As scam text messages go, this one needs work. Mostly literate, but the tone is off.
I don’t think the tollway authority has a bit of girlishness in it. Or boyishness either, or any particle of human emotion. It functions as a machine: in its own small sphere, a calculating, persistent revenue-generating engine. Then again, I guess it’s fitting that the text message is likely machine produced.
That’s pretty heavy. Something a little lighter.
Floral studies by my father.
Some years ago, I scanned some of my father’s slides from the 1950s and posted them, including family pictures in London, one of the lost and lamented Penn Station in NYC, and on the Texas coast in 1958. I didn’t lose interest, exactly, I just never got around to doing any more.
This time around my nephew Robert, who also visited San Antonio when we were there, took some of the slides back to New York for scanning, and later shared the results. I hadn’t seen most of them. Such as at Jay’s fifth birthday party, which would put it in 1957.
You could call it Mid-Century Birthday Party. Next, my brothers playing with balloons.
And the two of them in cowboy getup.
By the time I could remember, cowboys were becoming old hat. Spacemen were the thing, though I never dressed up as one (but I could have). The Woody-Buzz dynamic originated in that changing taste.
I could pay to ditch all the ads on YouTube, but for now I stop the them after five seconds – and leave pages that don’t offer that option, to teach the system not to do that. Sometimes I also marvel at just how wrong the algorithm seems to be in terms of pitching ads to me.
For some reason, for example, the bots are positive, completely positive (to anthropomorphize), that I’m going to open a restaurant soon. At least, that is my conclusion, since the same two ads for a restaurant supply store keep popping up again and again and again.
Also, some bot somewhere believes (to anthropomorphize again) that I’m in the market for a wife from one Slavic-language nation or another. Must be a guess based on the fact that I’m not young any more. But I’m not a fan of mail-order marriage, whatever the tech. Want a spouse from outside your cultural milieu? Go get her or him yourself, in person.
I haven’t seen an ad for this product, though I did see it on the shelf recently, which is about as random an appearance as many YouTube ads.
Another in the long list of things I will never buy.
Below is a poster I picked up among the debris in the closet of my former room in San Antonio, and brought back north last month. I probably originally liberated it from a wall at Vanderbilt, though I would have had the good manners to do so after the concert.
I remember going to see P.D.Q. Bach in Nashville in early 1980, but, maybe true to the spirit of the not-great composer himself, I don’t remember much about the concert. After all, Schickele.com says: “P.D.Q. was virtually unknown during his own lifetime; in fact, the more he wrote, the more unknown he became.”
It’s easy to believe that after 45 years, my memory of the concert is slight. I saw Bob Marley in concert in 1980 as well, and mostly I remember the various kinds of smoke at the venue, and Marley’s frequent cries of “All hail Jah!” and “Free Zimbabwe!”
Back to P.D.Q. Bach. I must have been amused by the concert. Not as much as if I’d actually known anything about classical music, but I’m sure Peter Schickele’s antics were amusing above and beyond mere music spoof. I’m also pretty sure I went by myself, since even the student price (more than $34 in current money) would have been a lot for an act no one else had ever heard of.
But I had. We had at least one record of his around when I was in high school, namely Report from Hoople: P. D. Q. Bach on the Air, which was in personal heavy rotation for a little while, along with all our Tom Lehrer records.
That reminds me: I need to get around to writing that short bio of that other non-famous musician, Irwin Hepplewhite, leader of Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys during the gold and silver age of American pop, since clearly no one else is going to do it.
Back to P.D.Q. Bach again. I didn’t note the passing of Peter Schickele last year, but I’m going to now. Here’s an interview he did only a few years after he came through Nashville. Everybody comes to Nashville, even Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys, who brought the house down – literally, a ceiling fixture fell on them – at the Ryman in ’69, one of the lesser-known events referenced in “American Pie.”
Literal Texas leftovers might include barbecue brisket, chili and pecan pie. I don’t happen to have any of those on hand, unfortunately, though I’m glad to report I ate all of those and more while in Texas this month. On the other hand, I have some metaphorical leftovers.
Corpus Christi isn’t a large real estate market, but I did notice some development activity downtown. It has to be apartments with a spot of retail on the first floor.
Being new, they will surely rent for more than the Corpus average of $1,575 a month for the entire range of apartments (Zillow data). Even so, the city isn’t an expensive market by current standards. Austin hipsters, take note. Go make Corpus weird.
I didn’t drink any alcohol in Texas, though I did have a couple of 0.0 brews when Tom and I watched UT go down to ignominious defeat against Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl on January 10 (ridiculously called in full the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the 89th Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic). We watched it on a big screen at an Austin bear bar – I was one of the few male patrons without a beard, and the patrons were about 90 percent male – and most of the rest of the crowd weren’t participating in dry January. If Texas had won, there might have been a jubilant sports riot on the streets of Austin that night, but it was not to be.
No beer for me, but plenty of beer neon.
Good old Shiner. As Texas a beer as you could ask for. Touring the brewery might be nice someday, but for $30? (I checked.) I don’t know about that, Shiner.
An aged Lone Star manhole cover in San Antonio.
Also in San Antonio, a church I’ve never been in, but have passed by countless times: Sunset Ridge Church of Christ. This time I stopped for a picture, since it’s a handsome church.
Alamo Heights Baptist Church.
Another one I’ve passed countless times, and decided to take a slightly longer look this time.
On the drive between San Antonio and Dallas, we went pretty much straight through on I-35, except for bypassing Austin by way of Texas 130, which costs extra but gives good value in that you don’t have to deal with the molasses that is traffic on I-35 through Austin. North of Austin, and back on the interstate, we stopped at the Bell County Safety Rest Area, which is fairly new, opened in 2008.
The interior.
TexDOT says that “the architectural design was inspired by the many grist mills that once stood along nearby Salado Creek.”
There are exhibits there about the Chisholm Trail — “the greatest migration of livestock in history,” the sign says — and the Jerrell Tornado strike of May 27, 1997, an F5 monster that killed 27 and destroyed much of the town of Jerrell, which isn’t far to the south of the rest stop. True to its designation as a safety rest area, there’s a tornado shelter inside the facility. Its door was propped open with a rock, so I went in for a look. On the wall was illustrated detail about the deadly tornado. May 27, 1997, was a good day to be somewhere else.
The day we visited was a windy, but fortunately not that windy.
Just enough to kick the half-mast flags into motion in the low afternoon sun.
If a cemetery is going to have “park” in its name, “burial” is a refreshingly non-euphemistic adjective to go with it. Such as at Mission Burial Park, San Antonio, at least at the front entrance.
The place is also called Mission Burial Park South, because it is one of a number of cemeteries under the brand Mission Park, which is specific to San Antonio (where a lot of things are called “Mission”). The brand also includes local funeral homes and funeral chapels. I haven’t seen any of the other places, but South has to be the flagship and, in fact, it is very near both Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan Capistrano.
Replete with the kinds of names you’d expect in South Texas.
I knew a Zuehl in high school.
And maybe a name or two you wouldn’t expect. People get around.
A nice variety of sizes and angles when it comes to stones: one mark of an aesthetic cemetery. Even including flat stones. Just not too many.
That last one, Luby, has to be the restaurant family. Luby’s is owned by other investors these days. Once a sizeable chain, the company also owned other brands (for a while, Cheeseburger in Paradise). I had heard Luby’s was about to close all together a few years ago, but that didn’t happen, and there is still a fair residue of them in Texas. They’re probably not the cafeteria I remember from my youth, one of the mother’s go-to restaurants, but in the casual dining slot in our time.
Another notable South Texas family, the Steves.
They didn’t opt for a mausoleum, but others did.
What’s a mausoleum without stone Sphinx-like creatures guarding it?
An active cemetery still.
A particularly sad one, this.
We hadn’t planned to come to Mission Burial Park. After visiting Hot Wells, I fiddled with Google Maps and decided we needed to visit the nearby Espada Dam, an 18th-century relic of the Spanish presence in the area. Now part of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, “the dam diverted water from the San Antonio river and forced it into hand dug earthen ditches that carried the water to farms around the missions,” the NPS says. “Eventually emptying back into the San Antonio River [sic].”
The San Antonio River, which is the size of a largish creek in this part of Bexar County, flows near Hot Wells. Downstream maybe a half mile is the dam. But I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves at the cemetery, which instantly looked intriguing.
The San Antonio River forms one boundary of the cemetery.
I think this is a back view of the dam from the cemetery.
Didn’t make it for a front view, which apparently can be seen from a small park across the river. Maybe next time. As for the excellent cemetery we got to see, that was another bit of serendipity on the road.
For someone who grew up on the north side of San Antonio, South Presa Street on the south side meant one thing, and it wasn’t the fact that the street is a major thoroughfare in that part of town. Instead, it was the location of San Antonio State Hospital, founded in 1892 as the Southwestern Insane Asylum. When we 1970s kids mentioned the place, it was usually just called “South Presa,” as in, “You belong in South Presa!” “They’re taking you to South Presa!” Better than calling it a loony bin, I guess, but that’s what we meant.
The hospital is still there, though in a building that opened just last year, and with a South New Braunfels Avenue address. Jay and I drove by the 349-acre hospital grounds the day after we went to Corpus Christi, because one day out and about wasn’t enough for me. We did a kind a day trip to the south side on January 17, not to see the hospital, but rather a nearby site, also on South Presa: Hot Wells of Bexar County.
Which doesn’t have a permanent sign yet, though it has been a county park for five years now.
More than 100 years ago, Hot Wells was a posh place to take the waters. Sulfuric waters, in this case, via a well fed by the Edwards Aquifer.
“The first structure burned to the ground in 1894 after only one year of operation,” according to the Edwards Aquifer Web Site, whose page on the historic vicissitudes of Hot Wells is well worth reading.
“The most famous version of the spa was its replacement, a lavish Victorian-style structure built in 1900 that became a renowned, world-class vacation destination for celebrities, world leaders, and wealthy industrialists. Some of its visitors were Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, Teddy Roosevelt, Porfirio Diaz, Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and Cecil B. De Mille.”
Probably not all at the same time — the overlap would be a bit of a stretch — but wouldn’t that have been a guest list to beat all? Alas, time took its toll on the site (more fires, especially) and now visitors come for the stabilized ruins.
There’s a certain elegance to them, even in their ruined state.
The park is simple in execution. The ruins are fenced off, but a sidewalk goes all the way around.
Note the ghost signs: Ladies Pool, Gents Pool and High Diving Strictly Prohibited in the Pools.
Urban ruins aren’t that common, at least not in the US. Our real estate tends to be recycled with all the demolition tech we can bring to the job. But any city with any sense of history ought to have at least one ruin. Of course, San Antonio has its share of fine ruins. But one more is good. Nice work, Bexar County.
It was a nicely structured day trip to Corpus Christi earlier this month, if I say so myself. We left not ridiculously early from SA, but early enough to catch a few easy sights in Corpus before lunch. After lunch: a single main attraction and then a drive home in time for dinner.
It was a Texas dinner: drive-through Whataburger.
The main attraction that day: The USS Lexington, CV-16, nickname, the Blue Ghost. That is to say, the 16th aircraft carrier belonging to the U.S. Navy, commissioned in early 1943 in the thick of the war in the Pacific, where it kicked ass. The ship survived the war with close calls and Japanese propaganda broadcasts asserting more than once that she had been destroyed. After a period of decommissioning beginning in the late ’40s, Lexington returned to serve throughout most of the Cold War.
Note the rising sun flag. That is where a kamikaze struck the ship off Luzon in November 1944, killing 50 men and wounding many more. RIP, sailormen.
That afternoon my brothers and I were entering what is now called the USS Lexington Museum, which is permanently moored across the ship channel from downtown Corpus Christi, where it has been since 1992, within sight of the Texas State Aquarium, the scattered buildings of North Beach, and the old highway bridge and the new one.
The Blue Ghost is one of five aircraft carrier museums nationwide, with two others in California, and one each in New York and South Carolina. These days, tourists enter the Lexington via the Hanger Deck. This deck and all the other lower decks are thick with exhibits, on many of the available surfaces, about the ship and its active service.
I’ve seen a similar bronze before.
George H.W. Bush as a young naval aviator. A sign is careful to point out that the future president was never assigned to the Lexington, but spent a few days recuperating here (“sack time,” he later called it) in June 1944 after being rescued from the ocean when mechanical issues forced him to ditch. Also, he trained as a naval aviator at Air Station Corpus Christi, so there is that connection.
We climbed a number of staircases to higher decks, through the Foc’sle and ultimately to the Flight Deck. Slow going at our age, but we went.
Some of the exhibits were very specific, such as the rat guards used by the vessel. I remember seeing those depicted in a Carl Barks comic, maybe a Scrooge McDuck adventure.
Others were more generalized, such as entire room in the Foc’sle about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eventually we made our way to the Flight Deck, towered over by the island (the towering section including the bridge). Mostly, the Flight Deck is an open-air aircraft museum.
Sage advice.
Restoration in progress on a Phantom II.
An A-6 Intruder. Like a number of the other airplanes at the Lexington, on loan from the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola.
An AH-1 Cobra. There’s a warrior slogan for you, on the nose.
A T-2 Buckeye, developed in the late ’50s as a trainer. The marvel, when it comes to naval aviation, is how anyone learns it without getting killed.
How indeed. The sign mentions an incident on the Lexington in 1989, when a T-2 Buckeye flown by a trainee crashed into the aft section of the island, killing five and injuring others. Among the dead: Airman Lisa L. Mayo, 25, of Oklahoma City, the first woman killed aboard a U.S. carrier in the line of duty. Again RIP, those who died.
More.
Onward to the Bridge.
There’s the captain.
Spare and utilitarian, the Bridge is. Except for that wig.
The sparse neighborhood cut off from the rest of Corpus Christi by I-37 at least offers a view of the new bridge, nearly complete, that will connect downtown with the North Beach district. New bridge in the foreground, existing through-type arch bridge in the background.
The new bridge has been in the works awhile, including a delay arising from firing FIGG Bridge Engineers from the project part way through. Another FIGG bridge had infamously collapsed in 2018, with the NTSB reporting that “the probable cause of the Florida International University (FIU) pedestrian bridge collapse was the load and capacity calculation errors made by FIGG Bridge Engineers.” Reportedly TexDOT in particular was leery of that company continuing on the Corpus bridge project.
The new bridge will be open by this summer, and soon after the old bridge (vintage 1959) will be demolished. For a narrow window, including January 2025, there are two bridges.
We got a good look at the old bridge from a different vantage.
In this case, the Texas State Aquarium is in the foreground. If I’d known that old bridge was coming down so soon, I’d have taken better pictures of it, including from the ground practically under it in North Beach. Never mind. Time flies, things change.
When was the last time I was in Corpus Christi anyway? A question of no importance to anyone else, and not even that much to me, but something I wondered about while visiting the city (January 16). It occurred to me after I returned home that I might have documentation to pinpoint it – the pages of the desk calendars I kept, starting my sophomore year in high school. I used it, as one would, to keep track of things I had to do for school, but I also made notes about social activities, of which there were a fair number. A speech tournament counted as both, and a travel opportunity to boot, even if it were only to other high school campuses in town.
So I checked: I went to a speech tournament at CC Ray (W.B. Ray HS) January 12-13, 1979, and at CC King (Richard King HS) February 16-17, 1979, so the latter is the answer to my question. I don’t ever remember attending a tourney at CC Miller (Roy Miller HS), where my mother graduated in 1943, when the school was simply Corpus Christi HS, the only one in town.
Early in my sophomore year in high school, I was considering joining the speech club, which mainly would mean debating, and in the fullness of time that’s what I did. I must have mentioned my deliberations to my English teacher, Bill Swinny, who also taught drama at Alamo Heights HS. I can picture him: not as old as I am now, but wrinkled with a slightly leathery face, probably from years under a South Texas sun; silver narrow rim glasses; and a full shock of white hair without a hint of youth.
“If you do debate, your learning is going to go like this,” he said, holding his hands near each other, as if he were about to clap, and then spreading them wide apart – a hell of an effective gesture, with the fact that I remember it after nearly 50 years proving the point. Guess Swinny, who had been on the stage professionally, had that actor’s instinct for gestures.
He was right and it wasn’t long before I realized it. But I probably would have joined debate without his encouragement. Debate meant Friday and Saturday trips to other high schools in San Antonio (I suppose we got all or part of Fridays out of class to go, at least when I didn’t have a football game to go to, and assuming good enough grades). Even better, it sometimes meant going to other cities: Austin, Houston, Dallas, Corpus, even as far as Midland, Texas.
Under the sort of loose supervision that was common in those days. People wax nostalgic for that sort of thing, and they’re right.
I remember traveling by student-filled bus all the way to Stevens Point, Wisconsin in August 1978 for a school club trip (not speech, math) and being completely free to set my schedule once I got there. One day I skipped a few of the organized events and took a long walk around Stevens Point, including a visit to a local church, St. Stanislaus – probably the first time I’d ever looked inside a church, just to see it – and wandering through a large greenbelt around a pond, with fragrant pines that made the place seem intoxicatingly far away. I came home a better person for that amble, and being trusted not to be a moron.
Like band, speech was a social occasion with other members of the club, away from school, away from our families and usual-suspect friends for a little while. It meant nights in motels and occasionally actual hotels, and meals in restaurants beyond our usually haunts – generally organized by the students themselves, such as the time in Corpus we had to put our heads together, in those pre-Internet days, to find and procure food from the known-by-reputation somehow Star Pizza. (Or maybe Starr Pizza, since there’s a street of that name in the city). It might have been middling pizza by later standards, but I’m sure it tasted better for the effort we put into it.
We speech club types were bright but mostly well behaved, and I don’t remember that the teachers ever regretted our loose supervision. There were minor amounts of unreported underage drinking (which I never liked much myself), but no one got too stupid from it, to the point of anyone’s parents having to collect them.
There was the time we sang a few parody songs in one of our hotel rooms. In Houston, maybe. Fairly mild stuff, even then. “Rock Around the Clock” became “Rock Around the Cross,” for instance, with lyrics that would have been offensive, and certainly ridiculous, to some older ears in Texas at that time; but no one else heard it. We might have been loud enough to be heard in the hall, but I doubt in any other rooms. None of us recorded it, either. No one would have thought of that.
That same hotel-room gathering, without any one older around, we talked about what we knew or had heard about some of the other teams from other schools, including opinions about who were the toughest opponents, and otherwise. I don’t remember any details. It would be demented if I did. But I know that that moment was both business and pleasure.
Speech was also an opportunity to meet fairly smart girls who were also exotic. By exotic I don’t mean anything like ethnic background, but rather that they went to other high schools. Even more exotic, other high schools in other cities.
There turned out to be a lot of nuance to that meeting girls thing, something adolescent boys are only dimly aware of. During that single trip to Midland for a speech tourney, I remember my debate partner and I went up against two female partners from who knows what school in an early round of what was called Standard Debate: one team affirmative, the other negative, each partner speaking in turn about whatever the subject was that year. Energy policy? It was the energy-crisis ’70s, after all.
The opposing teams sat across from each other at the front of a classroom, with the judge and any other spectators sitting where students normally would, though in early rounds you could expect few other people besides the judge. So the teams had a pretty good view of each other. One of the opposing girls spent a fair amount of time staring at me. Or so it seemed.
She was lovely. My kind of lovely, as it happened: dark hair, dark eyes, slightly olive complexion. Unusual for those days – an era of straight hair for girls – she sported a lot of curls. Also, she was dressed if not to the nines, pretty close, since nice clothes were mandatory for all debaters, and of course the girls tended to put a lot of effort into how they looked, while it was enough for boys to be in a suit and have taken a shower recently.
I don’t remember anything else about that debate, not even who won. After it was over, the girl debate team was gone in a disappointing flash. No time for small talk, as was sometimes the case.
In conversation not long after with some other (male) debaters, this particular team and its curly-headed debater came up. That’s what she does, I was told, stares at male debaters to distract them. So it was high school-level psyop.
I could have taken a misogynistic lesson from that, but I don’t think I did, and certainly don’t now. She was just using an advantage that was temporarily hers, and, since everyone else seemed to learn about it pretty quickly, probably not that effective. But it was memorable.
One more story: there was that other time that the faculty advisor of the speech club, a youngish woman (early 30s, perhaps) who was with us on a trip to Uvalde, apparently left us completely and went across the border with her boyfriend for an entertaining evening (or night?). The student president of our chapter of the National Forensic League, who did not like her – thought of her as ditzy, if I remember his phrasing right – got wind of that and narked her out to the administration. Soon we had a new advisor. Supervision might have been loose, but it wasn’t supposed to be nil. I don’t know whether there were any other negative professional repercussions for that teacher or not.
Well, maybe that time that was an example of a teacher regretting the loose supervision of a bunch of bright ’70s high school students.
Texas – they say, or was it in a song? – is full of wide open spaces. “The Wide Open Spaces of Texas” must have been a lesser-known Western swing hit. Or not. The [Dixie] Chicks did one called “Wide Open Spaces,” which is clearly about coming of age and leaving home, and vaguely the West, but not as specific as Texas.
You don’t have to drive very far from urban and suburban Texas to find the spaces. Head south on US 281, which can be picked up in the urban-suburban conglomeration that is the northern half of Bexar County. The further south you go on that road, which becomes I-37, the more sparse the population and buildings become. Soon you pass into Atascosa County.
The increasingly arid land flattens out and the brush is pretty thick, browns and yellows and grays, maybe a less wild version of the thorny Nueces Strip further south. Or something like the Hill Country, but no hills, and few well-to-do city dwellers or retirees taking up residence there. Many Atascosa County residents are of the bovine sort, though I didn’t see that many cattle from the road, as one does sometimes. But they’re out there, the 2022 Census of Agriculture tells me: more than 65,000 head in the county that year, which sounds like a lot, but this is Texas. Plenty of counties have that many and many more.
A scattering of crops is also raised in the county, but for real economic action there’s the service industry, like in most places, and some oil. A scattering of pumpjacks is visible from the highway. That’s Atascosa County, a scattering of this and that. But with a family connection: my mother spent part of her formative years in Jourdanton, the county seat, and periodically even as late as the 1990s (I think), she would visit old friends there. I went with her sometimes in the ’70s.
From San Antonio, I-37 continues southeast through Atascosa, Live Oak and Jim Wells counties, to Nueces County, whose seat is Corpus. A few towns tick by, but not many: Campbellton, Whitsett, Swinney Switch (a fun name), Mathis, with slightly larger burgs just beyond the immediate highway: Three Rivers, George West, Sandia.
Choke Canyon State Park is some miles to the west of the road, and its reservoir is not visible, except in signage. But looking at an online review of the park, it’s clear that while the territory may be arid, not too much to support all kinds of fauna. Invisible from 80 mph, but the animals are out there, getting by.
“Stayed 2 days in a cabin,” houstonphotojourney says [all sic]. “Saw tons of javelinas and their babies, white tailed deer, gorgeous green jays were all over the park, wild turkeys, vermillion flycatchers, orange crowned warblers, ladder backed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, crested caracara, a wilson’s snipe, common ground doves, golden fronted woodpeckers, western meadowlarks, american coots, long billed thrashers, killdeer, verdin, had regular evening bunny visitors.”
We found some wide open spaces at a cemetery in Corpus Christi last week – at least in an urban context. Or barely urban, since the neighborhood around the cemeteries features a scattering of houses (that word again), a lot of vacant lots, darkened landscape and a large part of the city’s petrochemical industry in the near distance, toward Nueces Bay.
A graveyard that humanity is forgetting. Guess that is the fate of the majority of all graveyards so far. A scattering of stones are upright and legible, despite that.
Most are not.
Entire family plots are now anonymous, at least to casual visitors like my brothers and I.
There isn’t any signage to identify the cemetery that I could see. It was just some city blocks, if you can call them that, cobbled together as a burial ground, but it’s been a long time since any of the graves were new.
I knew from reading that a place called Bayview Cemetery was the historic cemetery to visit in Corpus. Early settlers are there, along with participants of the war with Mexico, marked by a fair number of standing stones, at least to judge by the photos. The kind of place at which the local historical society conducts periodic tours.
The cemetery we’d gone to was called Bayview on the electronic map. Turns out the historic one is called Old Bayview on the same map, but simply Baywiew in some of the other materials on line. Anyway, to get to the historic Bayview from the less picturesque Bayview, we had to deal with this knot of highways a bit to the east. If you’re going to be a big city in Texas, or at least aspire to be one, you need flyover expressways, and lots of ’em.
We didn’t make it. Instead of going to the cemetery, I managed to get in the lane to crosses the Harbor Bridge to North Beach, where we planned to eat anyway. Later, as we started on the way home, visiting the historic cemetery was again flummoxed by a wrong lane in the tangled overpasses. In cases like that, I take it as a sign, or at least a suggestion, to visit that place some other time.
At one point, I did stop across the street to check Google Maps and we were treated to a view of Corpus Christi Electric Co.
If that doesn’t say built during the 1960s, I don’t know what does. And so it was: 1965. Originally the Lew Williams Chevrolet Dealership, designed by Donnelly and Spear, with Wallace R. Wilkerson as structural engineer – something worth noting for a structure like this.
“Prominently sited at the intersection of two main thoroughfares, the circular former auto showroom links a set of eight hyperbolic paraboloids that dynamically thrust upward at each of their pointed ends,” says the Society of Architectural Historians. “At the time, the showroom’s 185-foot clear interior span was considered as the largest to be erected in concrete in the United States.”