Time for another winter break. Back to posting around January 21, including time off for MLK Day.
Till then, the Eggman.
It’s actual title is “Egghead,” a work by Kimber Fiebiger, an artist from Minneapolis. The sculpture, at least as of September, is in Sheridan, Wyoming.
Above freezing temps in January, or December or February for that matter, mean a good day here in northern Illinois for a walk. That kind of thinking inspired us to go downtown on the Saturday after Christmas, an overcast but dry day without any bitter winter temps or in-your-face wind.
It wasn’t exactly warm, just not really cold. That happy condition inspired some people to do a bit more than walk. Spotted in the Chicago River.
A hot tub boat. I couldn’t remember whether I’d ever seen such a thing. Human ingenuity takes some odd turns. While I might not ever tool around in one myself, somehow I find it oddly reassuring that such a thing exists.
Looking the other way: one of the excellent bridges of the Chicago area. Or any urban area. The Michigan Avenue Bridge, which has formally been the Du Sable Bridge since 2010, named for the early settler and trade post operator in the vicinity.
We crossed bridge twice that day. Once on the upper level, which is always fairly busy, both with cars and trucks, and the flapping of flags, but also people on the wide pedestrian paths on either side. Later we crossed on the lower level. No one else was there.
Just another small example of how close off the beaten path can be. There’s nothing hard about reaching the lower level of Michigan Ave., and in fact there are a number of ways to get there.
The lower level walkway isn’t pretty, but there is urban texture.
It is also a good walk across an impressive steel bridge with a view, and that’s enough.
You might say I had a vision recently.
A vision, but no mystic revelations. When I saw the Jesus bobbleheads in Milwaukee on the Friday after Christmas, I thought that a really good lyricist could do a follow up song to “Plastic Jesus,” which would be called “Bobblehead Jesus.” But I am not that person.
We’d dropped by the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, where the bobbleheads crowd shelf after shelf after shelf: some 6,500 on display of the 10,000 figures the museum says it has.
But for Google Maps I might have missed National Bobblehead, which reminded me at once of the American Toby Jug Museum in Evanston. Still, there are some differences. Most of the tobies are behind glass, but not the bobbleheads, and most of the bobbleheads are sports figures, while the tobies have a wider variety of figures.
Like that other museum, National Bobblehead started with a single collection that morphed into something bigger – in this case, a bobblehead business for the two founders, Milwaukeeans Phil Sklar and Brad Novak. It isn’t enough that they collect them, though they still do, but they make them and sell them as well.
The museum asserts that Chinese nodding dolls had a vogue in Europe in the late 18th century, and that afterward various bobbly figures were made worldwide, with references to Germany and Russia and other places. These days sports figures dominate. Maybe three-quarters of the bobbleheads on display are sports figures, including both players and mascots.
Their popularity in the sports world has been growing since their introduction in the early 1960s in baseball. The first player-specific bobbleheads formed quite a lineup: Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Willie Mays.
Most of the others are entertainers and political or historic figures, as you’d expect.
More of him than I’d expect.
Can you really be a famous entertainer if you don’t have a bobblehead? 
Near the gift shop – which sells bobbleheads, naturally – is a more than complete collection of U.S. presidents, in order, back-to-front, left-to-right, Washington to Biden.
More than complete because FDR is represented twice, once standing (with a cane) and the other in a wheelchair. Grover Cleveland is represented only once, however. Curiously, beginning with Herbert Hoover, all of the figures have their hands raised, as one does to a crowd. Before him, only TR does so, and he’s holding a top hat.
More more note: the museum occupies part of the second floor of one of the redeveloped Kramer International Foundry buildings in the Walker’s Point neighborhood of Milwaukee. That early 2000s project was an early one in the transformation of the neighborhood from industrial to retail and residential.
Milwaukee continues to surprise.
Since we went to Indiana just before Christmas, it only seemed logical (to me) to go to Wisconsin just after Christmas. Due to considerations I don’t need to detail, we chose to make it a day trip. Milwaukee is convenient that way.
We arrived at the Mitchell Park Domes late in the misty drizzly but not freezing morning of December 27. Not our first visit, but the last time was quite a while ago.
Didn’t remember this detail: An analemmatic sundial in the sidewalk near the entrance, the likes of which you don’t see often. But no sun.
Formally, the place is known as the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory and, since the last time we were there, the fate of the Domes was the subject of a number of recommendations and other proposals. One proposal was to knock ’em down and replace them with something still undesigned, but which I suspect which would be more along the lines of immersive edu-tainment. Again, just a suspicion, but that would fit a pattern: destroy something distinctive to a particular place (in this case, Milwaukee) and put up something that could be anywhere, in the name of an enhanced guest experience that is interactive as a modest pinball arcade.
A few months ago, the county committed to spending some money on the Domes, including “a $30 million commitment from Milwaukee County once funding milestones are achieved,” according to Friends of the Domes, which unfortunately sounds like “when the county figures out how to get the money, this could take a while.” But at least the magnificent triad of domes isn’t going to be destroyed in a plan to merge it with the county’s Milwaukee Public Museum.
“Based on our review of the information we believe there could be a great guest experience which integrates the content and stories from Milwaukee Public Museum with the content and experience of the current Domes and Conservatory,” a 2019 report by an outfit called Gallagher Museum Services notes. “Specifically, the natural history portion of the MPM storyline fits very nicely with the Domes experiences. From our analysis, GMS has concluded that the Milwaukee Domes should be demolished. The cost of properly renovating the Domes greatly outweighs the benefit of doing so…”
A far as I can tell as a non-Milwaukeean, the reaction to that was, “Outweighs the benefits? Says who?” Anecdotal evidence supports the preservationists. On the Friday after Christmas this year, when people have more time to go out, they were out in force at the Domes. Not obscenely crowded, but pretty busy. All ages. Many were families with small children. Children who will, if allowed, take their own children one day.
The GMS report makes it sound like the Domes themselves aren’t really part of the “Domes experience,” which really just involves an elaborate garden, as opposed to an elaborate garden in a distinctive, placemaking setting. The experience, the report seems to assert, is portable: take it out from under the Domes and you’d still have the “Domes experience” somehow in a spiffy new building.
People like the Domes. They already want to go there. The Domes are not the Milwaukee Public Museum, which is a fine institution in its own right, however one might shoehorn the “Domes experience” into a part of that museum that happens to be about nature. The “Domes experience” is only found at the domes, and the people of Milwaukee know that.
I believe that too. Just for the vaulting glass overhead, if nothing else.
The Domes hold their crowds pretty well, too. We were able to circulate comfortably and without any sort of jostling.
The tropical dome.
The arid dome.
The show dome.
Christmas was represented, of course, but also Advent, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
As we did those years ago, we caught it during the holiday season show, and quite a show it is under the Domes.
The trappings of the holiday season are disappearing, as they always do in the grim early days of January. A few of the seasonally lit houses on the block are no longer cheerfully glowing, and I’ve seen a few forlorn Christmas trees out on the curb. Ours still stands inside, fully adorned, but even it is a short-timer.
I saw this figure in Chicago before Christmas, and in fact that wasn’t the only giant skeleton I’d seen re-decorated for the holidays.
I figure that considering the cost of such a skeleton – and possibly the pain-in-the-ass effort that goes into setting it up and taking it down – keeping it up just for Halloween didn’t appeal to the homeowner. Put on a Santa hat and red scarf and ho-ho-ho, it says Christmas, eh?
But what next? Some Cupid-like garb for Valentine’s Day, I suppose. An Easter bonnet for that holiday, which I think would look pretty funny, even though how often do you see Easter bonnets any more? An Uncle Sam hat for July 4 and I’m not sure what for Labor Day, and we’re practically back to Halloween and Christmas again.
Near the courthouse square in Kokomo, standing next to a fairly busy intersection and the parking lot of a small office building, is Kokomantis, all of 17 feet tall and – in late December anyway – decked out for the holidays. That’s a big bug. The kind of thing begs you to look at it.
“Its torso and wings are crafted from World War II fuel pontoons, while the legs are made from stoplight arms, giving her an industrial yet graceful appearance,” Heidi Pruitt writes in The Kokomo Post. Local artist Scott Little and developer Scott Pitcher collaborated on the work, with its creation taking Little a reported total of 220 hours.
I wasn’t sure what a “fuel pontoon” was, so I looked into it and came up with a reasonable definition from a British web site: “a self-contained floating facility for the storage and dispensing of petrol and diesel fuel for coastal sheltered marina environments.” Yep, that would have been useful in WWII.
Kokomatis isn’t the only animal of size in Kokomo. In Highland Park, one of the city’s parks, tucked away behind glass in what amounts to its own exhibition room, is the stuffed steer Old Ben (d. 1910). Impressive taxidermy, considering the age.
“Old Ben’s story began in 1902 on the farm of Mike and John Murphy between Bunker Hill and Miami near what is known as Haggerty’s crossing,” the city of Kokomo tells us. “He was the offspring of a pure bred registered Hereford bull and an ordinary shorthorn cow. Ben was a prodigy from the very beginning, as he weighed 125 pounds at birth…
“He weighed one ton at 20 months and two tons at the age of 4 in 1906. By that time, he had become quite a celebrity, and his owners exhibited him at many fairs and festivals. The Nickel Plate Railroad even ran a spur line to the Murphy farm just to help Ben in his travels.”
The article is worth reading all the way through, including for the pictures of a woman named Phyllis Hartzell-Talbert posing with stuffed Ben in 1944 at age 22 and again in 2022 at 100.
Not far from Ben, but in a different display room in the same building, is another former living thing famed (at least in Kokomo) for its size: The Sycamore Stump. Complete with explanatory notes on a sign.
A plaque you don’t see often. At least not as much as the WPA or the CCC. In this case, it’s attached to the structure housing Old Ben and the Sycamore Stump.
A New Deal jobs program for youth, including not only men, but women, and not only white youth, but blacks. It was part of the WPA for most of its existence.
Yet another item on exhibit in the park is a former Confederate cannon, one of those prizes of war that lingers long after the war. This one is a little unusual in that it isn’t out in the elements, like many.
Made by Leeds Iron Foundry in New Orleans some time before the Union occupation of the city beginning in mid-62. The cannon’s plaque explains: “Leeds made a total of 49 cannons for the South. Nine of these were 12-pound howitzers. Of these nine, only three are known to exist. Two are in the National Park Service and ours!”
One more item in the park, and it’s even bigger than Old Ben or the Sycamore Stump. A relocated covered bridge.
The Vermont Bridge, which doesn’t refer to the New England state, but instead to Vermont, Indiana, near Kokomo, where it crossed Wildcat Creek. When threatened with demolition, the city of Kokomo paid to have the bridge moved to the park in 1957 and the park district has done some renovation over the years. By 2039, it will have been in this location as long as it was in its original location.
When you see a bridge, cross it if you can, especially if traffic is light. Inside included plenty of graffiti.
Lewis Cass? Like the 1848 presidential candidate who lost to Zachary Taylor?
Yes. I remembered seeing Lewis Cass High School as we drove through Walton, Indiana, which is up the road a piece from Kokomo.
At the corner of Sycamore and Apperson streets in central Kokomo is Story Book Express.
Outside, a design on the whimsical side, using a lot of repurposed building materials from demolished structures, according to Fortune Cos. Inc., which mostly specializes in historic building restoration — and which is headed by Scott Pitcher, also of Kokomantis fame (at least in Kokomo). Inside, it’s a fairly ordinary convenience store. As the last place we visited in Kokomo, we went in for a look, and I knew I had to support this oddball convenience store in some way, so I bought a pack of gum for the drive back.
Sounds of the northwest suburbs in the seconds after midnight, New Year’s Day 2025.
A little way down our block, a knot of school-aged kids were in a front yard just after midnight, yelping and whooping and tooting horns as the fireworks popped all around the neighborhood; you can hear them on the third recording. The father of the house stood in the front door, up a few steps. Soon the kids headed up the steps to go inside, and I noticed gold-colored crowns on all of their heads, including the dad.
On the Monday before Christmas, we found our way to Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co., which is housed in an unpretentious complex in an unpretentious neighborhood in that town.
It’s another legacy of the Kokomo Gas Boom. A French glass chemist named Charles Henry found his way to Kokomo in the late 1880s, taking advantage of free natural gas to set up a glassmaking factory. That arrangement didn’t last, since Henry was more a technical man than a manager, and a heavy drinker besides, so he lost the factory and thus didn’t become the glass baron of Kokomo. But under other management the company has endured. KOG abides, you could say.
Three of the maw-of-hell furnaces for melting glass. There were others.
“Founded in 1888, KOG is the oldest producer of hand cast, cathedral and opalescent glass in the United States… known worldwide for our high-quality, hand-mixed sheet glass. KOG… has hundreds of color recipes, documented color combinations and numerous textures and densities,” the company web site says, with an illustration of handling molten glass better than I could photograph.
Not that I didn’t try.
Out it comes.
After the molten load has been dropped off at a suitable table-like surface to cool and be shaped, other glass experts do what they do.
Such as this fellow.
Our knowledgeable guide told us about the chemistry and the process and the history of the place.
I didn’t understand a lot of it, especially the finer points of the process, but remained fascinated. As a glass artist herself, she also conveyed a sense of artistic wonder at the multitudes of glass, the colors and textures, which are both hard and fragile. All that came through a device to boost her voice, since a glass factory can be a noisy place.
Note the glass at her feet. Among other stipulations that we agreed to before taking the tour was no open-toed shoes. In fact, that was stressed the most. When moving globs of molten glass around, a little is naturally going to drop and harden on the floor. Then break. In the fullness of time, the factory workers remove the glass, perhaps to be remelted, or sold as random pieces by weight to artists who use it. But there’s always going to be some glass underfoot. Fortunately this wasn’t a problem with standard footwear.
Another thing the company tells you is that the factory has no climate control. So while it was just above freezing outside, the factory was warmed by the furnaces. In summer, of course, the effect would be additive, and so devilish hot on the factory floor. Away from the furnaces, in the spaces used for processing and storing and packing all that glass, temps were low in December.
Such as in the cullet barrel room.
Cullet. How did I get this far and not know there is a word for shards of glass, thought of collectively and probably destined to be remelted?
Most of the company’s product isn’t broken, and so is stored in an impressive array of racks and shelving.
Hues galore.
Toward the end of the tour, we passed through a studio where artists employed by KOG work on custom projects. It being just before Christmas, only one was around, though I’m sure it’s a livelier place most of the time. And it is climate controlled.
Most of the complex is newer than 1888, but even so glass has been made on this site for nearly 140 years, using fuel unknown to the ancients. By ancient I mean really ancient: man-made glass from about 3500 BC has turned up in Egypt and eastern Mesopotamia, and it has been made ever since. So we visited a modern gas-power glass factory last month, but also experienced a vivid link to the heat and work of millennia.
In my 7th grade Texas history class back 50+ years ago, I’m pretty sure the prickly Mrs. Carico taught us about the 1901 Spindletop oil gusher in what’s now Beaumont. Could be that not even Texas students learn about that any more, though I couldn’t say for sure. We did not learn about the Indiana natural gas boom of the late 19th century. Maybe Hoosier kids of my age did. I hope so. Anyway, I had to go to Kokomo to learn about it.
Or rather, go to Kokomo to hear about it. I read more about the gas boom after I got home. I might as well stay home if I’m not going to occasionally follow up on the intriguing things I’ve seen and heard elsewhere.
“[Eastern central Indiana’s] industrial characteristics were brought about by one of the great booms of the late 19th century in the Midwest: the discovery of natural gas,” writes James A. Glass, an architecture prof at Ball State Muncie, in “The Gas Boom in East Central Indiana” in the Indiana Magazine of History (2000).
“The eruption of real estate speculation, industrial development and commercial expansion and population growth transformed a… portion of the state from a landscape of farmers, forest and agricultural villages into a territory in which cities and boom towns dominated, each teeming with factories, neighborhoods and commercial districts….”
There was so much natural gas under Indiana that for a while new towns burned it simply to show off. Gas flambeaux heated the day and lit up the night.
Image from Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, January 18, 1889.
Hindsight has only one ending to this story: the region had run out of gas by the turn of the 20th century. We tell ourselves that a “this resource will never run out mentality” is particular to the industrial revolution, as if we didn’t really believe it ourselves.
Not far from central Kokomo, you can stand right next to a physical legacy of the Indiana gas boom – the gas boom-era Seiberling Mansion.
The porch. The dome. The gables and arches. The brick and stone. Probably not to everyone’s taste, but it looks like a handsome assemblage to me. We arrived only about 20 minutes before the house museum closed – off-Interstate travel, while rewarding, can be a time suck, and besides, Eastern Standard Time had snatched an hour away from us. The desk volunteers were good enough to say we could look around without paying admission, though I did make a modest donation.
No surprise to find Christmas at Seiberling in full flower.
We would call Monroe Seiberling a serial entrepreneur, though I expect in his time he was simply a business man. He was a shooting star in the history of Kokomo. From Akron, Ohio – where his nephew Frank Seiberling stayed and cofounded Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. – the elder Seiberling turned up in Kokomo during the gas boom to take advantage of the lovely free gas to set up a few businesses, including a glass factory. He also stayed long enough to commission a mansion, designed by short-lived Hoosier architect Arthur LaBelle and completed in 1891.
After gas ceased to be so available or cheap in Kokomo, Seiberling moved on to Peoria, Illinois, according to one of the mansion docents, who provided us a quick informal tour of the first floor, probably because we showed some interest in the place. Also, she said, Seiberling’s wife didn’t much like Kokomo. As an incentive for him to leave above and beyond mere economics, that has a ring of plausibility to it.
Besides having a fun name, Kokomo, Indiana, is off that beaten path officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The closest highway to Kokomo in that system is I-65, which I have driven so many times I’ve lost count, except I never kept count. I also had never diverted to Kokomo.
One way to get from metro Chicago to Kokomo is to take I-65 to near Remington, Indiana, and then head east on US 24 to the burg of Dunkirk near the somewhat bigger burg of Logansport. From there, heading south on US 35 takes you to Kokomo. This is what we did on December 22, spending the night in that town (pop. nearly 60,000) and then returning home late the next day.
I’ve wanted to visit the Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co. for years. How did I hear about it? I don’t remember, but the sticking point has long been that the company, a major maker of art glass, only gives tours on weekdays. I checked and it turned out that the company was indeed open for a tour on December 23, so that clinched it.
We arrived before sunset on the 22nd, in time for a walk-around the Howard County Court House.
That instantly says 1930s. As it happens, the building was dedicated in 1937, built as a replacement for an 1860s Second Empire courthouse that burned down. Postcards, such as the one below, depict that long-lost structure (source).
The buildings surrounding the courthouse are mostly older, some dating from the late 19th-century natural gas boom that put Kokomo on the map.
Details.
Union halls: Operating Engineers and Carpenters.
Some buildings retain their names, which doubtless reflect local real estate entrepreneurs as long gone as the old courthouse. Such as the Riley Vale Building. Nice brickwork.
If it hadn’t been about freezing and a little windy that day, I might have done some closer images of its elaborate front.
The Wilson Block.
The tallest of these buildings says Garritson, with a date of 1911.
Though it’s hard to see in this image, there’s a barber pole in front of the building to the left of Garritson. It so happened that my old barber has retired, or died, and I’ve been looking for a new one. Till then, I’ve had my hair cut in various places. I peeked inside and saw the sole barber idling in his chair. I asked if he could cut my hair sometime that afternoon and he said that his most recent appointment hadn’t shown up, so he could right then.
So I got a haircut from the barber right then. One of the younger barbers I’ve been to recently (in his 30s, probably), we chatted some, and I learned that he was the last barber standing at that shop – which had three other chairs. Not because of a population exodus from Kokomo or anything so abstract, but because two other barbers had been caught with their hands in the till, he said. I’m not sure how that could have happened, considering the economics of a barber shop, but I guess if someone wants to steal, they’ll find a way.
Jimmy Carter had a hard time as president, but the underappreciated 1970s wouldn’t have been the same without him. RIP, President Carter.
Decorating was a slow process this year, but we finished by Christmas Eve.
On the Saturday before Christmas, I had an appointment in Chicago with three Wise Men. Better than an appointment in Samarra with three Wise Guys, certainly.
Gaspar, Melchor and Baltasar. Human-sized figures. Not smoking on a rubber cigar that I could see. They stood in a gallery at the National Puerto Rican Museum, which is formally the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, and which I was able to visit late in the morning. The Wise Men were part of the exhibit Los Reyes Magos Puertorriqueños (Three Wise Kings of Puerto Rico). Artists from the island took their hand at depicting the Wise Men-Kings, including the costumes above, which were created by Reynaldo Rodriguez only this year.
Other interpretations include Tres Reyes Magos Pescando, Three Wise Kings Fishing (2010).
Reyes Taínos, Taino Kings (2022).
No title (early 20th century), by Rafael “Fito” Hernandez.
A more permanent feature of the museum is the stairway mural by Cristian J. Roldán Aponte. 
Other current exhibits include Puerto RicanEquation: mixed media works, video y El Espiritu Santo by Juan Sánchez; Cuentos Ocultos/Hidden Tales; and liminal: LGBTQ+ Chicago – Boricua Imaginings. Since 2000, the museum has been housed in the wonderful Humboldt Park Stables & Receptory, a structure from the 1890s designed by the mostly obscure Fromann & Jebson, who were busy in their day. 
Once upon a time, landscape architect and park superintendent Jens Jensen had his office in the building, and the room is still acknowledged as such by the museum.
I’d hope so. More than any single individual, Jensen fashioned the major parks of Chicago as we know them, and did a lot else besides.