Fron Chateau to Shining Chateau

Around the turn of the last century, the Canadian Pacific Railway built a series of grand hotels across the country, which became landmarks in their cities. Here is the Hotel Vancouver, which we visited last year:


And now, a year later, we've come full circle, because the grandest of all is in Quebec City, the Chateau Frontenac, situated on a headland overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence and visible from just about everywhere in the city:


Up close it is quite something to see:



We didn't stay there -- it is said to be overpriced -- but the views must be spectacular.

That's it from Quebec City; thanks for reading! See you after our next trip ...

Remembering Vimy Ridge

One moment in Quebec did bring back memories of France, in a totally unexpected way.

A major landmark in the old city is the Citadelle, an old fortress at the high point of the city walls:
It adjoins the Plains of Abraham, the battlefield where the French lost Quebec to the British in 1759, which is now the city's main park:


Although Quebec City has never again faced an invader, the fort is still an active military base, home to a French-speaking Army unit. That unit fought at the most famous of all Canadian battles, Vimy Ridge in 1917 during World War I. It is still commemorated on the grounds:

French Canadians, of course, haven't necessarily felt much loyalty to the British crown or Empire, but in this case, the ability to fight on behalf of fellow Frenchmen seems to have made a difference to them.

(I visited Vimy Ridge when I was in France; it is a profoundly moving place. The French have ceded the grounds to the Canadian government, which operates it as a national park staffed with Canadian students. The ones I encountered all had the classic "eh" accent of English Canada, but maybe that's because I was on an English-language tour.)

Not everything in the Citadelle is depressing, of course. They have a changing-of-the-guard ceremony that includes, of all things, a goat:


It's the regimental mascot, the tenth in a line descended from a goat that Queen Elizabeth gave the unit once upon a time for some reason. The original is kept stuffed in the post museum:


And that's really about all I have to say on the subject.

Son et Lumiere

One of the landmarks of Quebec City is a huge grain elevator on the waterfront just northeast of the Old City. You can't miss it:


At night, or at least the night we were there, it turns into a screen for a fantastic sound and light show, which ranged from clips of old movies ...


... to abstract color patterns ...

... and even more fanciful images ...


I saw something similar projected on the facade of the Assemblee Nationale in Paris a couple of years ago, but this was far bigger, and better.

I've never seen anything even close to this in the United States, but maybe you have ... ?

Not a Drag

We didn't go to Quebec City for the nightlife. But we were surprised to find it has probably the best small-town gay club I have ever seen, and one that far outclasses anything currently open in New York.

To put this in context, Quebec City has a metro population of just over 700,000, which makes it around the size of Syracuse, and smaller than Omaha. Plus, it's less than three hours away from the world-class gay scene in Montreal.

It doesn't really have a gay neighborhood: this stretch of rue St. Jean, just west of the old city, is alleged to be the closest thing to one, but aside from a few same-sex couples on the sidewalks, it was a pretty nondescript stretch:


But just off this street, we found a club called Le Drague:



It's the only gay club in town, as far as we could determine, but what a club it was.

Drag was, it turned out, about the only thing we didn't see there on Saturday night (though I'm told they do have such shows on other nights). Instead, it turned out to be the kind of multi-purpose entertainment complex I had seen years ago in Minneapolis. (Maybe being in a cold-weather climate has something to do with it.)

Depending on how you count, the club is a collection of as many as six different spaces, each a mini-club of its own with (except for the last) its own bar. There's a patio out front for sitting, smoking and chatting. There's a large, two-story, brick-lined dance bar on the ground floor. Behind it and to the right is an indoor bar area with tables and a long row of video poker and slot machines. (Quite amusing, that, as one of them was a slots game with hockey images: instead of whirling cherries and oranges, you had skates, goalie masks, Zambonis, and the Stanley Cup.)

Down two levels of stairs in the basement is one of the nicest small club spaces I've ever been in: immaculate, with excellent clear sound, a balcony ringing the entire room, and white leather walls and seats that gave the impression of being in a padded cell.

Up a half-flight of stairs from the ground floor is an odd little leather bar, weirdly tasteful, with statues of musclemen on the bar that have hollowed-out nooks to hold liquor bottles. (Including, in the case of one statue, several bottles of wine. Who the hell drinks wine in a leather bar? Quebeckers, apparently. They also listen to Latin-and-jazz-inflected lounge music there.) There are stairs leading up from the leather bar, but ... better not to go there.

It took awhile to get started, and as late as midnight we were dancing almost by ourselves in the downstairs club. And I was thinking, nice club; shame about that neutron bomb that clearly hit the place the week before last.

Then we went upstairs and found the dance bar room had filled with bouncing youngsters -- we were the oldest people in the room by at least 10 years -- and extremely interesting music. So it turned out to be fun after all. But if you go, don't expect much before midnight.

Aside from the college kids in the dance bar, the crowd was quite a mix, as you'd expect from a place that is the only gay bar in town. It draws significant numbers of lesbians, some straight people, and gay men of all ages (though for whatever reason, the older ones seem to avoid the dance bar room rather strictly). They appeared to be all locals, or at least Francophones.

I will go out on a limb and say that Le Drague is the nicest club space I have ever been to in Canada (though I haven't been to Toronto in 20 years, so that's not included in the comparison). It's certainly nicer, physically, than Stereo in Montreal; though Stereo has amazing lights and sound and DJs, the building itself is a horrid '70s concrete monstrosity. And it's much nicer than either of the places I went to last year in Vancouver, though the Vancouver crowd is friendlier and friskier than just about anywhere else on earth. But for physical space, Quebec has them all beat.

... but Looks Can Be Deceiving

The European-ness of Quebec City was a big reason I wanted to go there -- given that a trip to Paris doesn't seem to be in my immediate future. But after having lived in Paris for six months, I found Quebec City wanting.

Sure, it looks European, and speaks French. And there are truly great restaurants there, including Laurie Raphael, where we had a seven-course tasting menu that equaled that served in many top restaurants in New York. One dish -- a side dish at that, not even a course of its own -- presented root vegetables in a flower pot, with crumbled cookies serving as the "dirt":


But what Quebec City, or at least the old town, lacks is everything else you associate with eating in France. We found no cafes whatsoever, nor charcutiers, cheese stores or most other types of specialty food places.

Even the boulangerie (bread bakery) is in short supply. Our options for breakfast croissants near our hotel turned out to be limited to one, a place called Paillard. But at least it was a nice one:


And upon further inspection, it turned out to have a feature that no Parisian boulanger has:


Yes, that's right: in Quebec City you can actually get your fresh croissants and coffee in the same place. How un-French of them. But how welcome.

A Bit of Europe, One Hour and Seven Minutes from New York

Any travelogue about Quebec City has to begin with the most well-known fact concerning the place: it looks like a medieval town in Europe.

And so, while appearances can be deceiving (and I'll discuss that a bit in the next few posts), let's start there anyway:

Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

A lot of people I know who summer in places like Fire Island Pines and Provincetown have heard vague things about Asbury Park and are, in a mild way, curious about it. This past weekend a group of 20 of us descended on the place to check it out. Here is my report. It can be summed up in a sentence: Asbury Park is the anti-Pines.

In a much more profound way than I could have imagined, the two places are diametric opposites. This is both good and bad, as I'll describe, but for both good and bad it's the central truth of the place.

If you've never been there, you've probably heard of it, at least as the faded, decaying seaside resort where Bruce Springsteen got his start (at the Stone Pony, which is still in business):


I visited once before, 14 years ago, for New Jersey Gay Pride. There was a parade up one of the main streets, past vacant lots and chain-link fences, toward an empty field near the ocean, much like the one shown here, where the Black Box woman sang "Everybody, Everybody" under a tent. There was one gay bar, with shabby plywood walls, a pool table and a neon beer sign. It was dreary beyond words.


A lot has changed since then -- the condos you see on the left side of this street are new, for one thing -- but Asbury is still, basically, dreary. It never was an atmospheric honky-tonk roller-coaster-and-salt-water-taffy place like Coney Island or Atlantic City, never mind places like Wildwood or Point Pleasant Beach that still make that formula work. Judging by the archeological evidence, it seems to have been a rather quiet middle-class place in its day, with a boardwalk but no real carnival midway. The boardwalk is bracketed by a partly ruined, partly restored convention center/auditorium to the north ...

... and a wholly ruined casino/carousel to the south:


The rest of the seafront is lined by a couple of restored hotels (the Berkeley, shown here, is at the north end near the convention center; the Empress, where we stayed and which I'll discuss further in a bit, is next to the casino) ...


... one or two modern buildings with upscale restaurants ...


... a couple of seemingly abandoned concrete shells ...


... and a bunch of sandwich and T-shirt shops set up in old shipping containers along the boardwalk.

There are many, many, many vacant lots in the oceanfront area, and a huge condo complex that seems to have been started and then abandoned before they got much past the first floor.

We stayed at the Empress Hotel, a '50s-modern, four-story structure at the south end of the beach that contains Asbury's main gay club and was recently purchased, restored and reopened by none other than Shep Pettibone, Madonna's producer in the '80s.


The architecture is mildly interesting if you like '50s modern; the lobby is comfortable; the rooms badly need to be updated. Out back is a large pool and deck, which got moderately busy with sunbathers during the day Saturday. A big second-floor deck with Astroturf gives a nice view down to the pool (notice the disco ball hanging over it) ...



... but if you turn even five degrees to the left, you get a much-less-nice view of the construction site behind it.



The 20 of us were arriving Friday in small groups, by car or train, and we were hoping that (like every other gay resort I've ever heard of) there was some sort of Tea where we could gather, mingle and meet the locals. No such luck. Even though drinks at the Empress's pool bar were only $3, no more than a handful of people were there by about 6p Friday. Because we had planned a group dinner that wasn't going to start until 9p, a few of us went looking for a snack, and more or less by accident stumbled into a wine bar across the street called the Watermark:


There, we started to see the good qualities of Asbury Park.

If the wonderful post-gay future we all claim to wish for ever arrives, it will have arrived first at the Watermark. This was the most diverse crowd I've ever seen: lesbian couples, twinky boys, bears, older straight country-club types, and Jersey Shore wanna-bes, all mingling happily and enjoying excellent, reasonably priced drinks and bar snacks (hummus, sliders, artichoke dip, etc.) on a beautiful rooftop, the ocean to our right, the town to our left.


I'm told that the Watermark just opened this year; it seems to be carving out a reputation as the place to go for happy hour in Asbury, and well it should.

We ended up, by now numbering 21, going to the restaurant an hour early just to see if they could take us. The restaurant was called Moonstruck; it's in a three-story 19th-century wooden house overlooking the body of water that separates Asbury Park and its neighbor to the south, Ocean Grove. Maybe 4 city blocks from the hotel. (It was a very nice house, but too dark for pictures.) One of us had called just that morning for a reservation. Not only could they seat us, an hour early, but we even got a private room (fortunately, as the rest of the place was pretty full). We must have been quite a handful, but the waiter (an older Irish-looking gentleman) was a great sport, and the owner came by to thank us for our patronage. The food (modern American) was terrific as well, though having left Manhattan and entered the United States of America, we did notice that we were now in the land of Big Food. One person's steak came on an oval platter that in my house is used to serve dinner for six.

We headed back to the hotel, and that was about it for the night. The hotel's nightclub, Paradise, was open but pretty much empty. There was a contest of six local drag queens, five of whom were terrible.

Saturday we hit what we were told was the gay beach, just south of the convention center (and, ironically, at the other end of town from the gay hotel). It wasn't impressive when we got there at noon; there were a few lesbians, and fewer gay men, but the crowd looked mostly straight. Over the next few hours it got gayer and gayer, and there were quite a few serendipitous bump-intos with local and New York friends who also happened to be in town for the day. But it's not a place to go if you're a beach lover. The sand is clean but coarse; the beach is interrupted every couple hundred feet by a ruined groin (you can see one in the picture above, as seen from the Watermark); it's crowded; and, this being New Jersey, you have to pay $5 per day just to use it. On beach quality, the Pines wins hands down.

Saturday night is definitely the night to go out to the Paradise. It's a nice club, actually, especially considering what you pay ($10 to get in, free to hotel guests; on Saturday nights the drink prices double to $6, still a bargain considering how heavy the pours are). There are three rooms; a dance floor larger than Splash's, with a bar of equal size off to the side; the smaller room (still at least as big as the Splash dance floor) with seats where the drag queens were the previous night; and the pool deck. On this night, with an unknown local DJ performing, all three spaces were about 2/3 full. They had Tony Moran the previous weekend and will have Ralphi Rosario on Labor Day. I'm told for such events they can draw up to 1,700 people, though that seems like an exaggeration.

It was fun. The music was good; the crowd was friendly in a low-key, non-cruisy way (though not, in terms of attractiveness, in the same league as the Pines); it's nice to be able to go outside for fresh air; the infrastructure is good (meaning, e.g., that the bars and bathrooms are of ample size to handle the crowd). Parts of it do feel a little hotel-ballroomy, but not enough to be a downer.

There is allegedly another gay(ish) bar in town, but we didn't try to find it after a FOAF we met at the pool that afternoon described it as a place where lesbians go to watch male strippers.

And that's really about all I have to say. Sunday was cloudy and showery and we didn't stay for the Paradise's weekly tea dance.

I do think Asbury has a lot of potential. But it also has a lot further to go to reach that potential than I had imagined. In theory, it could end up being something like an upscale Brighton Beach or Long Beach (New York, that is, not California), a place to own a condo by the sea in a walkable but urbanized town with good restaurants, shopping, beach-and-boardwalk, culture and a real mix of people. But right now, it seems more like a place for occasional weekend trips to a hotel than a place to own property and spend the season. Developments like the one containing the Watermark are promising but the downtown is still too much an urban disaster zone for my taste:


It could get there. But it will take 5 years and an economic recovery, minimum.

But while I'm not rushing to buy property in Asbury Park, I do plan to go back for more weekends. That much, it has already earned.