Two More Milwaukee Churches

Posted on September 30, 2021 by admin

Royal road to the unconscious, eh? Last night a pleasant elderly couple appeared in a dream: “Mr. and Mrs. Folger.” He didn’t look like anyone I knew, but she looked like Virginia Christine. I know, of course, that wasn’t her name in the commercials, but tell it to the unconscious.

The last two Doors Open places we visited in Milwaukee on Saturday were churches, not far from the cluster of churches we saw in 2017 along or near Juneau St. One this time was St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

A Richardsonian Romanesque design by the busy Victorian architect Edward Townsend Mix, completed in 1884 for the oldest Episcopal parish in Milwaukee. No Cream City brick this time, but rather another Wisconsin material: red Lake Superior Sandstone, found near the Apostle Islands, and (I think) similar to Jacobsville Sandstone up in the UP.

The church is known for its Tiffany windows, one of which is reportedly the largest opalescent glass window the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany ever made, at 22 feet x 28 feet. That would be “Christ Leaving the Praetorium.” My pictures didn’t turn out so well, but fortunately there’s a public domain image available.

A few blocks away is St. Rita Catholic Church. Its current iteration didn’t exist when we were nearby in 2017. The church was completed only last year.

“St. Rita Church at 1601 N. Cass St. began in 1933 as a mission outpost of the old Italian parish, the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii Church in Milwaukee’s Third Ward,” the Three Holy Women Parish web site says. “Its basement church was blessed as a new independent parish in 1937, then a building was erected and blessed in 1939… In 2018, the church was demolished with plans to build St. Rita Square, a six-story senior housing campus operated by Capri Senior Communities, along with a new St. Rita Church.”

Some elements of the new church were part of the old St. Rita, and a few were even part of the Blessed Virgin of Pompeii, which was razed in 1967 for highway construction.

“One of those artifacts, an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Gabriel, is already visible to passersby,” Urban Milwaukee reported in early 2020. “Sculpted in 1904, the year the pink church [Blessed Virgin of Pompeii] was constructed, it had been on the top of St. Rita since 1969. It now rests atop its third church.”

St. Rita has an inviting but relatively spare interior.

The church also has some nice stained glass.

I didn’t know much about the saint. Anything, actually. She’s Rita of Cascia (1381-1457).

Now I know a little more, such as she’s the patron of abused spouses and difficult marriages, among many other awful situations.

Forest Home Cemetery & Arboretum, Milwaukee

Posted on September 29, 2021 by admin

A touch of fall in southern Wisconsin.

A touch more every day, for sure, but this is how the foliage appeared on Saturday at Forest Home Cemetery & Arboretum, Milwaukee, which is mostly still green.

The cemetery’s chapel was part of Open Doors Milwaukee over the weekend. It is a handsome structure, completed in 1892.

“With an exterior of gracefully aged reddish-brown Lake Superior sandstone, the interior features stately buttresses, fine leaded-glass windows and spacious conservatories containing lush tropical foliage,” the cemetery web site notes, a little heavy on the adjectives. “Many of the tropical plants are decades-old and provide a comforting ambiance that truly sets the Chapel apart from others built before, or since.”

The conservatory elements are on either side of the main nave-like room. I put it that way because, according to a docent on site, no denomination has ever consecrated the space.

As for the cemetery proper, some 118,000 people reside there.

The nonprofit that runs the cemetery publishes a wonderful, 20-page full-color guidebook and was giving them away for Open Doors Milwaukee. Maybe they’re always given away, but anyway I got one and used it liberally during my visit.

“Forest Home Cemetery was established in 1850 by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church as a cemetery for the city,” the guide says. “As Milwaukee expanded, the cemetery became the final resting place for 26 mayors, more than 1,000 Civil War veterans and countless prominent people who left their marks on Milwaukee’s history… the property was one of the first landscaped sites in Milwaukee offering a natural respite. Designed by Increase A. Lapham, known as Wisconsin’s first naturalist, it is considered one of the finest examples of a rural garden cemetery in the Upper Midwest.”

Increase Lapham. Makes me smile. Name your babies Increase, hipsters. You could do a lot worse, considering the distinction of this particular Increase.

“A self-educated engineer and naturalist, Increase Lapham [1811-1875] was Wisconsin’s first scientist and one of its foremost citizens,” the Wisconsin Historical Society notes. “He wrote the first book published in Wisconsin, made the first accurate maps of the state, investigated Wisconsin’s effigy mounds, native trees and grasses, climatic patterns and geology, and helped found many of the schools, colleges and other cultural institutions that still enrich the state today.”

More important than the text, the guidebook includes a detailed map and a color-coded key to the notable burials at Forest Home.

Yellow: Beer Barons; Pink: [Other] Industrialists & Business Magnates; Brown: Pioneers, Inventors & Publishers; Orange: Mayors & Founders; Aqua: Notable Women; Red: Black Leaders & Abolitionists; Purple: Entertainers, Artists & Art Collectors; Deep Blue: Military Heroes; Green: Tragic and Distinctive Burials, such as the memorial to the victims of the 1883 Newhall House Hotel Fire, which General and Mrs. Tom Thumb survived, the grave of John “Babbacombe” Lee, and five victims of the 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire in Chicago.

All together, the guide lists 65 notable burials. Far too many to see during our hour jaunt through the property, but I managed to find a few, which as always is enough. I was especially interested in finding beer barons. A whole category for beer barons; that’s Milwaukee for you.

Valentin Blatz (1826-94).

Frederick Pabst (1836-1901).

The cenotaph of Joseph Schlitz (1831-75).

If I knew it, I’d forgotten that Schlitz died in the sinking of the SS Schiller off the Isles of Scilly on May 7, 1875. The ship is carved on the cenotaph.

Those three were among the largest memorials in the cemetery, but hardly the only striking ones.

I chanced across the stone memorializing company founder A.O. Smith.

As an industrial concern, A.O. Smith has experienced an interesting trajectory. Over the years, it has made bicycle parts, steel vehicle frames, bomb casings and other munitions for the World Wars, brewery tanks, water heaters, air conditioning components, boilers and more. It’s still headquartered in Milwaukee.

We noticed that the statue on top of the memorial of one Emil Schneider had toppled to the ground at some point recently.

The head and hands are missing. Go figure.

Toward the end of our walk, we noticed George Marshall Clark (1837-61), whose spanking new stone was dedicated only a few weeks ago, on the 160th anniversary of his lynching.

As I said, there was only time to see a small fraction of the notable burials. Among the others listed, I’d heard of a few that we didn’t see, such sausage king Fred Usinger, Gen. Billy Mitchell and insurance executive Edmund Fitzgerald, who lent his name to the ore carrier that famously sunk in Lake Superior in 1975.

Many more stones memorialize interesting people I’d never heard of, including Increase Lapham, see above. The world is full of such. That’s one reason to visit cemeteries, or at least those with useful guidebooks.

A selection, including slightly edited text provided by the guide:

Harrison C. Hobart (1815-1902). Union Gen. Hobart was captured at Chickamauga. Along with two other officers, he devised a plan to dig an escape tunnel, working in secret for months until 109 prisoners crawled to freedom.

Christopher L. Sholes (1819-90). Inventor of the QWERTY keyboard typewriter.

Georgia Green Stebbins (1846-1921). Stebbins was the keeper of the North Point Lighthouse for 33 years. Her father, Daniel Green, initially held the job, but was in ill health, so Stebbins unofficially performed his duties for seven years before being appointed to the position.

Xay Dang Xiong (1943-2018). Xiong was a Hmong veteran from Laos who risked his life in secrecy working with the CIA during the Vietnam War. He spent 16 years in the Royal Lao Army fighting in numerous battles while commanding 4,500 troops… Col. Xiong received a full military burial.

Carl Zeidler (1908-42). Elected mayor of Milwaukee in 1940, Zeidler requested a leave from his duties in 1942 to fight in WWII. He died six months later when his ship, the USS LaSalle, was torpedoed and everyone on board perished. Because his remains were never recovered, he was memorialized with a cenotaph. (His brother Frank Zeidler (1912-2006), three-term socialist mayor of the city, is also in the cemetery.)

An FLW Block, Though Built by Mr. Richards

Posted on September 28, 2021 by admin

Once upon a time, Frank Lloyd Wright took a stab at designing affordable housing. He didn’t get far for various reasons (including, maybe, his temperament), but relics of the effort occupy the north side of the 2700 block of W. Burnham St. in Milwaukee to this day. We arrived to take a look around noon on Saturday.

I bought some postcards from the nonprofit that now owns most of the block. One line on one of the cards says: “Burnham Block is the only location in the world where six Wright-designed homes sit side by side.”

I’d say that’s reaching for a distinction, but in any case the block was worth seeing. FLW is usually worth a look, even in the case of an obscure warehouse building in otherwise obscure Wisconsin town.

The houses on the block have that FLW look, all right.

At one point the owner of the house on the left, which is in the middle of the block, had the temerity to put siding on the house, which horrifies the Wright purists, who have been acquiring the houses one by one in recent years, but haven’t gotten that one yet. When they finally do, it will be restored to its 1910s look, once funds are raised (always a consideration with FLW works).

The six are American System-Built Homes. To quote from the last time we saw one, which was in 2015: “Between 1915 and 1917, Wright designed a series of standardized ‘system-built’ homes, known today as the American System-Built Homes, an early example of prefabricated housing. The ‘system’ involved cutting the lumber and other materials in a mill or factory, and then brought to the site for assembly; thus saving material waste and a substantial fraction of the wages paid to skilled tradesmen.”

Much more detail on the Burnham houses is at web site of the organization that owns most of them.

On Saturday, only one of the houses was open for a tour (the B-1 model, roughly 800 square feet), taking about a dozen people at a time, so we had to wait 20 minutes or so each to get in. While we waited, a docent talked about the houses, and FLW, and the houses’ developer, whom he quarreled with — Arthur Richards, pictured in an early 20th-century ad — the cost-savings measures, the history of the properties after Wright gave up on the American System but before the world acknowledged them as products of The Genius, which was decades later, and more.

This is the B-1, with people waiting on the porch to get in.

The inside is impressive in a number of ways, but mainly in its efficient use of the small space, and its inexpensive wood buffed up to look elegant. Two pictures in the slide show here that illustrate that. Nice place to visit, I thought, but not enough room for essential clutter.

Two Churches in Bay View, Milwaukee

Posted on September 27, 2021 by admin

Just at first glace on Saturday morning, the Bay View neighborhood in Milwaukee seemed alive with small businesses and pedestrians along S. Kinnickinnic Ave. (long ago, an Indian trace). I was glad to see it.

The place has a long history, founded separately from Milwaukee. “Captain Eber Brock Ward of Michigan opened his third rolling mill, the Milwaukee Iron Co., in Bay View in 1868,” the Bay View Historical Society says.

“Within a year the village of Bay View sprung up as a company town around the steel mill. Cottages erected for mill workers became the center of the village. Many of these cottages are still occupied today and are a part of the diverse architecture of the Bay View neighborhood.

“With village incorporation in 1879, its rapid growth and demands for city services were so great that a vote was taken and the village was annexed to the city of Milwaukee in 1887.”

Rising at a bend on Kinnickinnic is St. Lucas Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Originally, Evangelische Lutherische St. Lucas Kirche zu Bay View, since it is yet another Midwestern church founded by German immigrants, with the building completed in 1888.

Built using good old Cream City brick, a local specialty.

“The church commissioned architect Herman P. Schnetzky (1849-1916) to design its new place of worship,” Architecture of Faith says. “Schnetzky was born in the town of Wriezen in the Kingdom of Prussia… He came to Milwaukee as a young man and worked in the office of H.C. Koch and Company from 1874 or a bit earlier, [establishing] his own office in 1887.

“Schnetzky’s design for St. Lucas Lutheran is quite similar to his design for St. Martini Lutheran, built just a year prior to St. Lucas on Cesar Chavez Drive and Orchard Street on the South Side. He went on to design at least five other churches in Milwaukee by 1896, under his own name and in partnership with Eugene Liebert.”

A few blocks northwest of St. Lucas is St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church, finished in 1908. More Cream City brick.

It too was developed for a German-speaking congregation, with a design by Brust & Philipp, a very busy firm 100 years ago.

A volunteer told me that the platform extending out from the apse (a term he didn’t use) was added after the Catholic church “changed a bunch of things” in the 1960s (not using the term Vatican II). I guess he was used to talking to people who had no notion of that bit of ecclesiastical history. Anyway, the platform was thought better to facilitate priestly interaction with the congregation, now that they faced each other.

He didn’t know who had made the stained glass windows, except that they were original to the church and not added later. They’re wonderful.

The Stations of the Cross on the wall, on the other hand, were salvaged from another Milwaukee church that closed some years ago, though they look like they belong in their current place.

Emerging from the church, I noticed a couple of men on a porch across the street from St. Augustine.

Just a couple of regular Milwaukee guys getting ready for their Saturday doings?

Doors Open Milwaukee ’21

Posted on September 26, 2021 by admin

Warmish weekend, good for walking around. We did that in Milwaukee yesterday, because the Doors Open Milwaukee event has returned after last year’s cancellation. We drove up in mid-morning and returned not too long after dark, as we did in 2019 and 2018 and 2017. One difference this year was that a few — not all — places required a mask.

Another wrinkle this time is that we took the dog. Leaving her at home alone for more than a few hours is just asking for a mess to clean up upon return. So that meant for most of the places we went, we took turns, as one of us stayed with the dog, either in the car or walking her around.

First we went to the Bay View neighborhood south of downtown, a place that got its start as a 19th-century company town. In our time it seems pretty lively. There we sought out St. Lucas Evangelical Lutheran Church and St. Augustine of Hippo Catholic Church, both late 19th-century/early 20th-century edifices themselves, distinctly built of cream brick.

In the Burnham Park neighborhood of Milwaukee, southwest of downtown, you can find the Burnham Block. In fact, an organization called Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block, which is part of Wisconsin’s Frank Lloyd Wright Trail, very much wants you to come see the six small houses on that block, designed by The Genius.

Who are we to resist the call of FLW? We went there next. So did a fair number of people late that morning, more than at any other place we saw yesterday. This was part of the line to get in.

Taking turns looking at FLW’s work took up a fair amount of time. Afterward we repaired to a park for a drive-through-obtained lunch. Then we went to Forest Home Cemetery. Usually, I can’t persuade Yuriko to visit cemeteries, but the Doors Open feature was its chapel, which she was willing to visit.

Then, to my complete surprise, she wanted to walk the dog through the cemetery as I stopped here and there among its many stones and funerary art. Forest Home is an historic rural cemetery movement cemetery, as fine an example as I’ve seen anywhere.

We had time enough after the cemetery for two more churches in East Town — or maybe the Lower East Side, hard to tell — St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and St. Rita’s Catholic Church.

By the time we’d finished those, it was 5 pm and Doors Open was done for the day. But I didn’t quite want to head home. I wanted to find a place to see the Milwaukee skyline, something I’d never done in all the years I’ve been coming to that city.

It didn’t take long.

That’s the view from Veterans Park on Lake Michigan, and it illustrates one of the advantages of the Milwaukee MSA (pop. 1.57 million) compared with the Chicago MSA (pop. 9.6 million).

The logistics of getting to that view of Milwaukee were exactly this: drive to Veterans Park, park on the road for free, and walk about two minutes. To reach a similar vantage to see the vastly larger Chicago skyline, I shouldn’t have to point out, is much more complicated, and free doesn’t enter into it.

Veterans Park in Milwaukee also has some nice amenities, such as a place called Kites.

At Kites, you can buy kites, as well as snacks. We got some nachos.

People were out flying kites. The wind was up but it wasn’t too cold, so it was a good afternoon for it. If we’d gotten there earlier, we might have as well.

We walked the dog again, this time a little ways along the lake.

It was a good afternoon for that, too.

Technical Errors

Posted on September 23, 2021 by admin

Good news for the day. Our heater woke from its summertime slumber on command this morning, after I found that the house’s interior temp had edged below 68 F. during the night. I could have lived with 67 F., and it would have warmed up anyway, but I wanted to do the test.

Speaking of tech — vastly more complicated than my garden-variety HVAC — not long ago, I watched a couple of interesting videos by an outfit called Mustard, which specializes in aviation subjects and other complex transport. So that’s what happened to the SST. I vaguely remembered hearing about its effective cancellation in 1971, but haven’t thought about it much since, along with much of the nation. A rare example of officialdom deciding not to throw good money after bad, I think.

Even more obscure is the story of the Antarctic Snow Cruiser. For me, the most intriguing part is the fact that the monster machine has vanished beyond the ken of man.

Here’s a Google Maps map to illustrate that Google makes mistakes.

I took a walk not long ago in “Freedom Park.” That is not the name of the park, at least according to the Schaumburg Park District. This is the sign at Cambridge Drive entrance to the park, as documented in 2018.

More recently, the park district has been replacing its signs with a new style, so that sign is gone. But the new sign — which I saw myself this week, no Google tech intermediary needed — still gives the name as Duxbury Park. There is no sign at the S. Salem Drive entrance, and the two green blobs on the map are actually connected by an undeveloped neck of land under which natural gas and water mains run, giving the park an irregular dumbbell sort of shape.

A small error, but worth noting.

Duxbury Park’s pretty nice around the fall equinox. Mostly still green, with hints of yellow.

That’s the “Freedom Park Little Mountain” off in the distance. I’d call it a hillock, to use a word that needs more use.

My daughters sledded there occasionally in previous winters, but it’s been a while. Next to that bald hillock is a wooded hillock, complete with trails that cross it.

Take all of about a minute to climb up one side and down the other, if you don’t stop for anything. Definitely a hillock.

Dear Algorithms and Bots

Posted on September 22, 2021 by admin

One bit of meme wisdom has it that if you aren’t paying to use a social media site, you’re the product. In Internet terms, that old saw is old indeed: here’s an article skeptical of the assertion from 2012.

Still, I have to wonder, what is Facebook learning from my spotty pattern of usage? What insights are their faceless algorithms and shadowy bots salting away for sale to — whom? Does it even work that way?

I’ll sum it up here, to save those mysterious actors any more trouble. Sometimes I go days or even weeks without checking my page, sometimes I check a couple of times a day for a few days. Sometimes I realize that only about 10% of my Friends’ posts appear on the rolling feed that I see, and I seek others out, but usually I’m too lazy. Or is that 20%? I’ve never done a study, because it would be a waste of my time, and I can waste time much more entertainingly than that.

I post now and then, a few comments here and there on other people’s posts, and pictures from somewhere I’ve been recently on my own feed. That’s it, mostly.

So you might say that my engagement with social media is somewhere between things I have no interest in (celebrity news, golf, K-pop) and things I have a strong interest in (too many to list, though I’ve written about a lot of them over the years). Guess that isn’t very helpful to digital marketers who have my Internet address.

Occasionally I click a “like.” Generally, I like it when people go places and post about it. Good pictures help. Even better, pictures with at least a little explanation. You know, captions. A mild pet peeve is posted pictures with no explanation. Wow! This is neat! Followed by a random series of ocean or forest or city pictures that could be any damn where.

So, algorithms and bots, I like to go places. You’d think they’d know that already, but that’s anthropomorphizing them. Besides, my Google search patterns probably muddy the picture a bit. Or a lot. As a reporter, I go to a lot of diverse web sites. That, and the tangents I sometimes (often) follow, which can be unpredictable, even to me.

The only clear marketing patterns occur when I click on online ads. For example, take a look at a site that sells coins or lingerie (ahem, the latter just for research purposes) and their ads will follow you for days. Otherwise I get a sometimes hilarious assortment of misplaced ads, something like mass marketing on TV.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Posted on September 21, 2021 by admin

I ate a fortune cookie not long ago, as I do when offered them by restaurants and takeout places that offer them. Also, I read the fortune, as a form of very low-grade entertainment.

Something I knew about fortune cookies: their origin seems to trace from Japan, Kyoto in fact, a place that’s long been inventive when it comes to confections. I’ve sampled some of the traditional products in the small, wonderfully colorful shops of that city.

“The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least,” wrote Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times some years ago, an article I remember seeing before. Maybe so, but ideas and inventions travel and morph, in this case to California for an association with Chinese food by the 20th century.

“The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie,” she quotes Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”

Which brings me to the wisdom in my most recent fortune cookie, from a bakery in Chicago. Seven words, entirely sic:

Being an able man. There are always.

Glad to see that fortune-cookie writing, in this case, has been outsourced to someone whose native language isn’t English. Entirely possible in polyglot Chicago. I can’t say what language they do speak, but I’m certain of that.

Mallard Lake Twilight

Posted on September 20, 2021 by admin

Heavy rain part of the day, with the promise of a cooling trend later this week. Not down to icy depths, but rather a hint of the months ahead.

Yesterday we walked the dog around Mallard Lake. Last time there was April 2020, which seems like an eon ago. This time, the sun set while we walked the trail.

Lots of goldenrod still.

And Brown-Eyed Susan.

Bridges to cross.

Toward the end of the trail, a pretty western sky. Much prettier than the image below, but that’s the way it is.

A good moment to finish the walk. The dog thought so too, though I don’t know that she paid much attention to the aesthetics of the sky.

Lone Star ’71

Posted on September 19, 2021 by admin

My brother Jay took this picture of me in the back yard in San Antonio, as I displayed a bit of regional pride. I have no memory of it, but it was about 50 years ago. This is the unretouched image.

This is a bit retouched, using the simple program I have on my laptop. It will never be a great image, but then again not bad for one taken with an Instamatic 104, the print of which has been sitting in a photo album for decades.

A monochromic version, which has its interests.

One more, using one of the buttons that comes with photo editing system. I played around with it until I found one I liked.

A nearby photo processing shop, Fox Photo, developed the film, and at that time always put the month and year on the edge, along with its red fox mascot. JUN 71 it says, but that doesn’t mean the photo was taken then.

I have another photo from the same batch taken at my grandmother’s house. That one had to have been taken before she died, which was in January 1971. So maybe the back yard image is from the same summer, I assume 1970. On the other hand, the camera could have easily taken pictures on the same roll of 24 or 36 images both summers. We didn’t take a lot of pictures, and sometimes the camera would sit around for a long time before a roll was used up.

Anyway, ca. 1971 is close enough. A nice, round 50 years. It occurs to me looking at my much younger self that a lot can happen to a fellow over that many years.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: September 2021