The Ironbound
There is a section of Newark that is downtown and got its name from being a transportation hub with lots of tracks all around it. It was also an area where there has historically been a lot of metalworking industry including the second largest metal smelting and refining plant in the U.S. Needless to say, this is a working class neighborhood and I have known people who are alternatively ashamed and proud to come from this gritty part of New Jersey. I doubt many people have heard of the Ironbound, but I used to have a guy who worked for me who came from there and always said that he was underutilized and felt like a Ferrari idling by the side of the road. That was his way to tell me to give him a promotion. My response was that the problem was that our business was more of a dirt track and a Ferrari might just spin its wheels. He had that problem where his head tended to get wedged too often up his own posterior. He was an errant Ironbound graduate.
What I always liked about he Ironbound was that it seemed to represent the hard working immigrant class of Americans. People tend to think of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in that regard, and that certainly was a first-stage hub for immigrants across the years. The Tenement Museum, located just south of Delancey Street pays homage to those immigrants and details the various waves that came through there from the early German and Dutch to eventually the Vietnamese. What I like about the Ironbound is that it wasn’t really a way-station for immigrants, it was an endpoint destination. I doubt anyone dreamed of the Ironbound when they first saw the Statue of Liberty, but it became a very important place for hard-working and respectable immigrants to live and raise their families, all within a stone’s throw of their port of arrival at Ellis Island.
The history of the Ironbound is that it started with German immigrants, then Polish and Italian, and eventually Portuguese. It was the Portuguese that took hold of the Ironbound and made it their base of operations in the new country. The other waves that came later went elsewhere because the Portuguese immigrants decided that the Ironbound was a keeper. To this day, you can still find a strong Portuguese presence in Newark, and especially in the Ironbound. So, here we are, ending our Viva Espana / Viva Portugal motorcycle tour in Porto, with two of us (Bruce and Jim) flying out from Porto today and the rest of us getting to Lisbon tomorrow for departures on Sunday back to the States.
Our trip was really Viva Espana with a small taste of Portugal. It seems to be Portugal’s lot to take the scraps off of Spain’s Iberian plate, and after almost 980 years (Portugal was founded in 1143 by the Zamora’s Treaty), it must be getting old. Actually, the boundary between Portugal and Spain is the world’s longest unchanged national border (according to our pal Kaz, who is more historian than any of us), so the two countries have apparently figured out how to coexist on this peninsula with meaningfully different languages if only slightly dissimilar cultures.
Yesterday we went out to what is supposed to be the most desirable rural area of the country, the Douro Valley, due East of Porto and the valley formed by the Douro River that runs to the sea through the city of Porto. The Douro Valley is best known for the grapes which are grown there and are the basis of the port wine that is made and aged in the twin cities of Porto and Gaia, all within the Porto District. This city of Porto is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as one of Europe’s oldest communities. It came into its own in the Fourteenth Century when Portugal and England bonded by virtue of a royal wedding in the City. The English are no dopes, they recognized the value of the wine coming out of the Douro Valley through the Foz de Porto and they jumped on it in a commercial sense. To this day, the big vintners that can be seen on the Gaia side of the Douro river carry names line Taylors and Grahams. The Valley has remained solidly Portuguese with a number of local vineyards that source the valuable grapes and have created a Lake Como-like setting for the rich and famous to enjoy and build summer homes.
After a wonderful end-of-ride dinner arranged by Kaz and Skip at the Graham’s Vintners site at their Port Lodge restaurant called Vinum, we reflected on port and Porto. I don’t drink, so I can’t appreciate the fine taste of the three types of port that were tasted (Ruby, Tawny and White) and the very popular “Portonic” cocktail, but all the pageantry was not lost on me while we sat amongst the thirty and forty-year-old barrels of the stuff. We had a lovely meal and sang the praises of one another for another wonderful American Flyers Motorcycle Club ride arranged by MotoDiscovery and Kazoom, as prominently displayed on our matching grey and red team jackets. The prominent logo for the Viva Espana / Viva Portugal Tour is a charcoal-like drawing of Don Quixote astride a BMW R1250GS motorcycle. We, like the man of LaMancha do our share of tilting at windmills and this trip was no exception.
Today we spent a warm morning shopping around the center of the town with great difficulty since the in-process subway excavations surround our hotel and all the major sites. Luckily, Kaz and Skip had organized a more pleasant way to spend the afternoon and we all boarded three Tuk-Tuk’s for a tour of the City. These are a slightly bigger version of the all-electric three-wheeled vehicles you see in India. In fact, the idea and the vehicles were imported from Mumbai and retrofitted for the streets of Porto. We piled in for a very pleasant trip up to the top of the cathedral and the monastery over in Gaia. The Tuk-Tuks were the only way to do that without walking a lot of stairs and it was a grand way to travel. From the plaza overlooking the cities, where we could see the winding Douro River make its last few miles’ way out to the Foz at the sea, we got a wonderful sense of the cities and their traditional buildings and hilly architecture. There is a distinction to the Portuguese buildings in that they are mostly adorned with colorful ceramic tiles not unlike one sees in Mexico or Morocco. It creates a lovely, antiquated and very global feeling to the City. We tried to go out to the Foz (the delta where the blue waters of the Atlantic meet the green waters of the Douro) but the river fog was thick as pea soup, so instead we went back into the sunny part of the riverbank and took our break there to enjoy the cooling sea breezes on an otherwise warm Portuguese day.
The history of Portugal is very much like the history of England. It is a country of similar heritage and aspirations of global greatness. Portugal did not gain the breadth of presence that England did, but that said, its presence from Brazil to Angola to Mozambique, Goa and Macau is significant. In the U.S., the Portuguese influence is more subtle given all the other immigrant waves that found their way to our shores. But go to the Ironbound and you will see that this small country has a strong cultural that believes strongly in the value of what they have to offer. As for us, we are pleased to be here seeing all of this culture at the source.