their own little world.
"I'm Danny, by the way. My girlfriend is a painter and works at the museum. You should meet us tonight at the New Amsterdam Café. There's a writer's group meeting there."
The café was in Fair Park, an Art Deco complex where the state fair was held. The Age of Steam Railroad Museum was housed here. 
Old Hopper era trains rested on the grounds. They were not as well kept as the Pullmans in the Indianapolis Hotel, that's for darn sure. In the parking lot, a bunch of guys were revving their motorcycles, and a line-up of State Police was passing muster under the scrutiny of a sergeant. The police, apparently, store their horses out here.
This was an urban pioneer's neighborhood where warehouses had been transformed into art galleries, and this cafe was one of the hip local watering holes. The café was dark and woody. As I arrived, the writers' group was just breaking up. I saw Danny, and he introduced me to his girlfriend Trish. Trish's hair curled around her ear, and her hands moved quickly as she spoke.
"Intuitively," she began, "I see a lot of 
Diebenkorn in his work, especially in his perspective, the flat planes. Diebenkorn did an homage to Automat. Hopper's night scenes are compelling. The colors of the night scenes are great: serene, but there is a tension in the figures. They are solid but vulnerable. Reminds me of David Lynch movies. Did he do Christina's World?" she asked. 
He did not. But in the museum's files, I had seen an article having Morning Sun right below Christina's World. It was written in Japanese, but presumably it was showing the same connection.
"Hopper's paintings are like 
Twilight Zone," Danny chipped in. "Nighthawks, the people are drawn to the bright café like moths to a light. It's like hyperrealism. 
It's a subjective reality. I think of Eastern philosophy when I see his paintings. They make me think of Jung; they're archetypal. And we have pathologized the loners. We think they're sad. But they may not be. Art is partly audience response. So I guess they are about the isolation. Hopper was lucky; what it must feel like to finally achieve what you're working toward.
"I think that all artists are isolated. We're one-percenters, the artists. We're unlike 99% of the people. But artists need you relating to their work; they're not isolated culturally. That's part of the point [of art]. Hopper just tuned in to it, because everybody is isolationist. We have a private and public self. Personal isolation is not political isolation. People don't feel whole. There is no whole, just a becoming. You think you are some idealized you that you are always becoming. Its like a silhouette: it's not you, but people can recognize you from it. People have a nostalgia for isolation. Hopper and J.D. Salinger played on that. Tennessee Williams did the same thing.
One of the other writers, Alberto, was interested in my question and bent my ear. He was tall and lanky, with a mop of dark kinky hair and café-au-lait skin. He had a slender face, a long thin nose, and bright green eyes.
"I'm starting a poetry workshop," he intoned in a cool baritone, lounging like a laid-back jazz musician, "because I feel a little isolated. I used to live in New York. In Dallas I have trouble motivating myself and feeling the buzz. When I was living in New York, I couldn't even get halfway through a shower without thinking, 'hey, I know something is going on somewhere; I'm missing something.' I'd rush out of the shower and call a friend. And sure enough they'd be like, 'Well, yeah, there's a reading going on I'm heading out to.'"
"I work in a gallery. The stuff that they're showing …?" He shook his head. "The woman who runs it has an 18-year-old son who said, 'Mom, the audience just isn't going to get this stuff.'"
After that, I went to pay the bartender, who had insisted all night that I could pay on my way out. I had assumed this was part of Southern Hospitality.
"I'm not used to that," I told him. "In Chicago, people would just run out."
"You're in Texas now," he grinned. "We all have guns."
When I called the week before my visit to confirm our appointment, the owner had meantime made plans to be out of town. I was met at the door by her housekeeper, a short, squat woman with white bouffant hair. A colorful ascot adorned her neck above an understated white sweater and gray suit coat. She called the painting's owner "a sweet, sweet woman" and had been her housekeeper for nearly twenty years.
She showed me into a beige living room, which had a grand piano, big brass telescope, and primitive stone heads lining the rear window overlooking the bay and Alcatraz, the island prison from which no successful escape was ever made.
Portrait of Orleans 
hung above the fireplace mantle. The painting shows downtown Orleans, near Hopper's summer home on Cape Cod. An electric pole and traffic lamppost rise from a broad intersection at center. Sidewalk storefronts trail off into the distance, where trees and a barn demarcate the town's end. The dominant colors are white, green, and salmon, which unite in the upper right corner's Esso gas station sign. Early in the painting process, Jo noted, "[T]he corner of Route 6 & the Main St. of Orleans is down on canvas.... It's not so exciting--yet!" After several weeks of driving around Cape Cod hoping to find the right kind of sky he wanted to top this scene, Hopper "faked one of his own."
To my questions, the housekeeper demurred before finally conceding, "I like it because you can tell what it is." She pointed to an abstract painting on a nearby wall. "That I no like so much."
Unlike Portrait of Orleans, the other painting in town hung in its usual home: San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Bridle Path depicts people riding horses in New York's Central Park. In the foreground, a tall man in a brown tweed coat rides a white horse. Beside the man, a redhead in a black riding outfit sits astride a tan horse high in her spurs, seeming to float. Slightly behind, a blond woman in a gray coat rides a chestnut horse. The man's horse rears as it approaches a tunnel, perhaps scared by the darkness.
The man looks like Hopper, and his wife Jo had red hair like the rider next to him. As they both start to enter the tunnel, he stops his horse, putting him nearer to the blond. This implied love triangle is reinforced when one realizes that the title could be a pun on "Bridal Path." A preparatory sketch was titled: Men, Women & Horses. All "bridle" when asked to go where they don't want. 
Bridle Path was painted in 1939, and it could also be viewed as a comment on the war in Europe. Everybody is rushing headlong into a dark tunnel, and the man wants to stop the charge.
Jo noted about this painting that Hopper got "a little book on horse anatomy... Unmistakably Central Park this time of year on a grey day. Almost the smell. The horses too reek horse flesh. What thanks is he to get for doing the job so masterly?"
This painting I could interview people in front of. A couple of older women approached. The taller one wore a multicolored scarf above a blue blazer draped by a thick gold necklace. Her shorter friend donned a purple shirt and carried a purse with a black-and-white square Gucci Gs. 
I asked if they were from San Francisco.
"No," the tall one barked. "We're from Marin." She stopped and rolled her eyes. "Sorry. We're from the 'bay area.' Can't use that word 'Marin' any more. It has to be bay area. I'm Dolly, and this is Candy." Her face soured when I asked if they felt isolated. "Of course we don't. Why should we? Just because we're often described that way by people who have never been here? We all feel part of the bay area."
Candy asked tentatively, "What do you mean?"
"Like Hopper's characters," I explained.
"We don't lead the kind of lives he depicts," Candy reflected. "I think he sought out isolation. You know, all those lonely hotel rooms. What he depicted was a product of the times, too. Those types of places that people frequented don't even exist any more."
"The east coast people think we must be so isolated here," Dolly blurted. "Just because you're alone doesn't mean you don't want to be alone."
A white middle-aged couple stepped up. He had a ruddy nose, green eyes, and a graying goatee. His wan wife had a sharp nose and pale blue eyes. Both wore American flag pins on their lapels.
To my question, the man answered. "No, I don't think so. I've lived here all my life. I'm third generation. My children grew up here. We've lived in the same house, and my children have this anchor. That's so rare in this society. New York or Philadelphia or Chicago might have single neighborhoods that are as large as San Francisco. In San Francisco, it's pretty hard to stay isolated. You're on the end of a peninsula. You're bound to bump into someone." 
His wife was also from San Francisco and added, "I don't feel isolated. If you just came here and didn't know anybody, then maybe you would. A lot of people move here. Maybe they would feel more isolated than we who were born and raised here."
A twenty-something Asian man nearby told the diminutive Asian woman on his arm that Bridle Path looked like a photograph. So I asked if he meant that in a good way.
"Yeah," he nodded. "It's very nice." His pinstriped shirt was buttoned-up, and his short black hair parted on the side. "What other paintings did he do?" he asked. I described Nighthawks. "With Elvis and all the celebrities in it?" he confirmed. "I don't know a lot of paintings, but I know that one."
When I asked if he thought people here were isolated like Hopper's characters, he balked, "I don't. For a big city, San Francisco has people who are very friendly. People are more close in smaller towns. (I've been to Kentucky and places like that.) But it's inevitable in a large city. I've been in New York, and everybody's so busy and in themselves."
After they left, a girl with bright green eyes stared at Bridle Path, seemingly mesmerized. She bore black high-heeled boots, and a knee-length hooded coat hugged her small waist. Beneath brown hair dyed blond on each side, each ear had three piercings.
She averred that she did not see this painting as isolated. "I never would have guessed that this was by the same artist that did Nighthawks. This seems a little more social. I would say there's isolation amongst the neighborhoods here. San Francisco has a lot of very different neighborhoods, and they change in just a few blocks. They're very conscious of it too. There's not much mixing. It's a very culturally diverse city, but also it's a very separated city."
"I don't know if I really could compare it to any other city. This is a very small city. If you stay in the city, you run into familiar faces. At the same time, it has the big city feel. We all live in these huge apartment complexes [like in the painting]. We no longer know our neighbors."
A white-haired man sidled up, his shoulders draped by a sweater and glasses on a chain. When I looked into his earnest green eyes, I saw where she got hers.
"This is my dad," she explained and told him about my project.
"We came down for the day," he stated in a modulated, fatherly voice, "to visit our daughter. Getting here down to the city can really make you feel like you're isolated. So, are you asking, 'Does community exist without participation?' We used to do a lot more social activities in this country. I don't know if I notice or really feel isolation. Maybe that's part of the problem. Everybody wanders around in their own little world, thinking, 'We're not isolated.' But then they have to ask others, 'Who are you again?'"
The last person I interviewed in front of the painting was a broad-shouldered African American man, standing about six-foot-two and weighing more than two hundred pounds. He was dressed casually in a loose white cotton shirt, faded jeans, tennis shoes, and a cream-colored baseball cap.
"Communities?" he pondered. "Isolated? No. I think I'd have a pretty good idea. I was born and raised here, in Berkeley. San Francisco is a series of smaller communities that view themselves as part of a large city, a larger community, the whole bay area. I live north about thirty minutes from here. I don't get a chance to get over here that often. Only because I choose not to come here because it's too crowded and traffic is a pain."
"Is there a place in San Francisco where you can ride horses?" I inquired.
"Golden Gate Park, but you're not allowed any more. Just the police."
I headed over there. Like Central Park in Hopper's Bridle Path, Golden Gate Park was the city's gathering place and aswirl with human drama. 
People were making music, having picnics, or playing games of tennis or soccer with their families.
Instead of a bridle path, I found the police stables and a trotting track, a sand oval surrounding a polo field. Though I did not see any horses, there were fresh horseshoe prints, and the place "reeked of horse flesh."
Just off Golden Gate Park lay Haight Ashbury, famous as the home of 1960s counterculture. At the People's Café, the first man I saw had a gray ponytail poking through the back of a cap labeled "Haight-Ashbury." A rose tattoo graced his thumb, and the top of a butterfly tattoo sprawled across his chest and peeked above his T-shirt collar. He wore a single large black button as an earring, a leather jacket riddled with chrome buttons, and leather clogs. A hefty young woman sat across from him donned in knickers, thick black shoes, and a flowery red shirt.
"I wasn't here for the 1960s," he balked. "I arrived in the 1980s. I came here after studying Art at Michigan."
"You're an artist?" I asked. "A painter?"
"I carve ancient ivory," he muttered. "I was in the hoity-toity art world. The older I get, the more I've had a change of heart about what represents art."
When I asked his opinion of Hopper, he said he had none, then grumbled without further explanation that Hopper was racist. As he answered, his watery blue eyes peered out above a gray beard, bent nose, and small lips.
"When I moved here, there were always people selling things and musicians on the sidewalk. Now you can only buy boutique stuff. I don't need to buy used clothes; I have used clothes; I need new ones."
"There's a lot of broken hearts and broken people in this town," he rued. "There's a lot of recovering people in this neighborhood. A lot of people in San Francisco and in this particular neighborhood are cyclical. A lot of people move away because they get priced out. But they always come back. The neighborhood is where people feel a community. For years, I lived out of my van down at the park. I've been renting from the neighborhood's biggest drug dealer. Normally, I wouldn't have anything to do with this guy, but it's hard to find a good place to rent."
"You get to know your roommates well in this town," the girl finally chimed in, "because the living spaces are so small. The neighborhood used to have a lot more character, a lot more soul. San Francisco was invaded by dot-commers who made it much less spontaneous and fun. Now they're all leaving again."
I caught a cable car and headed to some of the famous sights. The car was so full that I actually had to stand on the runner board, something I love doing anyway. I transferred where cable car lines met, right by the Hopperesque "Cable Car Diner." The next car I got on was empty, so I asked the driver if he thought that San Franciscans were isolated. He was a large, round-shouldered African American with a wiry beard growing from pitted pores on his cheeks. He had on a black baseball cap, blue fleece coat, and big black gloves that performed an intricate dance of lever-pulling and -pushing to keep the car on track.
"Not at all," he crooned. His voice was as smooth and steady as the flow of his cable car. "I grew up in the Twin Peaks area here. When people think of San Francisco, they think of it as culturally diverse, so everybody knows they're kind of in for that here. It's a very warm city. It's not like New York. There, they'll bump into you and not say, 'excuse me.' They won't look you in the eye."
He let me off at one of the least isolated places you could imagine: San Francisco's Chinatown is one of the densest populated places on earth. Its famous alleyways were a solution to allow more housing when anti-Chinese sentiment restricted the community to a six-block area. The smell of vegetation and fish assaulted me as I wandered past dried shark fins and full-length eels sliced open at the belly with one single move, and I thought of the Chinese caricatures that Hopper painted. 
I interviewed two Chinatown shop owners: a short woman, maybe forty, and a chubby man about fifty. Both claimed that their community was not isolated. But neither spoke much English. Nor were they interested in answering when I tried to follow up with more questions.
San Francisco is associated with Beat poets, and their flagship bookstore City Lights is still here. Some Beats claimed a Hopper influence. San Francisco is also associated with gay culture. I passed several shops where I could have bought a bridle similar to the one in Bridle Path.
I took an architecture tour to see the best sampling of this town's many Hopperesque homes. Hopper was 22 and just out of art school the year of the great San Francisco earthquake, 1906, that created room for such houses. Many of its old Victorian houses were built in New England and then shipped here around Cape Horn. The tour started from the Hopperesque Haas-Lilienthal House. 
. A nearby apartment building proclaimed itself "…an attitude not an address." Real estate is a major economic force here, where the attractive topography and weather attract people. From gold rush through banking to venture capitol dot-coms, San Francisco has never had much in the way of industry. It's not a very urban urban center; not Hopperesque in that way.
Downtown in San Francisco I visited an institution that, like Hopper's paintings, blurred the lines between art and everyday. Gump's department store boasted that everything in the store was for sale. I found this verified when I approached an employee at her desk, which also happened to be a dining room table. It made this workplace seem like a home.
The petite woman had an elfin chin and short auburn hair lightly touched with gray and parted in the middle. She wore pale pink lipstick, a pink frosted sweater, and a blue coat with yellow braiding.
"I grew up here," she began, "so I don't feel that people here are isolated. I see a bunch of people I know everywhere I go. I live in the Portrero District, which is the most diverse. There are Philippines and Blacks, and it started off Italians. If you go down the block, every single home changes ethnicity by its owner, and I like that diversity. Now, I don't know any of my neighbors; none of them speak English. I like the buffer zone, the anonymity of not having to say hello to everybody. When you're in a city, you can't say hello to everybody. It would get daunting or overwhelming. If someone comes up to you and says hi, they usually want something--usually money, but occasionally directions. San Franciscans are used to being nice and offering directions because so many people come to visit. But San Franciscans are not as friendly as they used to be. There are a lot more scary characters on the street now."
My day ended the way it began, with a San Franciscan opening her home to me. My friend Bonnie worked as a city planner for a suburb across the bay. Because of San Francisco's expensive real estate, she also rented to boarders and worked weekends in a specialty food store to afford the mortgage on her condo.
"People here are isolated," she admitted when I asked her, "but they are coming to terms with it. They are not afraid to be alone. San Francisco attracts loners. San Francisco has a lot of transplants. They want to live life differently than where they're from. Somebody once told me that they keep moving west in search of something, then they hit the ocean and this is where they have to stop. A lot of people here think very differently than people in the rest of the country, and do things before the rest of the country gets it. They're really out-of-the-box thinkers. They have made it into a positive energy. But it kind of cuts both ways. Out-of-towners like I was when I arrived have a harder time overcoming isolation here."
As I fell asleep at Bonnie's, I felt like a Hopper character: a traveler in temporary lodging, even if it was someone else's home.
Phoenix: "an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland." - Edward Abbey
I knew Tempe before starting this book. My sister moved here in 1983 to study Solar Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). My father moved there the next year. My mother did not. That was the end of their marriage, and my dad had been in that town ever since.
The Hopper here was at ASU. Donated as Cottage, Cape Cod, Gail Levin's research discovered that the Hoppers referred to it as House by a Road. Tempe is a city of houses by roads--a post-WW II boomtown--and my dad and his wife Carol lived in one of its many sprawling subdivisions. I asked them, along with my sister Debbi and stepbrother Steve (all Tempe residents), if they thought people in Tempe were isolated like in Hopper's paintings.
"No," Debbi began. "All of Hopper's paintings are like in very rural farmland, so no I don't see it at all that way."
"I don't either," my dad agreed. "In fact, I can't think of a place that would be. Okay, on the level that we don't know everybody in the neighborhood, that's true. It's not like my interpretation of Hopper's isolation."
"There's two kinds of isolation," Carol noted. "There's physical and there's social."
"Isolation," Debbi added, "is a personal choice. Hopper's characters are always at the window expecting company. They're somehow reaching out."
"See," my dad shook his head, "I don't see that in his pictures. I see most of them wanting to be isolated. Why the hell don't they get out of there? It's like they're where they want to be."
Carol mused, "I see it not so much as where they want to be, but maybe where they are. And they're not quite sure, they're confused. They don't know why they're isolated."
"The Hopper painting here," I put forth, "is called House by a Road," and I described it. 
"When you talk about how much of a lone house it is," Steve piped up, "the big thing here, as far as in construction, would be these new developments way outside of town where land is cheap. Everybody is in their own house or development by the road. It's an isolating thing. I've got to say: I feel claustrophobic here now. I like being outside, doing outside things like biking. On nights, I used to ride my bike and be in the desert in a half-hour. I can't do that any more. There's so many people on the mountain close by here. You run in to everybody. Same thing with hiking. Can't take the dog out, because he's big and he wants to go up to other people, so I look for places where there's nobody else."
"I think that's a good point," my dad concurred, "and I think it holds true across the country: the move from urban areas. We want our kids to have fresh air and open spaces, so everybody's always moving out."
Debbi said, "When I moved here in 1980 it was smaller and less developed. Guadalupe [the town next door] was the outskirts of the town. There was nothing past there. Now, there's a whole Phoenix out there: shopping centers where there was just desert. I have to travel a lot for my job, so I go way out. People tell me where they live, and I think, 'that's desert; there's nothing out there.' But there's whole developments there."
"We were on the edge then," my dad related, "and now ten miles south of here is built up. Over here at the intersection, they raised sheep. Now, It's strip city. You can't tell when you leave one city and join another. If they didn't have a sign up, you wouldn't know what the hell city you're in."
Debbi continued, "I see huge houses and very small yards, not yards where you can play baseball, and then there will be a small park. Even the park isn't like how we used to have this big huge baseball field. So I see a lot of neighborhoods that are all house. Each has a double garage, and they're side-by-side. I'm sure the houses are beautiful inside, but I always think, 'I do not want a house like that.'"
Carol said, "I associate big houses and rooms with family or there's something comforting or appealing. If you really want to be isolated, you wouldn't choose a big house with lots of rooms. You would choose a tent maybe in the middle of the desert or something."
"Maybe if you isolate yourself in a really big structure," Steve theorized, "you don't feel so small. You feel powerful and less alone." 
"I love seeing lone farmhouses when I'm driving along," Debbi gushed. "There's something very intriguing about them. I don't know how I'd really feel if I lived there. I'm such a people person," she snickered, "I'd probably open a bed and breakfast."
Carol commented, "I think these farmhouses that you were mentioning do have a hold on our national conscience. Everybody looks at a Hopper and says, 'Oh, yeah, look at that farmhouse.' Those places (for me anyway) are places to visit but only for a while. I'm not ready to give up city things. I want the best of both worlds."
"I love the desert's wide open spaces," Debbi offered. "When I first came here, I thought it was ugly. The thing that was brought home to me when we had that blackout period in August five years ago was that there would not be very many people here if there was no electricity. Not many people would choose to live here without AC. In August, I can't touch the steering wheel. You just feel like the sun is totally sucking everything out of you. I stay inside. It's kind of like winter back there." 
Carol disagreed, "Even though I hate the summer here, I like it better than the cold winter there. I remember how the cold would go through me back there, and I hated it. Interesting how you see a place and you know that it's just meant for you. That's exactly how I felt, like this is where I belong. It's almost like I had another life before I came here."
"You did have another life before here," my dad joked. "When I first came to Arizona, I was mesmerized. I said, 'I want to live there.' It took me ten years before I was able to do it. I still think people who move here are pioneers. I really do. I met a lot of people in my life, who think, 'I can't do that.' They're married, have a family, and kids are in school, and they're just not willing to move. I think to leave the familiar takes a little whatever. It takes something. In the 1880s, this was undeveloped. I don't know that I would have moved out here in 1880 had I been living with a family of five in Chicago. I can just say that, in the years I lived, it was a paradise for me to move to Arizona, the one place I wanted to be."
"Do you think Americans are emotionally isolated from each other?" I asked.
"Yeah," Carol answered. "In Japan, they're housing is at a premium, and they have a lot of people living in a very small space. How do they do that? I would get claustrophobia. We need so much space. I guess it is the way you're brought up, obviously, your culture. But some people flourish with a lot of people. Why do some people need more space? Want more space?"
"I say in answer to your question," my dad proclaimed, "look at the national reaction to September 11th, which has, in my mind, just dwindled."
"Exactly," Steve echoed.
"I think," Carol began, "we want to come to somebody's aid. If somebody needs help, we're there."
"But on a day-to-day basis," my dad finished her thought, "no. I'm not going to buy you a loaf of bread, but I ain't going to let you starve to death."
Steve said, "As time goes by, it [our society] becomes more isolated. We're less dependent on others for information and news. Everything gets handled electronically. I buy stuff online. At the grocery store, I go to the self-checkout. There's less small talk, less chit-chat, less knowing your neighbors because people move so frequently, too."
"All this is Freudian projection," my dad concluded. "Show ink blots and ask people what they see, and they're going to project their own reality."
"All the same," Carol undercut, "it's your own interpretation."
ASU's Nelson Fine Arts Center where the Hopper hung looked like a Mayan Temple. Across Mill Avenue from it, a series of small stucco homes had been adapted into businesses such as Internet start-ups, lawyers, and even a Dairy Queen, or into frat houses that looked like cheesy roadside motels.
To get into the museum, I had to descend a series of concrete stairs into a dim, below-ground courtyard supported concrete pillars. This protected the works of art from the harsh desert sun. The work here is one of Hopper's less known and less successful, so when I visited, the Hopper was in storage. I checked in at the front desk with a woman named Doris who was sixtyish, with a hunched back and crooked nose. She wore big, gold glasses and a light blue shirt with dark blue flowers printed on it. Her hair had red and silver highlights and straggled over her tiny, silver tortoise earrings.
To my question, she answered, "If you live here, then you're part of the community. You certainly can't be isolated unless you choose to. I’ve lived here on and off for three years."
"And you know a lot of people here?" I asked.
"No," she confessed, "I really don't because everyone is either too old or too young. I'm from Milwaukee. There's a lady, it's like her first year here as a professor, and she's from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. You always are going to meet someone. It's a small world."
"Are students integrated into the community? "
"I think the community is integrated into the students," she countered. "The college has a lot of influence on the community from a point of visitors, family, all of this. It would be a totally different city without the school. I would never think of going to an art museum. But now that I've been involved in this program, I certainly can understand why people do. It's a really nice, peaceful, restful activity."
Three women walked into the front desk and one inquired in a high-pitched voice, "Excuse me, where is the shop?"
"Right behind me," Doris huffed and rolled her eyes.
Tiffany, the woman who showed me the Hopper, had a small hawk-like nose, big green eyes, small red lips, and blond hair flaring out halfway down her back, where it ended in an even cut. Her arms emerged from a black ribbed sleeveless top she wore above a print skirt. On at least four of her eight fingers, she wore ornate gold rings with a different type of stone in each one.
"I was born and raised in Phoenix proper," she said. "My grandfather moved here from Chicago because of his asthma. 
At that time, it was all orange groves, and the road was a dirt road. It's congested now and maybe not as isolated as it used to be, although Americans are very isolated. Computers are making it worse."
I looked through the files while a docent worked at the next table. She had fluffed white hair and her glasses looked enormous on her shrunken, wrinkled face. She heard my question about Hopper and volunteered her opinions.
"I lived in New York my whole life," she answered. "Then Connecticut, then I came out here. I love Hopper. I love his colors, and I love his sense of solitude."
"Loneliness," Tiffany offered.
"No," the docent quietly re-asserted. "Solitude. His characters all seem to me like they're working through a problem, and he puts you in a place where you feel like you are in the painting. I think we all reach a point where we want to be in that place of solitude in our life."
The gray house that is the subject of this painting is a sprawling jumble of architectural forms, like in Pittsburgh’s Cape Cod Afternoon but without any color. The sky at upper right is dark gray, as if a storm were brewing, and the tree swirls in the wind. House by a Road was painted in 1940: the Depression at home and war rumbling abroad.
During its painting, Jo jotted, "E. painted little grey house. It's taking so long & isn't a bit like the find he made down Eastham back road [Terre Haute’s Route 6, Eastham]. No good specially until the sun went down then it took on a dignity, ghostliness of color; something crustaceous in quality. …the small trees at the sides became head & arms that reached out & swayed. E. isn't getting any of this & it isn't that he didn't see it. E. sais [sic] one can't often, if ever, get just what one wants, it always turns out to be something different."
A playful letter from one museum director to another said, "I will be glad to loan you the Hopper, which, by the way, I dislike intensely. Why in the hell are you doing a Hopper exposition? We had one … and I hope never to see another. Very seriously, a Hopper show could be significant if a catalog could document his work and life to indicate his strong anti-Semitic and leftist activity prior to World War II. I'm afraid that the younger generation is inclined to recognize Hopper as a fun-like satirist. Actually, he was a boiling rebel, perhaps, 'refolutionary' would be a more apt adjective. If you have time read Whitaker Chambers and his dealings with Hopper." 1
1I had trouble tracking these down, and found very little to support these claims when I did.
On the top floor was an outdoor sculpture garden, but again a concrete trellis protected the art from the sun. The ASU Art Museum earned a reputation for an excellent ceramics collection, 
as you might expect in an environment that bakes the earth. Otherwise, the museum displayed one of everything because it was as much a classroom as it was an exhibition hall. 
One wall in the American art wing had variations of the motif "House by a Road." Charles Sheeler's Barn Variation and Ernest Fiene’s Above the River, which shows a series of homes in a section that's above a river. William Gropper's Migration 
shows a family leaving their dust bowl house, and Ernest Leonard Blumenschein’s The Pass shows a house in a rocky, western mountainscape. Houses and house-owning are American obsessions and something that Tempe is very much all about.
I found in one gallery John, a broad-shouldered, muscle-bound student with brown eyes, sideburns, and hair moussed into a point. He wore a white T-shirt with a logo on the chest that said "Pricks." 
Around his neck was a thin brown string with a small brown oblong rock on it. John worked for a local magazine about the art scene in the Phoenix area.
"You know what?" John hedged when I asked about Tempe and Hopperesque isolation. "I have no idea; I haven't even seen it. I'm not aware of Hopper as much. Seems people in Tempe are more isolated now. Especially, obviously, with people coming in and out [to ASU], I think that it's a shallow relationship with a lot people. But with computers and so forth, I think the people feel less of a need to communicate with someone else."
I said, "Are the students isolated?"
John said, "I think it depends on who you talk to and where they are. Tempe doesn't know about what's going on in the Phoenix area as much as they could. But I think that goes for anybody who spends a lot of time in one area as opposed to another. You have a lot of commuter students, and, in that aspect, that helps bring in other areas. It's not as holed up as someplace like Gainesville, Florida, where the university is all there is."
Another student came in. She had curly red hair, big white teeth, and green eyes on a long, thin, freckled face. She wore a light red halter top, brown leather boots, and blue jeans.
"If you see someone on campus who is isolated," she said out of the side of her mouth, "you notice more because the campus tends to have groups and not isolated individuals. Because a college is supposed to be people constantly interacting. I think they kind of are isolated. But I live around the campus, so to me Tempe sort of is the college campus. The college is a community compared to the rest of the area, which I don't think really is."
Afterwards, I went to the Shop of Art across the street from ASU's campus. The man behind the counter was in his late forties. His short black hair was mussed up above glasses resting on a bulbous nose of oily reddish skin, and black hair covered his knuckles. He wore a red Hawaiian shirt with a flower print. He said he knew Hopper's paintings, so I asked if he thought people were as isolated in Tempe as in Hopper's paintings. After pursing his lips and considering it for a second, he stated, "I would say yes. It didn't used to be that way. I would know. Forty-three years [ago], we used to come down on our bikes downtown here, do a bunch of stuff together. Groups of kids would do that. You can't do that now. It's no longer a small town," he concluded before the phone rang, and I had to let the interview drop.
At a print and poster shop at Fourth and Mill, Nighthawks on the front door. Inside, Chop Suey 
was framed on the wall. "I would say yes," the owner, Matt, answered whether Tempe residents were isolated like people in Hopper's paintings. His stringy hair was parted in the middle and flopped on either side of his tanned, freckled face with delicately lashed watery blue eyes. He was clad in jean shorts, a green T-shirt, and short black socks in beat-up tennis shoes. "That's not unique to Tempe." As he spoke, he put together a cart on which to display more posters. "I think everybody in the United States is isolated. I think it has to do with how we plan our cities. This city, Phoenix, is a perfect example. Look at how sprawling it is. To think: in the '50s, it was a small, manageable city. Greed is part of the problem. It has to do with the industrial revolution. Now people work ten hours a day, so they don't have the energy to go down to their public square and meet each other. The quality of life has been on the decline for quite a long time.
"I was born and raised in Nyack, so I know Hopper's work well. We normally have about five or six Hoppers in our collection to choose from. [But] Last week was the art fair, and a lot were sold. The only one that is still available is Nighthawks, which does sell a lot to students. Well, a certain type of person will buy it. Most kids here at ASU are just imitating what they see on TV. They are not given any positive models or choices. They are the most insecure group of kids I have ever met."
I had noticed this, too. People's hands hung heavily alongside their bodies, like actors on stage not knowing what to do while someone else delivered their lines. Maybe they are just used to conserving energy in this desert climate. When I asked them to talk to me about the book, most were too suspicious to offer anything longer than a curt answer. Or maybe they couldn't articulate more than yes or no.
I mentioned to Matt that I had seen three sets of girls who were dressed identical to each other. 
"Oh, yeah," he said. "My girlfriend and I noticed that when we moved out here. We've seen guys like that, too. 
I've been here less than a year, but when my lease is up, me and my girlfriend are moving on to a different town. The north and east of the U.S., with their weather, are for those who find solace in thought. The South and West have such good weather that you don't need to think to find solace. So you don't think."
As the city's main drag, Mill Avenue, implies, there is a mill house by this road: The Hayden Flour Mill had been continuously in operation since 1874. Charles T. Hayden came here in the late 1860s and laid the foundations for Tempe. School had been held in the town's saloon until Hayden donated land on which an adobe schoolhouse was built. That became a teachers college of thirty-three students that grew into to today's Arizona State University, which enrolls more than fifty thousand. The town had also grown from one and a half square miles to forty. Tempe ballooned in the 1950s through 1980s with GI bill students, retirees, and hippies. Between 1964 and 1967, its population nearly doubled.
The town was once alongside a river, so it was settled for agriculture. Eventually, farm and housing development dried up the river. So now it's on a lake. After gulping up the river, the town voted to dam the dry riverbed and fill it with water to create Tempe Town Lake. As you could have guessed, they have trouble keeping the lake's water level up because it evaporates so quickly in the desert setting.
Another house by a road here was the Petersen House on Southern Avenue, the only two-story Victorian still standing in Tempe. It was built in 1892 by Niels Petersen, a Danish immigrant, as a wedding present for his second wife.
My stocky, fast-talking tour guide Tim had short, rumpled blond hair and wore shorts and a white Honeywell T-shirt. Tim said, "Back then [when this house was built], people came west to get rich. The government was giving away land. Before they built the dam, the river flowed year-around. It wasn't that hot or dry. There were a lot more of these houses down here. But they got bulldozed out because people needed room. The reason this house got saved actually is it passed down the line, and they left it to the Oddfellows. They gave it to the city of Tempe. I guess they figured better that than to bulldoze it. It's sort of a landmark now."
Tim told me that I should talk to his boss, Josh, who would know much more about Tempe. I expected an ornery, gray-haired buzzard. Instead, Joshua was about 30, with sad blue eyes and randy hair that flared out around the base of his neck. He wore a green Tempe City T-shirt, jeans, brown shoes, and a large silver wristwatch.
"Yeah," he laughed in answer to my question. "The way the houses and neighborhoods are built here always struck me as being very isolated. Their master plan was, 'wall it in.' 
And the focal point of the house is behind the house rather than the front."
Joshua related that the plat of homes right behind this house was put in on the Petersen's old farm and only had three entrances. The people there were so unhappy about living there that they tried to get everyone to agree to sell their homes and close down the neighborhood. But a couple of people didn't agree. So everyone was stuck in their houses by a road.
"I grew up in a small town in northern Idaho," Josh continued, "sort of a real typical All-American town: Moscow. [He pronounced it with a long O.] When I moved here, it made a big impression on me how everybody has a big wall around their house. I thought that was weird," he squinted. "I thought it was very, very weird. I think it's easy for people here to not know their neighbors, not know who lives around them."
"Tempe," Josh deplored, "was sort of a classic small town up until then. As you go further downtown, around ASU, the older part of town, you'll see small neighborhoods that make more sense to me. Other communities have all grown in the same way, and Tempe is now completely boxed in. 
There's other cities on all sides. It seems like the focus everywhere is now on the edges rather than on the core. The town keeps pushing further and further away. Further from a sense of community. It will be interesting to see how Tempe continues to grow now because there's no place to grow but up.
"They're master-planning the downtown area now to be an integrated living, working, and shopping space. They're trying to move back away from isolation and back to some more integrated, non-suburban way of living. It's so funny that this way of living that we used to have now they're selling back to the American public. 'You can have it, but for a half million dollars.'"
"Tempe is not for everybody," Josh concluded. "But it really appeals to me for some reason. I really like it here. But, yeah, there is a sense of isolation."
Ned was short and square-shouldered, with shaggy dark hair and a full beard. His brown eyes measured everything. We arranged to meet at his law office in the old yellow stucco Steinfeld mansion. 
"It was a nunnery for a period of time," he said of his workplace. "It was also a house of ill repute. Hopefully," he added with a sly smile, "those two didn't overlap."
"You probably saw some of the other homes in this area," he continued. "It's a beautiful place, but this neighborhood experiences a lot of crime. The train tracks are down at the end of the street, and they have to slow down to go through Tucson. It's the only big town around. A lot of hoboes and rail riders hop off at night."
We headed to a Tucson legend, the Mexican restaurant El Charro. The dark wood walls were adorned with Western memorabilia: old road signs, weathered wood, etc. Hip-hop music blared out of the sound system as we sat at a blond wood table and ate some of the best Mexican food I have ever had.
"I would say," Ned slowly answered my question of Tucson's Hopperesque isolation, "compared to some of the places I've seen, that people here that I interact with are not isolated. I think you've seen, just being here a couple of hours, that people tend to be social and friendly here. Maybe it's by virtue of being out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it's sort of the mentality that 'hey, we're all stuck together here in the desert.' Maybe that sort of cooperation and interaction is necessary to eke out a survival here. That might be a hangover from previous times. People in this area have a sort of pioneer psyche. I like hiking," he offered as evidence of the desert's influence, "and when I'm just out of town, I feel like I'm out in the middle of nowhere." 
"You have a background in psychology," I noted. "Do you think there is anything about American psychology in Hopper's paintings?"
"Well," Ned coughed, "I didn't study clinical psychology, and I'm not sure my background in psychology gives me any special perspective about whether Hopper captured some sort of essence of our American psychology. I think all people are basically on their own. Sometimes you find yourself in your life getting to a point when all the options run out. Because of the way that we immigrated to this country and the way that we moved through it (to the west), I think there was a sense of isolation here that was different from other place. We've always been a country that encouraged individuals being on the cutting edge and going out and pushing the frontier. It's always been a pride in that expansionism. We're a very mobile society. In Europe, family essentially stayed in the same area as far back as you can go. Especially nowadays, people are more mobile than ever. If you go somewhere else and you don't have that sort of family network, it can be more difficult. People coming here left community and family behind. When they did get here, they dispersed. Maybe you stayed east and your bother moved west. And your son went off to college and never came back. This is a big country: physically, a big country." 
I said, "You could be in D.C. and say, 'I'm going to California,' and according to the U.S. 'you're still under our jurisdiction.' But that trip is further than from Moscow to Barcelona. It should be some sort of culture shock, but instead you find the same McDonald's."
"Yeah," Ned agreed, "nowadays. No matter how much the country moves toward that sort of McDonald's society, with big box stores, and national chains taking over mom-and-pop places and eradicating some of the local color and flavor, a lot of places still seem to have their own feel. Despite the fact that we have the national news and all the same television programs and all this stuff that ought to be pointing us to a narrow bandwidth of experience, there seems to still be a lot of things that are unique to different parts of the country. People might say, 'we're having such-and-such for dinner.' And you're like 'what is that?' They can't believe you never heard of that. Because everybody there has had it. If you go anywhere in the country, there's Home Depot and McDonald's, and you have a feeling of familiarity. But if you dig underneath that, you'll find things that are unique to that area that are a part of that area's culture. It might be that the people who go to Applebee's three nights a week, still go two nights a week to LoDuca's--a mom-and-pop place that they like in addition to the chains." 
I pioneered out of downtown to the University of Arizona campus to see the Hopper painting here: The City, in which you look down onto a Second-Empire, French-style building fronting a public square. All the other building façades are flat tenements trailing away into the distance where looms a skyscraper. Jo noted, "over 100 windows...." The painting seems a battle between French and American architecture. The French arched windows are charming, but the endless square windows on the others imply that American buildings will win by sheer numbers.
A woman named Betsy displayed the painting for me in storage. She was matronly, with an elfish nose that made her look like a young girl, as did her high energy level and quick, bird-like movements. She had short hair and wore a blousey pastel dress along with white polished shoes.
"There really is a physical isolation in Tucson," she began. "We just moved. The neighborhood we were in was an established neighborhood, and we lived there for 10 years and knew very few neighbors. Nobody came out of their houses. Where we moved into was a townhome, which, in itself, is more intimate. Like of 120 homes, we probably know half the people. We may not know their names, but we see them at the park with the dogs, or they walk. I want to say Tucson could be like this [The City]. I don't think we are. We're less metro than Phoenix. We tend to go out and visit our neighbors."
Betsy told me about the man who donated the Hopper. "C. Leonard Pfeiffer was an alumnus and businessman who moved to Tucson and got a master's degree here. He had begun his bachelor's degree at Cornell before World War I interrupted, and by the time he went back after a 22-year break, his son, George, was a sophomore here while he was a senior.
"He wanted to create an art museum, and so he took a stamp collection that he had and sold it, and with the proceeds from the sale, bought artwork. It was right during World War II, which was a very conservative environment. And his collection reflects that sentiment. They concentrated on work by living American artists. And the Hopper was one of those gifts."
A newspaper article announcing the collection's 1943 preview at New York's Metropolitan Museum said, that making one of the first 12 purchases Edward Hopper's The City, "demonstrate[d] good judgment as well as Catholic taste."
My barista was a young female student, round-faced and tanned, who had a vertical silver dumbbell through her pierced eyebrow. She had short brown hair and wore the red short-sleeved shirt of her food-job uniform.
"I think this is a pretty tight community actually," she answered. "The university's kind of isolated from outside the university, but, within the university, everybody's pretty welcome and open and pretty tight."
I took my coffee and sat beside a kid with a calculus book, a Bobbie Fischer book, and a series of decks of cards spread out before him. He stared intently at the cards, rolled a die, re-arranged the cards, and wrote on a piece of paper. When I asked what he was doing, he responded with a pronounced Southern drawl, "I am inventing my own card game. I already invented a couple others." He explained to me an elaborate scheme of flipping cards based on the most recent roll of the die, but I got lost soon into the description.
To my question, the kid said, "The university brings all the scenes together, but people are confused as to whether or not to explore the city. I think the university has to get more involved. The university is trying to offer universal programs that incorporate all the classes. It's a way for people to break out of that isolation."
"What are you studying?" I laughed and pointed at the cards. "I would guess math."
"Theater arts, really," he deadpanned. "I moved to theater. At first, my major was physics."
"What are you going to ou do with this card game?" I asked.
"I could try to sell it to Vegas. I don't know how you could play this with money, though. This is just for fun," he concluded with another nervous laugh. "By yourself."
There was another museum in town besides U of A's: the Tucson Museum of Arts (TMA). Inside, it looked like a squared-off version of New York's Guggenheim Museum. A ramp slanted down along each wall, and galleries sprouted off each landing. 
Here, during my visit, was Hopper's Pretty Penny, as part of a traveling show of works from the Smith College collection. 
In front of the TMA stood an employee bearing a name tag that read "Jodi, Director of Member Services." She was pale-skinned, despite Tucson's annual 300 days of sunshine. She looked to be in her twenties and had dyed red hair, big green eyes, pearly white teeth, and bright red lips. Beefy arms stuck out from a lightweight chartreuse sweater buttoned to the top and thrown over a lightweight shirt embroidered with blue and green flowers.
She said she had just moved here from Indianapolis. I laughed, "They have two Hoppers there [in Indianapolis]."
"Oh that's a beautiful art museum," she gushed. "Their executive director became the executive director of the Tucson art museum."
"Did you follow him?" I asked.
"I did not," she emphasized. "But I think being a Hoosier may have helped me into my position," she laughed. "A lot of Midwesterners live here. You have that friendly, Midwestern hospitality. Then you mix that with the strong cultural base that Tucson has for the size. I mean, you're looking at really small, roughly 700,000, but you've got 13 performing arts groups here. You've got the University Art Museum and you've got the Tucson Museum of Arts. So people are out from their communities all the time. I don't think people in Tucson are as isolated as other parts of the country.
"I've lived in Chicago and Indianapolis, Louisville. I guess I felt an isolation in those cities. During the winter months, not seeing the sunshine from November to May, I think a depression sweeps over everything and leaves everything with a little bit of dust over it. 
And not that there is not a lot going on, but people are so into the people they already know that you don't see a lot of venturing beyond that. I was in Louisville, Kentucky. I did not really make one solid friend there. They go to grade school and high school and college in the same community, and they just don't really leave that.
"If you talk to almost any person in here, they didn't grow up here. I've had many friends who have already left. And then I still am in contact with some people that I met when I first moved here. There's a certain type of personality that moves to Tucson. They're here because they enjoy being out with other people. And they enjoy being with nature. You won't meet a nicer group of people in one place. People give to social services. They give to the arts. It's a very giving town and a very forgiving town."
Tucson was settled more than 12,000 years as an Indian village called Stook-zone, meaning "water at the foot of black mountain." The non-Spanish-sounding Hugo O'Conor established the Spanish Tucson Presidio, and settlers began arriving in 1776 to the town known locally as the Old Pueblo.
Now, the city (Tucson, not The City) had a smallish business center downtown, sending tendrils of housing developments deep into the furrows of the surrounding desert mountains. None of what passed for high-rises seemed tall enough to provide the dizzying perspective in Hopper's painting. The largest was about 20 stories. In Tucson, you're more likely to get vertigo by staring up the pole-like shaft of one of the ubiquitous 
saguaro cacti, whose blooms are Arizona's State Flower.
Downtown Tucson's architecture was a bizarre mix. A squat 1900s brick-fronted building jostled a 1960s office building sided in blue and brown glazed brick. Downtown streets were deserted, and the event center was for rent. Seemingly everywhere in town, I heard trains rumbling past or blowing their horns.
Like Jodi had said, the town was home to a large number of theaters. The Fox Theater sported a 
southwestern mosaic of glazed tile. The Spanish-style Temple of Music and Art housed the Alice Holsclaw Theatre and the Arizona Theater Company. The Teatro Carmen was on Cushing, where the Arizona Theatre Company in Tucson was presenting a play, "Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright."
Hopper might have used these as subjects. Or he might have chosen the Grill Café, which retained its old black-and-white sign that promised, "Open later than you think."
But perhaps the most Hopperesque place was the Hotel Congress at Fifth and Congress, perfectly preserved from the night in 1934 when a fire raged through the upper floors. Some of the guests so frantically begged firemen to save bags that were in their rooms that the firemen peeked inside the bags and found Tommy guns and cash. That's how some of Dillinger's gang came to be arrested in Tucson. True to the fire's era, the rooms have no air conditioning or televisions. (Hopper's friend Brian O'Doherty reported, "[Hopper] possessed a radio but no television.") 
Behind the counter squatted an old switchboard to call up to the rooms. Standing beside it ready to dispense cigarettes, candy, toiletries, or sundries stood a guy with shaggy hair that had random blonde highlights, either from the sun or a bottle. He wore an old white shirt with a thin red tie. He had a boy-next-door look, and his gracious attitude seemed tailor-made to be the clerk at an old-time, service-oriented hotel. "Dave," read his nametag.
"I saw his [the Hopper] retrospective at the Whitney," he began. "It was an overwhelming tour. He's an incredible painter. I have a copy of one: it's a bunch of people just sitting fully clothed in the sun."
"People in the Sun?" I asked. "He claimed that was Tucson."
"That's fantastic," he gushed. "Hopper to me I've never associated with the west. You see all the great old pictures in the Smithsonian and they're all eastern seaboard."
"You're a native of Tucson?" I queried.
"Tucsonian," Dave answered, "yes."
"Do you think people in Tucson are as isolated as the characters in Hoppers paintings?"
"Not any more. Although, if you notice, the town is isolated geographically. But it isn't isolated. Like any place you go to now, there's television and the Internet; 
everything is here. Frankly, I think it's such a homogenized world now. That being said, we're certainly aware of our surroundings. We are aware that there is miles and miles of desert between us and anyone else.
"Just living in the desert, to me, is still a Wild West analogy. Our isolation is keeping us together. We have our own tempo. There's nothing else really influencing us. There's a certain lifestyle that we've come to know and like and operate. It's slow. It has a certain vibe. Lot of people tend to like it. Great town. It's right, if you're self-motivated. Cheap rent, great Mexican food, Mexican women-all great things in my humble opinion. 
"I have no idea," he mused, "what brings a person into Tucson. Not that I don't think we have enough attractions. But I can travel around the country and find great things and certainly great places. I guess we are the quintessential western town. We're the largest city right outside of Tombstone if you're going to the Old West. We have the beautiful saguaro desert, unlike the northern deserts. So you get a lot of bang for the buck.
"Here [at the hotel], we get mostly artists, foreign travelers. That's usually our demographic. My job would be helped immensely if I knew Japanese and German. But it's very European. We don't have air conditioning. We don't have TV. Let's face it: it's not a Motel 6."
"Well, sir. We're closed. We've been without power since this morning." I only then noticed the lack of patrons and the darkness in the upstairs galleries. "The shop has an emergency generator that is keeping its lights running. Maybe that is why you didn’t notice." She smiled and nodded, "You can come back some other day."
I began babbling like an American caught in a foreign civil war, "I've come all the way from Chicago to study your Edward Hopper painting, and I'm only here today. Can I talk to the curator who I have been e-mailing?"
"She's not in today."
I slumped onto a lobby bench.
"Oh, dear," she frowned. "Let me think of something."
She pressed into service a security guard to take us up to the gallery with the painting, where they showed me the painting by flashlight. Wilmington was the thirty-ninth city I visited for the book, and I thought I had seen pretty much everything. But I'd never seen a Hopper by flashlight.
Only about two square inches of the painting could be illuminated at a time. The docent instinctively trained the beam on the woman's face at the painting's center then followed the contours of the woman as if the light beam were the eyes of an appreciative suitor. After all, the main character is a full-bodied, red-lipped strawberry blond in a tan hat and a gauzy white summer dress beneath which you can see her thighs. Hopper finished Summertime on May 8, just in time for his summertime move to Cape Cod.
The docent commented, "That is gorgeous. You see much more in it actually in the dark, shining a flashlight over several areas. The impression that you get when this is lit is a blue-and-white floor behind her; now it looks green and yellow. You can feel the heat off of the sidewalk and off of the building. You can see that there's some wind drawing the window in and her dress clinging to her, and you just know it's summertime on a hot day. You just wonder what she's thinking. Is she waiting for somebody or something? It's very dramatic. This is supposed to be his wife. I understand that even when she got older, he painted her as a youthful figure."
I said, "There's a lot of old architecture in Wilmington. I might see a thing like this: a young woman who buys retro clothes, vintage clothes."
"Or just coming out in her nightgown." she harrumphed.
To my question of Hopperesque isolation in Wilmington, she merely shrugged, "I think there are people that are isolated here as in everywhere, but I think basically they're not isolated here."
SAS had a Wilmington connection: it was started by the DuPonts. In 1791, several French families fled to Wilmington to escape a slave insurrection in Santo Domingo. One of them convinced his friend Eleuthére Irénée du Ponts de Nemours to settle here, where DuPont opened his black powder mill in 1802. DuPont grew to be the largest manufacturer of black powder throughout the nineteenth century, supplying it to the United States government in the War of 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish American War, and World War I. 
Before the DuPonts et al., Wilmington was founded by Swedes, some of the most successful colonists in the new world. When the men left for a year, they returned to find all the women and children still alive. Six years before William Penn was born, these Swedes negotiated for the land from the local Lenni Lanape, whose name meant "the original people." In Wilmington's harbor, you can tour a reproduction of the 139-foot 
Kalmar Nyckel, the ship that brought these settlers. Fort Christiana Park now stood where the ship's Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and German settlers landed along with Anthoni "the Black Swede," a freeman from the Caribbean. Here they built the first log cabins in America. The Dutch laid siege to Fort Christiana in 1655, and the Swedes surrendered without firing a shot after negotiating for twelve days. Perhaps this foreshadowed its settling by pacifist Quakers as part of William Penn's Pennsylvania Colony, whose lower three counties became what we know today as the state of Delaware. 
These counties are part of a peninsula called Delmarva, for the three states with parts of it: Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Delaware is thus on an isolated peninsula, like Hopper's Cape Cod.
The town was chartered by the Crown in 1739, but on June 15, 1776, Delaware declared its independence from England ahead of the other 12 colonies, and became the first state to ratify the Constitution. "The First State" is still its nickname and on their license plates. Wilmington became capital of the second-smallest state in area, about 1/108 the size of Texas, whose entire population is 750,000.
A sign I saw at the town limits read: "Wilmington: A place to be somebody."
Delaware is also home to most of the country's corporations due to the founding Quakers' liberal business laws. More than 300,000 corporations, including half of the Fortune 500, incorporate in Delaware, though they don't have to bother to relocate there. It further enticed the banking industry to relocate within its borders by offering tax breaks and rigging its laws governing how much interest a bank can charge. Eight of the ten largest credit-card firms in the country operate within Delaware. In the meantime, personal bankruptcy nationwide rose sevenfold.1
1An ad in a Wilmington newspaper said, "We all want our kids to be the same thing when they grow up: financially secure." Whatever happened to "happy"?
In 1698, children of the Kalmar Nyckel's emigrants built Old Swedes Church, the nation's oldest church building still standing as originally built and in regular use for worship. The modest building was heavy with mortar holding together various-sized stones in meticulous stone masonry work. After the nearby Battle of Brandywine in 1777 (the largest of the Revolutionary War), British soldiers were quartered in the church.
The man who showed me around Old Swede's church was tall enough to strain the pulpit (the oldest in the United States), which was built for a man who was six-foot-four. He had thinning, whitish gray hair, combed over to one side above a tan birthmark on his forehead. If he had taken off his thick glasses, he would have looked a little like a weightier Jimmy Stewart. He had retired here from being a music teacher in Southern California. "First, I went to Western New York, the Fingers Lake Region, and those people are isolated. I haven't been in Wilmington a lot, but I think that they're less isolated than there. In Southern California, where I used to live, everything is isolated: sprawling and car-centric."
I told him I was in a hurry to see the rest of Wilmington, so he gave me an abbreviated tour of the church, though I took the time to ring the bell in the front tower that had been added in 1892. He proudly displayed the church's organ--one of the few organs that does not have any swells to stop the sound; the player adds stops to increase or decrease the volume. "When this church was built," he explained, "Bach and Handel were both thirteen." He demonstrated how it worked by playing Johann Sebastian Bach's Tocatta & Fugue in D Minor, which was played by Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I sat enthralled through its entirety.
Delaware propaganda can be found at the Delaware History Museum, a cheerful Art Deco storefront in downtown Wilmington that looked like a Hopper subject. 
The man behind the counter was a tweedy academic man with a graying beard and literally a tweed coat. "It depends on what you mean by isolation," he began in answer to my question. "If you mean is Wilmington isolated from the rest of the general region, maybe to some degree. We've got to march to our own drummer. If you mean isolated from each other, no."
"Talking about Wilmingtonians," he continued, "who have lived here for years and gone to school here and so forth, everybody practically knows each other." Then he added ominously, "But there are a lot of people who have come in relatively recently, and they sometimes don't quite get it. The entire state of Delaware is almost like a small town. Everybody knows everybody. But, I would have to amend that to say maybe some of the African Americans are more into their own culture and they all know each other. And the Caucasians are probably more of a group too. It is kind of split along racial lines."
Due to the founding Quakers' anti-slavery beliefs, Wilmington was a key stop on the Underground Railroad, and Wilmington's 
August Quarterly is the oldest continuously celebrated African American Festival in the nation. On condition that they return at the end of the weekend, slaves were permitted to gather once a year to celebrate and worship free from discrimination. However, Delaware was also the last Union state to ban slavery, and it voted against the Amendments that freed the slaves. Only in the early 1900s did it abolish the pillory 
--the last state in the Union to do so. Delaware flogged its last convict in 1952.
At lunch hour, I found many of the local corporations' employees lolling on the pedestrian mall where Seventh Avenue at Market Street was closed off to car traffic. I interviewed a pair of African American> friends laughing in the promenade. He was rail thin with a floppy cap and gray goatee. She was large in her late thirties and wearing flamboyant clothes. When I asked if they knew the paintings of Edward Hopper, the man responded, "No, not really. But who we work for probably has pictures of that. We work at MBNA. And they have a collection."
When I followed by asking whether people in Wilmington were isolated from each other, they both answered, "No."
"Like on Peyton Place," he explained, "everybody's pretty close to knowing everybody. When I came down here in '57, a lot of people came down from Detroit following Chrysler. A lot of people. So there's a lot of people that know each other for years."
"What about African Americans versus the white community here. Is there any division there?"
"No," she dismissed the idea. "We all hang on the same wall together. We pretty much get along cause Wilmington is a big small city. Everybody knows your business. Delaware is real small. You go in one end and you're out of it at the other end in no time."
In addition to Swedes, Italians came to Wilmington, and Little Italy is one of Wilmington's remaining ethnic strongholds, brooded over by St. Anthony, a square-towered church on a hill whose festival attracts 40,000 visitors a night. 
Row houses' brick-fronted porches jut right up to the sidewalk. Metal or oilcloth awnings reached over all the porches, and the city's rolling hills allowed each row house's roof to be slightly set above the next. 
I interviewed the owner of a family legacy pasticceria whose face glowed with red burnished skin, brown eyes, blue mascara, and big eyelashes. Her blond hair was pulled back, and she wore simple black pants and black clogs dusted with tan flour. When I asked if people in Wilmington are isolated, she shrugged and said in a high pitch, "Maybe." Deciding to take the plunge, she continued, "I do think that Wilmington people are isolated. We do a lot behind closed doors. It's a small city. Maybe because everybody talks. I do think that people feel not free to be themselves."
"There are areas you don't want to go into," she warned me before I continued my wanderings, but assured me, "You can see the lines."
Wilmington is on a natural harbor that was once home to famous shipyards. One single smoke stack had been kept from the shipyards, and it now loomed over the cinderblock chain outlet stores of Shipyard Shops. Kitty-corner sat the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, a tin-sided building down in Riverfront Plaza. 
The girl working the counter had dirty blond hair, big blue eyes, and a pouty lower lip. Six hoop earrings lined the bottom of her earlobe, with a final ring through the top of her ear. She wore a black zip-up sweater with cords around the neck above a light blue skirt.
"I'm not that familiar with his work," she answered, "to make that statement [that people here are isolated like in Hopper's paintings]. It depends on the person of course. You are what you put out. I don't see Wilmington as an isolated place, but I've grown up here. That makes a big difference."
"Are you an artist?" I asked.
"No," she laughed. "I love art. I love looking at it. But as far as raw talent? Nah! My mother's an artist and I've tried doing what she does, but I just end up hurting myself somehow." She giggled again. "She's a jeweler, and I've done it and bled. Cut myself. Nah!" She shook her head.
"So you're a perfect example that art is painful," I joked.
"You have to bleed to be an artist," she agreed, chuckling. 
"You have to hurt yourself so many times before completing a work. You can only lose so much blood."
"There is an artist's colony up north," she offered. "All the houses have a lot of sculptures. It's just in a class by itself. They're their own city. Arden Town."
"Art in Town?" I misunderstood.
"Arden," she clarified, spelling, "
A-r-d-e-n. I don't know all the history to it. But it's a very, very old artists community. And it's so much fun. They have their own little theater. Like one of the oldest outdoor theaters in the country. They do Shakespeare every summer. I don't think enough people know about it."
Eugene was thin, with a drooping nose above a tiny close-trimmed mustache. He wore oval shades with tortoise shell rims, and his shirt collar was opened to show graying chest hair in which nested a gold chain. On his balding head, he wore a plastic jungle helmet. As he answered, he held his long fingers interlocked or pounded his palms on the wooden arms of his director chair.
"Why would we be isolated?" he responded to my question, "To put it the other way around, I would say if you're isolated, it's your fault. Right down here at the waterside is a very active place. Friday and Saturday nights you can't walk down here it's so crowded with people. The Navy community, which is the largest community here, takes care of its own. This is the largest natural harbor in the world."
"I've seen a lot of changes. I'm one of the few who grew up here. A lot of this area was all woods, just like so much of America. When I was a kid, the drive from Norfolk to Virginia Beach was just a little two-lane road, and you didn't arrive there in fifteen, twenty minutes. It was an all-day thing. I remember my mother making fried chicken and coleslaw and potato salad, putting it in a box with a checkered tablecloth, and we would drive down. And when you got to Virginia Beach, they had two big pavilions with picnic tables. You could go up there and put your basket of food down on the table, walk two blocks away to the water, swim for a couple of hours, and come back, and that table was yours. Nobody had taken it, nobody used it, and your food was all there. So that's a big change.
"My father came here in 1903. 1903, what was here in America? My father had a grocery store. Those were the days when you had a corner grocery that took care of you. You could get credit, that sort of thing. Then the supermarkets started coming along and took all the small men out of business.
"Then we moved to Ghent," he continued. "This was one of the big sections. However, in the fifties I would say, it went down dramatically: the white suburban exodus. Schools closed down. Problems with civil rights. At one time, you took your life in your hands if you would walk through it. And it has come back now. They have million-dollar homes there."
"Now let me ask a question, sir" he said, turning the tables. "You know the history about the museum? That was called the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, a very small little local place, very undistinguished. Walter Chrysler wanted to give his collection to Newport, Rhode Island. Newport, Rhode Island, said he had too many fakes. He was married to a Norfolk girl, Jean Outland. So he asked Norfolk if they wanted the collection, and they renamed the museum the Chrysler Museum. As a result of that, we probably have one of the nicest small museums in the country, certainly east of the Mississippi. We have the largest collection of Tiffany glass on public display anywhere in the country. Now my opinion is that it's true he had some fakes and had some that were not of quality. However, it's one thing if you take a half a million dollars and you go to a sculpture gallery and say, 'buy me some sculptures.' But he did it all himself. And you know if you do it yourself, you make a few mistakes. That's understandable. But what he achieved is miraculous. They have a bust of Christ done by Bernini, who designed the columns for St. Peter's. I got blessed there by the Pope on Easter Sunday, 1957. Most guys on the ship didn't know what an opportunity they had. When they would show up, the first thing they wanted was a bar and then a girl."
Stepping away from the harbor, I pounded the pavement of the Cannonball Trail, Norfolk's walk highlighting the city's history. The Native American Scicoaks who lived here were wiped out by Chief Powhatan's tribe from the west as a preventive measure because one of his advisors had prophesied that they would be destroyed by strangers from the east. Later, of course, the colonists came from the east to fulfill the vision.
In 1610, Hampton Roads was named to honor the Earl of Southampton, Treasurer of the Virginia Company in London. Fifty acres of land were bought in 1682 for "tenn pounds of tobasco and caske" and became the town of Norfolk. On New Year's Day, 1776, English ships opened fire on the town, burning many of the buildings to the ground. A British cannonball (the source of this trail's name) remains in the wall of St. Paul's Church, the only building spared by retreating Colonial troops who razed the town so that the British might not occupy it. In 1855, the steamer Ben Franklin arrived in Hampton Roads with Yellow Fever on board. About one-third of Norfolk's inhabitants died, and half the population fled. The history of Norfolk seems one of desertion and return, like a ship.
By 1894, its modern identity was sealed. The New York Towne Topics nominated Norfolk as the "wickedest city in the United States." The New York Voice seconded the nomination. The city had 240 liquor dealers, 81 brothels, and 35 gambling shops. World War II doubled Norfolk's population, and, in 1940, the U.S. Housing Authority administrator called a Norfolk hotel-apartment "the worst slum he had seen anywhere in the U.S." 
By 1998, it had been voted the South's #1 big city to live in by Money magazine. From 50 acres of land and a population of 1, Norfolk had grown to nearly 40,000 acres and a population of 225,700, a financial and insurance center. It was big enough to have an Arena Football League Team which was named (coincidentally enough) "The Nighthawks."
The street corner sculpture series here had the motif of mermaids, including one called "The Jewel of Norfolk." 
I ducked into Prince Books and Café in a nice old Hopperesque building. I asked my question of a female worker, fortyish, tanned, and wearing shorts, a black T-shirt, and chunk-heeled sandals.
"It is a tough call," she wavered about whether people in Norfolk were isolated. She talked slowly and formally, holding her hands together at her waist and nodding a lot, bouncing the brunette bangs above her green eyes ringed in dark eye shadow. "At night maybe not. But during the day, yes, like when you're in business mode. But at night when you're out and about, you're a little more into what's going on. I think of North Granby and Waterside, where it's a crowd going out and looking for fun, looking to meet people. Actually, in the past about year, they revitalized all the restaurants and homes and things like that. It's become not so desolate. Before, it was homeless or military tourists. Now you actually see people. Not just people, but people coming here to enjoy the area.
"We moved here from Fredericksburg," she explained. "I was getting married, my ex-husband was going to Old Dominion, and we had families from here. It's a good area. It's big without being too big. You've got places like the Chrysler and lots of good venues to see shows and places to go."
Then she frowned, "Between the ragged water's edge and the railroad tracks, it's hard to get anywhere without being cut off. In a way, just getting from one place to another, you're isolated in Norfolk."
I found out what she meant as I tried to navigate my way to the Chrysler Museum. The narrow streets were unevenly paved in slim red bricks, and I kept dead-ending into water.
An article titled "Edward Hopper, American Realist," asked rhetorically, "Did Hopper ever paint a child?" The answer would be "sort of." The Hopper here, 
New York Pavements, is notable for showing a nanny pushing a baby stroller, the only hint Hopper had of a baby.1,2 When Hopper posed for his friend Raphael Soyer, Soyer's wife brought in their one-year-old grandson. She said, "Say hello to Mr. Hopper," and Hopper jokingly replied, "He doesn't have to say it if he doesn't want to." Soyer wrote in his journal that there was "warmth and humor" in Hopper's gaze at the baby.
The perspective in New York Pavements is from above, as if the nanny were viewed from Hopper's top-floor New York studio. The sidewalk seems to tilt as if she's struggling uphill. Her red face rhymes with the pink of her hand and the blanket in the baby buggy. Her rich, royal blue outfit and headdress flap in the wind. She passes in front of a strongly rusticated gray slate apartment building with a four-pillared porch out front. At the base of the building, two street-level half windows of a garden apartment seem to spy on the scene.
Up walked a man whose balding head slung forward as if apologizing for his six-foot-three frame. The hair on the top of his head was shaved close, as was his beard, darkly outlining his skull. He wore oval glasses, a green collar-less shirt, jean shorts, a webbed leather belt, and sandals.
"I came here today just to see this painting," he answered, keeping his arms crossed over his chest. "If you asked me about anyone else, I wouldn't know a thing about it. I actually love his stuff. I've never seen this [Hopper painting] in a book or referred to. It's not one of his super famous; it's not New England Morning or New England Evening or whatever. Or certainly the one that you're wearing is pretty big. 
My partner always laughs at me. He whispers, 'his stuff is so lonely.' I don't know, there's something there. You get the feeling in his paintings that he accepts loneliness. It's not this tragic thing. It's sort of the way it is, or the way he sees the world. Although it's interesting when you read he claims, 'Well I wasn't really trying for that.' But it's so obvious. There's something sort of comforting in a weird way. Somebody told me once that the ones who like Hopper are melancholy, heady types. I'm not quite sure what to make of that because I actually like this stuff a lot."
When I asked about Hopper's relation to Norfolk, he hesitated. "That depends on what Norfolk you're talking about. This is the second most transient city in the United States, so a lot of people talk about there being a disjointed sense of community here. If you're from an old Norfolk family and you've lived here for 300 years (and those exist), they would say, 'There's a very strong rich sense of community here.' I've only been here seven years, and I feel I am integrated into the community. For this area, I'm almost considered local. So from my point I would say no, it's not. But I think a lot of people would say it is. Is that a nice vague answer for you?
"Norfolk," he continued, "is a generic city. You don't think of anything when you think of Norfolk. It is the most average place I've ever lived. My partner got a job here in '95. We came from the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota."
"Have you two had difficulties?" I wondered.
"Actually," he glissandoed, "I'm the graduate assistant of multicultural student services. We live in sort of 'the neighborhood.' And I work at the university involved with liberal politics, go to the art museum, belong to a reformed Jewish synagogue. I'm in a sort of liberal microcosm. All our friends know, and if they don't know, they wouldn't care anyway. Some people would say, 'oh, there aren't too many gay people here.' I mean, you know, Joe Average would not be tapped into it. But it's everywhere by now."
1In the files was a letter from a patron saying, "This figure is NOT a nun, as you say. It is an English nanny or child's nurse. I am quite old enough to remember such sights. ... At least one of my age bracket friends noticed your error independent of me."
2One psychology journal published an article that proposed that "Hopper used his art as a projection of his wish for reunion with the mother." Of New York Pavements, that author posited, "If nun = sister, the painting might represent … his older sister, Marion." Hopper thought psychological interpretations showed more about the interpreter's tendencies, and this is a classic example. The painting does not show a nun; it shows a British nanny.
The painting hung in a building that looked a little like the one in Hopper's painting. The Chrysler Museum was monolithic and gray, an Italianate-style structure facing the picturesque Hague Inlet of the Elizabeth River. From its huge atrium lobby with a skylight above it, huge sandstone stairs led up to the galleries.
The Chrysler grew from a female seminary dedicated to the support of art. The Museum set sail in 1971 when automobile heir and art collector Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. presented the city of Norfolk with his collection. John Russell in the New York Times wrote, "It would be difficult to spend time in the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va., and not come away convinced that the most underrated American art collector of the past 50 years and more was the late Walter P. Chrysler, Jr." He added, "Any museum in the world would kill for these [works]" and the museum was "one of the pleasantest places in the United States to while away the day.
"People thought of him [Chrysler] as an accumulator [but] [A]mong the paintings of Edward Hopper, for instance, he chose one that is this critic's all-time favorite. It is a metropolitan scene in which well-kept and heavily becolumned New York house fronts bear down upon the observer like so many emblems of respectability. But, like a gifted storyteller, Hopper leaves us to guess at the identity, and the purpose, of the nunlike nanny in her bight blue uniform who hurries along with an inhabited pram in the lower left corner. Is she late for afternoon tea? Or is this a kidnap attempt, with a co-conspirator around the corner?"
Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., also a theater producer (including The Strong Are Lonely, whose title could describe Hopper's paintings and characters), was born 1909 in Iowa, but grew up on a Long Island estate with a view of the Manhattan skyline characterized by the landmark building named for his father. The older Chrysler said about art, "Son, remember that fundamentally they and all things like them must belong to everyone, and the best of them will become public property in museums throughout the country." Chrysler Junior said, "Collecting has always been in my blood." While a 14-year-old at prep school, he purchased his first painting--a Renoir watercolor nude. A dorm master considered the piece lewd and destroyed it.
The woman from the bookstore had asked for my number and called me that night in my hotel room, as if she had something to tell me that she didn't want to say in public. She said that she lived in a somewhat successfully integrated neighborhood, but that the African American people behind her had trouble with the thought of her moving into her house. She said, "We live on one of the 'darker' streets in our neighborhood," and she said certain neighborhoods in Norfolk stay white or black because people will not put a "for sale" sign out, they'll just tell their friends, 'I'm thinking of selling my house.'" 
Charlie's restaurant was recommended to me as one of the few successfully integrated restaurants. It was in the first floor of an old house and looked like it might once have been a grocery store (maybe Eugene's father's). The 20-foot-tall room looked like it was built to be ringed with shelves of goods. An old rusting grill behind the counter had a stack of skillets on a shelf underneath it and a cook in front of it who wore a floppy white tennis hat. He fluffed my omelet artfully in an old skillet, making circles over the high flame. As he cooked, he talked to me over the broad beefy back of his gray T-shirt. "There's not a lot of segregation in this restaurant," he redirected my question about segregation in Norfolk. When he turned around, I saw delicate eyelashes like a giraffe's and nearly pitch black eyes on his big cherubic face. "Ten years ago it was a lot more, when I started as a cook here. Part of that was because it was just a couple of older white people who owned it, and they had erratic hours and nobody could count on anything. I showed up on my first day with the old owners at 7:00, and nobody was there, and nobody came for a long time, so I went home. Then I got a call at 11:00 from them saying, 'we're here.' Once the new woman bought it, everything improved. Now it's got regular hours, and both blacks and whites come in. All kinds of people come into this restaurant. Black doctors and lawyers will also come in and sit down and have a meal."
My experience when I was in there though was that most people came in, sat down, and stared straight ahead. One couple at a table did talk--to each other.
One place in Norfolk where both blacks and whites went was Doumar's, a drive-in restaurant worthy of being in a Hopper painting. Doumar's claims to have invented the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and to have made the first ice cream cone machine, which was still in use at Doumar's the day that I visited. It was an old, iron-grated, gas-fired system that made round thin waffles that were then wrapped around a cone-shaped dowel until they could hold a scoop of ice cream.
The young man working the machine, Randy, was red-cheeked, with pale skin, pale blue eyes, and a burr haircut. He wore a baseball cap, clear glasses with no rims, and the restaurant's uniform. He considered my question for a second, then stammered, "Yes. I would say yes; people feel isolated here in Norfolk. Part of the reason Norfolk is more isolated is you get people from the Navy here. It's so transient, you get people literally coming and going from all parts of the world. You have to be outgoing to be in the restaurant business and, the thing is, I am. But I like to have my own space when I'm at home. I'm more isolated when I'm with my family. I don't want my kids to get the idea you can just go up to anyone and say hello." He concurred when I said that the bay's many cities all bled together, yet each had an individual feel. "Out of all the cities in this Hampton Roads section of the United States, Norfolk is probably the place where you're most likely to find isolated people."
Wieland Schmied said, "It is interesting to compare [Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte's] Realm of Lights (1954)…. Hopper's picture seems more eerie because more real than Magritte's..."
Hopper himself actually spent some time in Richmond. In early 1938, he was set to be in charge of a jury for the Virginia Museum, but he took sick right before. Jo wrote a letter to the museum's director, Tom Colt, who later helped acquire a Hopper for Dayton, Ohio's museum. Colt later wrote, "…the [Virginia museum] officials extended an invitation to him to stay at a local home, and someone sent the invitation through the Rehn Gallery. Rehn called and said, 'For heaven's sake, invite Mrs. Hopper. If she doesn't go, he doesn't go.'" Nevertheless, Edward traveled without Jo. Colt, who had met Jo in New York, wrote to assure her that he and his wife, "stood between [Hopper] and the southern beauties."
A photo was taken of the jury, and Hopper claimed that he came out looking like a "a very gentle, harmless and much resigned old lady." In 1953, Hopper again served on a jury in Richmond. Richmond artists Jewett and Jean Campbell recalled that, at the museum party, "Edward was seated at a bench with Jo standing over him doing all the talking." Jo later wrote: "Life shared with E. H. has been a dull life, not withstanding Mexico, Richmond, the Corcoran & Carnegie...."
The museum was deserted during my visit, so I interviewed an African American museum guard about five-foot-nine, stocky, and good-natured. "You want to talk isolated," he deferentially ticked his head, "talk to her." He pointed to his co-worker, a short, wiry woman with starched black hair and a lengthy jawbone. "She sits in her car until it's time to work, then she punches in, then she punches out and drives away. She don't talk to nobody while she's working either."
When I tried to include her in my interview, she put up her hand and walked away.
"People here are not isolated," the man continued unabated. "We got too many get-togethers. People here will be driving down the street and beep at you if you're on your porch, even if they don't know you. They're isolated, the north from the south, because the James River runs between them. People from the south who go up to school in the north side, their bus has to take the highway. I live in the north side. North side of Richmond is the most crowded part of Richmond. It's too packed in. You can't be isolated. So you're from where?" he asked me.
"Chicago."
"It's easier to be alone there," he nodded.
In the artsy Carytown section, I geared up for sightseeing with a latte at a sidewalk café and interviewed one of its workers. Evan was tall and in his early 20s, with a serene face, blond hair pulled back behind bushy sideburns, and a close-cropped beard, and his sandals completed the effect of making him look like a taller, beefier Jesus.
"They're definitely segregated," he answered my question, his blue eyes catching mine. "Coming from a Bible Belt town in Tennessee, I thought it'd be better because this is a little further north. But it's in fact a little worse."
He sidled up and puffed his cigarette. I felt a parable coming on. "Ever heard of Oregon Hill? That's where I moved when I first moved here. It is predominately white; rebel flags in windows everywhere. But the other side is Hollywood Cemetery, where some of the dead presidents are buried and Confederate 'heroes,' so to speak: beautiful gravestones, beautiful cemetery. 
Then on the other side of that, there's a barbed wire fence, and then there's this dirty, worn-down cemetery where there are a lot of black families buried. Then on the other side of that is Randolph, which is a predominately black community. That's sort of symbolic of the town. The past people are separating the present people.
"Everyone knows it's still a problem, and there's people still fighting to have their rebel flags in their cars or in their workplace. A lot of people who had their family members in the Civil War want to remember their families, but they're possibly not doing it in the most positive way and the most beneficial way to everyone around them. On the other side of that, there's people arguing, 'this is ridiculous. Move on, son.' I mean, are you familiar with Monument Avenue?"
"I read that the Arthur Ashe monument caused a furor here," I told him.
"Yeah," he snorted. "It's the only one facing north. Even though that's kind of a saving grace of that street, it's still very obvious that it was an official thing to put up this monument. To make the street look a little better, less white."
"People are not isolated because they're in communities, but the communities themselves are isolated from one another. In the Bible Belt where I came from, everybody's nice to each other. But even in that, there's a sense of artificiality. For me, the isolation I find in Richmond was the isolation I found in any big city, and I've been to London, Chicago, New York, Baltimore. The larger a city gets to be, the more isolated. It's just as isolated as any place is."
There was "no place so strong, so pleasant and delightful in Virginia, for which we called it Nun-such." So wrote Captain John Smith about the site he chose in 1609 when he established the first English settlement near the falls of the James River. This was to grow into Richmond, named for Richmond-upon-Thames, now a borough of London. This Richmond became the capitol of Virginia and was once capitol of the Confederacy.
The White House of the Confederacy (now part of the Confederacy Museum) was a four-story, Greek-style house that now housed the largest collection of Confederate artifacts in the world, such as Robert E. Lee's sword, the Confederacy's constitution, and Stonewall Jackson's stuffed and mounted horse. 
Confederate General Robert E. Lee came to this house (war-time home of his family) after surrendering. One of the most famous photographs of Lee was made here on the back porch after portraitist (and one of Hopper's favorite photographers) Matthew Brady persuaded the general to pose. 
The photo looks like it might have been taken at dusk, and the sun was certainly setting on that chapter of American history.
St. Paul's Episcopal Church here 
was called the "Cathedral of the Confederacy" because of Lee's attendance (when in town) and Jefferson Davis's attendance regularly. While in Sunday services here, Davis received word that Lee's army had broken and that the Confederate government should evacuate. Ironically, 90 years earlier, Patrick Henry had delivered his "liberty or death" speech at nearby St. John's Episcopal Church. 
Richmond was still the state capitol, home to the oldest legislative body in the U.S. and the second-oldest in the Western Hemisphere. As I admired the Greek temple Capitol building designed by Jefferson, cars rolled by whose sides read "Virginia Capitol Police: established 1618." A Houdon statue in the Lobby is considered the most valuable piece of marble sculpture in the country, 
and is the city of Richmond's symbol and the main feature of the seal of the Confederate States of America because Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy beneath it. From niches in the encircling wall of the lobby glare down busts of the seven Virginia-born Presidents of the United States--more than any other state.
The neighboring governor's mansion could be in a Hopper painting. 
So could the building across from the capitol--a magnificent gray Gothic Richardsonian Romanesque court building that reminded me of Hopper's House by the Railroad. 
The "Stonewall" Jackson statue was the first, funded by "English admirers." 
And perhaps the most unusual was to Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill, who was buried under his statue in the middle of a busy intersection. 
Confederate memorials ended in 1929. In 1995 the Arthur Ashe statue was approved, to much controversy. 
The only major monument in the city of Richmond dedicated to someone actually born here was over in the traditionally African American Jackson Ward district, where Bojangles (Bill Robinson) was born and donated a traffic light to help children cross the intersection. Also in Jackson Ward was the home of Maggie Walker, African American business woman and financier who developed a successful black-controlled bank, insurance company, and newspaper.
A non-Confederate memorial NOT on Monument Avenue was to adopted local son Edgar Allan Poe. The Edgar Allan Poe Museum was housed in the oldest surviving structure in Richmond. 
Poe's parents, both actors, married in Richmond while on tour here in 1806 and while again in Richmond in 1811, Elizabeth Arnold Poe died. Edgar was adopted by the local Allan family, and Poe adopted their middle name as his. Poe always considered himself a Virginian, and he returned here to edit the Southern Literary Messenger and to court Elmira Shelton. Richmond was also home to Jane Craig, his muse 'Helen.'
The Richmond Theatre where Edgar Poe's mother had performed burned to the ground on December 26, 1811, only eighteen days after her death. The fire took the lives of many Richmonders including the Governor of Virginia. On that same spot was put up as a memorial to the people who died in that fire: the Monumental Church, which was exactly that, looming up over the streetscape from a rise on a hill. 
It must have been intimidating to young Edgar Allan Poe when he went there. Perhaps it influenced his stories knowing that many of the victims' remains were buried in a vault under the church. Poe's American Gothic stories seem the literary equivalent of Hopper's images. One could easily imagine the house in Hopper's House by the Railroad 
as containing a man buried alive in a vault (as in Poe's "Cask of Amontillado") or (as in Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher") crumbling to the ground with its morbidly self-involved inhabitants trapped inside, another type of "dusk" falling on a house.
At a neighborhood coffee shop, I interviewed the young, wan waif behind the counter whose hair hung in fine blonde dreadlocks. Even on this summer day, she wore a heavy red shirt buttoned halfway down above her black skirt. She had a very slight nose, which might be why she kept pushing her glasses back up it.
"Well I'm not the person to ask," she responded, accompanying her speech with gangly arm movements. "I'm paranoid. I don't trust anybody, and I isolate myself. I think that the different groups of people are isolated from the other groups. Like the 'west enders' as opposed to the 'Jackson Ward.' I think Richmond really wants to have its boroughs, like New York City. But the boroughs here are only like five blocks. But as far as being isolated as individually from other people, I don't know. I think now in the U.S. [after 9/11], a lot of people have been brought together. I think it's short-lived. People don't vote, and they should.
"Personally," she continued, "I think we're really screwed up as a country compared to Europe. Or maybe we're not as screwed up, but people are trying to keep us that way. They try to fragment us, it seems. Who cares if you've got five piercings and green hair? It really doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't make an impact any more; some people are trying to tell you that you should be aghast at that or whatever. I don't know if it's the government or the older generation is trying to keep us in that isolated space when everyone's like, 'I don't care.'"
On the bench out front I spied a wiry, light-skinned African American guy, with close-cropped hair and tiny ears. As he answered in a high, nasal voice, he shrugged a lot, tenting his black T-shirt adorned with the logo of a band call the Rah Bras, with the letters playfully topped with Slavic accent marks. 
"I don't think so," he answered, looking askance, "It's just a small town. Hard to be isolated." After a pause, he asked himself, "What else can I say? It is definitely segregated. People hold on to their southern Civil War identity down here. There's more blacks than whites. And the city leadership and city council are all black. But when the Arthur Ashe monument went up in the early 1990s, there was still a lot of hullabaloo from the white people. They thought of Monument Row as a monument to the Confederacy.
"People in their neighborhoods hang together. It's such a small city that they should be able to all know each other, but they don't. Maybe we should be more together, but you could say that about any city. It's a difficult question. You have any other questions?"
"You have anything else to say?" I asked.
"It's a small town, that's all," he laughed, but then mumbled, "It's too small for me."
Over at Puddin' Head Wilson's coffeeshop, I interviewed a woman who had bobbed, frizzy brown hair just turning gray. She had brown eyes behind glasses, and a sharp nose and crooked teeth. She wore an open-collared, half-buttoned shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes.
"People here," she confided, "probably would not say they're isolated, but if you came from outside, you would feel isolated. I've hired three people from elsewhere. One from Chicago, one from Philadelphia, one from Pennsylvania. And they all moved on because they couldn't penetrate the local social scene. It's very cliquey here. The one from New York she said, 'What's the deal here? You're the only person that'll hire me.' Everybody else is really kind of closed off. I don't get it either. It's like they're guarding something, but I'm not sure what it's protecting them from. I wouldn't describe it as isolated, but provincial, very provincial. We're not in the twenty-first century. That's cause they're looking more back than forward."
Richmond had long been a train hub; one of the first railroad lines in America was constructed here. The locals claim it's the only place in the world where three railroads intersect at one place, a place they call "Triple Train."
Main Street Station was a train station Hopper would love. They built the highway around it, because it was so cherished of a landmark. 
} 
The nearby River City Diner had a façade of slick black marble and polished steel, and a menu that included fried apples. 
My waitress said it was a common breakfast food in these parts. She had reddish brown hair unevenly cut short above her shoulders, and blue eyes peered out from black-rimmed glasses that were chipped.
She pointed to my backpack and papers spread out across the table. "Are you visiting?" she asked. I told her why I was in town.
"The one with windows, right?" she double-checked about the Hopper. "At the Virginia Museum?" Then she answered, "I lived in other southern cities, and they are less isolated here than the other cities I've lived in. It's a really nice town. I'm sure people say that about everywhere. Everybody in their hometown is somewhat isolated, because they tend not to leave their hometowns."
"Do I think I'm as isolated as other people?" she asked herself abruptly. "No, I don't think I'm isolated at all. I don't believe in it. Because I'm happy. I have people around me all the time. Friends. I just recently moved here. I was modeling in New York City."
"You chose to come back?" I gagged. "That's a pretty glamorous gig."
She said, "It's always glamorous if it happens in New York--until you work with a photographer. I need a place to start again. I like it here. It's comfortable. That doesn't necessarily mean I don't feel isolated. Richmond is kind of in between. We're not a big city: we're really not. But we're not really a small town either. A lot of people think bad about Southerners. But I've lived there with them, ya know. And people here are not isolated. Does that help?"
A Mrs. Scott lived there, but it's not called Mrs. Scott's House.
Mrs. Scott's House in Lynchburg is a modest, beige, stucco-sided house with a quaint dormer over the front door. 
It was built in 1887 for a founder of an early Lynchburg telephone company. It is actually called just "The Scott House."
Mrs. Scott's House in Lynchburg is a couple of gray, barn-like buildings connected by a one-story hallway and topped by a red roof with two chimneys. It is actually called Mrs. Scott's House, and it exists only in Edward Hopper's painting here, 
which hung at Randolph Macon Women's College (RMWC) in a museum called the Maier, which locals pronounced like a female horse.
In the painting, bright yellow-green grass angles up a valley between hills topped in salmony seagrass and sunlit buildings. At back, beneath a watery blue sky, white clouds hug the dusky horizon above a set of darkening hills. Jo wrote of the painting, "We feel Mrs. Scott's House is among the 15 or so finest canvases of E. H. ... Late Sept., tall grasses changing colors--pink in light. Hills roll for dear life! … Glorious! ... No weeds grow on Cape Cod, everything that comes out of the ground is beautiful. The house, kept in good repair, is old, it is quite humble, as is the best of this Cape (to our point of view) & doubtlessly built by the people who fished or sailed on its seas, but it is no proud Captain's house."
I asked my question of the only other person in front of the painting, an African American woman with crisp, graying black hair combed straight back over double loop earrings. Gold glasses rested on her flat nose in front of intense brown eyes. Out of her black shirt extended graceful arms dotted with liver spots and small pock marks.
"To me," she answered, "I don't see isolation in these pictures. To me, I see privacy. Because to be isolated, I don't think they would be near a beach. Because peoples gonna come to a beach."
About people in Lynchburg, she ventured, "I don't think they're isolated from one another. We all just a sweet little retirement place. Especially since all our big job places like GE and Lynchburg Foundry, all of those is gone. We don't have a lot of active social life, but we do socialize. It's just not a formal thing; you have gatherings. I've got all my family to my house. And my family and me will go to maybe a friend's house, coworker's house, church member's house.
"The only social thing that we have is the clubs, though the Piedmont Club just closed. But we still have the Oakwood Country Club." 
"Are they country clubs or social clubs?" I clarified.
"Private country clubs. They have, during the year, what they call a Night of Elegance. They sell tickets, and you can get all dressed up. We have what they call Friday Cheers. 
Every Friday night, you go to the community market downtown and you socialize down there. We have what we call the Bateaux [a boat race] is getting ready to start out at Bateaux Landing."
"What about the African American and white communities?" I asked.
"As a whole, we do pretty good together," she said. "We work together, we dine together. The students do pretty good. Its, you know, a little biased. As a matter of fact, my grandson played with the City of Lynchburg Little League, and it's two teams. That has always been segregated. But we live with that. We got our team, and we always beat them. It's bad, but not as bad as it could be. 
"I," she continued, "as a fact do not see color, but that's the way my mom raised me. My uncle worked on the neighboring farm. I grew up with white kids. I didn't know they were white. They didn't know I was black. I didn't know that they were rich. They didn't know that I was poor, you know. And so that's the way I grew up.
"My children was raised not to see color. Like I said, I do love people. But I was always a child of God. I'm not quoting 'what would Jesus do?' I hate that statement. But as the Bible teaches, you're supposed to love your neighbors. And if you don't love yourself, we know you don't love your neighbor, and if you don't love your neighbor then you don't love yourself. So you're back to love.
"Most peoples know if you genuine. Most peoples know that you got love in your heart. And if you ain't got it, they're not going to mess with you. And my momma always taught us: 'I don't care how much money you have. If you've got good manners, that will get you further then anything in the world. You treat people the way they treat you.' And so this is why I got so much mouth, because if you talk to me I'm going to talk back to you. You see, you shouldn't have asked me."
"No," I blurted, "I should have. I definitely should have."
"The only isolation that I can really see," she reconsidered, "is in the churches. Each group has its own church. The churches are starting to intermingle now, and you might have maybe three or four families in a white church of maybe three or four hundred families. But it comes down to that: race. You know we haven't broke through the religious barrier yet. We haven't faced the fact that, if we all die and go to heaven, which one of us is going to leave if the other is there?"
The Maier was a small museum and nearly deserted, so the statuesque woman behind the front reception desk listening to our conversation stepped forward when she heard my question about blacks and whites. Her long face was haloed by dozens of fine dreadlocks.
"My husband is white," she informed me and primly clasped her hands in front of modest, full-length white blouse. "We don't have any problems. My in-laws are from up North. They're from the Tiffanys of New York. They treat me fine. And in Lynchburg, as we move around, should anyone have a problem, they don't face us with it. We don't hear a lot of remarks. I was raised Baptist, and my husband was raised Baptist. Actually, there are two or three churches that are inter-denominational, blacks and whites attend. We attend those churches. Because the children, they're all blacks and whites." 
The National Gallery of Art constructed the Maier in 1952 to store its most valuable works in case of national emergency. I assumed that there was a bunker in the hill upon which it sat. One thing that I found in its vaults were the handwritten letters to the Maier from Jo Hopper. They were written on odd-colored pumpkin and green paper--faded to even odder colors. Given Ed and Jo's frugality, these might have been the cheapest in the stationery store--or even paper they scavenged for free. Jo wrote the museum, "That foreground of tall grass would wring the heart of anyone who feels strongly about this Indian part of the Cape." Added in tiny script at the bottom of the page was, "Quite on my own I add - that picture surely is destined to outlive much of the dense fog of ignorance + arrogance that has ["come"] to gain ground in our day. You will do well to guard a relic of the spiritual, yet unobtrusive whose value belongs to time + history." On a separate line, she added, "You have a responsibility." And on another separate line for even further emphasis, she added, "And do not change frames."
In another letter in the files, a Lynchburg woman described her run-in with Edward. "On one of my trips to Boston years ago I attended a Hopper exhibit at the Boston Museum. I do not remember the year. [It was probably 1950.] When I stopped in front of the painting Mrs. Scott's House, I found a man had pulled up a seat and was intently studying the painting. In typical Southern fashion I volunteered that Mrs. Scott's House was a favorite of mine from the collection at a college where I lived. The man replied, 'it is a favorite of mine too. I am Edward Hopper.'" 
Randolph-Macon Women's College (RMWC) was founded in 1891, when Randolph-Macon College in nearby Ashland refused to admit women. RMWC's most famous alumna might be Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth Pearl S. Buck. She wrote, "We were very proud of our College. We still exulted when I was there in the knowledge that we were being taught what men were taught... We came out ready to use our heads and accustomed to work. I have always been glad of that." However, as a relic of her era, she is billed in school publications as "Mrs. Richard J. Walsh" (still better than her given name of Pearl Sydenstricker, with which she graduated in 1914).
RMWC's total enrollment was a mere 721. Fewer than 1.5% of females attend women's colleges, but one-third of the female board members of Fortune 1000 companies, and one-fifth of the women serving in the U.S. Congress, are graduates of women's colleges. The 2002 Princeton Review Guide ranked RMWC 20th for "Beautiful Campus." The complex of 18 NeoGothic or Georgian Colonial buildings on 100 acres of lawns and groves overlooks the James River and commands a distant view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Covered walkways dubbed "trolleys" connect the buildings.
I stopped for some lunch at the café nearest the Maier. The place was full, but this worked in my favor, as I had to share a table and therefore had a handy interview subject. I sat beside a large, pleasant-looking young man, weighing about 250 pounds. He had red-skinned jowls, a scab on his upper lip, and short blond hair flipped up into a tiny curl in front. He wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt with three fancy pens in the pocket. 
He set aside his Washington Post and smiled through small lips as he began answering my question by explaining that he moved here because his wife got a job at a local hospital.
"People here are definitely isolated," he affirmed. "In a socioeconomic way, where you know how much money people have. People will even refer to what zip code they live in here. 'Oh, you live in oh-three.' They feel like they know something about you that way. My wife really likes it here. She thinks everybody is open and they'll talk to you in the store for a long time (which they will)," he conceded. "But I'm more cynical. I think they're just more polite. But it's all like external. Well, there's southern hospitality here; they'll invite you in for a glass of iced tea. When we bought life insurance, it was from a neighbor's friend. That is how things are done here. Everybody here knows one another. Their families are related. They live near each other. They went to school together. People don't go out to dinner here. They entertain in their homes. That's not always a good thing.
"Hopper's isolation is associated with big towns, but I think that small towns are getting more isolated as well. It used to be that a small town like Lynchburg would be a lot more friendly, but now," he shook his head, "everybody stays to themselves."
In the bookstore next to the café, I asked the woman behind the information desk for a request she had never heard before: a recommendation who to interview. "Well, you could interview me," she said, sounding slightly offended. "I live here."
She had bronzed, weathered skin and close-cropped dark hair highlighted with blonde curls, atop which rested her glasses. Her knee-length white dress was dotted with watermelon colors (black, red, and green).
"I've lived here for 32 years," she barreled on. "I don't think it's isolated. There are a lot of people here networking and agencies that are responsible for different people. I'm not religious, but there are a lot of religious organizations in town that look after people and try to get their attention. When I moved here, I was really put off by everyone grabbing at me. I mean, that's the first thing people asked us when we moved to town: our church. And I said, 'Hold on there, cowboy. It's nice to meet you, but keep your hands off me.' Anyway, it's just interesting. I had never been in the South before for one thing. I wasn't used to small towns. Of course, we have a very big influence of the Christian right. Now, after Jerry Falwell, it has grown. He was not here when we moved here. There are several factions, and the one which we adhere to is we are not," she said laughing, "fans of Jerry Falwell. A lot of people are against him."
"If you are looking for RMWC students," she raised an eyebrow, "that lady working at the coffee shop just graduated last year." She pointed to a girl wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Book Shoppe insignia: book pages in the form of a coffee cup with a wisp of yellow steam rising from the cup. Her hair was tucked under a green kerchief, and her nose looked like it had been broken.
"I think I did a report on the Hopper painting for a Spanish class," the recent grad began, "and I think I wrote about the isolation. Students only know the town if they rent an apartment in it. All my time in school was spent on campus or here at the local strip of businesses. I'm just getting to know the city. I had this job, and my girlfriend's graduating next year. So I thought I'd stay for a year."
"It seems," she went on, "like people [RMWC students] don't realize about the community that exists. People always make fun of it. Everyone has something that they don't like in the city. And most people don't like the city without really exploring it. It happens wherever you are. People will find something to complain about."
Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and bordered by the James River, this city of 65,000 was founded in 1757 when 17-year-old Quaker John Lynch established a ferry here. Lynch later renounced his Quaker membership in order to fight in the Revolutionary War. The city's early days were spent making millionaires of those who mined the local hills, and, by 1850, Lynchburg had the second highest per capita income of any city in the U.S.
During the Civil War, Lynchburg was a Confederate transport hub. It was successfully defended in June 1864 but surrendered in April 1865 while serving as the capital of Virginia for the few days between the fall of Richmond and the fall of the Confederacy. (A local book shop had a section titled, "War For Southern Independence.")
Afterwards, Lynchburg became an important tobacco market. (Lynch's renunciation of Quaker religion might have made him rich because Quakers could not own slaves, and tobacco growers needed slaves to work this labor-intensive crop.) In 1882, local James A. Bonsack revolutionized the tobacco industry by inventing a cigarette-making machine. By 1886, more than 30 million pounds of tobacco were marketed from Lynchburg. 
Other local industries included the world's largest tannin extract plant, cotton, silk, and hosiery mills. In 1889, local pharmacist Charles Brown Fleet invented Fleet's Chap-Stick lip balm and the local company later developed the Fleet Enema and the first disposable douche. 
RMWC was out on the edge of town, in a section called Boonsboro, where still stood gargantuan old houses like Hopper painted. It was one of several such areas in town, and each constituted a historic district with a name ending in "hill," lending the town its nickname "City of Seven Hills." The hills isolated each neighborhood just as the house in Hopper's painting here sits on a hill that seems to float (isolated) between the hill in the foreground and the hill in the background.
I started walking the cobbled side streets that traipse up and down the steep streets of downtown Lynchburg. Lynchburg was set out on a grid, but the many steep hills threw any regularity catterwhumpus. 
A sign on 12th Street right downtown said "watch for falling rocks." Downtown was virtually deserted. In a family-run jeweler, a clerk absentmindedly tapped her fingers on the display case. Slum sections turned up unexpectedly around the corner from treelined avenues.
Around town, signs announced what the woman at the museum had told me: that the Bateaux Festival was going on. Before canals and railroads, tobacco was transported from here down to Richmond on fleets of bateaux, exceptionally flat boats designed for the James River’s low waters. 
It took three husky slaves to propel the boat with long iron-shod poles and a large oar as rudder--six days down river and ten days up. The eight-day bateaux festival (called the River of Time) features authentic replicas and costumed crews poling from Lynchburg to Richmond, camping each night along the way. J. Canaday, in his article Edward Hopper: American Realist, noted that while in Paris Hopper liked to paint "bateaux-mouches, which still plied the Seine as a form of public transportation instead of serving as tourist sight-seeing boats as they now do."
Lynchburg was (as everybody I interviewed mentioned) notorious for being home to Jerry Falwell's headquarters and his Liberty University (LU). Down the hill from it, I found one of its graduates, the owner of the Drowsy Poet café. She had a long thin neck and short, copper-colored hair. Her fresh, freckled face held big brown eyes and a wry smile.
"Me and my husband moved here from West Virginia. I wanted a master's. We went to Liberty, but I like to tell people that I did most of the work in West Virginia. Me and my husband went to Drowsy Poet as students. We moved away to see where we would move after school. Then the owners called and asked if we wanted to buy it. So we did."
When I asked if people here were isolated, she jumped to answer, "Oh yes. In my café, I have seen that. If one person sits in the café, it draws a crowd. But if it stays empty, it stays empty. There are definitely seats you sit in if you want to be seen and approached, and seats you sit in if you don't want to be approached. The one you chose by the window, this is one you would be in if you don't want to be approached. I see people sit in here at the table you're at and look outside at people. People like to sit in that nook and watch everyone else, and they think no one can see them. They think, 'I'm invisible.' Nobody's invisible."
Minneapolis was closer to my home in Chicago than most of the cities in this book. But it was one of the last I got to visit. Early on in the project, I had asked about seeing their Hopper, but they said that it was in storage and a viewing could not be arranged. I asked again a bit later and was told a second time that I couldn't see it. When I called a third time, they said it was set to leave in two weeks to go on tour for a year and a half and that I had better come see it quickly.
When I arrived, I was again made to wait a long time, so I struck up a conversation with a young museum worker who said he was also an art student. He wore a white Oxford shirt with the collar open over his blue vest. Wiry black hairs sprouted from the bottom of his acne-pitted face. His breath smelled of smoke and mint. When I asked him about how Hopper might relate to isolation in Minneapolis, he asked in return, "You've heard the phrase 'Minnesota nice,' right?
"'Minnesota Nice'" he explained, "is, if someone asks you for an ashtray at a café, you’ll be like, 'please, yes, go ahead, take it, no problem.' You're not using it, and the person asked politely. But as they walk away, you'll both be thinking, 'Asshole.' I don't know where that comes from, maybe the weather. But I equate the solitude of Hopper's characters with quiet and strength: independence. They are strong enough to be on their own."
Finally, I was shown upstairs to see the painting itself by Joe King, who was fresh-faced, round-shouldered, buoyant, and balding. I resisted the tempting opening line, "You must be joking." [Joe King, get it?] Instead, I asked if he thought people here were isolated. "Absolutely not," he barked. It seemed like I had unknowingly offended him: Minnesota nice. "A lot of people come here from other places in the Midwest. It's like a magnet." He seemed a little put off by my question and by having to show me the painting. 
Office at Night shows a man at a desk studying a piece of paper, while across the room a woman in a tight blue dress stands at a filing cabinet with her body unnaturally turned so that you can see both her breasts and her buttocks, which are disproportionately large compared to the rest of her body. Many critics see in it a scene of sexual tension. If the typewriter bottom-left is on her desk (assuming she would be the one to do the typing), then she has moved across the room and is closer to him, whether she intended to get close to him or not. Easily overlooked is a piece of paper on the floor next to his desk. Will she bend over to pick it up?
Jo suggested other titles for the painting: "Confidentially Yours" and "Room 1005." She described it as, "'Shirley' in blue dress, white collar, flesh stockings, black pumps & black hair & plenty of lipstick."
Edward handwrote a letter to the Walker. "The picture was probably first suggested by many rides on the 'L' trains in New York City after dark and glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind. My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air with the office furniture which has a very definite meaning for me. …. Any more than this, the picture will have to tell, but I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended."
Hopper's Office at Night was shown in the Walker's 1948 "purchase exhibition," "New Paintings to Know and Buy," meant to inspire the public to buy art from well-known living painters. The show, in fact, sold only eight paintings--all to the Walker. Hopper's Office at Night was one, though only two of three voters recommended the purchase.
John put his children to sleep, and, in order not to wake them, we stepped into the next room, an office at night.
"Minnesotans," John began, "are some of the most insular people I've met in my time. Friendly, but insular. When we moved here, I wasn't meeting anybody, wasn't making any friends. It's harder than a lot of other cities. Minnesotans don't bond. They don't need to bond. Like three out of four were born here. They have family here and their neighborhood friends, so they don't need to get to know anybody more."
"They don't go anywhere," he concluded. "They don't know anything else, so they think this is the best that there is."
The next morning I started my day with a good dose of coffee and Minnesota Nice. I went to the Mill City Café, a local artists' commune, in the neighborhood called Northeast (pronounced "Nordeast" by the locals). A former industrial area that was traditionally home to blue-collar Slavs, Nordeast recently had an influx of art studios and galleries.
Inside, tall, narrow, mullioned windows let light onto a warping wooden floor worn smooth beneath a ceiling held up by large timber beams. The owner behind the counter handed a cup of coffee to a goateed young man ahead of me who started to reach in his pocket. The owner mimed taking money from him and opened the cash register and threw in the imaginary dollar bills, saying theatrically, "Thank you."
I sat at a table with Aaron, a tall, stringy young man who had short wavy hair and green eyes. He wore glasses, a ragged sweater, and tan corduroys with fraying cuffs.
To my question, he answered succinctly, "No."
"Okay, thank you, that's it," I joked.
"Well," he tried again, "those kids at the café [the characters in Nighthawks] aren't isolated. They don't seem like they are. A few of them are talking to each other. The bartender and the one guy may have had a conversation. But you come around here, everyone talks to each other, in Northeast Minneapolis that is. When I walk down the street, I say ‘hi’ to people; I had a great conversation with three great people on my one-block walk here."
"People you didn't know?" I asked.
"Well," he ahemmed, "people I kinda know but really don't know. Maybe we are isolated in that way. I don't really know who I'm talking to. But I don't really know you. So I don't know if that means we're isolated or not. Well, in a way we are feeling more isolated, like when it comes to computers. A lot of people work from their home. Basically, we're preoccupied but at the same time we're much more interactive with computers."
"Before I came," I told him, "I had an image that Minneapolis would be isolated because of the clichéd Scandinavian coldness."
"Oh, rumors," Aaron airily joked, "rumors, you know. Nobody's isolated here at the café. But superficial relationships are wide, not deep. We crave a deeper connection. It's why people couple or want to have a certain clique. If we didn't feel isolated in the first place, we wouldn't crave it."
When I left the café, a man had his car door opened against mine. "Can I get into my car?" I asked.
"Would have been easier if you didn't park so close to mine," he growled.
I got confused. "Oh, was yours here when I parked?"
"No, I just got here," he said. "But that doesn't make a difference, does it."
I stopped next at Blackey's Danish Bakery, a Nordeast institution since 1908. The woman behind the counter was named Michelle. She was maybe five-foot-three-inches, with dark eyes, freckled skin, and a mole on her right cheek. The strap of her red apron criss-crossed over a black T shirt. I asked her my question, and she said, "No." I waited for more, but that single word was all that was forthcoming. "I have to explain my answer?!" she asked indignantly. Maybe she thought I was just taking a poll. "I don't know," she repeated. "I just know what they aren't like.
"I guess," she yielded, "that [isolated] would be the word. Not the word I would come up with. Northeast is really it's own little community. I was born and raised Northeast. It's a nice place. You probably passed Edison High back there? Everybody in Northeast went there. And everybody in Northeast has worked at Blackey's at one point or another. Any stranger stands out. When I bring friends to my bar in Northeast, everybody stares at them. They're like, 'Who's that?' because they know everybody from this neighborhood so well. My boyfriend lives in St. Paul, and he hates to drive over here to visit me. I hate to drive over to visit him. We each think that the other's town has a weird way of doing their streets. 
"I live in the suburb Crystal right now, but I'm always hanging out around here. My mom still lives around here. A lot of people have moved to like South Minneapolis. Central [the main drag through Nordeast] has changed an awful lot. There was never any Mexican stores. Now, a lot of different nationalities are moving in. The new people don't seem to join in the neighborhood. Which, that's okay, too. But there was a time when I was a teenager, right across the river there were a lot of blacks. They would never go here, never. And now they're everywhere."
If I did find an office at night in Minneapolis, it would probably be the office of a miller, like Pillsbury or Gold Medal Flour. Minneapolis, at the edge of the Plains' wheat fields and with the Mississippi River to power mills, became the flour milling capital of the world, and earned the nickname Mill City. Because of its milling and food processing background, Minnesota was the birthplace of American icons Cream of Wheat, Wheaties, Bisquick, Green Giant, and the bundt pan. The well-known company 3M got that name as a shortened version of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing.
Minnea-polis means "city of Minnehaha," a Native American princess immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Song of Hiawatha" and associated with Minnehaha Falls--a place that local kids beg to be taken and a symbol of the city. The name means "laughing waters." 
If the couple in Office at Night wanted to share a romantic meal (maybe after work), they might head for Basil's on Nicollet Mall, a 12-block pedestrian mall downtown. That's where Mary Tyler Moore ate. You can find it by the Bronze statue of Mary throwing her hat in the air like at the end of the show's intro. The hostess said that they constantly get requests for "Mary's" table, which is exactly in the middle of the balcony and labeled with a bronze plaque.
It was not yet noon and the temperature was not quite in the 60s, but the outdoor restaurants in Nicolette Mall were filled with Minnesotans out to enjoy the "nice" weather. I interviewed two women at a sidewalk cafe. One was fortyish. The other was old enough to be her mother and probably was her mother. The younger one said, "A lot of people who move here might feel that way [isolated]."
"I don't think so," the mother objected. "I think that most people who move here are happy here."
"If you move here with a family," the daughter clarified, "it's fine. But if you're single, it's more difficult. It is a cliquey kind of town."
"Is this a hard-working city?" I asked, "Would people be in their offices at night?"
"No," the mother said, "it's a cultural city. They'd be out at a show of some sort."
The city’s "other" art museum was the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA). In one of its small scattered galleries, I found a squat little man with a graying goatee and bushy black eyebrows. He wore tri-focal-lensed glasses, creased gray slacks, a crisp white shirt, and a tie with no suit coat. His crooked front teeth stuck out like a rabbit's. Two young women approached, and he answered their questions about a painting in a way that I knew he was their art teacher. So I asked him about Hopper.
"Well," he hesitated, "there's some question about if he was actually painting isolation and alienation of modern people. I think that he was actually just painting light at different times of day. And the most interesting kind of light is early in the morning or late in the evening. If you're trying to get a dramatic lighting early in the morning, there's not people around then. I think if he was alive and you could grab him and talk to him... Well, he didn't say much, so it's hard to know. His wife was the talker for the family. She was like a rocket; she was like a mosquito going around in the room.
"I think people look at his everyday deserted streets of America or people sitting at a diner or people looking out a window, and they think that he's making some kind of social commentary about the alienation of modern man and so on. I think people, when you hear their comments, they're talking more about themselves than they're talking about what's in the painting. That's the good thing about art: that interpretation. You know, people look at it from their own psychological makeup, and cultural background and expectations, state of health. All of that stuff influences what you see. I just think that the art historians and people looking at that art are projecting some of their feelings."
"People who write in books about Edward Hopper," he noted, "may be wrong, too. Education, of course, is about synthesizing everybody's view so you come to a kind of a consensus. But we learn through that; the critics and commentators have often been wrong. We know that, but still why do we accept everything they say?
"I have a friend who does Raku sculptures. 
It's a very iffy kind of thing. You're at the mercy of the smoking and the rapid cooling, and the crackling. And he says that two out of three just don't work. So behind his house he had dug a pit. And over the years, he's been discarding these clunkers into this pit. Then he moved recently, and he covered this pit. Well, you could imagine two thousand years from now some anthropologist or archaeologist would dig this up and go, 'Oh my God. It was a ceremonial center, and they made offerings here.' 
"Minnesota," he continued, "is more isolated. I mean, it being in the interior of the country. The people obviously have a different perspective than people who live on the coast who run into and are connected with and see lots of influences from other parts of the world. By the time it gets filtered into the Midwest, I think people in the Midwest have a different slant of things."
"Probably," he mused, "Minnesota has a better chance of that [looking like a Hopper painting] because there is the time of day where there's no one on the street. In the Midwest where they have smaller communities and small towns, five-thirty in the morning, you're the only one on the street. If you lived in Los Angeles: four in the morning, there's a hundred thousand other people with you on the freeway. When I had moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles, I felt like I was going into another planet. In the days when I moved there, in Minnesota there weren't any stores open on Sunday. Sunday was a forbidden kind of thing. And the day I arrived there, I went to a grocery store that was open on Sunday, and they sold liquor. There was a woman in a bikini buying a quart of Scotch and a watermelon, and she had no shoes on. I was just aghast. And of course she was about eighty. In a bikini! I couldn't have been any more surprised if she was purple with green hair and antennae growing out of her head. There is a difference from Minnesota."
There's even an "other other" museum here. The University of Minnesota Weisman Art Museum was designed by noted architect Frank Gehry and thus nicknamed "MinneaGuggenheim" after his most famous design: Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum. The bending silver building looked like he gave a child a series of tin pie plates and asked him to put together a building of the future.
The Museum was set on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi beside a two-tiered bridge, painted University of Minnesota Gopher maroon with yellow "M"s. I visited just a couple months after the closing of a show the Weisman organized about vaudeville that included Hopper's Two on the Aisle and Sheridan Theater. 
Now on exhibit was "Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway." The aural complement to Hopper's visuals.
At the front desk, below a huge Warhol portrait of Weisman himself, 
sat a jowly young man with a beard coming in in patches, wearing the museum uniform: a black T-shirt with a red silhouette of the Weisman building. He had shoulder-length hair, thick on the side, so that his hair looked as dumpy as his body, and the way he rested his arms on the table in front of him made him look even frumpier.
"I guess I don't feel that way," he answered. "My experience of the city has been it's a very vibrant and changing community. It's got a lot of diversity, and there's a lot of action. And I guess I view a lot more interaction between Hopper's characters, so I don't view us as less isolated. Maybe it's just that I haven't had the experience of being alone with a lot of very lonely nights as much. I'm around more during the day, but it doesn't seem to me that Minneapolis people have the cold distraughtness of Hopper's characters." 
"I'm an art history major, and I think Hopper's a brilliant painter. I think he's one of the best painters before 1950 in America. His figures and their expressions express solemn-ness brilliantly. There's just this quality about his characters that their isolation within the city really speaks more than most of the American painters that were working at that time."
I accosted another student looking at the art whose short blond hair was pulled back and held down by a white macramé tiara. She had blue eyes, tiny ears, a bump on the bridge of her nose, and straight white teeth. "People in Minneapolis," she answered, soft-spoken, "are isolated, but that is a measure of protection against perceived danger. I grew up on a sheep farm, 
I hope some day to return. In the country people say hello to each other when they walk past. Here, we just go," and she made blinders with her hands beside her eyes. 
"I think it's sort of a measure of protection, though, maybe from being overwhelmed? Cause in the country it's easy to said 'Hi' to the ten people. Here, there's hundreds of thousands of them. And you never know what people are gonna do, either. There's more danger, I guess. More danger perceived."
Minneapolis was known for coffee shops, so I headed off to a local fave. Bob's Java Hut still had tables out front, despite the fifty-degree weather. Sprawled at one was a tall, lanky man about 50, wearing a brown leather beret and green corduroys. His face looked like one you would see in a Dutch Masters painting. He had yellowing teeth, high cheek bones, and sad brown eyes with a cigarette-ash mark right above the brow that I wanted to brush away. His black sweatshirt bore a large ornate dragon, and around his waist nestled a fanny pack with a Chinese symbol on it. 
When I asked him if it was okay to ask him some questions about Minneapolis for a book I was writing, he stared evenly at me, blew smoke, and croaked, "No names, right?" 
He talked in fits and starts.
"Well," he thought, "I would probably say a yes and a no. For the most part, no. In Minnesota, the whole upper-Midwest, it's easy for people to join groups: sports, cultural, religious, whatever. In that way, they're not isolated. But they are isolated, in that the groups are isolated.
"In some senses, people are very isolated in how deeply they are aligned or committed to any one particular group, and whether they really know what they are committed to--other than living this nice little upper-middle-class lifestyle free from economic worries, you know? It'll be interesting in the next year to find out how that changes. Many things since 9/11 have played for and against that. And it's going to be very interesting now to see what's going to happen with respect to Iraq in the next year and the economy and everything else that's going on; how these things are going to break us and pull us again into something else.
"I spent twelve-and-a-half years as a tour guide in China. I always end up back in Minneapolis. I've been here pretty much continuously since 1967. Minneapolis is a hell of a cultural node. We have more repertory theater seats than New York, and we have a better music and art scene than Chicago. It's hard to leave it for that reason. But it also has a lot of cliqueyness. Most natives stay in the metropolitan area. I would throw out a figure of anywhere from ten to fifteen percent that would be attracted to Chicago and New York and larger urban areas with an East Coast-type of mentality.
"There's still a lot of people," he went on, "that believe, or try to believe it, that Minneapolis and St. Paul are really 'big small towns.' The wave of immigration, population growth, overpopulation in the urban areas, the huge blow-up of the outer ring of suburbs and everything has changed that dramatically. 
But a lot of people are not aware of it. The kids, teenagers now, early twenties; they don't see it at all. This is a large city to them."
The typewriter in Office at Night has been the subject of a surprising amount of scrutiny, and many are used here in Minneapolis, which has a reputation as a writers' city. The Loft was a legendary gathering place for them,
and I popped into Ruminator Bookstore there and bought as a memento a book of poems by Mark Strand, who also wrote the brilliant Hopper. As I was paying, I interviewed the stocky woman behind the counter. Dark hair spilled out from the bun it had been pulled into atop her head above blue eyes. She had a big red nose, and her two front teeth had chiseled out of them an upside-down "V."
"I guess," she hedged, "I would qualify it with I don't really know. Do you mean isolated from each other or more just sort of interior? Because I think that there may be some of that here because of weather. And so you can have a sort of heavy inner-life. But I don't necessarily think that they're isolated. There's this stereotype about Minnesota says the opposite, which is like they're the most over-friendly nice people in America. So I would tend towards that being more true than isolated. But I think that also these are different times. It's changed [since 9/11]; there's more of a sense of community now. I guess that you do see people who live very isolated lives. I drive past the White Castle on my street, and it's like a Hopper painting. You know, it's like an old man at every table.
"There is a community of writers," she put forth, "that are very social, that are very connected. But there is also many writers who work in total isolation because they can't become a part of that community. Because, as welcoming as that community tries to be, there is a certain type of writer, type of writing, type of interaction and personality, that a community attracts. And if you fall outside of that community, you'll still feel isolated. And some of the better creative minds, I think, are part of that outsider contingent. But it's always hard to get to know who they are because the money and the grants and the coverage and the publishing and everything goes to the known writers. I find that a little tiring. I think that some of the better creative work actually happens in isolation."
or The Modern Café. 
I chose the generically named The Diner. 
By the back door as I entered I spied a tile painted with a scene like Nighthawks, titled "The All-Night Diner." Inside, red Naugahyde stools on tin stands fronted the bar, and booths with wooden backs lined the walls. All the customers were lone men--smoking, bearded, bald, and wearing oil-stained sweatshirts, jackets, and hats. The older waitress, whose teenage granddaughter worked beside her, said she didn't think people in Minneapolis, were isolated from each other. "I can't tell you why I think that, but I just do." That was all I could cajole out of any of the nice people in there.
One of Minneapolis's many theaters that the guy at Bob's had mentioned was in a bowling alley. Actually, several Hopper subjects co-existed at Bryant-Lake Bowl: behind the chic diner/bar was an eight-lane bowling alley with a little theater off to one side. 
This was a local institution. But, like several places touted as "local hangouts," it was more "local" than I cared for. When I entered, it was like a scene from a comedy where a stranger enters and the noise stops and all the locals turn critical gazes on the out-of-towner. Maybe the music didn't really stop when I entered, but every face did turn toward me. The only person who would talk to me was soliciting me to come in and see a comedy improv show. The show was titled 
"Send Help," and that's how I felt after trying to interview at such impenetrable in-crowd places.
At another local spot, folks were a little friendlier. But that could have been because they wanted my vote. A political fund-raiser was being held at Lee's Liquor Lounge by a Napoleonic, boyish, man with a thick beard and hair that made him look like an Irish leprechaun. 
He was running for soil and water supervisor.
Lee's Liquor Lounge had Naugahyde stools, yellowing foam ceiling tiles, yellow canned lighting, a huge Vikings flag on the wall, and a niche filled with Elvis memorabilia. 
One of the women working the candidate's table was Abby, an urban studies major and Hopper fan. "I love Hopper," she roared, and then named and described several of his paintings. She wore a brown leather jacket over a shirt of a soft material swirled with mauve and lime. She had a round face, brown eyes, and brown hair swirled around her head with an extra curl at the base of her neck as if she had not cut it in a long time. "I also love Tom Waits, and there's a definite connection between their two arts.
"In the winter," Abby downed her drink and shrieked, "downtown Minneapolis is a Hopper painting. Minneapolis has the largest skyway system in the U.S. and is really known for it. You can live, eat, work and shop without going outside."
I mentioned that Des Moines claimed to have the largest, and she said, "Well, Minneapolis is really known for it." 
I was eager to visit the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices to get the bumps on my head read in the neighborhood of St. Anthony Main (also called St. Anthony Falls). I also read that there were unbelievable "curing" devices and a real fun owner who had been on David Letterman and other talk shows. But when I went to the new address, the building was locked. I went to three restaurants nearby asking direction. No one knew where the museum was. I renamed it the Museum of Questionable Location.
At one bar, I finally was told that it was no longer in business. Maybe as a consolation to myself for the fruitless search, I asked the waitress for an interview.
"As long as it won't take really long," she rolled her eyes.
She was, like everyone I met here, willing enough to be interviewed. But because of "Minnesota nice," I couldn't help but worry as I left if they weren't thinking, "Asshole."
"If you have to ask," said the former mayor, "it's probably illegal here." The city's handout for new residents, Do's and Don'ts, was subtitled "Mostly Don'ts." All Hopper subjects are outlawed: no theaters, hotels, or apartments, no industry, and no nighttime business hours so no Nighthawks.
The prohibitions against everything might be a legacy of the wealthy founders. The town was originally a Gabrielino Indian village that became part of a Spanish mission eventually included in a land grant that became the ranch of J. de Barth Shorb. In 1903, the Shorb Estate was purchased by Edward Huntington, nephew of one of the Central Pacific railway's "Big Four" owners, Collis Huntington. Edward took his $12 million inheritance from Collis and moved to Los Angeles to develop train lines that brought suburban sprawl to the region. In 1913, Huntington and his two neighbors with huge ranches, D.B. Wilson and George S. Patton Sr. (yes, THAT George S. Patton), incorporated as the city of San Marino.
It was Shorb who had named his ranch "San Marino," after his grandfather's plantation in Maryland, which in turn had been named for Italy's Republic of San Marino, a similarly isolated town. A fourth-century Dalmatian stone-cutter named Marino fled his home during a Turkish invasion and took refuge on Monte Titano along the Adriatic Sea where the local Monastery canonized him as San Marino. 
I had called the San Marino (California) Historical Society assuming that one of the reclusive residents would be running it and I could get at least one interview. Paul, the man who answered, said that the historical society was history: defunct. Perhaps it had been outlawed. After I explained that I was there to write about San Marino, he offered to give me a personal tour of San Marino.
Paul lived in a white two-story house with dark wood clapboard siding and a pool out back. I parked on the street in front, worried that I was somehow breaking one of the town's many laws. I noticed that he kept his cars in the garage--as required. But Paul appeared in the front door and assured me I was OK.
Formerly the town's mayor, he was an energetic barrel-chested older man with apple cheeks and eyes like a faithful dog. He wore blue laceless shoes, tan khakis, a half-buttoned shirt, and a white baseball cap with the San Marino Titans football logo on it.
He invited me into a wood-lined den with floral wallpaper, and then down into the low-ceilinged basement, where World War II posters adorned the wooden walls. Pointing to one that invoked a racist stereotype, 
Paul said, "Nobody paid attention to that back then. This basement has seen a lot of history. We held city meetings here." He held his hands up by his shoulders as if surrendering. "If these walls could talk," he said.
"That continued the tradition of holding meetings in the basement, because the first mayor, Patton, held them in his basement. We're strong on traditions around here. We're making history by staying the same," he joshed and raised his eyebrows.
"Did you have another job besides mayor?" I asked.
"I have a family engineering business," he explained, "that my son is now president of. But I help. I'm still on the board. My dad was MIT; he got a job to build the first Southern Cal Edison Steam Plant in 1920 out here in California. So he was sent out to do that, and he got married. And I was born out here in Long Beach in '28. And then in 1930, the crash hit, the Depression, and he lost his job. We still have a letter saying, 'Dear Charlie, we wish we had the train fare to ship you back here to Boston, but we can't; we haven't got any money.' So he started his own business, which we still have. There wasn't anything else to do except to start your own company. It turned out to be a good thing. San Marino was a good place to live. People liked to live here so they could ride the street car into Los Angeles. It was the era of one-car families. And the wife of the family could walk to these areas on Huntington Drive (it was always a business district) and get all the goods they needed."
Paul pulled out of a file cabinet a series of articles hailing San Marino as "the strictest city in the country." "Churches," he crowed, "were illegal 'til 1940. Whatever it is, it's not legal. We had a German newspaper come over about a year ago to talk to us 'cause they say, 'We've heard that you folks are stricter than we are in Germany. Nobody's stricter than we are in Germany.'" 
"Then, when this Kathy Fiscus thing hit fifty years (three or four years ago it was fifty years afterwards), I got calls from South Africa, Czechoslovakia, London, reminding us it was fifty years, and this is where it happened. Her mother, who's still alive, and her sister were here. The field where it happened is right down the street. It's the upper field of the high school. I'll show you."
He told me about the resident who brought the world to San Marino as he drove me out to the high school where a plaque read, "a little girl who brought the world together--for a moment."
"That's where she fell into a hundred-foot abandoned water well: dropped down, three years old, just playing. For two days, they worked to get her out. Every fire department and everything in the whole area was involved. In the meantime, television had got a hold of it. It became known all over the country on television; the first television news story really ever. And Stan Chambers, he's one of our long-time TV announcers, he got famous for it. They drew a parallel shaft, and got her out, but she had died. The family physician said she had probably died within two hours of falling in the well."
"Kathy's father David was up in Sacramento pushing to get a bill passed that all abandoned water wells would have to be capped. He had no idea that one of his own wells was sitting here uncapped. That was his well [she fell in]. And, nobody, nobody could believe the irony in that."
He turned to the main high school building. "They have a thousand kids at this high school."
"In a town of 13,000?" I flinched.
"Well," Paul explained, "a lot of people move here just because of the schools. San Marino public schools are subsidized by the residents. Lately, with all the Chinese kids here (we're about 40 percent Chinese, but they're good people), they don't grow very big, so that cuts our football numbers in half. They don't play football. And they don't play baseball, strangely enough."
Turning to the pool, he chuckled, "We have the only el-shaped swimming pool of any high school in the state. Perhaps any high school anywhere. So all of the other schools say, 'Hey, San Marino has an advantage; they've got a screwball pool, and we can't figure it out.' The swimming pool is el-shaped because there was no other place to put it except around this old adobe. 
This belonged to an Englishman the Mexicans all called Miguel Blanco. We call him Michael White."
He drove me to Lacy Park, named not for lacey trees but for resident Mrs. Lacy, who was niece of Arthur Sullivan (of "Gilbert and"), and whose brother Frederick was a Hollywood director who used San Marino as a filming location for the Tarzan series. The park stood where once Wilson's Lake had attracted settlers. A city Web site said that San Marino currently held no surface water. Maybe it was illegal.
Paul pointed to a chain-link baseball backstop. "That baseball field and the kids' playground here were so hotly contested," he chuckled, "you'd think we were asking to put in a brothel." We pulled up to the Old Mill, the only horizontal mill in California. The building had been redone in original style, using tarred and fired logs plus oxblood paint. A very old photo on the walls showed a woman painting in front of the mill, watched by a man. "He went on to carve Mount Rushmore," Paul informed me.
After the park, Paul meandered through the streets, proud of the homes and meticulous grounds keeping. "We try to keep the architecture kinda, you know, historic. We are particularly vigilant against 'mansionization.' That's called breaking up a lot. That's tantamount to murder."
For lunch, we stopped on the main drag at San Marino Grill and Coffee Shop, one of the few diners in town that could be in a Hopper painting. The narrow Roman brick storefront had a single bay window topped by tiny half-curtains. "San Marino Grill Coffee Shop" was spelled out in red plastic letters that had faded to salmon on a red and yellow awning now paled to pink and white.
Inside, the smell of french-fries wafted from the back, where the wall behind the grill was quilted in pristine aluminum. Red Naugahyde seats lined the counter, and booths lined the walls. The waitresses' uniforms were black with gray pinstripes and included very short mini-skirts. On the wall was the San Marino Tribune article from 1980, announcing "Walter" celebrates 25th Anniversary.
"Walter" was the diner's owner, and Paul introduced me and explained my visit. Walter had striking blue eyes and wispy white hair. He smiled feebly, and I noticed a dark mole on his lip. I asked Walter if he was from San Marino, and he replied that he was from Croatia (where the town's namesake Marino had been born). Like the original Marino, Walter fled because of war.
"I left Croatia," Walter explained, "to avoid the Communists. I had a choice between the Communists and Germany. Communists chose Russia. I chose Germany," he added defiantly, "and I would do it all again. At that time, we had no other choices. After I fled Croatia, I was in Austria then Italy for six years, moving constantly. And I moved a lot more before I settled in San Marino."
I asked if he felt that the people in the United States were isolated.
"I don't think so," he answered. "Americans are more close to each other than European people. Europeans: if you are born poor, you more likely will die poor. In America, you can be born poor, die very rich. So, here it's a lot better. In Europe, educated people do not associate with not-educated people. That's wrong. Here it's different. American people, they're more friendly and more helping each other than Europeans."
"San Marino," he continued, "is a very close community, a bedroom community. And I like it. I bought the restaurant thinking that I would spend one year working at The San Marino Grill, and I've been here thirty-seven years and a half. My wife and I have had three homes in San Marino. But I talked with my wife and we are not moving anywhere else. We settle here."
After lunch, Paul drove me back to my car. "[General] Patton," he said driving past one house, "although he was born here, went to a private school in Pasadena. He had a problem of dyslectia [sic] if you can imagine. I don't know how he got through West Point. I should have bought the house. It was $135,000, which at that time was a fortune. It sold recently for $3.8 million. We all have a few of those things that we let get away."
Afterward, I had to part ways with Paul. I would miss his company. On the way back to Paul's house and my car, we passed again the high school and its markers to Kathy Fiscus. Paul waved at a new building going up on the campus. "My wife and I are sponsoring a memorial art pavilion in the new high school for our daughter. Our daughter was majoring in art at Wellesley College, and she died in a car crash her senior year." He got quiet for the first time all day, and I could think of nothing appropriate to say. It must have been tougher on him than I had known to give me a tour of the town famous for Kathy Fiscus, another daughter lost before her prime.
The Hopper here, The Long Leg, hung in the town's only current art pavilion, the Huntington Library and Museum. The museum was housed in a large Beaux Arts mansion built by Huntington. At the age of 60, he retired from business and devoted himself to collecting art, books, and maps. He married his uncle's widow, one of the most important art collectors of her generation, and lived for a few years at the San Marino estate then sold off more than half of the land, which was soon parceled into the neighborhoods Paul had just driven me through. He turned the estate into a museum that opened to the public after his death.
Walking around the Huntington's world-famous gardens, it was easy to forget I was still within the city of San Marino. There was water here: The Huntington's lily pond and Japanese garden ponds. 
Indoor highlights included a 1410 manuscript of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a Gutenberg Bible, and Thomas Gainsborough's masterpiece The Blue Boy. 
The museum also had a renowned map collection, including a 7.5-centimeter seventeenth-century globe that showed California as an island.
Jessica, who showed me the painting and files, had clear green eyes and a long thin face. She greeted me in sharply cut, figure-hugging gray suit and informed me that she was newly minted that day as a curator. I congratulated her. Then the museum's newest curator went to see the painting with me.
The Long Leg shows a boat sailing beneath a high bright sun, tilting on a rich cerulean sea as it passes a lighthouse on the shore behind it. The wet band of sand on the distant shore tells us the tide is going out. The boat takes a tack that sailors call "the long leg," and this was "the long leg" of my journey, the farthest town away from my hometown, at the geographic edge of the country.
A note in the files explained: "The path that [a boat] must take to get out of the harbour consists of a series of short and long tacks, or legs, and-–with a head wind and a head tide-–such a long leg can be slow and discouraging." This was painted during the Depression, in 1935, and may represent the long slow journey of recovery that the country was on. To remove the symbolism, the long leg would also be the obvious one to paint because it would give the painter the longest amount of time in which to see the subject.
Jo described the painting as "Provincetown in distance. Sea dark blue, with long diagonal pattern made by strips of light, (water uneffected [sic] by squall darkening the rest of it.) … Sails very taut, hard as marble in still breeze." The Long Leg was painted during Hopper's first summer in the studio at South Truro on Cape Cod, his first sailing picture in six years.
I already had learned that the chances were slim of finding anyone from San Marino in San Marino, much less in front of the Hopper painting. One article I read noted that, though hardly any of LA's many celebrities lived in San Marino, "Residents are as hard to spot as movie stars." So I asked Jessica about the painting.
"The boat, lighthouse, and hills are beautifully rendered," she gushed, "but those are the only three objects in the landscape. Compared to his other compositions, the objects are more grouped in the middle. And what's this?" she asked, pointing to what looked like a pencil line from the sail through the cabin to the water line. When she asked if I had seen similar lines on his other canvases, I realized that I had. I was still finding new things in Hopper's paintings on my long leg and one of my last. 
After I left the Huntington, I went back downtown. I felt like I had been shown the condoned city, but I wanted to see the underbelly (such as it was) in this town where everything was prohibited. Huntington Drive was originally divided by Huntington's P&E railroad tracks, but was now a parkway lined with the town's businesses and the Chinese Club of San Marino. Someone had mentioned that San Marino may very well be the first suburban Chinatown. One store was "The Andover Shop." I laughed seeing on this long leg of my journey an outlet so far from its home in Andover, Massachusetts, where I had seen the original store three years earlier and thousands of miles away.
I tried to find people to interview, but a woman working at the business strip's Starbucks told me, "I don't think anyone lives in San Marino." In a car culture like L.A., people I found here were driving through because everybody just drives through neighborhoods. They can't walk.
At Fresh Gourmet, 
a modest storefront deli and café in a strip mall near the end of the business district, the cook, owner, counter girl, and a patron all sat in a semi-circle around one of the dining tables. I asked if they could tell me where the local coffee shop was, and they said, "We're it! There isn't another one in town except for the San Marino Grill, which is already closed for the day."
I told them the reason for my visit and asked, "Do most people here know the Huntington?"
They all nodded. "Mm-hmm," Norma, the owner, said. "I should sell tickets to all the people who stop here to ask me for directions." She was a matronly, fiftyish, Hispanic woman with a large round face and short, disheveled gray hair that swayed as she spoke.
They all nodded again when I asked if most of the locals would know the Hopper painting. "Are people here isolated like in that painting?"
"Isolation," Norma answered first, "in a good sense. It helps you know your neighbor. Like that lighthouse [in the painting] is there to direct all those lost souls out there at sea."
"Right, tranquility," said Christine, the cashier, who sported diamond flower earrings and a diamond stud in her pierced nose. Her eyes were nearly black above a hawk-like nose. "You know what's great? Since I've been working here, I've seen so many people come in here. They're like, 'Oh hi Christina' It makes me feel good that they remembered me."
"People here are isolated," Lillian, the customer, answered with a furrowed brow, "because they like it that way. I mean, it's their choice."
Norma had finally formulated her thoughts. "The people in San Marino have more stuff. They have more money than you and I can think of. But as far as the community, there's a lot of great people here. We know one another, and I think that's a lost art. There's a little small-town mentality here. Which I love 'cause I came from a small town. And I think that San Marino wants to stay that way. I'm not saying they're closing the doors to other people. But it wants to have that small-town mentality. I can go to the hardware store, and they know my name. I can go to the pharmacy, they know my name. But of course I've also extended myself that way. I don't just want to be the local place where they come to eat. I want to be the local place where we care for one another. They accepted us with open arms. Customers have become our friends. Kids'll swing by here and all of a sudden they forgot their money. I'll say, 'Go ahead and have it. Go home and come back and bring [the money] back.' Families have people die, and we feel the loss like they do. I had a customer who came in last night and lost his wife. And we were crying on each other's shoulders."
"If we don't succeed?" she concluded. "If tomorrow we have to close? I made some great friends."
Neverland was nearby. A soap opera called Santa Barbara remains one of the most watched TV shows on the planet.
Some of the wealthy associated with Santa Barbara were industrialists from other less-gentle-climated cities who retreated here in winter. It was Chicagoan Sterling Morton and his wife Preston who donated the Hopper to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The museum began in 1933, when the U.S. Postmaster granted a special dispensation to hang an art exhibition in an abandoned post office building. The museum eventually bought the white-faced Spanish-style former post office and opened on June 5, 1941 at exactly 11:43 a.m. (in true California style, determined by an astrologer as the most auspicious time).
February, Santa Barbara, when I visited, had warm temperatures and leaved trees. It was like a fantasy compared to the cold hard slap in the face of November, Washington Square. 
The painting shows the Judson Church across Washington Park from Hopper's studio. The church's square tower culminates in a yellow cross atop a red tile roof. Banks of clouds bookend a swath of blue sky that leads your eye right to the belltower and plays well off of the church's yellow. The buildings are all linear, while the park spaces at bottom are circular. Prominent in the foreground is a denuded tree.
November, Washington Square was unique among the Hopper paintings I was seeing, in that it was begun in 1932 but not finished until 1959. He was waiting to fill in the sky until he found one acceptable. Perhaps word that Preston Morton was in New York purchasing large blocks of art motivated him to finish an old canvas so Rehn would have one to show her. Another sign that Hopper might have been rushing the product was a condition report that noted: "The stretcher may not have been the original." This delay also possibly made this canvas unique among all of Hopper's for another reason. Hopper switched from zinc white to lead white in 1938 after he noticed that the white parts off his earlier paintings were cracking. This might be the only canvas of his to contain both types of white paint. Even Jo admitted, "Colors and canvas unknown, probably zinc white." (Not only might Santa Barbara's Hopper be unique, they might have another Hopper work. In their files, I found a curious tag on the back of a New York City dinner invite that had "November, Wash Square Edward Hopper" written on it in what looked like Hopper's writing.)
Up strolled a couple in their 40s. She had blond hair, a bulbous nose, and tiny red lips. She wore a black-and-tan webbed dress that looked like a body stocking over the top of which her breasts spilled. Even with the extremely high stiletto heels on her black boots, she only stood about five feet tall. The man was over six feet tall, with green eyes and hair parted in the middle and swept into a duck tail in back. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved charcoal gray T-shirt covered by a light sleeveless sweater. One gold chain choked his hairy, thick-muscled forearm.
"I don't feel that way in Santa Barbara," he looked down at the floor and answered soft-spokenly with a gravely voice, "because Santa Barbara, for me, puts on a kind of touristy, happy face. When we go out in the streets amongst everybody, we have a very quick and easy contact. By way of comparison, I might mention that I went to Montreal a couple of times--Montreal, Canada--and when I was there I noticed the people would not have eye contact on the street. And I have a friend who's sort of a 'get-in-your-face' kind of guy, and he would employ his technique to do just that. And we would many times hear from people, 'Gee I've lived in this city for many years and I've never had a conversation with somebody like we're having now.' Perhaps people are that way as a way of giving respect to the other person, so they don't obligate you to fall into a conversation with them. When I compare that with the kind of atmosphere we have here in Santa Barbara, [here] it's more open and social, and contact is easy. If somebody wants to talk to them, well, it's time to talk to them. You don't feel a chill factor here, do you?" he asked his companion. She whispered to him in an Eastern European accent something that I couldn't decipher.
"Did we answer your question, by the way?" he followed up. "Repeat your question to me."
"Do you feel the people in your community are as isolated as Hopper portrayed his characters?"
"Okay," he registered. "Absolutely not. No. I would say that it's not."
"No," the woman curtly offered. "There are a lot of connections going on. It's a good community for everybody socializes."
"A friend of mine," the man launched into a story, "called me from Santa Barbara last night; he was in the streets. His car broke down. He realized that the last bus had left the city. When I picked him up and took him home, he said, 'My God, you don't know the strange feeling I had being downtown knowing that I didn't have transportation and there was no way that I could get home. And the streets were like empty.' I said, 'Did you feel like you were in a tin can?' And he said, 'Yeah, exactly.'"
"There's might have been taxis," she pointed out. "Taxis will come any time."
"Well, yeah," he conceded, "Sure. But that was the feeling he experienced. Not that it was necessarily that way. Maybe it was his own mood or something."
She looked away. "Maybe you should put him in New York and see how he does there. I feel very safe in Santa Barbara. It doesn't matter what time of day or night. You know, you hear stories that things happen."
"Well," he conciliated, "by way of contrast, I may mention that I spent some time in Mexico in some of the villages, and I was able to walk in the streets almost any time of night and never felt that feeling whatsoever. You always felt safe." He broke off and asked me, "Are you studying Edward Hopper?" And I began to think maybe he had indulged in a little something before coming to the museum.
"You know," he philosophized, "I like to define artists many times as poets. Then I like to think, 'if this painter is a poet, what is he expressing or what is he talking about or what is his main theme?' And when I think of Hopper, I always think of the word 'destiny.' I have the feeling that something is coming or something is going to happen. It's as though his characters are portrayed caught up in this space where the future is out there somewhere. They're staring off into it. It's almost the experience you feel looking out of your own eyes."
"In Santa Barbara," she objected, "you would have the mountains and trees. And the tree would never look like that [the dead one]. The tree is almost like a ghost. Santa Barbara is always crowded with people, you know. It's never, never empty like that. This thing [the park] would not be empty. There would be something on the street, either a biker or whatever. It's just like so strange. Why is nobody's there [sic]?"
"How you feel about it," the man jumped back in, "and the painter feels about it, and how I feel about it could be completely different. But, therein probably lies one of the great attractions of fine art. I guess you could go on ad infinitum about how they make you feel."
The next guy I interviewed was lanky and gaunt-cheeked, with hair graying at the temples. He wore a button-down shirt over a white T-shirt, carrying a light coat over his forearm.
"Some are, some aren't," he answered with a slightly distracted air and a tight voice. He jerked his forearm toward the painting. "Hopper did a subject that was representative of a scene. It's not supposed to be generalized as this is all of society or this is all of anything. It's just my depiction of a particular subject. There are people in this town who are really out there and involved with each other, part of the community. And there are people who are on the down-and-outs who are like the people in the Hopper painting. You can't generalize. And it's not, you know, an either/or. There's some shades of one or the other."
"So," I asked, "you might be found at a café, like in a Hopper painting, staring off into space?"
"I could be found at a museum, too," he said, "just like a Hopper character." We both laughed, then he concluded, "I go to a museum as part of a connection to a long history of art and to culture."
That exhausted my possibilities of talking to other patrons, so I approached the guards. One was a tall blond girl from L.A. with brown eyes and freckles. "Hopper's isolation is of a city," she began. "And Santa Barbara," she emphasized, "is not a city. Not a 'city' city really. There's not that isolated loneliness."
The other guard was a 50-year-old Santa Barbara native. He wore glasses, and his gray-haired head slung forward from his neck like a turtle's.
"Art is a rich man's game," he shrugged. He had the slow nasal delivery of a well-educated effete. "The artworks here are treated better than the humans. I remember Santa Barbara in the '60s, but it's totally changed. It's become very commercialized, very touristy. It was always a haven for the wealthy. But more so now. Here it's just like rich or poor. There's nothing in between. We are the blue-collar workers."
"My mother and my father bought their house--this was a three-bedroom Spanish-style house here in Riviera, a nice area--back in '63 for like $26,000. Two people can afford that. But now, I mean it's up there near close to a million. It's a rip-off. The cost of living is outrageous. I hate it for that. I mean I'm from here, but I don't appreciate that part. All the other people come, and they love Santa Barbara. And they tell me, 'Oh it's so beautiful; I love your city.' But they're just visiting. It's just like any place. You live here: that's another story."
This area has always been prime real estate. The local Chumash Indians established a town here called Syukhtun, meaning, "where the trail divides." In the 1760s, Spanish King Carlos III established Mission Santa Barbara here. The beam-and-adobe-sided mission had two bell towers that were symbols of the city and reminded me of the church tower in Hopper's November, Washington Square.
Being "where the trail divides," Santa Barbara first gained notice as a travelers' stop. The first Overland Stagecoach arrived in 1861. It became a base for forays into the surrounding hills and valleys. Tired of being a stagecoach stop, in the 1920s Santa Barbara played up its relation to Colonial Spain to drum up tourism and business. Soon, Santa Barbara enjoyed a reputation as the film capital of the world. Not only were the first movies filmed here, but the original "Hollywood"--Flying A Studios--was located in town. There are still Hopperesque old theaters here like the Arlington 
and Granada. 
The history museum's back patio was kept like the Mission's. Surrounded by low-eaved, Spanish-style roofs, a flat base of reddish dirt was dotted with trees, large rocks, statues, and a hexagonal fountain. The woman behind the front counter was older, matronly, and tall, enough so that I could tell even though she was sitting down. Gray hair fluffed out around her ears. She wore a gray dress with daisies hand painted on it and had on thick red lipstick.
"The word that comes to me," she began, "is not isolation: it's loneliness. I lived in New York, and was in boarding school out here during the '30s. You know, you're kind of isolated there [at a boarding school]. So I didn't see scenes like Nighthawks. That's all I have to say, and that's all I know."
"Would people in Santa Barbara be lonely like that?" I prodded.
"Oh, I don't think so," she defended. "I think it's a period in our history. It's an era of the nineteen-what, the '30s? '20s and '30s. I remember them well. If you want to know about Santa Barbara, you should hurry to the courthouse. A girl there will be giving a tour in just a couple of minutes."
At the courthouse, I was the only one on the "tour," and the "girl" turned out to be an older woman named Theresa. On June 29, 1925 (she informed me), a huge earthquake had leveled the old courthouse and State Street. The new courthouse was open to the elements, and lanterns had accumulated along the walls because Spanish sailors would donate a lantern to the church in any town where they landed. The designer liked the idea that a white building should be asymmetrical, so many arbitrary forms and details had been added. Theresa said someone on one of her tours asked if he was drunk when he designed it.
The locals joked that The Statue of Justice atop the courthouse holds a California surfboard because her sword is resin-covered redwood. 
The tower attached gave a panoramic view of the city, bay and surrounding hills.
At the visitors information center at the base of Stearns Wharf--the longest, oldest working wooden wharf in California--the woman behind the counter wore a heavy brown dress with black lapels and cuffs, and she had a pinched face, making her look like the kind of girl in grade school who would rat on you.
"No," she responded curtly about Santa Barbara being isolated. "There are so many different things going on and so much cultural activity that's all really accessible. It's not like a big city, where it's so hard to get through everything. We've got the best of both worlds. That's why people want to live here. We've got the big-city culture but the small-town ease of access. Plus there's like 900 nonprofits here. Most people are involved in one or another as volunteers."
I asked where I might find Hopperesque people, and she said, "Oh all over downtown, you'll see a lot of creative people, a lot of semi-homeless people, a lot of just plain weird people."
She then directed me to the restaurant Super Rica, which a friend in L.A. had recommended to me as a foodie Mecca.
Super Rica was a white building with garish green trim; the ceiling sloped down so low I bumped my head entering. As I waited in the notorious line, I overheard behind me one older lady said to an older couple, "You're not going to Hawaii this year?" "No," the man answered, "we haven't been since that time we saw you there. It's so nice here. Why would you want to leave?"
I sat at a table with a hefty, forty-something couple drinking beers with limes in them. He was balding on top and had a gray beard. Above his dark checkered shirt beamed a big, friendly face with a round nose and brown eyes with creases underneath.
"No," he answered assuredly. "No. And I studied art history, so… I know exactly who Edward Hopper is and what that kind of isolation is. Well," he pulled up, "Santa Barbara's very cliquish. People get really involved in their group and they end up with blinders on to a lot of other things. We're not necessarily isolated as in being all alone, but you're isolated in hanging out with the same people."
They shook their heads as the husband told me, "It's changed in the last forty years--a lot! I was born and raised here, and all the people I knew growing up are gone, due to the cost of living and whatnot."
"I moved here in '75," she offered, "and it's changed dramatically since then." She had light green eyes, red hair, and freckled skin. She was draped in a gray sweater on which hung a large silver pendant. "When I moved here, there was very little. When you wanted to party, you went to somebody's house 'cause there was no place to go. And now it's just ridiculous."
"That's one of the ways its changed so dramatically," he offered. "When I grew up, there was no nightlife at all. Now, they've opened the entire downtown length of State Street. You'll find definitely a lot of very interesting Hopperesque characters down there, definitely." And he roared with laughter.
Everybody told me that Santa Barbara also had a lot of homeless and a lot of non-profit associations. (One local quipped, "It's because we have so many for-profit residents.") That tradition goes back to the Depression, when Lillian Child let hobos live on her manor grounds. When she died, the city burned her house and kicked the people off of the land. This was part of a backlash. In the 1980s, the city passed laws that allowed them to arrest many homeless, and some merchants poured bleach on their garbage to discourage foraging, earning the town a reputation as the worst place in America for the homeless. November, Washington Square is a cold time and place. I could see someone from Hopper's painting seeking out better fortunes in Santa Barbara. But sometimes, it seems cold wherever you go. 
Outside a coffee shop that promised "liquid culture" lounged a Goth guy in three-inch soled shoes, an all-black outfit, and a thick set of silver chains around his neck. He had a frizzy Mohawk dyed black and a lip pierced at both ends to look like vampire fangs. I imagined it took a lot of money to keep up that "outsider" look.
Inside, a bright yellow T-shirt draped the rail-thin 6'2" frame of the guy behind the counter. His thinness lent him prominent cheek bones and a pointy chin that held the thickest part of his scruffy beard. Above his piercing green eyes, one curl of gelled hair drooped across his forehead.
"I was born here," he answered, his thin pink lips barely moving as he spoke, "raised just outside. But once I got a car at seventeen, I was here the whole time." He leaned a hip against the café counter and leaned on his elbow on the counter. "And at nineteen, I went off to Dallas and New Orleans, and then came back. It's definitely my home town, and I love it, but I'm kind of like an outsider because I've lived in New Orleans; I know what crime is. Like walking around here all my life, I have no fear walking the streets at 3:00 in the morning. But a lot of people here don't even realize. I took a friend of mine from here to New Orleans, and she wasn't comprehending at all. She was intrigued by it. Like if someone was getting robbed right next to her, she'd stop and stare. I'm like, 'No, just lower your head and walk away. Otherwise, you'll probably get shot or robbed as well.' That's a total Santa Barbara thing. With the youth, they don't really realize it 'cause they haven't gotten out. So I would say sheltered but not like emotionally isolated. They're not emotionally mature enough to be in a Hopper painting."
She was a freckled twenty-something, with an elfin nose and brown eyes. A diamond pendant necklace graced the black T-shirt beneath her white, broad-lapelled shirt. "We get people from all over the world in our visitors center, and they're all surprised how nice Alabama is." As if to prove it with a dose of southern hospitality, she presented me with a Montgomery T-shirt. I felt like it was a bribe, but maybe we Yankees just don't get it. Everyone down here told me as much.
A city of slightly more than 200,000 souls on a sharp turn in the Alabama River, this was one of the last places I went, but it was one of the friendliest. Montgomery was also the only city in the Deep South that had a Hopper, so it had to shoulder the load for a large part of the country. I found certain clichés true about Southern hospitality and willingness to talk for a long time. The clichés were also true about secrecy and racism.
Jina insisted that people in Montgomery were not isolated, but when I asked, "What about from the rest of the country?" she hemmed, "Ooh, well there you're on to something." When I asked about African American relations, she said things were much better now, but conceded, "That didn't start till after the bus strike. After that, we began to think maybe we should try working together rather than butting heads."
When I asked where I might find artists, she looked baffled but eventually ventured, "Maybe '1048' would be a good place to go. They have jazz." Then she added, "They have artsy types there; you know, berets."
I took her advice and started my exploring at the coffee house 1048, where I found three guys who were studying at Maxwell Air Force Base, the Air Force's biggest school. One was boyish, with chubby squirrel cheeks, a recessed chin and big blue eyes. He wore on his balding head a blue cap bearing an insignia of Athens, Greece and pins of each the American flag, Greek flag, and Olympic flag.
The second was tan, with jet black hair, dark heavy eyebrows and a strong chin colonized by five o'clock shadow that he must have had to work hard to keep in line with his trim military look. He wore a primly pressed blue-checked shirt with a pen in the breast pocket and never turned entirely towards me, as if I was something he did not want to acknowledge or was suspicious of.
With them sat an Asian man with a very long face that ended in a black goatee. A small fanglike tooth grew beside his front upper teeth. He wore a tight black T-shirt, and had short feminine fingers. He was a hairdresser friend who had tagged along here with the other two, all friends from DC. He said he owned a Hopper poster, and all of them knew his works.
When I asked whether people in Montgomery were isolated that way, the military-sharp guy answered, "That's been my impression. Gosh, people tended to interact more in DC, I think in part because there were more places like this. This is the only coffee house in Montgomery, and in DC we had one every block. Rather than just people sitting at an individual table being engrossed in their book, there was a lot more interaction, not only with folks from DC but also folks from everywhere."
"There really is not a place here," the guy in the Athens cap offered, "that offers any kind of mixing or cosmopolitan nature. If you visit the downtown area of Montgomery, you're going to find [like in Hopper] the stark office buildings and almost no city life at the sidewalk level, especially after five or six o'clock. If you go to a more cosmopolitan area, like DC or New York, a whole different crew takes over in the evening."
"I agree with them both," the soft-spoken Asian hairdresser chimed in. "I lived in DC for twenty years, and I would sit in coffee shops and see total strangers, and we would just have conversations, and I haven't been able to do that here with anyone. And we've been here for about eight months."
"You're very lucky," the military-sharp guy said, "to find this place so quickly 'cause this is in an odd area. It's kept its character, and it's vital. It's not, you know, mass-produced, pre-assembled housing. 
It struck me when I moved into the apartment complex: the people who introduced themselves to me were just like me. They were in the area for just a short time, and they were much more apt to reach out and introduce themselves. I've yet to really get to know any native Montgomerians."
"Like in DC," the Asian explained, "if someone from South Africa moved in next door you might be like, 'Well, I only have one year to get to know them; we'd better have dinner.' As opposed to, 'Oh these guys are just going back home, so…' I was very interested to talk to people who were not from DC. No one's from DC anyway. When I moved into the neighborhood here, nobody really came around and introduced themselves. I had one neighbor did stop by, but that was because I had a downed cable."
"Now," Athens man cautioned, "what I find interesting is that some place like New York, it maybe the transients who are isolated and the locals very tight. There may be that strong community here; it's just something that we're not a part of, and haven't been invited to be a part of. There are ways that people come together here. Churches are very strong here. But those tend to be long-term residents. And that may be part of the problem we're having is that we're transient, and everyone knows we're transient, so they're not going to bother getting to know us 'cause we won't be here very long."
"So," I said, "for places to go that I might interview people, I guess church on Sunday morning."
The man in the Athens cap laughed, "Or Saturday nights or Wednesday nights. They go all the time.
"Places I've lived or visited," he mused, "they have some common bond. In Washington, so many people work for the government. In New York, it's Wall Street, or maybe the theater. In LA, it's definitely the film industry. So when you meet a stranger there's a good chance you have some common interests. Here, and a lot of smaller cities, there isn't necessarily something that everybody shares. So here maybe it's the locals who find themselves isolated. If there is a common industry here, it's military. I've moved around because I grew up as an Air Force brat, and in some places you have a lot of conflict between the military and the townies (as they call it). I lived in Minot, North Dakota, and the base was fifteen miles out of town. So there was definitely 'wing-nut vs. townie' competition. Not always friendly competition. It's easy for military communities to be isolated within themselves because we have our own services provided on base, as far as groceries, stores, and churches. Here, the response that we get when we go out into the community and they find out that you're in the military is positive."
The military-sharp guy said, "The military move so frequently. So they're very accustomed to short-term relationships, and they recognize making them as valuable. Because isolating yourself is miserable. And they realize that the relationship they establish, even though it may end in two years, you're going to see it emerge again and again. I can foresee meeting these two again. I mean, career paths do that."
"I was walking through a neighborhood in Paris," the military-sharp guy interjected, "and in the middle of a very urban area there was a park. It couldn't have been more than a hundred meters by a hundred meters, but in that park there was probably a hundred and fifty people. And there was a cluster here of old men playing cards; they had ping pong tables made of concrete; and kids playing soccer over there; and a game of cricket over there; and there were probably five different nationalities. You don't see those kind of parks in [U.S.] neighborhoods. If there's a park, it's a kiddy lot kind of park, and you take your kids there to play ball and you leave." He shook his head. "The character of a city changes so much if people rely on their automobile like in Montgomery. When you're on foot, and you pass people, and you walk past the stores, you're more apt to look in them, go in them, and you greet people; there's much more sense of community. When you get in your car and drive to the Starbucks, you don't feel any ownership of that store."
"I've never really studied Hopper," the Asian hairdresser offered, "but I just like that painting." [Nighthawks was on my T-shirt]
"A lot of people," I said, "feel that it does portray something about a very American isolation. And I started this book in 2000. A lot's happened since then to muddy the waters of isolation."
"Now that would be interesting, too," Athens cap pointed out. "Well, that's another book I suppose; pre-September 11/post-September 11. How attitudes changed. Do they connect more because they feel the need to be connected? Do they isolate more out of fear?"
I noted, "You're an Air Force brat, and you're from DC; it's easy to have a holistic view, but I don't think somebody from Nebraska necessarily ever thought or cared about what someone in Afghanistan thought of us. Now you have to care what the rest of the world thinks of you."
"Right, exactly," the military-sharp guy said, "That's, ironically, the very stuff that we're studying. Strategically, what's going on in the world? And how do those forces interact to affect the security of the country?"
A little boy stopped beside our table and tried to pick up a quarter on the sidewalk.
"Can't get that quarter?" the military-sharp guy asked. And the little boy walked off defeated. "I already tried picking it up."
"It's attached," the Asian hairdresser explained to me, "someone soldered it down."
The man in the Athens cap got a quarter out of his pocket and laid it atop the stuck one, then called the boy back to try again. The boy pulled it off and dashed inside to show his mom.
"How sweet," she cooed. "You are so lucky. Collin, you go poke your head in there right now and thank the man for the extra quarter."
At the next table, a bearded construction worker about 30 wearily tossed down his dusty bandana from his head to beside his hard hat. He wore a white T-shirt dirty from work, jeans, and sleek sunglasses. He said his name was Eldon, and he spoke methodically with a deep resonant tone maybe made more so by the Camel cigarettes he nursed constantly throughout our interview.
"Yes," Eldon answered, "we are isolated as a people. In Montgomery, I noticed this more financial thing. Competing with the Joneses. Half of our neighbors haven't spoken to us, and it's because I work for a living. I don't sell insurance, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a lawyer. As a result, they see me as scum of the earth. My neighbor next door, he's a working man, and we get along really well, you know, we help each other out."
"It's definitely a class structure, " he continued. "It's not quite the chain of being of the Victorians, but it could be. On the other hand, I choose not to associate with the soccer moms in the SUVs, either. So it goes both ways. But I like watching people. You learn so much by watching your fellow citizens. If you sit at this little coffee shop and watch as people go by, there's some that won't look at you. There's others that will sit down and talk with you all day long. Good with the bad."
"I don't suppose," I ventured, "you'd find people sitting in a city diner late at night in Montgomery, this type of isolation." I pointed to Nighthawks on my T-shirt.
"The closest thing we have to that," Eldon answered, "would be if you go to the Waffle House at two or three in the morning. 
There's usually that old man who sits by himself. He drinks coffee all night; he chain-smokes; and he might know the waitress; but he does not want to speak to anybody. He just wants to sit there. And that's every Waffle House I've ever been to. I've been that guy.
"In Montgomery," he said, "as I'm a new face on the scene, my wife and I are very isolated. We're 27 both of us. We've been here for almost two years, and we have no friends in our age group. We hang out with people that are 50 years old. But we have yet to meet anyone our own age that is actually willing to stay in touch with us. If you didn't go to high school with these people and haven't known them your whole life, it's really hard to break in with the group."
"I work for a little Mom-and-Pop company," he explained. "It's one of the best I've had the pleasure of working for. You have a company that is all black guys or all Mexicans, but very seldom do you have a racial mixing in the construction industry. Some of my fellow workers live out in the country and have their sheets. 
I lived in a neighborhood where my friends were afraid to come visit, and I would walk up to the store on a Saturday night and talk to the guys and never have a lick of trouble, you know. It's all about your attitude. I've been to New York, I've been to Boston, I've been to London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfort, Hawaii. People are the same everywhere you go. There are good people, and there are bad people. And it's my humble opinion that there are a lot more bad people than there are good people out there. You have to really watch your back. And take everything with a grain of salt that you hear.
"There's skeletons in every closet, and it's a general rule that you got to keep it hush-hush and quiet. You don't ask, you don't tell. Keep the crazy aunt upstairs, you know. That's the way it is down here. We take care of our own problems. It's that need to keep up appearances. You know, the lawn's got to be perfect; the cars have to be washed. Never mind that daddy's smoking crack; the grass is level. The hypocrisy is blatant. And like I said, there's good people that'll bend over backwards to help you out, you know. But my philosophy in life is balance. I feel that extremes are bad, and few people have any balance in their lives. And they're the ones with the ulcers and the crack, what have you. Just stay spiritually and mentally balanced and keep an open mind."
"Which way do you think most people go out of balance in Montgomery?" I asked.
"Chasing after that almighty dollar," he said, inhaling smoke. Then breathing out, he said, "The almighty dollar: whereas it's necessary, that's not the answer. You've got to look after relationships with your wife, your parents, your children; you've got to look after your own people instead of squishing their little heads to get ahead."
The Hopper here, New York Office, shows a woman in bright sunlight standing in a great cavernous first-floor office window boxed in by rusticated façade columns. Along the impossibly high ceiling, a line of yellow oval lamps trails off into the distance. She holds a letter at arm's length, as if apprehensive about its contents. There is no glass in the window, so she almost seems to be standing on the street or where we could reach right into her office and touch her.
The Blount Collection also included two Hopper watercolors: Lighthouse at Two Lights and a view across a strange dark rust-colored trawler bow called Deck of Beam Trawler. 
Hopper's fellow Jazz Age artist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an army lieutenant in Montgomery and married local girl Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. Like Hopper's, F. Scott's marriage was turbulent, and Zelda was occasionally institutionalized. She had three paintings in the museum: squiggly dancer-like figures in theatrical settings. 
After being housed for its first sixty years at first a school and then the town library, The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts moved in 1988 to its current location in the Winton M. Blount Cultural Park in a domed red brick building with Greek columns lining a terrace overlooking a pond. Blount forged a contracting company that built the New Orleans Superdome, Cape Canaveral launch pad, and King Saud University in Saudi Arabia (at two billion dollars, the largest construction contract in history). Blount's company proudly advertised that they sell "almost everything needed to build an old-time fort and defend it:" lumber, power equipment, and ammunition.
A cheerful African American woman was working as the security guard. She had a round face, round nose, and thick curly black hair. When I asked her about the painting, she said, "You know it's very cold. And there are plenty of, I mean, the majority of people I meet, especially that come here to the museum, are not warm individuals: first impression. They are kind of cold like she is. And I spend five days a week here.
"I like the lines," she added. "We were learning from the docents how these lines move directly to her. And the other thing I like is just the colors. Bright. A pretty blue. I love his light. His watercolors are just totally different. I just like his work; he's just got so much talent to me. At least compared to a lot of stuff I see. I don't like junk. But Edward Hopper has something I enjoy. He's strange, but... I would like to have met him."
"Is part of why you relate to his paintings is that you relate to that sense of being alone?"
"You know," she thought, "it could be. Because I feel alone, I just lost my son. I mean, I'm still married, but you know. Even married, I'm pretty sure he must have felt like that still. But I don't mind that feeling; some people find it lonely, but to me it's just good quality time. I'm not afraid to be alone myself."
"Is there an isolation between African Americans and whites here?" she asked herself, rhetorically repeating my question. "Yeah, for sure. To be honest with you, yes. I think so. My opinion is."
Afterward, she drifted into other galleries, and a pair of teenage girls came to look at the painting.
One girl was beefy with too much blue eye shadow around her dark green eyes. Her thick frizzy brown hair and refusal to meet my eyes as she clutched her black purse to her blue top gave her the impression of being a bit on edge. The other one was bony and pale with insect bites on her neck and forehead. She had green eyes and squiggly blond hair bunched up atop her head.
When I asked my question, the beefy one answered suspiciously, clarifying my motives. "What do you mean isolated? You mean just from, like, general people, like stay to themselves and like? Nah," she sneered, "they might, individuals, stay by themselves. That's basically it. But a lot of the youth stay close."
Her bony friend ventured, "Just like all people, if they see you walking down the street, they won't say 'hi' unless they know you."
"Well, it's kinda like all people," the beefy one defended. "It varies. The youth group, like the youth and teens, isolate into groups."
I asked, "Why are the cliques not interrelated?"
"People are too different," she answered. "And they're shy, and they think that they'll be okay if they stay in their own groups with the people they already know. People don't like to really get to know other people, to be friends with them. 'Cause they might think what their other friends will say if they saw 'em out with someone different. So, they just stay in their own little group."
"Do you think that teenagers today are isolated from society?"
"To a certain degree, kinda, maybe," she conceded. "They stay in their own world, in their own little group. They don't really venture out, and they don't really know what's going on in the world."
"Would you find someone in Montgomery isolated like this?" I asked of a man whose spine slouched into a paunch of stomach, and whose sleepy brown eyes showed off long feminine lashes. His soft blue terry shirt was halfway unzipped. "Gosh," he drawled from the back of his raspy throat, smelling of smoke, "I'm sure there's a few. Just like this one person here? Oh, I'm sure. But in general, it's probably less isolated than other cities. You know, we're the South, and I think we've got good values, and I think we're just very friendly in this town. We have a couple of major Air Force bases, so we get an influx of, you know, at any one time probably ten thousand people from all over the world, different areas. And a lot of those folks, they come back and retire here or close by, so I suspect we're doing something right.
"Montgomery, it's a big town, but it's got kind of small-town ideals, you know. I guess we've got about 200,000 people, but if you live here you can get a chance to know everybody in this town if you get out there and walk."
"Do you like Hopper's stuff?" I asked.
"Oh yeah, I do. I saw, and I walked over, and I was thinking, 'Oh, they've got an Edward Hopper.'"
I said, "Do you think Americans are isolated like his characters?"
"I don't know," he mumbled. "I think we go through swings. Sometimes we are a little bit more than other times, but to a big extent I don't think so. I'm trying to think of an office building in Montgomery that would have a person in a window that big right up front like that. You know, when I was a kid, Montgomery downtown, that's where you came. There were no malls. You shopped downtown; you came to see Santa at Christmas downtown. All the movie theaters were downtown. I remember being a little kid lookin' at the big buildings. You could see things like this. You know, it was like, my New York. And the way I knew about New York mainly was 'Family Affair,' just watching that show when I was a kid."
I said, "What would you say about isolation between African Americans and Whites in this town?"
"Ahh, yah, you know I think it's like a lot of towns, like a lot of towns. Whether it's at school and you're in the lunchroom, or it's, you know, one group goes this way, one group goes this way. And then there's a group that's together. And it's like that here, and it's like this way everywhere. You have a predominantly black section, a predominantly white section, and then there's sections that are all mixed up."
In 1540, Hernando de Soto explored this area and battled with Choctaw Chief Tuskaloosa. Some claim that Alabama is a Native American word meaning "campsite" or "clearing," but other groups interpret it as "Here We Rest." Montgomery was named for Richard Montgomery, the first American general killed in the Revolutionary War. An Irishman, he led the American troops that took Montreal but died New Year's Eve 1775 in the battle of Quebec. In 1818, Montgomery's body was transferred here from Canada.
The town of Montgomery was settled where the Alabama River takes a hairpin turn around where a meteorite hit and fused such hard rock that the river had to flow around it. The Alabama license plate says, "Stars fell on… Alabama." Montgomery evolved from a merger of two rival towns: Court Square stands where New Philadelphia's Market Street (now Dexter) once met East Alabama's Main Street (now Commerce). 
Commerce Street had a series of preserved old Hopperesque storefronts. The Montgomery Theater opened 1860 but now had a 1950s tin and yellow plastic façade. A sign noted that John Wilkes Booth performed there and the song "Dixie" was debuted there. The city's "Lightning Route" was the world's first electric trolley. Nat King Cole's birthplace still stands here. Country singer Hank Williams lived here 1937-1953, and his 1952 Cadillac that acted as his hearse was on display here in a museum dedicated to him. 
A Montgomery office, as opposed to a New York Office, would probably be a state government office in one of the town's many large, whitewashed, Greek Revival buildings. Montgomery became the state capital in 1846 after three other towns had proved undesirable due to geography, politics, or flooding. The 1850 state capitol building is commonly referred to as "Goat Hill," due to the property's original use as a pasture. February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America here. The Confederacy White House nearby, built by William Sayre (one of Zelda's relatives), was a dead-ringer for the one in Hopper's Pretty Penny: 
green shutters, white wooden sides.
One Court Square, the building all the locals said was most like the one in the Hopper painting, was a huge faceless modern building home mostly to government offices. 
Older, quainter buildings surround Court Square, which in the 1800s was the slave market called "Artesian Basin." 
It was from Court Square's Winter Building (still standing) that the telegraph demanding the evacuation of Fort Sumter was sent, essentially starting the Civil War.
Court Square is also where Rosa Parks began her famous bus ride, and Dexter Avenue leads from there up to Capitol Square, where the National Historic Landmark Martin Luther King Memorial Church stands kitty-corner to the entrance of the State Capitol where until 1993 still flew a Confederate flag. (The Confederate flag still flies across the way on the Confederate memorial, which is surrounded by scaffolding and sports a sign saying without irony that it was under reconstruction.) 
The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (as it was called when Reverend King was pastor here) was a modest church, with pews haphazardly resined and varnished and hackneyed from years of use. The windows had been replaced after being knocked out by rioting mobs during Civil Rights times. From this church, Reverend King led a boycott of the local bus system for trying to make Rosa Parks sit in black for being black. It grew into a civil rights movement that swept the nation in the 1960s. In a sign of how much things had changed, a movie celebrating Rosa Parks was filming in Montgomery during my visit. I planned this visit in a hurry and didn't pay much attention to my itinerary. But when I began my walk around Montgomery on April 4, 2003, one of the monuments reminded me that I was here on the 35th anniversary of MLK's assassination in Memphis. I asked the woman leading a tour of schoolchildren through the church about racial isolation in Montgomery today. She had short heavily oiled hair and a round face dotted with dark brown freckles.
"Yes," she began formally, holding her hands together in front of her blowsy white top. "It's not so much as out in the open, but it's still here. Like for instance, a couple of years ago me and my husband moved up to the east side of town, which is, which was predominantly white, and I'll never forget it, I had a daughter - she was about three. And this lady came down the street, she was a white lady, and my daughter said, 'Well, hey, how're you doing?,' and she kept on saying, 'Well, hey, how're you doing?' This lady looked back at my baby, when she was only three, and she just kept going. And I'm like, 'I don't understand it.' It's difficult for me to explain to my children because, like I told some of the children, if you cut me and you cut a white person, we gonna bleed. We go to church every Sunday; we say we're parishioners, but yet we don't like people because of the color of their skin? I guess that's been true all during the bible days. I thought I'd teach my children not to hate people just because of the color of their skin; judge people by their character and the way they carry themselves. But yes it's still isolated, very much so."
That night, I went to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival Theater (ASF), home to the world's fifth-largest Shakespeare festival. The man who bought the painting also brought the town ASF. Blount's gift of the theater building was the largest donation ever made to an American theater company, and in appreciation in the circular driveway before the entrance stood a bronze statue of Blount in a business suit, one hand on a horse's-head-topped hitching post.
I interviewed an older woman working one of the shops. She was mousy with a girlish quality, though her thinning gray hair curled around her ears. She wore a white tuxedo shirt with a round gold braid around her throat punctured by a white pearl at its center.
"That depends," she answered through slightly crooked teeth inside a small round "O" of bright red lips, 
"on where you go and what you bring to it. People are here to see the plays. If you go to the mall or something? You do your own thing. But if you happen to run into somebody, then you're like, 'Hi there,' Because we will talk a lot."
"But here I don't think isolation is that prevalent [pre-VAIL-ant]. My parents moved here when I was like in third grade, and except for going off to school a couple times, I've pretty much been here. And, I'm happy. This is my motto: 'Land where you've landed.' Wherever you are, just take advantage of it, and do your thing there. If something takes you someplace else, you do it there. So, I'm content.
"I've gone to New York, and that was exciting. But, a lot of people that work here [at ASF] come from New York, and they really like it here for a while, then they end up going, 'It's so slow here.' And sometimes I'm going, 'It's too fast!'
"I teach school so I'm working with kids and meeting a different set of parents each year. Working with kids, you have so much to do. And I just want to sit and do nothing but look off into space. 
And it's hard to have time to do that, you know, but you have to do it.
"I feel there's a little more stress on the females, especially if you're a single mom. Or even if you're married. Because you've got wife, mother, job, house. And if you try to do anything extra for yourself, is it fair? That's not a put-down to the guys; that's just the difference in men and women. Women accept the responsibility, especially of children, a bit stronger than sometimes men do. At least now it's a choice. In the old days, it was assumed that was what they were doing.
"I think sometimes as a teacher, when you see kids all day, and you don't see adults, you feel isolated. That's why I work here part-time, so I get to see adults. You know, people who are well-mannered and polite. Working here is my chill down."
"So" I asked, "if you saw Hopper's people sitting alone and not doing anything, you would think, 'Great, they're getting their chill-down time' instead of they look so lonely and sad; maybe it would be a good thing to be alone."
"Right, sometimes it is. I guess if you feel it's not permanent. Sometimes you just want to have time by yourself. I don't think I feel isolated, 'cause I'm one who I go out and get involved anyway. I'm not gonna stay isolated. That's just not me. I've had a couple situations in my life where I was like single again. And I didn't stay at home. I mean, I didn't go out and party. But I did things, and life goes on."
"I hope you enjoy the play," she said in parting. "We're real proud of our theater. A lot of people think, [with exaggerated accent] 'Montgomery, Alabama got something like that? Uh-uh.' You know? But you're in for a heck of a surprise when you come down here."
The space had brightly-colored walls filled with original paintings, as well as reproduction portraits of famous writers, musicians, and artists. A bullet hole pierced the back window. I couldn't have picked a better starting place. Within his first three sentences, Orin, the owner working the counter, mentioned some of my favorite philosophers, like James Hillman and Joseph Campbell. "The coffee shop," he related, "from the beginning, was kind of envisioned both as a business and a place to address isolation." Orin was a bit shy of six feet, paunchy and gray-bearded, draped in a black apron with a small black-and-white peace sign pin on his lapel.
"There just aren't places for people to meet face to face and to talk to each other anymore. There's a quotation by James Hillman in an essay that he wrote about cities that I used in the first letter I wrote trying to raise funds to start this place. (I ended up doing it without raising these funds.) He talks about the need for places in the city where people meet 'at eye level.' I tried to make a place that would appeal to a cross-section of people, so that different sorts of people would end up talking to each other. Boy I get 'em! I get everybody from the mobsters to the peace coalition. It's fun.
"I had people saying to me when I started this, 'Oh, the best thing is you'll make out real well and Starbucks will buy you out.' I said, 'I'm not interested in starting another Starbucks; I'm interested in this place and keeping this great.' We're very interested in promoting the idea of local economy. These items you see for sale in our display case, this milk and eggs, are from a nearby organic farm run by a retired airline pilot and an Ivy League economist.
"There is an isolation in Utica," he mused in answer to my question. "Part of it is just modern life; that's a better word than culture. I don't like to use culture to describe what we have in this country. There's another element here, and that's that a lot of people in the community come from Southern Italy originally. You tend to run into a lot of dysfunctional cynical attitudes. There's been a lot of in-fighting and back-biting for years in politics here that I think contributes to the isolation. I have a friend who calls people here 'Utaricans;' that's his way of saying they have small, stubborn politics. And that further increases the kind of distance that exists between groups. For a small place, there's a lot more of that here than there needs to be.
"A whole hell of a lot of people have left Utica," he lamented. "You had kind of an economic catastrophe. When I was growing up around here you had Griffiths Air Force Base, which was very much a product of the Cold War. My father worked as an artist who ran the graphic arts department for the air base. And besides that there were mills. They're all gone. General Electric sold out; they're gone too. And with that went a large lump of the population. I lived within three to five blocks of both of my grandparents, several uncles, bunches of cousins, and there was this kind of fabric of the community. You knew everyone. There isn't one of my uncles who lives in this area anymore.
"There's several good things happening right now," he noted. "I see a lot of people who are starting to look for places like this to get out of big cities. We've got two guys, just for instance, from Los Angeles who've bought the church up the street here and put in a recording studio."
A woman who had stepped in to the café and ordered several coffees to go, jumped in, "Yeah, he's my dad; I'm the studio manager. He's from San Francisco actually."
"People would love it here if there was more opportunity, don't you think?" he asked her.
"Absolutely," she agreed. "You've got gorgeous architecture. It's like traveling back in time."
Since she had included herself, I asked her my question. "I don't feel isolated," she shook her long blond hair. "My whole family's here. I'm Italian and Irish, and I have five hundred cousins and aunts and uncles, and they all stayed here. My mom and I are the only ones who left. For two hundred years my family's been here. Both sides. 1803. I felt way more isolated in San Francisco because it's such a transitory city. This city: talk about roots, they're here. People would come back, they definitely would. It's just there's no economic opportunity for them."
Orin continued, "I would like to see my kids make it [Utica] somethin'. Have my grandchildren around. If corporations start looking seriously at putting things like chip plants here, it's because we've become third world. Your wages have to be so low, and they have to give away so many things for them environmentally and tax-wise and so forth that you don't even want 'em here. And besides which, there's no loyalty. You guys set the studio up here, with all the work you put into it, you're not just going to leave next month."
"Right," she said enthusiastically. "I'm gonna inherit that studio."
The Hopper here, Camel's Hump, shows a series of Cape Cod hills, bright in the foreground, darker in back, under a pale blue sky with one white cloud. The slanting hillsides converge like arrows. There are no figures, no architecture, just the light catching the camel's hump. Jo described it in the ledger as "Bare saddle shaped dune (Indian campground) on skyline." Hopper had painted the same subject from a different perspective the year before in Hills, South Truro, now in Cleveland's museum. Cape Cod was still new to Hopper as a subject when he painted this in 1931.
The painting hangs at the Munson William Proctor Institute (MWPI), 
whose mouth-garbling name is shortened by locals to "Munstitute." I was at the museum the day that artists were dropping off submissions for the annual art contest. I asked one who had stopped in front of Camel's Hump her thoughts about isolation in Utica. She was a sturdy 5'8", with big round face, crooked teeth, short black hair, and lots of eye shadow ringing her brown eyes. She leaned away from me at a forty-five degree angle suspiciously.
"Definitely yeah, I agree," she began.
"Isolated from each other?" I probed, "or isolated from the rest of the state and country?"
"All of those," she exclaimed. "I grew up here, but I was away for twelve years. I just now came back. I've seen isolation like this. But my perspective comes from my life experience. You know, you talk to someone else, and they might feel completely different. And if you had interviewed me fifteen years ago, I probably would feel very differently about a lot of things because I was doing very different things."
"Would you have been more or less inclined," I wondered, "to agree that people are isolated at that point?"
"Less inclined," she said, "because my life was very different then. I was married. I was busy all of the time. I had virtually no down time, no time for myself. So I wouldn't know if people were isolated, because I was not isolated. Now things are very different, and I just want to spend time with myself. Art is an isolating work. I don't have the same kind of money I used to have, you know what I mean? It's just the way my life went. I was alone at the time. I had a bunch of time. I've been sketching and all this stuff since I was a toddler. Until the last six years, I never really had time to put into that. Now I can."
"Is there a place in town where I might interview other artists?"
"Oh gosh," she ahemed, "you know, that's the thing. Nah. Everybody's got their own schedules. There're a couple artists friends that I have conversations with, but there are other artists around town who I don't know. Some I don't want to."
I found in the files an original hand-drawn map by Jo Hopper of how to get from the local train station to their studio. Another note told me who had gained possession of Jo's journals. A letter from painter Phillip Koch, who had a residency in Hopper's studio in 1996, reported that the hill known as Camel's Hump was bulldozed after Hopper's death.
Camel's Hump was bought by Edward Root, son of Elihu Root, who had been born in a cottage on the campus of nearby Hamilton College and went on to become Secretary of State and 1912 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Root admired Hopper's "feeling for the brilliant sharply defined iconic appearance of the American Landscape." 
Out in the galleries, I spoke with a short, stocky woman in droopy jeans and a "Get Art?" T-shirt. She wore a backpack and had frizzy light brown hair, several ear rings, chubby cheeks, and gaps in her teeth.
"Um, I'm not sure isolated," she mumbled, She was always moving and held a Coke in one hand and candy bar in the other. "But you know I think they must really [be] on a level. Location-wise, I think maybe [they are isolated] because the valley area is definitely out of the way. It's kind of in an area where there's farm lands all over the place, and there's the city right in the middle of it. I think a lot of people can relate to this painting just because they see hills and stuff. So I think maybe even though he may not have painted it around here, people say like, 'I kind of seen that around here, too.' There's definitely serenity about the painting, too. I think maybe people relate to that kind of green serene feelings around here. What kind of isolation I like is in the woods. Someone from around here?" she balked. "If they saw this? I don't know if this is isolation; this is just home." 
Stephanie's sister, Jennifer, worked at the museum and came over to us. She looked similar because they were part of identical triplets, but her green eyes were framed by fashionable oval glass frames, and her dark hair was cut in a short pageboy.
"From what I know of his characters," Jennifer responded, "they do seem very caught up in their own business, and Utica can certainly be like that!" She and her sister both laughed at this. "There is a sense that people are only looking out for themselves. Certainly, if I needed directions to go somewhere, I wouldn't feel totally comfortable just asking any random person off the street. I would want to make sure I was asking a respectable person, someone in a respectable position anyway."
The building housing the MWPI collection's decorative arts was Fountain Elms, an 1850 Italianate mansion from Utica's prime that was the ancestral home of the institute's founders. The tour guide there gave me a history of the place and explained the origins of its long name.
"Okay," she began, "Alfred Munson came from Connecticut and he gets in on the Erie Canal that's just about to open. Mr. Munson makes a ton of money. He's the first millionaire in Oneida County in 1823. He has a lovely daughter Helen. This is her portrait here. She falls in love with a local attorney, James Williams. She becomes Helen Munson-Williams. They raise two young ladies, Rachel Williams and Mariah Williams who marry two Proctor brothers. So now we have Munson-Williams-Proctor."
I asked her, "Do you feel that people in Utica are isolated like Hopper's characters?"
"Uh," she hesitated, "no I don't, not at all. I don't feel an isolation like that exists here. Maybe it's just because of the fact that I work here, and we see people on an international basis. But even the city itself, we have a lot of different ethnic groups. It's a very friendly community. "
I said, "In a town of 60,000, you probably see your neighbors fairly regularly, too."
"Oh, I know all my neighbors," she said. "You know names from high school and grammar school, and they're still here. If you don't know them, somebody else does. So it's a close-knit community. Very friendly people here, very generous people. Well certainly these people [the Munson-Williams-Proctors] are, right?"
The town's name was chosen out of a hat with 13 names in it. If that number wasn't a bad omen, the source of the name was. During the Roman Empire, Utica was a North African state overrun alternately by Romans, Carthaginians and Arabs. New York's Utica began in 1758 with the establishment of Fort Schuyler. It was chartered as a city in 1832 and became a manufacturing hub, halfway along the Erie Canal from New York to Buffalo. As the economy crumbled and the population dwindled, the town gained a reputation as a haven for the Mafia. Even today, mob hits don't raise eyebrows here. They had to call in the Federal Arson Squad recently because so many buildings were being torched.
Knowing Utica's staunch Italian history, I expected the Italian delis and stores to be in thriving neighborhoods. Instead, they were the only businesses left amidst blocks of homes burnt, boarded or for rent and storefronts now derelict or colonized by ad hoc pawn shops, small grocers, etc. The Italian Heritage Center had even packed up and moved to Syracuse. One storefront had nothing except black tinted windows and signs on the walls that blared, "For Members Only"!
I had read online about Utica's mysterious "pusties," the favorite food of townies. I learned that it was short for pasticciotti, an Italian pastry. The name comes from Naples and means "big mess" (a potshot metaphor for the town). When I stepped into Caruso's to order one, I asked for one second to see whether I wanted anything else as well. After a count of two, the flabby-armed woman behind the counter said, "Time's up."
Seeing that the Italian neighborhood was not what it used to be, I headed for the heart of downtown, lorded over by a bank's huge gold dome. 
Genesee Street, the main artery, sloped up from the Mohawk River Valley and passed the Hopper-era Stanley Theater: whose sign read "Stacey, we love you so much, The Amigos and Me." 
You can also rent the lobby, and it has become a local tradition for wedding parties to have their photographs taken on the grand staircases in the lobby--though that might not be a lucky thing because legend has it this one was designed to resemble the grand staircase on the Titanic. The theater tradition in Utica began (of all places) on Hopper Street, where, in 1914, the Players Theater produced an evening of plays at the New Century Club. 
Near Hopper Street was the appropriately Hopperesque Triangle Café, a tiny greasy spoon diner shaped like the one in Hopper's Nighthawks because it was at the tip of a triangular building. A sign advertised a special price for a "hamburg," which in Utica comes without the final "-er." The walls were covered halfway up with wood paneling, halfway down with dingy plaid wallpaper. Fluorescent lights buzzed on the dropped ceiling. A spacey-eyed, wiry character to my right smoked a cigarette with zombie-like slowness. Three women mindlessly rubbing lottery tickets with their spoon ends talked weather, taxes, and lottery. I sat at the counter and leaned on my elbows. The transformation was complete. 
Some things remained vital downtown. The Hotel Utica had been saved and restored with a lobby decked out in Tiffany lamps, crystal chandeliers, and caged birds. A live pianist and violinist played classical music from one corner under the balcony ringing the room. As I jotted down the day's notes, the candle at my table burned out, the only one to do so, like some Sicilian curse, malocchio.
My waitress's gold nameplate read, "Tina." She was tall and trim, wearing black pants and a white shirt. She had a fresh pale face and brown heavy-lidded eyes beneath reddish-brown hair pulled tight behind her head. She looked sweet and young, but she approached with the self-assured, square-shouldered walk of a man and spoke with a strikingly husky tone.
"The answer to the question," she asserted, "is yes. I've been out of this country, and I feel more warmth [elsewhere]. I've been to Italy and seen a different way. I grew up with a family community that was stronger than most Americans because it had Italian heritage. My father moved here when he was 17. I feel they are different from my friends' families, and that's why I say, absolutely."
I asked, "Did you notice when you grew up in Utica that this was isolated?"
"No," Tina pondered, "I think I learned that as I got older. I've been more isolated places. At least people here will acknowledge if you say something in the store line. And Monday Night Utica is a great tradition; different ethnic groups take each one. My father claims that Genesee Street was formerly so packed on a Saturday night that traffic was at a standstill."
"Why are you back?" I asked.
"This is where my family lives," she shrugged.
Another still-vital Utica institution was Utica's 1914 Union Station, the last grand station built by the New York Central Railroad. I visited in the evening, and the cavernous hall was empty, save for a teenage girl slumped on a long bench and an East Indian man in a business jacket standing beside his luggage. Three workers were sweeping up one corner. One was a paunchy, white guy with a gray-haired buzz cut. His partner was a tight-lipped muscular young African American. Their supervisor was a middle-aged African American man who had the ease and fleshiness of a Buddha, calmly smoking a pipe beneath a dark mustache.
The supervisor said he didn't really have an opinion, then turned to his workers and explained what I asked him.
"Oh yeah, we get along," the paunchy guy said. "We've been talking to each other all day. If you look on a State of New York map, we're right in the center of the state, between New York City and Buffalo, New York."
"Unfortunately," the African American supervisor said, "we haven't been able to capitalize on it, on our location. Well," he amended, "we've been getting a big influx of individuals from New York. This afternoon we had a Hispanic gentleman who was here with his son who looked at Utica College campus, and he was trying to decide whether he wants to move up here. And, you know, he said, 'well, where's all the people?' Well, you probably said the same thing when you came in here. But we're getting a lot of Bosnian immigrants; you know, Russian immigrants, Hispanics, people from Nicaragua, you know? Vietnamese.
"Matter of fact," he perked up, "I wouldn't say that I'm isolated, but I have some Vietnamese neighbors; they've been living next door to us, I would say for about five or six years, and they pretty much keep to themselves. We have some Hispanic people on our block also, and they pretty much keep to themselves, too. I don't think that's healthy, but I guess that's their culture. And I guess that's they way they want to live. In fact, the case is the neighbor that I have who's Vietnamese, I do his lawn, when I do my lawn, and the guy has never said, 'Thank you.' And my daughter said, 'Well, why do you continue to do his lawn if the guy don't even say thank you?' but, you know, my house would look as dumb if my lawn was done and his lawn wasn't done. 
The lobby housed the Adirondack Scenic Railway office. The man who ran it was just over 50, had a gray beard and a big nose, and wore a blue shirt with the Adirondack Scenic Railroad logo on it.
"This place," he informed me, "is the middle of the New York State Rustbelt. I mean it's taken a beating. Somebody said they took down five hundred homes in the same night just because people walked away from them. This is something I know about, and I'm just recently here ten years. That's funny, this town probably by default has a lot of its original structures. Nobody wanted to build anything there, so they didn't take anything down. So we have more beautiful downtown, a fairly intact Main Street here. Take this station for instance. It's one of the grand old railroad stations, the only one left between New York and Chicago. It's all the marble and stuff; some of these columns came out of the original Grand Central that was taken down in 1908. Some day I'd like to turn it into The New York State Railroad Museum. I mean it's empty now. It's a shell, but it's still there.
I said, "The painting I'm here for is called Camel's Hump, and it might have the New York-New Haven-Hartford track in it. You should check it out."
"Ha," he exclaimed. "There's a spot on this railroad they call 'The Camel's Hump', too. I mean, if you want a story, this is a story. It was saved by a bunch of volunteers with hard heads that wouldn't let the state rip this railroad up, and they have a world-class railroad going back to Lake Placid. There's a story for you; put that in."
The station also housed a taxi company, barber shop, restaurant & bar, and newsstand, where the woman working the counter was fiftyish and a stout 5'5". When I asked if she though people in Utica were isolated, she said, "Yes, I really do." She had a big friendly pale face with freckles, brown hair, and kind brown eyes. A gold cross with inset diamonds dangled on her white T-shirt beneath a plaid soft short-sleeved shirt. "It never ceases to amaze me that little pleasantries that used to occur twenty-thirty years ago just don't happen. You can say something funny to the person in front of you or behind you, and they won't answer back. It's like everyone is just scared of their own shadow. It isn't because of 9/11. This happened earlier than that. I think that it's the tremendous media coverage making the smallest things and the most random and infrequent things appear like everyday occurrences. People perceive threats around them that just aren't there."
"Every once in a while," she continued, "you'll be in a grocery store or somewhere, you know you'll see a little kid struggling with something; you'll just give 'em a hint how to do it. And I was here tellin' a little girl, next to her mother. And when they're walking away, the little girl said, 'Do you know that lady?' and she said 'no.' And she said, 'Then why was she helping me?' And she said, 'She was just a nice lady.' But, you know, even the kid noticed the difference. 
"I help out people who come through here," she continued. "There was a gentleman who told me he had come to town to visit his long-lost daughter, and he came in here and he got a cab to the address, and then was back in an hour. And I said, 'Didn't it go well?' And he said, 'I got there; it was an empty lot.' And I said, 'Stay right there,' called the police department, had them work backwards and found her, and she was one number off across the street. And he went back and had Christmas with her. You never know when someone's gonna need something.
"One time I gave somebody a ticket. Someone came in had a ticket to New York on a voucher, then got a ride; his girlfriend came and picked him up. So I had the voucher. And there was this woman in the lobby, and I asked if she needed help because I just had a funny feeling. And she said, 'Oh, I just have to get to New York, and I don't have enough for a ticket.' And I said, 'I guess you're the lucky one. Here, use this ticket. And if the driver asks if you're just being released from jail, just tell him yes! Because that's what the ticket is for, and you have to pretend you just got released.' So she went down to New York, and two years later her daughter was up here and came to thank me and explain. That was her mother, and she had lost her medicine, was stuck in Utica, and was starting to have problems because she didn't have her medicine. And had lost her money. And she said, 'You saved my mother's life because you gave her a ticket that day.' So you just don't know how far-reaching some of the things you do really are until the people come back and tell you about them. It's like It's a Wonderful Life."
"Corporate America," she cautioned, "is out to get everybody. I started a bus ticket company from nothing. I had a two-million-dollar business here I started from nothing. And, on thirty days notice, they took the business that I spent all those years growing and gave it to the drinking buddy of the Greyhound area sales manager. And I'm stuck in a long-term lease. So, I had to make the best of it, so I added lotto, and I'm about to add Internet access in the back, expanding into fancier coffee and things. 'Cause you gotta do something. I own two houses two-thirds paid for. I wouldn't have anywhere to live. So you just gotta keep doing what you have to do. And I don't lose my outlook. I don't know why everyone else does," she laughed, "I'm the one who has the reason to.
"People are struggling. They're not banding together yet, but we gotta. My husband and his brother are making a big attempt. They're starting a club, Internet-wide, that we're gonna push for an amendment to change income tax. So that the people who have the money are paying it. Instead of hiring lawyers and accountants to not pay it. But I'm only here because I wanna be, you know, I could be elsewhere."
"Did you grow up in Utica?" I asked.
"No," she said, "I grew up in Long Island. I went to Clarkson on full scholarship. I was one of the ten smartest girls in the country in 1965. So I had every expense plus spending money if I'd go to Clarkson over MIT and Duke. And Cornell didn't have enough dorms for women then in sciences. Only if I would take Home-Ec. So I wouldn't do that. And now I'm thinking about going back and getting my master's and getting back into research. The kids are all grown, and I've lost a quarter of a million dollars in the last three years because I was committed to these huge things."
I said, "Is there anything specific to Utica that would make people here more or less isolated than other Americans?"
"I think around here it's the old, y' know, mafia history," she opined. "And people being afraid of who they might say something to or about. Because there have been people blown up; there've been people hit. There was a man who worked in this lobby who was found beaten to death with a baseball bat. And, you know, when it strikes home like that, it makes people more cautious."
Perhaps you've seen it with dogs, or Santa and his elves, or one of many other parodies. 
Or maybe you've seen it in its most famous appropriation with Elvis Presley, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe (titled Boulevard of Broken Dreams). 
But by now, the image in Hopper's painting Nighthawks of four city-dwellers around a café counter at night is burned into our nation's consciousness as surely as the fluorescent lights under which the characters in that painting sit. 
A man with a hawklike face and hat, wearing a suit and tie, sits almost touching elbows with a redhead who looks like she escaped from a film noir cell. She stares at something in her hand. The man in turn stares straight ahead. The tension between them is thick. Behind the counter hunches a pale short-order cook or busboy in a white jacket and cap. Another customer sits with his back to the audience. The four people are arranged with a few spare objects signifying a diner (salt shakers, mugs, counter, coffee dispenser) in such a way that the sight lines all lead from one person to another. It’s like you can't take your eyes off of them, but you jump from one to the other to see what they will do, expecting or hoping (even rooting) that one of them will do something. Nothing converges. Nothing touches. Not the characters, nor the perspective lines. A cigarette burns but is never spent. Time is running out on the characters and the night.
At the bottom, a large swath of cool blue sidewalk not only makes the bright interior all the more mesmerizing, it also implies that you the viewer are walking along the street. You are in the picture, which may be part of why we feel we are these people in the painting. The café's window is see-through; it reflects nothing (much like the faces of the denizens). However, the glasses and salt shakers do cast reflections. In one preparatory sketch for Nighthawks, Hopper included the writing on the café window, so the see-through windows were a deliberate choice, another way to break down the barriers between the viewer and the viewed. There are no people in these streets, no trash, no cars, and most importantly no people. All the people in the painting are huddling inside. If we are indeed on the sidewalk, it seems to beckon to us to enter as well and commune with these lonely souls.
The diner in Nighthawks was inspired by one in New York City on Greenwich Avenue where two other streets meet. Hopper's friend and Whitney Museum director Lloyd Goodrich said its shape was "like the prow of a ship." It might also have been influenced by Chicago native Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers." In that story, two killers wait in a small-town café for the appearance of a local ex-boxer they have been sent to kill. Hopper wrote to Scribner's when they published the story in 1927: "It is refreshing to come upon such an honest work in an American magazine after wading through the vast sea of sugar-coated mush that makes up most of our fiction. Of the concessions to popular prejudices, the sidestepping of truth and the ingenious mechanism method of trick ending, there is no taint in this story."
Perhaps this painting is so associated with Hopper because he served as his own model for all the male characters. Also, as a bachelor until he was 40, Hopper got to know fast food places like this intimately. In a 1960 interview, Hopper said, "Nighthawks seems to be the way I think of the night street…. I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably I was painting the loneliness of a large city."
"Did you know he lived in South Truro?"
"No," Hank avowed. "There are so many changing landscapes there. South Truro and Wellfleet and Provincetown is still old Cape Cod, very well-preserved. A lot of artist types and professional psychologist types from New York and Connecticut have summer homes there. I joke that there's plenty of work there for psychiatrists because of the artists.
"We have a print of a street scene of Hopper's in our living room, but this is my first time seeing him in person. Our youngest daughter is an art major. She liked him and got me kind of interested in him. Our daughter gave us a book that has all of his pictures in it. He really is saying something. Why do you like him?"
"His characters seem isolated," I said.
"They do, don't they?" Hank realized. "I think the U.S. is more isolated. Europeans have age-old national identities. Our identity is based on being a melting pot. We came in past [Chicago's] Chinatown and Little Italy: you see those in every town, whether it's here or Boston or New York. It's a terrific museum here."
Gretchen finally chimed in. "I get to see a lot of foreign museums with my job, and this is as good as I've seen. And this painting is also. He draws me in, makes me feel like I'm part of the scene. I want to be there and see, 'What's wrong with these people?'" She shrugged sadly and concluded, "I wish we could be more help," leaving me unsure whether she meant to me or the people in the painting.
"Have you seen this painting before?" I approached them.
His voice was husky as if from brandy and unfiltered cigarettes. "Not this one. But we're from Philadelphia, and we have some Hoppers there. Also we've seen those at the Whitney. This is bigger than I expected. The lighting and the composition emotionally evoke the pathos, I think; the loneliness. I love the way he captures the color in the bricks. And the way he uses greens and oranges together is awfully difficult."
"You know your art," I said.
"I studied art, but too many years ago."
"So as a painter what do you make of this?" I asked.
"The lines draw your eye in from left to right as most Americans read, but the lines of the window converging right to left anchor your attention in that café. One reason Hopper might disconcert viewers is that his lines tend to go from right to left against the way we read."
"Why are you visiting Chicago?"
"To see this museum actually," he barked. "We spend time in France every year, and we try to get to the little museums there."
"I love small museums," I said. "I first saw Hopper in Toledo."
His eyes popped in recognition. "We stopped in Toledo on the way out to see the museum, and we were amazed. That great Rembrandt! And the El Greco!"
They shared a look, and he apologized, "We have to keep moving if we're going to see all that we want to today."
"Have you seen this before?" I asked.
"Oh yeah," he spoke quickly but distantly. "In reproduction. I had a college roommate who had this up. I think it was just the iconography of it. You come around a corner, and you see it: it's like when I saw the Mona Lisa. It certainly has a hold on everybody in the U.S. There are so many questions in his paintings. My roommate's poster cut off the left side of the painting. I think it's easy to see just the people and see that the characters are lonely or isolated or whatever. But to see the painting in full and the dead space over here, the whole painting as a whole becomes lonely. It's not just that scene, the restaurant, it's the whole city. Plus the café: how do you get in?" After a pause, he added, "Maybe they can never leave. Like Sartre's play No Exit."
"Are you from Chicago?"
"We're from Seattle. We drove out and we're gonna do Route 66. My husband's got an old '39 Chev [sic] he had restored. We're gonna spend two weeks trying to find the old route." She smiled in anticipation, then pointed at the painting. "We might see some place like this."
"It's the only place open for blocks," she answered, "that's why it looks so bright I think."
"I was commenting,” he commented, "on the unusual green on the outside. It's almost eerie. And when you look at the ceiling in the diner, you can tell it's a fluorescent light. It's a feeling everyone can relate to."
"I would imagine," she wrinkled her brow, "that it's 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, maybe the middle of the week, even. Everybody in the apartment above the store is asleep, but for whatever reason, these people are awake and out."
"And up to no good," he tossed in.
"That's not a happy couple," the woman asserted.
"They may not be a couple," he countered. "They may be together just that night."
She said, "She's looking at her nails, thinking, 'I can't believe I'm going to have to do these again tomorrow.'"
"Or, 'I can't believe I'm here with this guy'," he offered.
"Her expression," she continued, "is complete boredom. Like 'I'd rather be anywhere but where I am right now.'"
"Are you guys from Chicago?"
"From Chicago, yeah."
"Do you think Chicagoans and Americans are isolated?"
They hemmed and hawed. "You want us to generalize," the woman shook her head, "and it's hard to generalize for Chicago because it's so big."
"It also depends," said the man, "on where in the city you are. Some parts they roll up the streets at 9 o'clock at night; other places are open 24 hours. You can be as lonely as you want to be."
"Have you seen this one before?"
"Well," she answered brashly, "anyone has seen it. This woman I work with: it's her absolute favorite painting, and she has a print of it right above her desk. But people come into the museum and see it and they think, 'Oh my God: it's the real thing.' They didn't know it really existed. They've seen so many variations of it. I don't know anyone that just says 'eh' and shrugs, which is interesting because the subject is pretty mundane: four people in a café.
"We moved away from Chicago for a while when I was a kid. Every summer, we would come back to visit, and one of the things we would always do is come back to the art museum. Nighthawks is always one painting that I want to see. Even now, we were just wandering through, and we weren't looking for it, but we saw it and both went, 'Ah! Gotta go look.' The pull of that loneliness on the inside every time I see it."
"We just recently moved [here] from Atlanta," the man responded in a nasal voice that made him seem sneering. "This is our first visit to the Art Institute. It looks very different in reproduction. It's bigger in real life. You know what it reminds me of? I studied in Vienna for 6 months, and we'd always go to coffee shops. And it reminds me of one we would go to. There was never anyone in there. What can I say? Artistically, it's perfect. It looks like a photograph. He tells a story."
"It looks," his wife continued in soft, measured tones, "like they've come together for some reason. He makes it so plain and empty. That's where you get your loneliness. It gets kind of depressing after you look at it after a while. It doesn't look like a city. There's nothing going on. We moved from a job change, and a city is mostly for working. Especially those who live downtown, they live there because it's close to business. But a city is exhausting."
I interviewed people in front of the painting in Chicago, as usual. But in Chicago, I also had the opportunity finally to interview myself. I was an average-looking man, about 5'10" 180, with an intense stare and light brown hair parted on the side. I wore a pair of slacks and a sweater on the day that I interviewed myself. "Do you think that people are isolated as Hopper's characters?"
"I do," I answered. "In fact, I wrote a book about it. I certainly feel isolated myself, and I think that Chicago is an isolating town. The people here are often mean to each other. And the town is without a doubt segregated and nepotistic."
"So you see this painting reflecting Chicago?"
"Well, there were still a lot of places like this when I first moved here, but now Mayor Daley does his best to run them out of business. In fact, there is a place up on Irving, an old diner (The Diner Grill), that they tried to shut down and put in condos. I have gone to that diner several times, and I can tell you that it does feel like walking into a Hopper painting. The grill is right there in front of the counter and you can watch the food cook as you sit there, and there are no tables, just the counter."
"I got an architectural guidebook to Chicago and started exploring all the neighborhoods. It's amazing how many there are. And people in one don’t know about the others. There are a lot of neighborhoods that people will tell you you can’t go. But I go on Sunday mornings. The only people out at that time are church-goers. You see a lot of Nighthawks-like scenes at that hour, too. The guidebook has helped me notice the architectural treasures I would have missed otherwise. I think this is a lot like what Hopper did: search for the unique and evocative.
"Chicago's particular form of isolation would be segregation. A recent report declared it the second-most-segregated big city in America. (A black friend of mine who lived in a traditionally black neighborhood on the south side, noted that when Mayor Washington, the first black mayor elected in Chicago, was in power was quote 'the only time snow in my neighborhood got plowed.') Also with the well-known patronage system of big machine politics, there are two tiers of people politically, those with clout or at least access to city jobs and those outside."
"You said you felt isolated. In what ways?"
"Well, in many ways. I mean, I tried to make a living as an artist here. And the irony is that it is the third-largest city in America, so it draws a lot of people from the Midwest who want to be artists, but it still does not have a great artists' community--not powerful and visible like New York's. So you come to the big city for the art scene which is better than your town's, but it still is not a great art scene. I think artists and thinkers are sort of sneered at in this culture. If you have culture, it is not immediately visible or something that you can buy. I think it's just easier for people to make snap judgments based on people's belongings. Even people who say this painting and other Hoppers show people isolated are just jumping to a snap judgment. I mean, the people in here might be happy; they might not feel sad about being isolated or even feel isolated. But you know that's what you have been told about Hopper. So I guess I feel isolated in that way; I feel judged.
"Actually, I overcome isolation in this city by coming here. The museum and the people in it, even the dead artists who have stuff that I can relate to, that's where I find my community."
Hopper's Gothic scene in Nighthawks could easily have been titled American Gothic, the title of Grant Wood's instantly recognizable picture of the old man in overalls holding a pitchfork and standing next to his daughter (many believed it was the man's wife). 
That painting can also be found in Chicago's Art Institute, a truly great collection of often-seen classics: 
Sunday on Isle Grand Jatte 
Van Gogh's Bedroom, 1889, Caillebotte's Rainy Day in Paris. 
(The Terra Museum of American Art, headquartered in Chicago, also owned two Hopper paintings, but I was informed when I started that both were on permanent loan to their sister institution in Paris. By the time I finished the project, the Terra had gone under, and Dawn in Pennsylvania hung beside Nighthawks.)
Nighthawks is so well-known and prototypical of Hopper's paintings that it is the hardest work to talk about. Similarly, Chicago is the hardest town for me to talk about because I know it so well. As I visited all the Hoppers in the U.S., Chicago, my hometown for more than 20 years, was the touchstone against which I measured the other cities.
Chicago playwright Lynn Rosen, who wrote a play called Nighthawks, said, "A lot of Chicagoans connect with Hopper, even though he was a New Yorker, It's because the Art Institute has Nighthawks. New York is on a different planet. Chicago is more American." Chicago institution Studs Terkel said, "I love that Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. When I was a kid, I lived in this place: The Wells Grand Hotel; it's still there. There's an all-night restaurant down below. My God, it was Nighthawks in every way."
Like with New York, there is no way to summarize the people, events, and superlatives that made this such a significant and American city. Founded by French priests where the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan at a swamp filled with reeky onions that the natives called "cheecagou," the town became a hub due to its placement at the nexus of the waterways and roads of the North American continent. Its identity really solidified after the Great Fire in 1871, when there was money and infrastructure in place but no buildings. The "second city" that was built on top of the rubble was a showcase for the leading architectural wonders of its day: indoor plumbing, gas lighting, elevators, and other modern marvels made this town immediately more modern than any other. Chicago architect Louis Sullivan invented the term "skyscraper" to describe the building he was designing for the new city.
When I moved to Chicago in 1977, I was told that it was home at the time to the world's first, third and tenth tallest buildings. Chicago has always been trying to be the biggest and the best. In fact, it was the politicians who lobbied so hard to have the nation's Columbian Festival in Chicago in 1894 that gave it the nickname "The Windy City" (not the lake winds as many now believe). They got their wish, and the fair was so well attended it made the city famous. The Midway down the center of the White City created for the exposition to show off the most modern achievements in every science or art was so famous that the Chicago Bears became nicknamed "Monsters of the Midway."
Having always striven for the biggest and best, it is no surprise that Nighthawks is here: the pinnacle of Hopper's work. It is a surprise that it almost did not end up here. The original buyer swapped it for one that the Art Institute had. It almost seems like a mythical creature, like the man who broke the bank at Monaco: the man who let Nighthawks out of his possession. Yet here it is: in perhaps the most typically American city because it is the largest American city not on a coast. It is the swaggering giant of the heartland, due to its position at the bottom of the great lakes and halfway from the West to New England.
I spent a lot of time with Chicago's night hawks. Both the people and the famous painting by Edward Hopper. I lived here for 25 years starting in 1986, when no one wanted to live here. I first got an apartment in an old Hopperesque three-story Greystone with massive rough stones bulging out of the façade and a wooden door with cracked paint. When I first moved in, on my walks home from shows or waiting tables, a hooker would call out at every other corner (a professional courtesy of territory, I learned). Now, when I walk down the same street, a Starbucks calls out from every other corner (the opposite of territorial courtesy for business). Since my move into the city, the neighborhoods that used to be exclusively left to young college grads, artists, and hippie urban-renewal types (the term "gentrification" had not yet been invented) disappeared. Since then, people and their real estate dollars have flocked here. But I don’t think that more people has resulted in better community. Just the opposite. The types that moved here demanded parking lots and got them. They wanted the chain stores they knew in their former cities: Chicago suburbs or other metropolises. We are becoming more isolated like the people in Hopper's painting. As long ago as 1996, a friend of mine moved away form here and said she was doing it partly due to the "New Yorkification" of Chicago. When I was in Europe one time, I saw a magazine that highlighted the hottest neighborhoods in the world: Hong Kong, London ... and my neighborhood in Chicago. I had moved there because it was affordable and had longtime German householders lending stability. Now, it was overrun with yuppie couples and families, holding barbecues in the back yards and beer frat parties on the public ways.
When Mayor Washington was mayor is when the arts flourished. Washington's reign was the glory days for independent theaters. When Daley's men took over they shut down one theater where I had done a show because it was in an art gallery. When the director argued, "Theater is art," the city's henchman grunted, "Lady, it ain't art if it don't hang on a wall." Under Daley, things started changing in Chicago. Maxwell Street, long-time home of Chicago's blues culture, was demolished for a condo development. Housing projects tumbled without replacements. Lifeless high-rise cinder-block condos replaced quaint old single-family homes. I lived in this city when my family thought that it was gang-ridden. Now my family wants to come down to Navy Pier because that's the best mall in town. We've gone entirely the other direction. And I laugh because all my artist friends are moving to the suburbs which ten years ago they hated.
I could go on with examples, but trust me. I have lived here long enough to know the city. And the city is not the downtown that the tourists see. Most of the living is done in the neighborhoods and not downtown. Neighborhoods here used to be towns that were swallowed by the ever-growing city. That is why they retain separate names today: Lake View, Hyde Park, Austin, Bridgeport, etc. And allegiance is to the neighborhood first and the city second. Read Nelson Algren about how viciously people fought over the imaginary borders certain streets constituted between neighborhoods of rival ethnic groups. Algren actually knew Chicago better than almost any other writer and his opinion was, "[Chicago is] the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap." And about the Greek philosopher who went walking with a lamp in daylight to see if any man were honest enough to tell him his mistake, Algren said, "If Diogenes came to Chicago, they’d steal his lamp."
And the answer was yes. The way that I felt isolated was unappreciated and unlistened to. Perhaps because of this, my perception of Hopper's characters isolation was that they did not feel others would listen to them (certainly not sympathetically); and they did not feel like spanning the gap between themselves and others because they felt that they would not be heard. The people I met during my journey also felt isolated--from and by their fellow citizens and their leaders. They felt that their lives were not appreciated by others who did not take time to imagine what they might be going through, just as Hopper's characters seem to be alone and in trouble and in need of help, but we are not aware of that until we stand in front of them and imagine their lives. People were desperate to be heard and hoped I would help others hear them. Perhaps Hopper was so silent during his lifetime from fear of being misunderstood and/or dismissed. My journey was an attempt to give voice to Hopper, his characters, and the people that I met along the way. It was also a way to give voice to my own frustration at my feelings of isolation.
In February 2003, I gave a presentation as Artist-in-Residence at Chicago's Cliff Dwellers arts club about what I had experienced along the journey. I ended my talk by offering a bit of advice. "The next time you are in a diner with a bunch of Hopperesque characters, if you're wondering whether they feel as isolated as you, they probably do. What you do after that is up to you."
Later that night, I was at a bar for a friend's birthday party. I found myself beside a pretty woman who I felt a connection to. Before I could take my own advice and ask what she was thinking, a mutual friend introduced us, and we forged an immediate bond. She loved my idea for the book and felt that Americans were "some of the most isolated people on earth."
By the end of the year, we were married.
My friend Mike, who had encouraged me to undertake this book, came over to our apartment one night afterward to celebrate. "Do you realize how much this man has changed?" he asked my wife. "Why, five years ago he called me from his dusty hovel filled with milk crate library shelves and told me how unhappy he was. He probably wasn't capable of connecting to someone the way he has with you. That's when he got the idea to write the book about Hopper and isolation. By the way, Kevin, did you get your answer?"
I smiled down into my champagne glass and then looked at my wife.
"Yes."
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Hunting Nighthawks So Far Part 2
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