Monthly Archives: October 2013

Two Texas Churches

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Just before getting back on the train and leaving downtown Dallas, I took a look at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe — Cathedral Santuario de Guadalupe.

The cathedral’s web site tells me that “the Cathedral is the mother church of the 630,000 Roman Catholics in the nine-county Diocese of Dallas. Today, the Cathedral serves the largest cathedral congregation in the United States — as well as the largest Latino parish congregation — with 25,000 registered households.”

I had the place all to myself, as far as other human beings were concerned, for a few minutes on that Wednesday afternoon. Light was pouring in through the stained-glass windows on the west side of the church. It’s a lovely church inside, an example of High Victorian Gothic Architecture, finished in 1902.

Nicholas J. Clayton designed it. He’s another bit of Texas history – a prolific Irish-born architect who seems to have designed everything important in Galveston before the Hurricane of 1900 – that I had to look up (but not the hurricane; I read about that as a lad, and remained fascinated by it). One of these days, I need to go back to Galveston and look around, since I can’t remember much from my last visit, 40-odd years ago.

Not far from the cathedral are these small brick constructions.

As near as I can tell, they mark the site of the social center for a neighboring parish, Our Lady of Guadalupe, which eventually merged into Cathedral of the Sacred Heart – the former name for the cathedral pictured above, which was then renamed to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. Whatever the case, below Mary are the words “Guadalupe Social Center, Dallas, Tex. 1946.”

On the smaller plaque is an inscription in Latin. I have to like that. How much more public Latin is there in downtown Dallas?

ANNO DOMINI MCMXLVII HUNC LAPIDEM ANGULAREM CENTRI SOCIALIS PAROECIAE B.V.M. DE GUADALUPE EM. MUS ac ILL.MUS SAMUELIS CARDINALIS STRITCH SOLEMNITER BENEDIXIT.

Not too hard to figure out. Samuel Cardinal Stritch blessed the social center’s cornerstone on this site in 1947. At the time he was the Archbishop of Chicago.

During this visit to Texas, but in San Antonio, I also visited St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a much smaller house of worship near Ft. Sam Houston. Once upon a time, in the misty lost past, ordinary civilians could drive right through Ft. Sam – as everyone called it – no stops, no questions asked. Now all the entrances are barricaded. So you have to drive a long way around the fort to get to St. Paul’s.

I mention the fort because the church was originally established in the late 19th century to serve Episcopalians posted at Ft. Sam. It’s a church of beautiful simplicity inside, with some fine pews and stained glass.

There are also a few plaques on the wall that harken back to other times. Such as this dark one.

In Memory of T.J.C. MADDOX Assist: Surgeon U.S. Army BORN Dec. 12, 1852 Killed in action with Indians Dec. 19, 1885.

TJC Maddox seems to be this fellow. Remarkably, I’ve found found the story of his death on line, which was around the time the U.S. Army was busy chasing down Geronimo.

It’s possible, though I don’t know this for a fact, that relatives of Dr. Maddox who were members of St. Paul’s in its early years memorialized him with this plaque on the wall at the back of the church, where it remains into the 21st century.

Klyde Warren Park

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Among the things I did today, I mowed the lawn. It’s still green and was getting long. But with any luck that might be the last time until April.

Also, I visited HealthCare.gov to look around. No time for real shopping today, but I wanted to see whether there were any connectivity issues. I didn’t encounter any problems.

Various works of art weren’t the only thing I saw in Dallas. There was also the following. Call it a work of commercial art.

No ordinary ice cream truck, from the looks of it, but part of the food truck revolution. Or maybe “revolution” is too strong a word. Anyway, there seem to be more food trucks in cities than there used to be, and I suspect their offerings are a cut above what trucks used to serve — and they charge accordingly. What’s da Scoop? doesn’t look like the kind of operation that’s trolling for dollars from kids. It probably wants adult lunchtime business.

I didn’t find out. I would have considered it — ice cream would have been refreshing on that hot afternoon — but they were closing by the time I wandered by. So were the other food trucks parked in a line next to them. All of them were facing one of Dallas’ spanking new parks, which until recently was air space over a highway.  Now it’s Klyde Warren Park, a strip of greenery and other park amenities built over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, a recessed road that now goes through a three-block-long tunnel underneath the park.

Some years ago, I interviewed Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, near the end of his term, and he spoke at some length about how highways don’t belong in CBDs. He felt so strongly about this that as mayor, he oversaw the demolition of a short freeway in Milwaukee. I sympathize with the idea. They get in the way of walking around. If you can’t get rid of the thing, building on top of it seems like a good idea.

The park, which opened only last year, also features an incredibly detailed sign about how it was paid for: a public-private partnership that spent $110 million building it. Private contributions were about $52 million. Other funding sources were from bond sales, various state agencies, and $16.7 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Oh, really? Texas took some ’09 stimulus money? Well, money’s money and I say for their part, the taxpayers of the entire United States – or Treasury bond buyers worldwide, if you want to think of it that way – did a nice turn for the people of Dallas and visitors who happen by, of which I was one.

The Nasher Sculpture Center

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I don’t know a lot about sculpture, but I did recognize this face.

Or at least the artist, Joan Miró. His work’s pretty hard to mistake for anyone else’s. After visiting the Samurai Collection in Dallas, I headed back toward downtown proper, and the choice of two museums presented itself: the Dallas Museum of Art or the Nasher Sculpture Center, which are across the street from each other. Yuriko and I went to the DMA back in ’02, before the Nasher was even open, and while it would certainly be worth another look after over 10 years, I picked the Nasher. I make that kind of choice by going to the one I’ve never been to before.

During our 2007 visit to Dallas, we went to NorthPark Center, the mall the late Raymond Nasher developed. It has an unusually large and visible collection of sculpture and other art, so I knew about his affinity for collecting. Nasher’s museum, designed by Renzo Piano, doesn’t disappoint. There are plenty of fine items to take a look at, both inside and out in the sculpture garden, where the Miró stands. (“Caress of a Bird” (“La Caresse d’un oiseau”), 1967.)

The museum says of its collection: “Surveyed as a whole, the Nasher Collection demonstrates considerable balance between early modern works and art of the postwar period, abstraction and figuration, monumental outdoor and more intimately scaled indoor works, and the many different materials used in the production of modern art.  Perhaps its single most distinguishing feature, however, is the depth with which it represents certain key artists, including Matisse (with eleven sculptures), Picasso (seven), Smith (eight), Raymond Duchamp-Villon (seven), Moore (eight), Miró (four), and Giacometti (thirteen).”

Here’s one of the Moores. Can’t mistake his blobs for anyone else, either.

The Nasher’s definitely worth wandering through, inside and out. One irritation, though. Only some of the outside sculptures had signs. Maybe the information can be accessed in the self-guided audio tour, but even so every work ought to be accompanied by a written description, or at least a small sign with title, artist and year. Take this unlabeled example:

I thought, that looks familiar. Seen something like it – where? Then I remembered some of the works at the FDR memorial in DC. Sure enough, same artist, George Segal. Fittingly enough, the Nasher one is called “Rush Hour” (1983).

Or maybe “Sad People Walking Through the Cold” would be more fitting. Seems to have been a motif of Segal’s.