The Fine Arts Building

Posted on October 31, 2024 by admin

This year on Halloween, I found myself wondering when the apostrophe mostly disappeared from Hallowe’en, at least in U.S. usage. The charts posted at a site called Grammar Revolution (though without citation) offer some information on the question. Hallowe’en, as one might see on a card old enough to be in the public domain, was a more common spelling in the early 20th century.

Around the time of World War II, the apostrophe version started its decline, with the non-apostrophe Halloween becoming more common by far since then. That leads me to the conclusion that apostrophe rationing during WWII inadvertently had a long-term impact. History is funny that way.

The last few days of October this year have been unusually pleasant. On Tuesday the 29th, for instance, I was able to dine al fresco in the afternoon quite comfortably. Yesterday, the 30th, it was still warm enough to sit on our deck in the evening in short sleeves, though the wind was up.

Halloween itself, following rain in the morning, was still windy, but a lot colder. That didn’t deter exactly 30 kids who came to our door for candy – about three-quarters of them before dark. We gave away full-sized Hershey products, which pleased the older kids especially, along with small bags of Utz pretzels, which no one commented on. I didn’t wear a costume for distribution, but I did put on my fez. It was a Christmas present from Jay some years ago, but there are sadly few occasions to wear it. I’d say Halloween or even Hallowe’en is one such.

Back on the October 19 (it was warm then, too), we spent at least an hour getting into, and wandering around, the Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan Ave. Here it is, blocking the sun.

Like most vintage buildings, it began as something else: a factory and a showroom for Studebaker, when that company made carriages. The architect who designed it in 1885, Solon Beman (who did the Pullman company town too, among other things), did a redesign in 1898 when Studebaker left, thus creating a rather unusual office building. Since then, the Fine Arts Building has been just that, home to art galleries and artist studios, theater companies, publishers, dance and recording studios, musicians and musical instrument specialists, interior designers, and other arts-associated businesses.

For Open House Chicago, you can wander its long halls.

The current tenant directory makes for interesting reading, much more than almost any other office building: designers such as Doorways of Chicago; artists such as L.H. Selman, Ltd., Fine Glass Paperweights; performers such as the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival; very specialized music shops such as Parke Mouthpiece Center, offering “professional brass mouthpieces for trumpet, trombone, horn, & tuba. Interchangeable rims, cups, backbores, tops, & underparts.”

Some of the businesses were open for the event.

The Fine Arts Building is of course going to feature art on its walls.

Plus a lot of fine old details, such as for the manually operated elevators – the only ones in Chicago, I’m told.

Can’t forget the mail chute.

That was it for Open House Chicago this year. Still as fine an event as ever, except for one thing: no paper guides and their useful area maps provided to eventgoers, which disappeared when the event was revived in 2021. Sure, they cost money to produce, but I seem to remember advertisements in them that might have offset costs somewhat, or maybe entirely. Just another small step on the road to further map illiteracy.

Next year, Open House New York? We shall see.

Jackson Boulevard Stroll, Starring Monadnock & Rothschild

Posted on October 30, 2024 by admin

Not far east of the Chicago Board of Trade at 53 W. Jackson Blvd. is the hulking brown-brick Monadnock Building, one of the great old skyscrapers of Chicago. We passed by on the way to Michigan Ave. during our Open House peregrination. It wasn’t open for the event, but no matter. We’d both been inside, even taken a tour once upon a time.

I also knew a fellow who worked for a nonprofit for a while in the ’90s whose office was in the Monadnock. He said he considered going to work there every day a fringe benefit.

“The northern half has always been the subject of attention and wonder,” the AIA Guide to Chicago says, regarding the Monadnock, which is actually two structures fused into a whole: a load-bearing northern half designed by Burnham and Root (1891), and a steel-framework southern half by Holabird & Roche (1893).

“It was constructed as a thick walled brick tower, 66 feet wide, 200 feet long and 200 feet high,” the AIA Guide continues. “The American Architect in 1892 described it as a chimney. Two cross walls divide the interior space into three, flu like cavities, the centers of which are open from street to roof. A freestanding staircase spirals down from the brilliance of the sky lit 16th floor to the dark lobby cut lengthwise through the ground floor. Around this open stairwell, a light structural grid sustains stacks of rental floors. From these extend the modular alcoves pushing through the facade become bay windows.”

The late 19th century was a time of transition for tall buildings, with the Home Insurance Building in Chicago showing the way as the first building its height (10 stories) to use a weight-bearing structural steel frame to support itself. That building, on West Adams, was a mere diagonal block and a half away the Monadnock. Home Insurance is long gone; but the Monadnock stands. Or maybe I should say, abides.

Further eastward — the direction we were going that day — at Jackson and State is the DePaul Center, originally (1912) the A. M. Rothschild & Company Store, by Holabird & Roche (them again).

At the turn of the 20th century, A. M. Rothschild & Co. was a department store rivaling Marshall Field on State Street in Chicago, founded by a German immigrant of that name who also married into one of the richest families in Chicago, the meatpacking Morrises. Abram M. Rothschild didn’t live to see the 1912 building, however. By 1902, his in-laws, who controlled the store, had forced him to retire due to financial problems at the retailer, though he was kept on as a figurehead.

“July 28, 1902 started out like any other day for A.M. Rothschild,” explains chicago.designslinger. “The recently retired 49-year-old retailer visited the sixth floor office of his namesake department store in downtown Chicago that morning, and after a few hours left for home accompanied by his son 16-year-old son Melville. Rothschild’s wife Gusta greeted both of them in the front hall of the family’s large house on Michigan Avenue at 37th Street, and Abram Rothschild headed upstairs to freshen up. He went into his bedroom, retrieved his revolver, went into the bathroom, and shot himself in the head.”

Later, after spending a decade or so putting together the land for it, the Morris family hired Holabird & Roche for a new, 11-story retail building that eventually became the building you can see now, which belongs to DePaul University. Back in 1912, a department store could conceivably use such a building. Hard to imagine now.

“The architectural firm had a number of projects along the State Street corridor, but A.M. Rothschild & Co. would be their largest,” chicago.designslinger notes. “And although the family had a troubled history with the founder, they paid lasting tribute to him by having the architects incorporate the letter ‘R’ into the massive cream-colored, terra cotta facade which was repeated down the entire length of the building.”

As they are to this day, though since I only took an image of (mostly) the Jackson Blvd. elevation, the letters aren’t much visible. The building deserved a closer look, but we were operating on the lunch imperative as we wandered by, more focused on finding victuals. Maybe some other time. No matter how often I go downtown, something there is always worth another look.

The Wintrust Building & The Grand Banking Hall

Posted on October 30, 2024 by admin

I don’t know that much about Wintrust Financial, which is a bank holding company that specializes in community banks and has about $63 billion in assets. But I understand that when Wintrust acquires a community bank, which are by necessity locally oriented, the company does not slap the name Wintrust on it, thus sacrificing that local identity on the altar of branding – one of the idols worshiped by corporate America, but not apparently the bank.

I’m not suggesting that brands have no value. Clearly they do. But there are examples of consumer-facing companies gone national that have paved over long established and well-regarded local names.

The consolidation of the department store industry comes to mind. Somehow Macy’s persuaded itself that Chicagoans would respond to their name (which is a New York name) better than Marshall Field, as storied a local store as Chicago has ever had. There are a number of reasons the department store biz is a shadow of its former self, but that kind of thinking is surely one of them.

On the other hand, Wintrust has put its name on 231 S. LaSalle St., which is right at the T intersection with Jackson Blvd., across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

That’s a better use of a brand, I believe. The building was developed as the Illinois Merchants Bank Building exactly 100 years ago, with a grand design by Graham, Anderson & Probst, which is in the top ranks of name architects from the early 20th century. Since then, the building has been named for a succession of banks, making Wintrust merely the latest in an established pattern. Besides – who gives a fig about Illinois Merchants Bank or any of the others any more anyway?

Wintrust participated in Open House Chicago this year. The grandly named Grand Banking Hall was up a golden escalator.

Grand, all right.

Add a statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and take away electricity and you’ve got a Roman temple. Not just any temple, but one of the (that word again) grandest at which the likes of Caesar might have made offerings.

Notes the AIA Guide to Chicago (2004): “[The space] prompted Louis H. Sullivan to suggest that bankers here wear togas and speak Latin” (p. 78). I didn’t know the great Chicago architect Sullivan had a sense of humor, but it seems he did. The bankers shouldn’t take acting Roman too far, however, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to use zeroes.

Wintrust moved in after the building was restored in the mid-2010s. The bank uses the space for retail purposes. That’s pretty cool for a bank. Beats leaving it vacant.

The bank also rents the space for events. But not (according to the bank web site) for:

Weddings
Casino nights
Gambling

Public events
Political fundraisers
Religious ceremonies

Extremist group gatherings
Restaurant expos

Below the Grand Hall is a whopping bank vault. Among Chicago Open House visitors, it was a hit.

The main attraction is the door.

The vault itself, unlike the one under the Chicago Board of Trade, wasn’t open. Instead a bit of artwork covering the door depicted the rows of lock boxes inside. What’s going on in there? Time Tunnel experiments after hours at the bank?

A digression: A gritty reboot (is there any other kind?) of The Time Tunnel could be an exceptional show. What about it, Ronald D. Moore? You’re a little younger than me. That and Space: 1999 are waiting for you.

One more detail.

Time, the bank might agree, is money.

The Chicago Board of Trade Building

Posted on October 28, 2024 by admin

Stroll down Jackson Blvd. in the Chicago Loop and you’ll come across that deco masterpiece, the Chicago Board of Trade Building, 141 W. Jackson. With Ceres atop, put there by designers who knew their ancient lore. Wish it was easier to get a close look at her.

As mentioned, the place was crowded with Open House Chicago attendees, as seen in the magnificent lobby.

In one way, that was good. There was more time to eye the details. In this building, the deco is in the details.

No mail passes through these boxes any more, which is too bad. Back when I had an office in 35 E. Wacker, one of the pleasures of being in the building was passing through the lobby when I had something to mail, and slipping it into the imposing, ornate box, whose very presence announced: This Is The U.S. Mail. By the ’90s, a thing diminished, but not yet relegated to a has-been.

In the basement is the building vault, formerly used to store valuable commodities. The vault door is impressively massive.

Inside, an array of smaller boxes. Empty now.

Room enough for an upscale bar, I think.

The trading floor. Not busy on a Saturday.

Hardly looking the way Stanley Kubrick saw it in 1949, when he took this picture for Look magazine (reportedly in the public domain these days).

Those guys look like they might have traded a few pork belly futures in their time.

Open House Chicago ’24

Posted on October 27, 2024 by admin

Open House, which in some places is Doors Open, is a wonderful event. The concept is simple: at designated places around town, you can go in and look around during specified hours on a particular weekend for no charge. I’ve been attending Chicago’s most years since 2013.

More American cities ought to do it. Worldwide, almost 60 cities do so under the Open House banner, with only four U.S. cities participating: Chicago, Miami, New York, and San Diego. Others are Doors Open: Baltimore, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and the state of Rhode Island, which is only a little larger than a metropolitan area. Note the many missing from both lists, such as Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle – and I could add more among large and mid-sized cities.

We were thinking of visiting New York this year for its event, which was a week ago, but ultimately decided on the Bruce Peninsula for our October trip. Maybe next year. As it happened, Chicago was the same weekend as New York, October 19 and 20, and since we were back from Canada by then, we went ahead with another Chicago Open House.

We focused on downtown this year, mostly because I didn’t feel like driving to any other neighborhood, and Metra takes you right to Union Station. Steps away – as real estate listings tend to put it – is the Sears Tower (I’m not calling it anything else). The blue wavy feature is fairly new.

The ground level of the tower has been redeveloped since the last time I was there, adding a large food hall. Do-Rite Donuts & Chicken looked really tempting, but no. Some other time.

The open part of the Sears Tower for Open House Chicago was the Metropolitan Club, up on the 67th floor. I’d been there before a couple of times, for business lunches in the early 2000s.

Nice views, but no one was giving away views from the Skydeck up on the 103th floor. Tickets to that are timed, and sell for $32 or more, a fact that irritates me. I remember visiting in 1987 for $3.50, which is the equivalent of a little less than $10 now. Sure, there’s now a glass box jutting out that stands between you and eternity when admire the vista from that perch. Add a few dollars for that, but that isn’t enough to justify the gouge.

Never mind, we also visited the Chicago Board of Trade Building and the Wintrust Bank Building, both near the intersection of Jackson and LaSalle, as we made our way eastward. Both are marvels of design and familiar — but you can always see something new. After lunch we spent a good long time at the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Ave. Also familiar, but so many details to engage your attention, if you let it. All 10 floors were open, and we rode the manually operated elevator up to the 10th floor and made our way down the stairs.

That was it. Fewer places than in most years because, it seems, word of Open House Chicago has finally gotten around, and each place we visited had a line to get in. So did Symphony Center, which we didn’t want to wait for. If I remember right in 2013, that wasn’t the case, when everyone I mentioned the event to had never heard of it, and you could walk right in each sight.

The Port Huron Blog Post

Posted on October 24, 2024 by admin

Every time I visit Ontario, or at least a beach in that province, I scratch a message in the sand for Geof Huth, and promptly send it to him electronically. This time it was from the sandy beach at Bruce Peninsula NP. Why? Why not?

My knowledge of the New Left is fairly sketchy, I must admit. As long ago as my own student days, in the early 1980s, it didn’t seem new, but old hat. I’ve never even read more than a few paragraphs of the Port Huron Statement, though I could get around to it, since it’s easy enough to find. Such a tract doesn’t need to be mimeographed to reach an audience anymore.

At least I’d heard of it when the Dude mentioned his connection to it. As I understand it, there was no second draft, compromised or otherwise. But the Dude inhabits the Coen Brothers universe, where surely there was one.

As for my knowledge of the actual city of Port Huron, Michigan, that’s a little better than it used to be, informed by a short visit on the way home from Ontario earlier this month. It’s one of those places I stopped because I’d never been there, but had long seen it on maps. There’s an endless supply of places like that.

Downtown, especially Huron Ave., made for a pleasant walkabout.

Huron Ave. crosses the Black River – one of a number of rivers called that in Michigan alone – at a drawbridge, just before the river flows into the St. Clair. As we wandered along the riverfront, bells went off.

When you see a drawbridge in motion, watch it if you can. Again and again. Just another of the little maxims I live by.

There are hints that hipsters have discovered Port Huron. Maybe a scattering of them who have been priced out of Ann Arbor.

We spent some time in a sizable, multi-room antique shop on Huron Ave. Not quite as entropic as Reid’s Corner, but nevertheless stocked with all sorts of interesting stuff, including vinyl records (more evidence of hipsters about).

The First Family was first in a bin, offered for only $2. I didn’t buy it. I have a copy that my brother Jay gave me, and he said that he paid about 80 cents for it. I’m glad to have it around, though we have no record player any more. It functions as a reminder about eggs and baskets.

Two dollars might have been the nominal price in 1962, or a dollar or so more. As a collectible, First Family hasn’t even kept up with its original price in inflation-adjusted terms (nearly $21 now), though if you look at eBay or the like, people are trying to get ridiculous prices for the album. The supply of disks is vast, with 7.5 million units reportedly sold before the president’s death.

1962. The same year that the Port Huron Statement was published. Is it a mere coincidence that I saw this record in Port Huron, or is the universe trying to tell me something? I’ll go with mere coincidence.

London Town

Posted on October 23, 2024 by admin

Things you can do in London: walk along the Thames; visit Covent Garden; and see St. Paul’s Cathedral. We did all of those things in the original London, once upon a time.

Earlier this month, we managed two out of three in London, Ontario. The cathedral was closed. Some other time, maybe, since you can drive from metro Chicago to the Canadian London in about six hours, provided traffic snarls on the highways just south of Lake Michigan aren’t any worse than usual and you don’t encounter a testy Canadian border guard, as I did on Canada Day all those years ago, for the most thorough border-crossing inspection I ever received, before or since.

The Thames as it passes through downtown London. The banks are mostly parkland.

Actually, that point is the meeting of the North Thames and the Thames, locally known as the Folks. The river is called as La Tranche in French and Deshkaan-ziibi in Ojibwe, Antler River.

The King Street pedestrian bridge connecting the banks.

Near the Folks is the HMCS-NCSM Prevost, flying these colors – the Canadian Naval Ensign, if I understand correctly.

All that is a fair amount to unpack: the ensign is flying on land because the Prevost is a stone frigate, a naval facility on land. HMCS is His Majesty’s Canadian Ship, of course, but this being Canada, it is also NCSM, Navire canadien de Sa Majesté. The site is a training and recruiting center for the Canadian Navy, and also home to the Battle of the Atlantic Memorial. Another sign is in French, but I only made a picture of the English.

The memorial is still under construction, according to the London Free Press, and it looked like it, with memorial stones being put into place on a small slope. Dedication will be next May, on the 80th anniversary of the end of that battle, which lasted until the Germans surrendered.

I decided to look up one of the ships memorialized: the HMCS Valleyfield.

Commissioned in December 1943. Torpedoed and sunk May 7, 1944, with the loss of 125 Canadian sailors in the gelid North Atlantic.

After the riverside, we took a short walk through downtown, especially Dundas St.

An unexpected mural on that street.

“Johnny and June” by Kevin Ledo, a Montreal artist, and completed only in 2023. (If you want to see a large Ledo mural depicting a young Alex Trebec, go to Sudbury, Ontario.)

The mural, on the side of London’s Budweiser Gardens sports-event venue, is impressively large, at 45 feet tall and 20 feet wide. Larger than life, certainly. A nearby sign says it commemorates the moment on February 22, 1968, when Johnny Cash proposed to June Carter on stage during a concert in London.

As for Covent Garden, that’s where we had lunch. Site of a public market since 1845, though I expect things have been cleaned up some since then.

Not quite as grand as the one in the larger London, but well worth the stroll to look at the shops, and find an eatery. We ate at a Brazilian place. Don’t see too many of those in food halls. Most satisfying.

Lots of goods. Is there a Canadian content requirement?

A few more London details, near Covent Garden. We didn’t see on foot the part of town I found more intriguing, which we drove through: the area around Western University (a.k.a., University of Western Ontario, enrollment more than 40,000). Might be a good place to look around if we ever take that trip to the Stratford Festival, which is practically down the road from London.

I have to like a place with a name like that.

Roadside Ontario

Posted on October 22, 2024 by admin

A few miles (hard measuring habit to break, and why should I?) south of Kincardine, Ontario, is Reid’s Corner Antiques. Now this is my kind of antique shop: not an ounce of froufrou.

I think Reid himself waived us into the building, which had no one else inside. He was a strong-looking fellow in the middle of middle age, and he had a noisy machine on a truck to attend in some way. So we went in.

It’s easy to feel at home in clutter. I know not everyone feels that way, but I also don’t care. All the many Reid’s Corners in the world are a place to revel in the quantity and quality, but especially the quantity, of the vast amount of stuff produced by people.

A place like this ought to be supported by a little cash money, at least. This was under consideration for purchase.

In the end I went with a newer plate, one not quite as old as I am, which joins plates from Texas, Tennessee, Illinois and a Washington state BIGFOOT gag plate in the garage.

Reid’s Corner happens to be on Ontario 21, the two lanes that parallel the Lake Huron shore. If you’re on the way to London, you head southeast from Goderich on Ontario 8 briefly, and then a slightly different direction on Ontario 4. The place where highways 8 and 4 meet is Clinton, Ontario, pop. 3,200.

Near the juncture I caught sight of a fine block of buildings – the Victoria Block (see no. 53), erected 1877. Erected by genuine Victorians, by gar.

Nice. Then there was a large radar antenna perched in a traffic island.

Double take. I have to see that, I told Yuriko as I parked the car on the side of the road. Traffic was fairly light in Clinton, so it was no complicated thing to take a closer look on foot.

Like Reid’s shop, the wider world has human clutter. Not just objects, but stories. Early in WWII, a secret site near Clinton became the first radar training school in North America, the plaques relate, set up by the Royal Air Force as a safe location. The Canadian armed forces kept the facility open long after the end of the war and wartime secrecy, through the mid-Cold War, but eventually closed it. The town got a really big memento on the occasion of the country’s centennial in 1967.

Sauble Beach & Goderich, Ontario

Posted on October 21, 2024 by admin

I was a little surprised the seagull allowed me to get this close.

On the other hand, he’s a resident, at least sometimes, of Sauble Beach on Lake Huron. He’s used to people, because people show up in large numbers at Sauble Beach when the sun is hot, and that birdbrain of his is enough of a brain to know that the beach apes are usually harmless. Even better, food always seems to be around them, and they’re pretty careless about dropping some of it.

We’d come to Sauble Beach – the unincorporated town of that name and the beach of that name in Ontario – after our easy walk around Sauble Falls PP a few miles (ah, km) to the north. We were looking for lunch. And there it was.

Note the distinct lack of a crowd. Out of frame are two high school boys eating, and they were all the other customers at that moment, toward the end of (2 pm) conventional lunchtime on the Thursday ahead of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Other places were already closed for the season, but Beach Burger soldiered on for the trickle of customers still around.

A beach feast.

The concoction on the right, of course, is poutine. It’s not just for Québécois any more. Nor even just for Canadians.

Beach towns have beach businesses.

Which would be pointless without the beach.

Further down the coast, Goderich bills itself as the Prettiest Town in Canada, at least on the postcards I bought there. I will say that the courthouse square has some fine vintage buildings.

The severe Huron County Courthouse itself, a 1950s replacement for a building that burned down.

Nicely placed color on the square.

We walked around the square, which was pretty much our entire experience with Goderich that day, except for popping into the just-off-the-square Goderich Branch of the Huron County Library to (1) admire the building and (2) find a restroom. Waiting for Yuriko, I had a short talk with one of the staff, and found out that the building was originally a Carnegie library. The robber baron financed libraries in Canada too. Who knew?

The square isn’t actually a square, but octagonal, with eight commercial blocks and roads radiating out in alignment with the eight points of a compass, according to Paul Ciufo, who wrote an audio guide to the square, as confirmed by Google Maps. Ciufo calls the design “unique in Canada.”

“The plan was chosen by John Galt, Superintendent of the Canada Company, and co-founder of Goderich in 1829,” Ciufo says. “Galt was a polymath — a businessman, world traveler, and friend of the Romantic poets. Galt wrote a biography of Lord Byron, and authored novels second in popularity only to Sir Walter Scott’s. Town planning fascinated Galt, and he yearned for more creative designs than the grid pattern favoured by the Royal Engineers.”

William “Tiger” Dunlop

Another founder of the town was an even more colorful Scotsman, William “Tiger” Dunlop (d. 1848). The 19th century was quite the time for ambitious men looking to be colorful.

After serving with distinction as a doctor in the War of 1812, “[Dunlop] went… to India where, as a journalist and editor in Calcutta, he took a hand in forcing the relaxation of press censorship,” the Dictionary of Canadian Biography tells us. “His unsuccessful attempt to clear tigers from Sagar Island in the Bay of Bengal, in an effort to turn the place into a tourist resort, provided him with his famous nickname…”

Eventually Dunlop went to Upper Canada, involving himself heavily in efforts to settle the area as an official with the Canada Company.

“The year 1832 saw publication of his guide for emigrants, Statistical sketches of Upper Canada, an event that… helped put him back on public view,” the dictionary continues. “This engaging book, written under the pseudonym A Backwoodsman, mixes some (small) practical advice with much tomfoolery and fully exploits the author’s humorous persona. In his chapter on climate, for example, Dunlop says that Upper Canada ‘may be pronounced the most healthy country under the sun, considering that whisky can be procured for about one shilling sterling per gallon…’

“During the rebellion in Upper Canada in 1837-38, Dunlop raised a militia unit, whose nickname, The Bloody Useless, gives a clue to the important role it played…

“Dunlop is said to have done everything on a grand scale, and this is nowhere more evident than in his drinking. He kept his liquor in a wheeled, wooden cabinet called “The Twelve Apostles.” One bottle he kept full of water: he called it, naturally, ‘Judas.’ His reputation as a maker of punch ‘and other antifogmaticks’ was legendary with the Blackwoodians.”

Antifogmatic. I knew I got out of bed this morning for something; to learn such a fine word.

Wiarton Willie and His Hometown

Posted on October 20, 2024 by admin

Look at that point-of-interest spot on the map, I said to no one in particular. I think Yuriko was in the bathroom right then. Wiarton Willie, I said. And that is?

I didn’t look it up. But I knew we were going that way, south from the tip of the Bruce Peninsula at Tobermory on the two-lane Ontario 6, so we could find out. The town of Wiarton, Ontario was our first stop, late on the crisp and clear morning of October 10.

Wiarton’s on the Georgian Bay side. Willie has a lake view in a municipal park, but he is positioned looking away.

The plaque says that Willie was carved from Adair Dolomtic Limestone by Dave Robinson, and erected in 1996 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Groundhog Weekend celebrations in Wiarton, Ontario, pop. about 2,000. He honors the live groundhogs used in the annual ceremonies. “Willie Rising” is the formal name of the work.

Punxsutawney might have the best-known Groundhog Day celebrations — and certainly be depicted (by Woodstock, Illinois) in the best movie ever likely to be made about the holiday — but it isn’t the only place that touts the predictive talents of a series of marmots during a wintertime festival. Wiarton does, too. At one time an albino groundhog served as the living centerpiece of the fest, though more standard groundhogs seem to be tasked with forecasting these days.

One year, the Willie of the time died just before the festival, so the organizers held a public funeral instead, putting a lookalike stuffed rodent in a tiny casket, since the recently passed Willie reportedly smelled too bad for the role. Apparently some of the festivalgoers were miffed, but if you asked me that shows some imagination on the part of somebody — an urge to do something just a little out of the ordinary. In the hands of a competent scriptwriter, there’s probably a pretty good Groundhog Day comedy in that story.

Here’s a rabbit hole: or rather, a groundhog burrow: The Adair in Adair Dolomtic Limestone is a trademark held by Arriscraft, which is a unit of the stone products group of General Shale, the North American subsidiary of the expansion-minded Wienerberger AG, a leading multinational manufacturer of brick, headquartered in Vienna. The stone itself was quarried locally, since there are quarries near Wiarton. But the ultimate bosses are shadowy German-speaking billionaires.

The shore at Wiarton.

Not far away is the main street, Berford Street (Ontario 6), and its collection of handsome buildings of a certain age.

The taller buildings came in at no more than three stories.

Most had stores on their first floors, and people were out and about on the sidewalks, going about their business at such places as Beer Store, Peninsula Imprint, Bluewater Dental, Sullivan’s Butcher Shop, Coral’s Caribbean Cuisine, KW Real Estate Centre, Lost Art Espresso, Sunshine Drugs, Wiarton Emporium (thrift store), Cannabis Grey, Royal Bank of Canada, Ashanti Cafe, and more – a mix of ordinary retail and some that probably depend more on day-trippers from larger cities.

An active, walkable town, in other words, the kind planners dream about, but which are hard to conjure up from a set of plans.

Canadian Thanksgiving weekend was about to start.

From what I saw and heard, mostly on the radio, turkey feasts and family gatherings are common aspects of the holiday. That’s all very well, but I think we have a better deal: three holidays, plus a de facto holiday thrown in to make four days, on the leading edge of Christmas. Thanksgiving is a three-day weekend in Canada, and that’s that.

Over the door of the Royal Canadian Legion in Wiarton. Memoriam eorum retinebimus, we will remember them.

Nearby artwork in the town with the same message.

We should remember them, too. We, as in Americans. Not only have there been no hostilities along the border since the War of 1812 (not counting fishing spats), we and the Canadians have been comrades in arms ever since, when the times call for it.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: October 2024