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Salem Chop Suey Sandwiches, A Sign of Summer Again

Chop suey sandwiches have marked the beginning of summer for generations of people who grew up on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Vendors once sold the beloved cheap treat throughout New England and as far south as Coney Island in New York.

They’ve been sold at the Salem Willows seaside park since the early 1900s. And then the last restaurant that sold them, Salem Lowe. closed its doors in 2022.

But like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the North Shore Chinese restaurant in Salem Willows Park reopened in 2023. The Salem News reported the happy development:

Meet the new Salem Lowe, bringing chop suey and pepper steak back this April under new ownership.

Salem Lowe, courtesy Google maps.

The chop suey sandwich is a cheap and filling concoction of roast pork or chicken, onions, celery and bean sprouts cooked in a thickened soy gravy and served on a hamburger bun. It is not to be confused with the Fall River chow mein sandwich, which lack bean sprouts and, often, meat. Chow mein noodles are an option on the chop suey sandwich, but required on the chow mein sandwich.

The Salem Lowe restaurant served the chop suey sandwich in bread rolled into a cone and wrapped in wax paper. According to the Roadfood blog, you had a choice of your sandwich in a take-out container or in a paper cone. “The cones are designed for eating while strolling, which is what you should do,” reported Roadfood.

“If there were a Nobel Prize for food stuffs, one would surely have been awarded to the culinary genius at Salem Lowe that created the chop suey sandwich,” wrote one reviewer on Yelp. “Forget radiology, penicillin and world peace: this deliciously salty sandwich has done more for humanity than those things combined.”

Chop Suey Sandwiches

Chinese immigrant cooks started restaurants and lunch wagons near mills, schools and amusement parks. They tailored their food to local tastes. Foods like chow mein and chop suey, with soft vegetables in a brown sauce, resembled Yankee cooking. Add bread and you had a cheap and filling Asian fusion food – also known as “cheap Chinese.”

Salem Willows Historic District

Salem Willows was an ideal location for the chop suey sandwich. It was developed around 1875, at the same time the Salem Willows resort community (now a historic district) was built. The park and the cottage district were named for the European white willow trees planted in 1801 along a walkway for smallpox patients at a nearby hospital.

Streetcars brought hordes of day trippers attracted by the beaches, the casino, the pavilion and the carousel. They flocked to Restaurant Row, where celebrated eateries served fresh seafood. One by one the eating places succumbed to fire and changing demographics.

Entrance to Salem Willows, courtesy Google Maps.

The last restaurant on Restaurant Row closed in the 1960s, but Salem Lowe still soldiered on with the chop suey sandwiches. (E.W. Hobbs also serves much- loved popcorn, but that’s a story for another day.) But owner David Yee said it’s time for him to retire.

An online exhibit of Salem food linked to Salem State University dates Salem Lowe from ca. 1912. The reasoning: the menu refers to itself as a ‘bill of fare,’ a term not used after 1914. Salem, notes the author, played an important role in the old China trade, which began in 1783. Yee told Boston.com his father had bought into the business in the 1960s.

Nostalgia

Today, Salem Willows still has the carousel and several arcades, one containing a few rides. Two small beaches are popular for watching July 4^th fireworks from Salem, Beverly and Marblehead.

The North Shore inspires a strong sense of nostalgia among those who grew up there. Some say you can’t call yourself a native if you haven’t had the chop suey sandwich at Salem Willows. Brunonia Barry captured that devotion in her novel the Lace Reader, in which the fictional detective eats chop suey sandwiches at least once a day.

Devotees flocked to Salem Lowe on Aug. 12, 2022, the Friday before its last weekend. The Salem News reported,

The window opened Friday to a line that was already more than 50 people deep. By 11:45 a.m., 60 were lined up. By 12:15 p.m., 82. Soon, the line nearly ran the length of the Willows strip, crossing ice cream windows and arcade entrances along the way.

Woodman’s, famous for its fried clams in nearby Essex, Mass., offers a recipe for making your own chop suey in The Woodmans Restaurant blog.

Photo: Salem Willows Historic District, By Fletcher6 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11752323.

This story about chop suey sandwiches was updated in 2023.

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Seeing Boston By Streetcar on Film in 1906

Seeing Boston By Streetcar stands as one of the first films of the city ever made. It offers today’s viewer a fascinating glimpse of the city’s smoky, busy streets. The streetcar takes the viewer past Jordan Marsh and along Boylston Street to Copley Square and the Boston Public Library. Pedestrians, horses, carriages and carts vie for space in a free-for-all with no traffic lights, no crosswalks and no stop signs.

Viewers who first saw the film during its debut in 1906 probably found it even more fascinating.

Seeing Boston by Streetcar

(Note the brief fistfight at 2:26.)

The motion picture industry, even newer than the str had just started when American Mutoscope and Biograph Company filmed Boston by Streetcar in 1906.

The Early Film Industry

On April 14, 1894, the first kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City. Patrons viewed moving pictures through a peephole, which Thomas Edison’s laboratory invented. In New York two years later came the first commercially successful movie projection, again with an Edison invention – the Vitascope. Weeks later in Boston, Benjamin Franklin Keith showed a film with the Vitascope in his vaudeville theatre on 547 Washington Street.

In 1906, Boston’s first movie theatre, the Theatre Comique, opened on Tremont Row in Scollay Square. It typically showed a series of short films of real life, drama and entertainment. Cameramen traveled the United States filming scenery to product such cinema verite.

New England had dozens of film studios, including the Eastern Film Corporation in Rhode Island, the Commonwealth Photoplay Corporation in Massachusetts and Dirigo Pictures and Pine Tree Pictures in Maine. But then the film industry moved out west, in part due to the efforts of another New Englander — Thomas Ince, born in Newport, R.I.

People considered early movies technical marvels. The Boston Herald gushed over the debut of the Vitascope:

The scenes shown are full of life and action, simply lacking in vocalization. To describe the enthusiasm aroused would be impossible. Worthy professors and scientific men vied with grocery clerks in the warmth of their applause.

Billy Bitzer

A major figure in the early motion picture industry, G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, shot Seeing Boston By Streetcar. Born Gottfried Wilhelm Bitzer in Roxbury, Mass., on April 21, 1872, he entered the family business as a silversmith. But he abandoned his well-paying trade for the infant film industry.

Bitzer developed early cinematic technologies and techniques such as the soft focus, the iris shot and the close-up. He collaborated for many years with D.W. Griffith, most notably filming and investing in Birth of a Nation.

Bitzer, behind the camera, with D.W. Griffith on location for the film Way Down East in 1920.

In Bitzer’s autobiography, published posthumously in 1973, he described his early years:

When I started out as a cameraman in 1896 the Biograph camera weighed close to a ton. These were the days before movies were ready to be projected on the screen. They could be seen only when the viewer turned a crank and looked into a peep-show machine at the penny arcades. In 1896 at Hammerstein’s Olympia Music Hall in New York, I was the projectionist of Biograph’s first screening in a theater. We showed pictures of Presidential candidate William McKinley at his Ohio home, which I had taken; of the Empire State Express rounding a bend; of Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle, and two or three other shorts.

Those “pictures of McKinley” actually amounted to the first presidential documentary. And Bitzer used the first known close-up shot in Rip Van Winkle.

Bitzer died of a heart attack on April 29, 1944 in Hollywood.

Streetcars

Twenty-five years before Bitzer took his camera onto an electric streetcar, Boston greeted the conveyance with similar awe. However, the electric streetcar got no warm applause. An inventor named Benson Bidwell had brought a demonstration model to the city. He hoped for a contract to build and operate a streetcar line. Bidwell described the reaction in the winter of 1884-85:

The cars were nicely upholstered and made a sensation among the Boston Yankees, who, when they came to fully understand that an unseen power was running, lighting and heating the cars, said it was either magic or a fraud; for they could not comprehend though they were afraid of it.

He didn’t get the contract, but other people did. Bostonians quickly got over their fears after the first streetcar line opened to Brookline on Jan. 5, 1889. Within seven years, the city had a network of electric streetcars. As Boston By Streetcar shows, fear of the cars had disappeared.

The electric streetcar had a huge impact on Boston’s growth. They allowed for the development of streetcar suburbs, starting with Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan, then moving out to Brookline, Somerville and Arlington, to name a few.

Today, a few streetcar lines remain in Boston. They include the four Green Line branches, and the Ashmont-Mattapan High-Speed Line.

This story about seeing Boston by streetcar was updated in 2023. To read more about the early film industry in New England, click here.

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Surprising Stories: The Great White Hurricane of 1888

The Great White Hurricane of 1888 struck on the night of March 11 and continued furiously for two days, dumping as much as 60 inches of snow on parts of the Northeast. One of the worst blizzards in U.S. history, it killed 400 people and paralyzed the East Coast from the Chesapeake to Maine.

Drifts left by the Hurricane of 1888 in Northampton, Mass. Smith College Archives.

The huge drifts made roads impassable. Railroads shut down and streetcars abandoned. The storm wrecked 200 ships and 100 seamen were lost at sea. Horses and cattle died, trees fell, barns collapsed and people had to stay in their homes or hotels for days. The unlucky ones had no milk, no meat, no coal. Shortages forced mothers to pay 50 cents for a quart of milk when they earned $2.50 a week for 11-hour days.

Only three months earlier, the New England Hurricane had devastated the East Coast. It took more lives and did more property damage than the Great White Hurricane of 1888. But for the people who lived through both, the second storm seemed worse.

Art Botsford worked in a clock factory when the Hurricane of 1888 hit the town of Thomaston, Conn. Years later, on Dec. 19. 1938, he sat down with writer Francis Donovan of the Works Progress Administration and reminisced about the storm of 1888.

Hurricane of 1888

Saturday was a beautiful spring day, Botsford recalled, but it rained on Sunday. By nightfall the rain turned to snow. On Monday morning, people went to work or school but soon they were sent home.

Art Botsford went to the clock factory that morning, but returned home at lunchtime. He struggled through snow up to his waist, unable to see 10 feet in front of him. Two of his co-workers, Warren Westwood and his son-in-law Bill Woods nearly died trying to get home to Harwinton, Conn., about 10 miles away:

They bought a snow shovel, and they said by God they’d get through. They got stuck in a big drift miles from home. One of them got the horse out and got on his back and the other took hold of the horses’ tail. They hadn’t got very far this way when the horse dropped dead.

The two men plodded on, recalled Botsford, making their way the best they could by what landmarks they could recognize. They climbed over stone walls and dead trees in the deep snow, exhausting themselves. Botsford continued,

You heard how people get when they’re in that condition. Westwood wanted to lay down and rest. But Woods, his son-in-law, he pinched him and slapped him, made him keep on his feet.

… They made their way to the house at last and fell up against the door and Mrs. Woods opened it and dragged ’em both inside. They was both in bad shape. Had their fingers and ears and nose and their chins frozen. It was three weeks before either of them came to work again.

Killer Snowbanks

In Northampton, Mass., an unidentified Smith student wrote to her father about walking home in the hurricane of 1888:

… we found ourselves out in a white blinding whirl of snow with no paths to walk in and a wind that took away our breath…One of two girls just in front of us lost her rubber in the snow and fell down and could not get up till a boy ran up and helped her…”

Keene, N.H., after the hurricane of 1888.

Children died trying to get home from school and adults perished in snowdrifts higher than their heads. Telegraph boys tied wires around their waists so they could be pulled out of the drifts. In Springfield, Mass., a man named Edwin F. Leonard bent down to pick up a hat in a snow bank and found a little girl buried in it. In Stamford, Harry M. Capper, who lost a leg in the Civil War, was found nearly exhausted in a snowdrift near a store on Monday. Rescuers carried him home, and he recovered.

Fury of the Hurricane of 1888

Neither the fury of the wind nor the fall of the snow paused at all on Monday, day and night, reported the Stamford Advocate. Eleven-year-old Walter Crittenden of Wethersfield, Conn., also wrote about the hurricane of 1888 — in his journal:

Monday, March 12 _ A very stormey day, wind began to blow hard early in the morning. Children were sent home from school at half past 9. Pappa came home looking like a snow man, books in the pocket.
Tuesday, March 13 – The storm crept on with all its fury. Fred and I made some snow shoes. Their wasn’t school.
Wednesday, March 14 – Storm ended today. School let out at half past 9. Badly drifted.

Telegraph lines came down, leaving people isolated and in the dark.

“All people could do is wait for the storm to end while wondering and worrying about what was happening in the rest of the world,” Walter Crittenden recalled 80 years later.

Trains loaded with passengers stayed stuck for days. People dug tunnels to get into or out of their houses, and in rural areas like the Berkshires people couldn’t leave their homes for two weeks.

Shortages

Art Botsford remembered how store supplies of fresh meat first ran out, and then the canned meat and then finally the salt meat. Food was scarce, and suppliers who sold to the highest bidder rather than their steady customers never got those customers back, he recalled. Seven days after the storm began,

I went to church the next Sunday, the sun was shinin’ nice and bright, and over at Burr Reed’s market in the center, just as church was over a sled owned by Ralph N. Blakeslee of Waterbury drove up with a supply of meat. The butchers and the meat cutters was in church – they was more church-goin’ people then than there is today – and they went over and opened up the store and the people flocked in and they began to sell meat – Sunday or no Sunday.

Clearing the snow was a huge challenge in the days before snowplows. Men dug out with snow shovels or attached rollers or plows to teams of horses or oxen.

In Stamford, Conn., 15 men and four horses hitched to a lumber box couldn’t open a road. The town hired five yoke of oxen and a force of laborers with shovels worked through the day. Finally they cleared the way for wagons carrying groceries, milk and coal.

Beautiful Snow?

John Whitaker Watson wrote a famous poem in that era called Beautiful Snow. It lamented the death of a prostitute (a popular topic back then):

Store of E.S.Webb in Stamford, Stamford Historical Socirty

Store of E.S.Webb in Stamford, after the hurricane of 1888. Stamford Historical Society

O the snow, the beautiful snow!
How the flakes gather and laugh as they go!
Whirling about in its maddening fun,
It plays in its glee with every one.
Chasing, Laughing, Hurrying by,
It lights up the face and it sparkles the eye;
And even the dogs, with a bark and a bound,
Snap at the crystals that eddy around.
The town is alive, and its heart in a glow,
To welcome the coming of beautiful snow.

Hartford residents hanged Watson in effigy and pelted him with snowballs.

Bitter cold set in after the hurricane of 1888 and the snow didn’t melt for months. Great quantities of the frozen stuff were thrown off wharves or carted to town greens. Botsford remembered a mountain of ice on New Haven’s green, which didn’t melt until June.

Not everyone hated the Great White Hurricane of 1888. In Springfield, the Hotel Cooley filled with revelers stuck in the storm. For days “the knights of the cork” sang and drank. Those who stayed at the Cooley during the storm formed The Association of ’88 and met annually for years afterward.

Stuck Inside of NYC

Connecticut residents Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum couldn’t leave their hotels in New York City. Twain detested the hurricane of 1888 because it prevented him from meeting his wife Olivia. So on March 10, he wrote her a letter lamenting their separation. In it, he wrote,

…a blizzard’s the idea; pour down all the snow in stock, turn loose all the winds, bring a whole continent to a stand-still: that is Providence’s idea of the correct way to trump a person’s trick.

With thanks to the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection; Wethersfield Historical Society; and the Stamford Historical Society. This story about the hurricane of 1888 was updated in 2023.

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