The National Park Service takes more of an interest in the former U.S. 66 than I would have thought. On this page, the NPS lists dozens of historic sites associated with that road, including 12 in Illinois plus a listing on “Illinois Road Segments.”
One of the sites is Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station in Dwight, Illinois, which is about half way between the northwest suburbs and Bloomington-Normal. On the way back to take Ann to ISU on Sunday, we stopped there.
Though called Amber’s by the park service, the name on site is the Ambler/Becker Station, and the NPS does mention the facility’s other designations over the decades it was a gas station (1933 to 1999): Vernon’s Texaco Station and Becker’s Marathon Gas Station.
After the place ended its existence as a car-care facility, it became a tourist attraction. Sure enough, we’d been attracted for a look, though it was closed on Sunday afternoon.
“With the help of a $10,400 matching grant from the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, the Village of Dwight painstakingly restored the station to its former glory, taking the main office and canopy area back to the 1930s and the service bay area back to its 1940s appearance,” the NPS says. “Today, the station serves as a visitor’s center for the Village of Dwight.”
After our walk at Matthiessen State Park on Friday, we went to the town of La Salle and found a mid-afternoon lunch at a sandwich shop called Obee’s. Good sandwiches and chili, too.
Rather than head home right away, we stopped to look at a few of La Salle’s sizable church buildings. None of them were open, but the afternoon light illuminated their exteriors nicely.
First stop: Queen of the Holy Rosary Memorial Shrine.
Once a parish church, these days Queen of the Holy Rosary is a Diocesan Shrine dedicated to Mary in memory of all U.S. veterans. Designed by Arthur F. Moratz of Bloomington, it dates only from the 1950s. A late work for him. I’ve run across Moratz before; he did the Normal Theater.
Not far away (nothing is too far away in La Salle) is St. Patrick’s, a much older church, completed in 1848 to serve the Irishmen working on the I&M Canal. One Patrick Joseph Mullaney did the design.
According to a plaque on the front, St. Patrick’s is the “oldest living parish church in Illinois.” With a resplendent interior, from the looks of these pictures.
Elsewhere in La Salle is a church building that had the look of being closed. Permanently closed, that is.
St. Joseph’s, according to a stone in the wall, dedicated in 1907.
More remarkably, the cornerstone lists the architect: Henry Schlacks, whose work I’ve seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an architect mentioned on the exterior of a church, but he was a pretty big bug among church designers more than 100 years ago.
In any case, St. Joseph’s isn’t listed as an active parish by the local Catholic church, and there isn’t any evidence that any other denomination occupies the place.
On the other hand, St. Hyacinth looks active. Just not open when I happened by.
St. Patrick was originally for Irish immigrants, while St. Hyacinth was for Polish immigrants, a later wave to this part of Illinois. It was completed in 1892 to replace an earlier church that burned down, and was also designed by another prolific church architect, George P. Stauduhar.
I could see other steeples off in the distance, since La Salle is still a low-rise town, and steeples are often the tallest structures around. But the light was fading and the afternoon getting chillier, so we called it a day after Hyacinth.
Thanksgiving dinner this year wasn’t quite as conventional as other years: lamb shank with homemade macaroni and cheese (a complex mix of cheeses by Ann) and barbecue-flavored beans. The bread was traditional: the cheapest brown-and-serve rolls I could find. I didn’t forget the olives.
Last summer, on the way back from New Buffalo, Michigan, we bought some grape juice at St. Julian Winery, and had one of those bottles to drink with our Thanksgiving food. All in all, a pleasant meal, not a vast feast.
On Friday, we drove down to Matthiessen State Park, just south of the Illinois River in La Salle County and not far from the better-known Starved Rock State Park. The 1,938-acre Matthessen is a more modest park, but has a good set of trails along, and down in, a winding ravine formed by a creek.
To get to the ravine, you need to go down.
Those stairs lead to a bridge over one part of the ravine. Nice view from the bridge. For perspective, note that there are people at the bottom.
The bottom is accessible by another set of wooden stairs.
Though a few degrees above freezing, there were patches of thin ice here and there on the surface of the creek, which I poked with my walking stick, watching it break into fragments.
On to the other part of the ravine, which we reached by taking this path, then a different set of stairs.
A short section of ravine wall is marked by generations of carvings in the sandstone.
The trail sometimes meant crossing on stones over the shallow creek. A misstep into the creek would have meant uncomfortably wet shoes, at least.
Before long, there’s another bridge and a waterfall formed by a dam that creates Matthiessen Lake. Another set of stairs, not visible in the picture, leads up to the bridge. We did a fair amount of stairclimbing at the park.
Still, a good walk, even on a chilly day, especially since there was little wind down in the ravine.
The park is named for Frederick William Matthiessen (d. 1918), whose land it used to be, with later additions by the state. He was the other zinc baron of 19th-century La Salle County, along with Edward Carl Hegeler, whose house we toured a few years ago.
I went out ’round midnight last night to put the car in the driveway. When I finished, I got out of the car and looked up, and there he was, bright as could be: Orion. Winter is here. Been cold much of this month anyway. Off in the distance, an owl woo-woo’d softly.
Back again on November 28. A good Thanksgiving to all, and don’t forget to be up at 4 a.m. on the day after for all those doorbuster sales. I plan to be asleep then, though I might be up to go to the bathroom.
The name of the place we visited recently, according to the sign over the door, is the Umbrella Tea House. That made me wonder: what was the place where Winston Smith hung out at the end of 1984, ahead of his eventual vaporization? The post-Ministry of Love Winston Smith, that is, who loved Big Brother.
That’s the kind of thing I might wonder. I didn’t even have to find my paper copy of the book to find out.
“The Chestnut Tree was almost empty. A ray of sunlight slanting through a window fell on dusty table-tops. It was the lonely hour of fifteen. A tinny music trickled from the telescreens. Winston sat in his usual corner, gazing into an empty glass.”
So I might call the Umbrella Tea House the Chestnut Tree, just for a bit of dark humor that no one would understand unless I explained it. Orwell might have gotten Big Brother and doublethink and maybe even memory hole into the common lexicon, but not the Chestnut Tree.
Umbrella Tea House, which is in a retail strip near the Schaumburg Township District Library, is anything but dark. It’s a bright place.
It has all sorts of interesting features, such as a tip pig, and — not sure how to characterize the second image.
Naturally, umbrellas figure in the décor. Up on the ceiling.
A pleasant place to occasionally drink fancy tea, which we did.
Been a distinctly winterish November this year, except that trees seem to have held their leaves a little longer than in recent years. But there have been a handful of warmish hours, such as on Saturday in the afternoon.
We made our way to Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, south of where I used to live, but only by a few miles, and walked a while.
Nice description of the place on the Forest Preserve of DuPage County’s web site:
“The 2,503-acre Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve in Darien is one of the most ecologically impressive parcels of open space in the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, if not northern Illinois. It is also one of the District’s most popular forest preserves, known for its Rocky Glen waterfall, Sawmill Creek bluff overlook, and extensive trails.
“Waterfall Glen offers gently rolling to hilly terrain with 11 miles of trails popular with hikers, bicyclists, horseback riders and cross-country skiers. It also offers fishing and an orienteering course, model airplane field and youth group campground.”
Had an autumnal moment or two along the trails.
Last year was a year of forest preserves. Didn’t keep up the pace this year. Rather, it turned out to be a year of vistas, for which I always try to be glad.
The cover of a 12-page program, from among the debris of previous years. Such items accumulate if you let them, and we do, to remind ourselves of previous years.
Except I can’t say I have anything more than a vague memory of attending the Year-End Grand Kabuki Kaomise show in November 1993. There were actors in wildly colorful costumes and makeup, pursuing their exaggerated movements, as you’d expect. The dialect, Yuriko said, was sometimes hard for her to understand. I only picked up a word here and there sometimes.
“Kabuki theatre has been the most popular indigenous theatre form in Japan since the late 17th century,” explains the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (of all places). “Accompanied by music, the all-male group of actors perform a rich combination of dialogue, song and dance that even encompasses acrobatics, action-packed heroic tales, tragic love stories and burlesque comedies.
“By the 19th century, the best-loved actors and scenes from the most successful plays had quickly become part of an elaborate marketing system that was in part fueled by the proliferation of affordable woodcut prints which drew on the cult status of the stars they depicted.
“One of the high points in the theatre calendar was the wave of premières marking the season’s opening, held annually in the eleventh month of the moon [sic] calendar, during which it was customary for a theatre’s entire ensemble to present a play to the fans. This event is known as ‘kaomise,’ which literally means ‘the showing of faces’ and took its name from the fact that all stars employed for the coming season presented themselves to the public.”
I’d say the Japanese have seen a vast expansion of entertainment forms since the 19th century, just like everyone else, rendering kabuki a niche interest. I’m glad I went, but never felt the urge to go again.
Been a cold November so far, especially late last week, except for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. So I took a walk at the Chicago Athenaeum International Sculpture Park that day. It’s pretty much the same as ever, though of course a sculpture was added in 2019.
There’s still a side path through the woods.
As well as along water destined for the Mississippi.
That same day, I went to the Sears at the Woodfield Mall. It was about to close for good; it did so a few days later. So my stroll was through mostly vacant retail space, the ghost of a once-vast enterprise.
But not quite empty.
It was the last Sears in Illinois, the state formerly home to the Sears Tower. A retailer ending with a whimper.
I didn’t buy a rug. I will say that my lawn mower before the current one, a Craftsman, was a Sears acquisition.
Even further back is the cast iron table on our deck, purchased ca. 2003 at a Sears. Looks as solid as the day we got it, so like my cast-iron frying pan — bought ca. 1983 at a Nashville grocery store, not a Sears purchase — the table will certainly outlast me.
I was glad to see that Barbara’s Bookstore, a metro Chicago chain, has opened in the mall. I don’t go to the mall a lot, so I’m not sure when. The Barbara’s branch I remember best was the store in the lower level of the Sears Tower, which I visited sometimes ca. 2000-05 (gone now).
Most everyone in the mall was masked. Otherwise, everything was about the same as any recent year. The crowds were thick, and I’m sure they’ll get thicker still as the days progress toward Christmas.
I interviewed a British retail expert not long ago, and she happened to mention the prospects of Black Friday retail sales this year in the UK. I’d heard before that is now part of British retailing, and I told her I thought that was funny.
“What’s the special occasion?” I said. “The fourth Friday in November?”
She chuckled. Like Japanese merchants importing Valentine’s Day, their British counterparts have imported Black Friday — and come to think of it, American merchants are doing their best to expand Día de Muertos in the United States. About a month ago, I saw a Día de Muertos-themed box of Pop-Tarts in a mainstream grocery store.
We also discussed American Halloween, which she said the British have taken to as well. I hope not to the detriment of Guy Fawkes Day, I said. Some customs have faded, she answered, such as a penny for the guy, but there are still bonfires.
Good. We see no reason/ why gunpowder treason/ should ever be forgot….
From Crissy Field on San Francisco Bay, a convenient walking path leads to one of the formal entrances of the Presidio, on Girard Road, and some nearby green space.
Actually Crissy Field is part of the 1,491-acre former fort, which is part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and sprawls across the northwestern part of the San Francisco Peninsula. These days, the Presidio includes many former military structures, museums, restaurants, lodging, recreational spots, art installations, trails and lawns, but also residential and commercial properties, including Lucasfilms headquarters.
Too much to see, even in a series of days. Still, I saw a fine slice. I spent most of the afternoon of October 30 at the Presidio, taking a look at some of the large stock of former military properties.
A former band barracks.
I didn’t know that band members ever had their own barracks, but apparently they did at the Presidio. The building could accommodate 37 musical soldiers.
“The Presidio of San Francisco represents one of the finest collections of military architecture in the country and reflects over 200 years of development under three different nations,” says the NPS.
“Today, the Presidio boasts more than 790 buildings, of which 473 are historic and contribute to the Presidio’s status as a National Historic Landmark District. The building types range from elegant officers’ quarters and barracks to large, industrial warehouses, administrative headquarters, air hangars, major medical facilities, and stables.”
Who says the military isn’t concerned with aesthetics in its buildings? Was concerned, anyway.
The Main Parade Ground.
Food was available.
I had some excellent Korean food from the Bobcha food truck. It seemed like a better bet than Viva Vegan, at least to my tastes. Had a nice view while eating, too. I was at the next table down.
Not far from the parade ground is San Francisco National Cemetery.
A picturesque hillside cemetery with towering trees.
At about 28 acres, there are more than 30,000 service members interred there. It was the first national cemetery on the West Coast.
A memorial to an incident that doesn’t have that many memorials: the Boxer Rebellion.
In this case, memorializing four marines from the USS Oregon who died on the Tartar Wall defending the Legations in the summer of 1900.
As I sometimes do, I picked out an ordinary soldier to look up later.
Motor Machinist Mate First Class (MOMMI) Clayton Lloyd Landon of St. Louis, a submariner who went down with the USS Tullibee in 1944. It seems that the vessel was a victim of one of its own torpedoes, as happened sometimes.
Gunner’s Mate C.W. Kuykendall, on watch up top at the time, was the only survivor of the Tullibee sinking, having been knocked into the water by the explosion and later picked up by a Japanese ship, to spend the rest of the war as a POW. Remarkably, he tells his story in a recent video.
After leaving the Palace of Fine Arts, I made my way to the shore of San Francisco Bay. It isn’t very far.
It was a foggy moment, though most of it burned off as the afternoon progressed. In the foreground, the St. Francis Yacht Club. Off in the distance, Alcatraz.
If I’d had another day, I might have taken a tour of Alcatraz, if tours are running again. We took a boat around the Bay in ’73, a splendid excursion I remember even now, which went past the island, and under both the Golden Gate and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridges. No tours went to Alcatraz at that time, in the aftermath of the AIM occupation, and I didn’t bother in 1990.
In the other direction, the Golden Gate itself, looking a mite foggy.
I walked along the Crissy Field beaches and marsh.
It’s hard to imagine now, but Crissy Field is an important place in the history of aviation. There are a few visible reminders, such as this plaque.
Up closer.
I didn’t know about Lincoln Beachey, but I do now. A flying daredevil among daredevils. He had his moment of fame until he came crashing down, quite literally, during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
An oddity: the last lines of the plaque.
Dedicated on Lincoln Beachey Day 1998 March 16, CY 6003, by Yerba Buena No. 1 Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampsus Vitus
That is a fraternal order I was unaware of. Travel is broadening, isn’t it? All kinds of useless information out there, just waiting for the taking.
The org claims — not too seriously, since its whole point seems to be not too serious — a founding year of 4005 BC, meaning 1998 would be 6,003 years since then. CY = Clampus Year?
Apparently Clampers are fond of installing plaques, something we can all get behind. If Wiki is to be believed, 1930s members of the order also were possibly — probably? — behind the forgery known as Drake’s Plate of Brass. I think I read about the plate in one of those pre-Internet, true-life mystery-and-enigma books we had around the house when I was a lad, along with the likes of the Oak Island mystery, and hadn’t thought about it since.
Back in March 1990, I spent a few days in San Francisco before flying to Japan for the first time. On one of those days, which was warm and clear, I took a bus across the Golden Gate Bridge in the direction of Sausalito. I got off at some point and walked back across the bridge.
That’s a recipe for a peak experience, and sure enough, it was. A land-water view with few equals that I know. Then I pressed on, along the water’s edge, and walked back to Fisherman’s Wharf. For some distance, a narrow waterside trail was all that was open. Though the Presidio was on its way out as a military installation, at the time it was still under the jurisdiction of the Army and closed to casual walkers.
Eventually I passed through San Francisco’s Marina District. A lot of buildings were boarded up in that neighborhood, with visible damage from the earthquake the previous year.
Back to 2021. When I arrived at the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District on October 30, I asked myself: how did I miss spotting it on my walk all those years ago? The Palace isn’t that far from where I walked, but I’m sure I didn’t see it. I would have remembered. Maybe I was too occupied with looking out at the water.
Well, never mind. Under gray and drizzly skies, I saw it this time.
Chicago had its World’s Columbian Exposition. Somewhat later (1915) San Francisco held the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and the Palace is (in effect) a surviving structure from that world’s fair, a design by California architect Bernand Maybeck.
“The vast fair, which covered over 600 acres and stretched along two and a half miles of water front property, highlighted San Francisco’s grandeur and celebrated a great American achievement: the successful completion of the Panama Canal,” notes the NPS.
“Between February and December 1915, over 18 million people visited the fair; strolling down wide boulevards, attending scientific and educational presentations, ‘travelling’ to international pavilions and enjoying thrilling displays of sports, racing, music and art.”
It’s a survivor from the fair, but not exactly in its original form, which wasn’t built to last. Like the Parthenon in Nashville, also a relic from a fair, the Palace was completely rebuilt later (in the 1960s and ’70s), and a seismic retrofit was finished in 2009. Hope it stands a lot longer.
The National Park Service takes more of an interest in the former U.S. 66 than I would have thought. On this page, the NPS lists dozens of historic sites associated with that road, including 12 in Illinois plus a listing on “Illinois Road Segments.”
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