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 bellies 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.

Chapel of the Transfiguration

Posted on October 4, 2024 by admin

The place to contemplate the great outdoors is usually outdoors. But not quite always.

About a month ago, we entered Grand Teton National Park at the Moose Entrance. Not far inside the park is the Chapel of the Transfiguration.

Rustic, the style is called. A picture window behind the altar, looking toward the Cathedral Group of mountains, was clearly no accident. Liturgical east in this case points to the grandeur of Creation.

The chapel has stood in this spot in Wyoming for nearly 100 years, built to serve guests at the various dude ranches that existed in the area before it was a national park. Grand Teton became a national park in 1929, with President Coolidge inking the bill at the tail end of his administration, but even then the chapel wasn’t in the park, which didn’t expand down to Moose until 1950.

Transfiguration is an Episcopal chapel, associated with St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson, Wyoming. St John’s, a large log structure over 100 years old, is just off the busy main street in that town, a little apart from the many shops and restaurants and attractions. We spent a while in Jackson before entering the Grand Teton NP, including a visit to St. John’s.

The church was open, but no one else was there. If any place qualifies as the beaten path, Jackson, Wyoming is it. And as usual, it took about a minute to get off the beaten path.

The Idaho State Capitol & Bits of Boise

Posted on October 2, 2024 by admin

Boise is a growth town. I know that because the Census Bureau reported a population of about 235,600 in 2020, compared with 205,600 in 2010. Not only that, driving in downtown Boise was a pain in the ass last month, considering how many streets were closed for construction. That’s usually a growth indicator.

Adding to the irritation is the fact that many of downtown’s one-way streets (that are still open) go opposite of the way you want to go. But when you’ve found a place to park, and arrive at a restaurant like Bacon in downtown Boise, you forget all that. Nice tip before we left Seattle from Dan, who has spent some time in the area.

Maybe not good to eat in the long run, but in the short run, it makes you glad you spent the night in Boise and headed out for breakfast the next day. Also, downtown Boise looked interesting, especially on foot.

The former Idanha Hotel, which opened exactly at the turn of the 20th century – January 1, 1901 – and is now a multifamily residential property. Its architect, a Scotsman named W.S. Campbell, founded a firm in the late 19th century in Boise that’s still around: CSHQA.

Everywhere has one of these murals, though usually they say, Welcome to…

Eventually, by way of Boise’s unpredictable streets, we made our way to the Idaho State Capitol. I saw it briefly in ’89, but only from the outside. A grand edifice.

Grand inside as well.

John E. Tourtellotte & Co. designed the capitol, completing much of it in 1912, though the House and Senate wings came a few years later. Tourtellotte is another one of those architects of yore who did a lot of work.

The Idaho State Capitol has a gilded Washington on a gilded horse.

“Austrian immigrant [Charles Ostner] carved George Washington from a single pine tree,” the capitol web site says. “With a postage stamp to guide him, Ostner took four years to create his masterpiece. His young son was said to have frequently held a candle to light his workroom after darkness fell.

“Once completed, Ostner gave his rendition of our first president to the Territory in 1869. In return, Idaho’s leadership paid him $2,500.” Later, it was gilded and much later, restored.

Any capitol can have an image of George Washington. But how many have a Benjamin Harrison?

Idaho is, of course, another of the six Benjamin Harrison states, entering the union with his signature in 1890 as number 43, just days ahead of Wyoming. A nearby sign says the Harrison bust was carved in 2009 by one Steve Ussing using wood from a red oak planted by the president himself.

The Washington State Capitol

Posted on September 26, 2024 by admin

My travels in ’85 took me through Olympia, Washington, for a visit to the Washington state capitol. Thinking back on that, the visit is mostly a blank.

Nearly 40 years will do that. But I remember a lot of other things about that trip. Driving on small rural roads through unfamiliar kinds of woods, dodging log trucks, I admired the brilliant gold Scotch broom in bloom in profusion on the roadside without knowing it is an invasive species in North America. Along a not-difficult hike under the tallest trees I’d ever seen, the trail passed by a van-sized fallen tree trunk marked by graffiti reporting itself to be from the 1930s. Butchart Gardens, gem of parks and light show in Victoria, BC, wowed me completely; so did Victoria and the drive to Duncan, BC where I bought lunch in a diner that immediately reminded me of a favorite diner in Nashville, and acquired a dictionary in a nearby bookshop that promised to be authoritative in Canadian English. Know what else British Columbia had? Really good Hungarian food. I remember visiting the Space Needle on my 24th birthday, watching David Letterman destroy watermelons on late-night TV while staying with my Seattle friends, listening to Laurie Anderson talk-sing on the radio (from United States Live) as we took a ferry to Bainbridge Island, our car the last one shoed into that particular vessel. While on the island we discussed the uses of Slug Death – a product that I’d never heard of, and was glad of it. I heard about geoducks for the first time as my companions tried to dig one up on the beach, fruitlessly.

It so happened that the first two nights on the return from Seattle would be in Portland. It also happens that Olympia, Washington, is pretty much on the way to Portland, just a stop on I-5. Stop we did, arriving late in the morning of the last day of August.

The crowning dome is the tallest self-supporting masonry dome in the United States, and among the tallest in the world, up there with the likes of the famed high points of St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A protest was going on in front, an assemblage waving Cambodian flags and signs in Khmer script. The speech must have been in Khmer. Of course that’s unintelligible to the likes of me, but no language skills were necessary to hear the stridency in his voice. Protesting the current authoritarian government in their country would be my guess.

Forty-two steps to the entrance, Washington being the 42nd state to join the union, in 1889. One of the Benjamin Harrison states. He signed bills for six, more than any other president.

The capitol took a while to build, delayed by the Panic of 1893, a fit of austerity on the part of the executive branch, and other disputes about this and that for a few decades. The domed structure wasn’t finished until 1927, a little late for that style. If the delay had been longer, Washington might have gotten something like Nebraska’s capitol.

Inside.

The chandelier under the dome is by Tiffany & Co. The largest thing that studio ever made, I’ve read, and the last job Louis Tiffany oversaw himself. With 200+ bulbs, it’s a massive thing, dangling up there, full of potential energy at a weight of five tons.

Tiffany also did the Roman fire pots, something I don’t believe I’ve seen in any other capitol, despite how well they evoke republican government. There are four all together, one each at the four corners of the room, and each surrounded by flags from Washington counties. Never actually used to hold fire these safety-conscious (-paranoid?) days.

On the floor, straight below the dome. Roped off from feet that would casually tread on President Washington.

The House chamber.

Him again. Who do they think he was, the Father of Our Country?

The 2001 Nisqually earthquake moved the Washington state capitol dome by three inches or so. Since then anchors besides gravity have been retro-engineering into the dome. The quake also left cracks on the floor stone. A capitol might convey permanence to the human mind, but impermanence has already gained a foothold.

A capitol isn’t built of stone and bronze alone. The Olmsted brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, did the landscaping of the capitol grounds, with earth and vegetation as their raw materials. Anything by father or sons is usually worth a stroll through, especially on a warm summer day with blooms all around.

I knew at once it was a monument to those from Washington who died in the Great War

Sure enough. “Winged Victory,” by Alonzo Victor Lewis (d. 1946), known in the Pacific Northwest for his works.

One more feature of the capitol grounds: a view. Capitol Lake, created by the damming of the Deschutes River in 1951.

One of these days – as a larger movement to de-dam U.S. waterways is under way – the dam might be removed, returning to the estuary it once was. Naturally, there are arguments against taking the dam down. As much as I admired the behemoth likes of Bonneville and Grand Coulee, I could also be persuaded that a lot of the smaller dams were built simply because that’s what you did, and whatever economic justification they once had is long gone.

South Dakota Dash ’24

Posted on September 13, 2024 by admin

The first day of the trip was a slog from Illinois through Wisconsin and most of southern Minnesota. The second day, August 19, we woke up in Luverne, Minnesota and went to bed in Sundance, Wyoming. Less of a slog, mainly because we stopped a few places in South Dakota along I-90.

First of all, Sioux Falls. How can you stop in Sioux Falls and not see the falls?

Hard to believe, if you crop things right, you’re in a city of around 200,000. Sioux quartzite, it’s called.

Once a hub of water-power industries — the ruins of a mill are on the grounds — these days the falls travel through the municipal Falls Park. Sioux Falls has thoughtfully erected an observation tower on top of a rise in the park, for better views.

Naturally, we went to the top, for the view of the falls, downtown Sioux Falls, and – off in a different direction – a major Smithfield meat processing plant. Sioux Falls isn’t just about credit card HQs, the result of a race-to-the-bottom concerning usury laws. It still has industry, too.

Before leaving town, we sought out the Cathedral of St. Joseph, a work by Emmanuel Louis Masqueray (d. 1917), another of those famed architects mostly lost to time. Among other things, he was chief of design at the 1904 St. Louis world’s fair (one of the four fonts of the modern world).

It was open. Not all city churches can say that on a Monday.

Nice. Westward on I-90, at one of the rest stops, we found a much smaller religious structure, though elegant in its simplicity.

It too was open.

Lunch that day was in the burg of Kennebec, SD (pop. 281), which happened to have a place, Benji’s Diner, with a distinctive ag-town vibe, and serious meat on the menu.

It’s a little hard to tell, but there’s beef under that sea of gravy, and I found it mighty filling. Signs on the highway promote the SD beef industry and beef eating on principle, and they get no argument from me.

We took a look around town. When I saw this, I concluded that every town, no matter how small, has one of these murals as a little expression of civic pride. Seems that way, anyway.

Kennebec is the Lyman County seat.

The built environment isn’t just buildings.

Despite our large lunch, we managed to stay awake for the drive to Wall, SD, stopping for a few minutes at Wall Drug and then Badlands National Park, where we spent a few hours. That decision factored heavily into what happened next in Wyoming, more about which later. Enough to say that by the end of the day, we were in Sundance, Wyo.

But we weren’t done with South Dakota. For reasons I won’t bore anyone with, especially myself, we had to backtrack the next day to take care of a minor issue with the car, so it wouldn’t be major later on. For that, we went to Rapid City, which we had bypassed the day before. I’m glad we got to go, because the mechanical issue didn’t actually take long to deal with, which left us with time to see a bronze James K. Polk.

Plus U.S. Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge, among other U.S. presidents at street corners in downtown Rapid City that I managed to see.

“When a local man noticed people interacting with a temporarily placed statue of President Lincoln outside the Hotel Alex Johnson [in downtown Rapid City], an idea sparked. This man was Don Perdue, and he came up with the idea to put a president on every corner in Downtown Rapid City,” explains Visit Rapid City.

“It took a lot of convincing, a lot of fundraising, and hours of research before it started. In 1999, Perdue proposed the idea to the city as a way to honor the legacy of the American Presidency. The project was approved and in 2000 the first four presidents were unveiled: George Washington, John Adams, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush… Over the next ten years, a group of local artists worked to create and place all 40 of the remaining statues.”

I didn’t have time to see all of them. Or the inclination. It was in the low 90s F. that day, so I only wanted to spend a few minutes seeking them out, while Yuriko more rationally waited in our air conditioned car.

She was willing to get out and look at Rapid City’s older attraction a few minutes later, however: Dinosaur Park. I later checked with my brother Jim. He said he does indeed remember, a little, our family’s visit to the park in 1960, before I was born.

There’s a good view of Rapid City from atop the park’s hill.

But you’re up there to look at wire-mesh-frame dinosaurs with concrete skins, originally dating from the 1930s but obviously maintained into our time and (maybe?) tinkered with a little to more closely match current thinking about dinosaurs.

Even better, I learned that the park was originally a WPA project, consciously designed to draw tourists to Rapid City with something distinctive. Of all the various WPA projects one can encounter, this has to be unique among the lot.

Return to Le Roy, Home of Wausaneta

Posted on August 1, 2024 by admin

It so happens that Moraine View State Recreation Area is only a few miles north of Le Roy, Illinois, a burg I passed through more than five years ago. At that time I made the acquaintance of Wausaneta, an imaginary Kickapoo chief. His statue has stood in Kiwanis Park in Le Roy for more than a century now, gift to the town of the wealthy crackpot who dreamed him up. I mean, gift to the town of the spiritualist and leading citizen who communed with Wausaneta those many years ago.

As of Sunday, the statue of Wausaneta still stands in Le Roy’s main square.

I didn’t remember the carved stump tree nearby.

Panther Tree, it’s called. The local high school mascot is a panther. The reason I don’t remember it is because it wasn’t there until late 2019; I came in March of that year.

While Yuriko dozed in the car, I took a stroll down Main Street, learning that this isn’t the only Le Roy.

Most of the buildings are occupied by one business or another. The former Le Roy State Bank is now the Oak & Flame Bourbon Hall.

Every town worth its salt had an opera house, once upon a time. In this case, that time was 1892.

The Princess Theatre had an abandoned look, but its web site that says that Horizon: An American Saga is playing there once a day until August 3. Only $5 for seniors and children, and $6 for adults, which might be what it’s worth.

“Marcus West, son of Simeon West, built the Princess Theater in 1916,” the web site says. Simeon West was the aforementioned wealthy crackpot.

“Architect Arthur L. Pillsbury designed the brick theater with limestone accents. The first movie was Tennessee’s Pardner on November 21, 1916. The original theater was a silent movie house with piano accompaniment, as talkies did not make their debut in Le Roy until 1931. A grandson of Marcus West recounts that West’s daughter, while in high school, substituted as piano player when the regular player was unable to accompany the film.”

This building looked genuinely empty. Not only empty, but still sporting a Trump-Pence sign, already a relic of yore. It has a future as a hipster bar, maybe.

Guns & Glory.

Guns & Glory offers firearms, cleaning, repair, concealed carry classes, and Bibles.

“We are probably the only gun shop and religious book store combined that you will find,” its web site says. “We believe we can provide the two most important things to protect you – ‘God and guns.’ ”

Used to be the First National Bank. And a Rexall drug store.

Someone went to some lengths to blot out the Rexall name, but not enough to efface it completely, if you know what you’re looking at.

I believe the drug store in Alamo Heights where I bought comics in the early ’70s was a Rexall, but I’m not quite sure. At some moment after I left town, it disappeared. That same dynamic happened so much that the brand now enjoys only a whisper of its ’50s coast-to-coast retail glory.

Sintra: Pena Palace

Posted on June 3, 2024 by admin

Sizable rain and cool air to welcome June on the first day of the month. But June in northern Illinois isn’t one for too much cool air, and temps came in very pleasant today. That means deck time.

I’m glad we saw the interior of Pena Palace (Palácio da Pena), up in the hills of Sintra. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made the acquaintance of this fellow.

A little context.

It isn’t too often you see grotesques that are that grotesque. Looks like that tree growing from his head gave him a screaming headache, and those fish tails for legs couldn’t be that comfortable, either.

He’s just a cast member at Pena Palace, which is an eclectic riot, a hilltop thrust of colors and fanciful towers. There are more than a few visitors on any given weekday in the spring.

Looks like a crunch, but it was anything but an ugly crowd. They were in a good mood. They’d come because they heard this is a place worth going to see. It is? Yes. Yes it is. They knew they wouldn’t be disappointed, except for those (few?) who are disappointed in everything.

It’s best, I think, to start by looking up at the palace, which luckily is how all visitors approach the architectural extravaganza.

The palace was built on the site of a ruined monastery, abandoned since – you guessed it, the 1755 earthquake. Surviving elements of the monastery were incorporated into the palace design, especially the cloister.

In other parts of the palace, you see kingly things. Such as the king’s office.

The king’s dishes.

The king’s state-of-the-art telephone.

The king being Carlos, sometimes styled Carlos I, though he was the only one of that name in Portugal. Carlos came to the throne in the late 19th century. His grandfather Ferdinand II got the ball rolling on development of the palace earlier in the century, tapping mining engineer, explorer of Brazil, and amateur architect Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege to design it, but Carlos was the last king to spend much time there.

Wiki lists Carlos’ cognomens as The Diplomat; The Martyr; The Martyred; The Oceanographer; The Hunter; The Painter King; The Obese. Quite a selection. Martyr points to Carlos’ fate, gunned down in Lisbon by anti-monarchists in 1908, along with his son and heir-apparent, Luís Filipe. It was a dangerous time for monarchs. And, as it turned out, a dangerous time for monarchy itself in Portugal.

The king might have had all those things above, but the queen – Queen Amelia, Carlos’ wife – had a terrace built for her. It probably got as crowded on the terrace during occasional events at the palace as it does now, but everyone would have been more formally dressed at those long-ago, long-forgotten gatherings.

When you take in the view, you forget about the crowds.

The monastery chapel also survived to be incorporated into the palace.

Inside are marble and alabaster works attributed to one Nicolas Chantereine, a French artist who did well for himself in 16th century Iberia.

There’s always more detail, especially in stone — more exuberant detail, wherever you look.

Wonder how often or whether Carlos wandered around the palace, with no crowds around, pondering the detail. Maybe as a way not to think about affairs of state or what to do about the rising tide of republicanism. Was there so much even he would discover bits he hadn’t noticed before? I can’t say for sure, but that’s entirely possible.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Architecture