Issues → September/October 2009 → Travel →
What is There to See In New England?
(page 9 of 10)
Sakonnet's signature Vidal Blanc is a standard on the wine lists of Providence bistros. With top-notch culinary school Johnson & Wales minting more chefs every year, Rhode Island's capital city has a capital restaurant scene. Still, you might just prefer Federal Hill's Italian-American eatfest, otherwise known as Atwells Avenue, where caffes and salumerias and trattorias and bakeries stand puffy cheek by jovial jowl.
Walk it off on the East Side by traipsing down Benefit Street's so-called Mile of History, where the John Brown House is a virtual chronicle of Providence's society folk through the ages, and the Rhode Island School of Design has a surprising art museum that spans the globe. RISD's famous sense of style pervades the city -- what other community would celebrate the rivers that snake through it by setting them ablaze and throwing a party? (It's called WaterFire.)
Connecticut: The Nutmeg State
By David Lyon and Patricia Harris
All rivers run to the sea, but few do it with such force and majesty as the Connecticut as it bisects its namesake state. No less a connoisseur of great rivers than Mark Twain chose to live out his days not far from its industrious banks. To follow the river is to trace Connecticut from the heart-of-New-England uplands where the Yankee peddler was born to the lush marshlands of Long Island Sound so beloved by the American Impressionists. (Be sure to cross the river on the Chester-Hadlyme ferry, in service since 1769.)
Along Connecticut's sheltered coast, miles of sandy beach yearn toward the horizon, while deep harbors hold the submarine forces (and museum) of Groton and the salty maritime history museum of Mystic Seaport. Southward, Connecticut cozies up to New York, and somewhere en route you'll cross the Chowder Line, where properly creamy New England clam chowder suddenly gives way to bowls of tomato-stricken Manhattan clam chowder. Still, it's easy to forgive this culinary lapse when the folks of coastal Fairfield County break out their local oysters.
Despite the Gotham-hugging tendencies of communities on the commuter rail, upcountry Connecticut is as solidly New England as Currier & Ives depicted it. The Litchfield Hills and southern Berkshires thunder with springtime waterfalls, explode with the June blooms of mountain laurel, and glow scarlet and yellow when frost cracks the palette of autumn color.
History calls you to bear witness. Stand on the green in Litchfield and cast your eye toward a flurry of steeples and a broad crossroads where Beecher family preachers fought against slavery even before Harriet Beecher Stowe penned "Uncle Tom's Cabin." (To get the whole story, visit her home next door to Mark Twain's in Hartford.)
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