Lancaster the Beautiful - Money Rocks Park

It is said that during the Civil War, Pequea Valley farmers hid their money high up in the rocky ledges of Welsh Mountain in eastern Lancaster County to safeguard it from the approaching rebel forces.  After the threat passed, they climbed back up the steep hills only to find the money gone.

Today, you can drive 20 miles east of Penn Square to Narvon and clamber up those same imposing cliffs, now preserved in Lancaster County's Money Rocks Park.  You may cross paths with a few rambling couples or families on the trail near the parking lot, but for most of the time, you'll have the 3-plus miles of moderately difficult hiking trails and spectacular vistas all to yourself -- just you and the ruffed grouse, wood thrush and wild turkey.

Here's what we saw this weekend:

The cliffs of Money Rocks

Two intrepid climbers atop the Rocks!

Spectacular vistas

A steep descent beckons

Precipice

Wild flowers of Money Rocks

Dramatic terrain

My Kind Of Town

Thinking of moving somewhere new? You may have heard that this town was nice, but snobby; another one's shabby and maybe not so safe, but possibly on the rise; a third one is cool and youthful.

So how do you sort out the buzz from the beef?  For many folks looking to relocate to a new community, the factors are pretty basic: the reputation of the schools, property taxes, convenience to the workplace, and how much house you can get for your money.

For a deeper, more personalized method of evaluating a community and whether it's right for you and your family, The New York Times proposed in a recent article taking what they termed a "values audit.”  While the term may be nothing more than a bit of marketing jargon for doing your due diligence, the underlying notion is a sound one.

To really get a sense of whether or not a place fits, you have try to understand the values that a community and its people reflect and then see how they align with your own.  If that sounds amorphous or subjective, try structuring the exercise into a series of key questions, such as these below:

• What are the public priorities of the place?  Is the major concern for keeping taxes low, or economic development and job growth, or quality public services and amenities?
  
• What is the tone of public discourse?  Do issues get debated in a respectful and harmonious way, while allowing for disagreement and dissenting points of view?
  
• Is there a healthy mix of long-time families and newcomers?
  
• What can you learn about the community from the on-line comments and letters-to-the-editor of the local paper or from the postings on social media groups devoted to the life of the community?
  
• Are public officials accessible and responsive when you call their office?  How about police, fire and other emergency services?
  
• Who is dropping off and picking up the kids at school – a lot of nannies and caregivers, grandparents or stay-at-home dads and moms?
  
• Does the local shopping district feel like its populated by a diversity of people, or is it very homogenous, and if so, are they folks you feel comfortable being with?
  
• Is there a wide availability of programs and activities that you and your family will want or need as the years go by?
  
• Are there decent accessible medical care, social services, and transportation to meet your needs?

Here in Lancaster, we are endowed with a vibrant community, full of diversity, a high quality of life and rich in opportunity for a wide range of cultural, social, professional, educational and leisure pursuits.

But even a stellar community profile does not make Lancaster – or anywhere else, for that matter– right for everyone.  So go ahead and ask some questions of your own that occur to you.  Put a place to the test against the things that matter in your life.

Once you start, you soon see that taking the measure of a community and how well you and your loved ones would flourish in it is a rich exploration that tells you as much about yourself and your personal values as that of the place where you are thinking about putting down roots.

If This Is A Bubble, It's Going To Be A Bazooka

Yes, we know that San Francisco is probably the hottest real estate market in America -- some would say that the City by the Bay isn't America at all, but some otherworldly Avalon of mythic origin.

Certainly the steamed-up housing market is reaching mythic proportions, nowhere more so than the Bernal Heights neighborhood, the hilly residential community south of the Mission District.

Just look at some of these outlandish prices being fetched for cottages on postage stamp lots.  The average sales price in April was over $ 1-million for these tiny charmers -- and no one doubts that they are charming.  But 78 percent appreciation in two years on a place that didn't get a stick of renovation in the interim?  

As one dizzied resident put it on the Bernal community blog, "WTF?"  

No, we don't get real estate vertigo like that here in Lancaster -- but maybe that's a good thing.

Only 2 Hours From Penn Square: Whistler Like You’ve Never Seen Him

The Freer-Sackler Galleries, side-by-side repositories of the Smithsonian's Asian art collection, also house one of the finest and largest gatherings of work by James McNeill Whistler, the American-born painter who decamped for London where he advanced the radical vision of JMW Turner toward the flowering of 20th Century abstraction.

James McNeill Whistler
1834-1903

 Now through Aug. 17 in the Sackler is the landmark Whistler exhibition, "An American in London: Whistler and the Thames."   Brought together for the first time US and UK collections are some 80 of Whistler's London scenes -- many centered on the great city's great arterial waterway. 

This exhibition is the most significant showing of Whistler in more than two decades.  For Lancastrians, it is a privileged opportunity for a day trip to Washington to experience one of the masters in full.

Arriving as a young man in London in 1859, having left West Point to study etching at the US Geodetic Survey and painting in Paris, Whistler was very much a contemporary of Dickens: steeped in the novelist’s remorseless portrayal of London's squalor, inequalities and virile industrial tumult.  But no Victorian moralist was he -- rather, Whistler's concern was all form, light and color, the very elements that soon would come to define the modernist revolution he prefigures.

Nocturne -- Blue and Silver

Like Turner -- as well as Monet -- he explores the misty, indistinct and impermanent vistas of the riverscape with restrained emotion.  He also brings to life the seedy and roguish characters of the waterfront, as in “Wapping”, a Renoir-like pub scene of two sailors and a lady weighing her options, with the daily commotion of the docks and river spread out behind them.

Wapping

By contrast, a corner of the gallery space is given to work displaying Whistler's fascination (as with the West, generally) with all things Japanese.  He sets pastel-colored proper English women in geisha poses -- complete with kimono and chrysanthemum -- on a balcony overlooking the grey river and the looming charcoal tones of Battersea on the opposite shore.  He even signs the work with a butterfly icon.

Balcony

To complete the contrast, the gallery offers through July 27 a companion exhibition, much smaller in scale, of Kobayashi Kiyochika woodblock prints of Tokyo scenes from the same period. 

Whistler’s great London works challenged the Victorian establishment, and he ultimately fled England for the continent in disgust at the negative critical reception he received. As this stunning display of virtuosity confirms, Whistler’s detractors were shortsighted: his work endures for the ages.

Battersea Reach

Get up and go:

The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, located at 1050 Independence Avenue S.W., and the adjacent Freer Gallery of Art, located at 12th Street and Independence Avenue S.W., are on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (closed Dec. 25), and admission is free. The galleries are located near the Smithsonian Metrorail station on the Blue and Orange lines. For more information about the Freer and Sackler galleries and their exhibitions, programs and other public events, visit www.asia.si.edu. For general Smithsonian information, call (202) 633-1000

This is the final venue of a three-stop tour for this exhibition.  Don’t miss it.