Stillman Park

Posted on January 4, 2022 by admin

Stillman Park in South Barrington, Illinois, has a few features that sound like they were borrowed from Beatrix Potter: Rabbit Hill, Cattail Marsh, Owl Loop and Goldfinch Trail. It also has an unnamed parking lot, but at least it’s off Penny Road.

We arrived for a walk on Boxing Day afternoon — as far as we got from home over the holidays, which wasn’t far at all. Conditions were still dry and not that cold, which made for a good walk.

There were trails to follow.

Places to pass through (or by).

We toyed with the idea of further destinations this year, but cold rain and warm inertia persuaded us otherwise.

Manhattan Decked Out for Christmas

Posted on December 23, 2021 by admin

Regards for Christmas and New Year’s Day and all the days around them and in between. Back to posting around January 3.

One reason to go to New York City in December is to admire the seasonal lights and decorations, and that’s what I did. Starting with the impressive Christmas tree on the street in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

Fearless Girl is there now, and she still has her admirers.

On Broadway just up from Bowling Green, the Charging Bull bronze still stands, and there’s a sizable tree nearby as well. For some reason, there was also an Kazakhstan flag flying.

I saw the giant Rockefeller Center tree, though the madding and maddening crowd put me out of the mood to take pictures. For the record, the 2021 tree is a 79-foot Norway Spruce, 46 feet wide and weighing 12 tons, according to the center, with about 50,000 LED lights and a 900-lb. Swarovski star with 70 spikes on top.

You might call the tree shape at Radio City Music Hall a bit of deco decoration.

No Christmas show inside.

Another gorgeous light display in the area was on the wall of Saks, facing Fifth Avenue. The crowds were quite attentive as it shifted and blinked.

Back downtown, Zuccotti Park.

The lights of Trinity Center, overlooking Zuccotti.

From there, I went to the World Trade Center complex. Not especially decked out for the holidays, but I caught the buildings at a good time in terms of lighting.

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, still under construction.

It’s a replacement structure, designed by Santiago Calatrava, for a church of the same name and denomination on the site that was destroyed by the Twin Towers collapse. The new church will also be a memorial honoring those who died in the attack.

The Oculus‘ interior is blue for the holidays. At least it was when I stepped in for a few moments. A lot of other people were taking a look as well.

Wandering the streets of Manhattan, I saw a lot of smaller decorations, such as this restaurant annex on 51st.

Fire house lights, same street.

Bongs in the window.

Not Christmasy, but colorful all the same. This head shop near the Oculus — are they even called that any more? — is no doubt taking advantage of the legalization of cannabis in New York State this year, though retail sales haven’t started yet. For what it’s worth, I noticed the smell of cannabis on the streets of the city a lot more this time than ever before. And for that matter, less urine smell, which I suppose is a function of the hypergentrification of Manhattan.

Over in the Meatpacking District, angular snowfolk occupy a small plaza.

The angular building facing that little plaza.

After visiting Little Island, Geof and I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant on the first floor of the building.

I had the Mexican French toast.

I’d never heard of that before. Created for the table of Maximilian I? Man, it was good.

Not far away, on 14th Street, is Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe en San Bernardo, a parish church formed by the merger of two congregations in the early 2000s.

An 1870s building designed by the amazingly prolific Patrick C. Keely. Wonderfully colorful interior, hardly shown in my picture.

A good place to spend a few Christmastime minutes.

Little Island

Posted on December 22, 2021 by admin

We arrived footsore at Little Island late on Saturday morning. Or at least my feet were a little sore and warmer than usual, since Geof walks a good deal more than I do, and faster as well. Along the greenway on the Hudson that morning, he modulated his pace, partly because he wanted to see certain things himself, but also to accommodate my slower gait — but not too slow. I can still walk three miles without serious difficulty.

Little Island is in fact an island, an artificial one built on the ruins of Pier 55 (in full, the place’s name is Little Island @Pier 55). Even before Hurricane Sandy slapped the pier, it was in poor shape, and the blow brought complete ruin. Redevelopment took years, as it does in Manhattan sometimes, with one plan sinking into a legal quagmire.

A second plan finally came to fruition with the opening of Little Island, managed by a nonprofit, in the spring of this year.

We entered at the south entrance bridge.

The 132 concrete structures supporting the park are called “tulips,” and I guess that’s a reasonable description. Tint them green and they could form the supports for Marvin the Martian’s summer home, but in any case, they’re big and heavy: each weighing as much as 68 tons and measuring from 16 feet to 52 feet high.

The British architectural firm Heatherwick Studio (designers of the Tower of Silence in India) and the New York-based landscape architecture firm MNLA collaborated on designing Little Island. I’ve read, and Geof confirmed to me — he has made a good many visits or at least walk-bys of the park this year — that the place is a hit. During the warmer months, you have to register for a specific time to get in, though at no charge. This time of the year, you can just wander in.

Good to hear that a new public space is popular with the public. I can understand that. Even in winter, it’s a pleasant place to wander around.

It’s lush too, at least this mild December.

With views of the city. In the foreground is the construction site on another old pier, which will be an extension of the Whitney Museum.

I took these to be homages to The Time Tunnel.

I might be one of the few to think of that, since you have to be of a certain age to do so, besides mildly eccentric.

William Street

Posted on December 21, 2021 by admin

Less famous than Wall Street and a bit longer, William Street snakes through non-grid Lower Manhattan, another faint echo of New Amsterdam. I didn’t walk the entire way during my recent visit, but did cover a fair amount of the street, starting at the back of the fortress-like Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Beneath my feet, roughly, more than 6,000 tons of gold, more than even old Croesus himself could imagine. Above street level, a building that evokes Florentine palaces, though larger even than a Medici could imagine. Designed by a NY firm that did a lot of bank buildings, York and Sawyer.

A block away is Fosun Plaza, which surrounds the 60-story 28 Liberty Street, formerly One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a midcentury creation. The plaza is a story above street level, accessible by a wide staircase. The first thing you see on the plaza is a Jean Dubuffet sculpture, “Group of Four Trees,” commissioned by David Rockefeller and completed in 1972. Almost instantly, it reminded me of “Monument With Standing Beast” in Chicago.

Deeper in the plaza is an Isamu Noguchi rock garden fountain, back down at street level and naturally dry this time of year.

“Windswept” came to mind when I was at the plaza, the adjective that’s often attached to such midcentury artificial flats, even though there wasn’t that much wind. Still, the plaza offered some good views of surrounding buildings, such as 84 William Street, the Howell apartments. In front of the Howell (from this vantage) is a small park featuring steel sculptures by Louise Nevelson.

A wonderful old office building at 62 William Street, dating from 1900.

Down at street level at that building, a Greek restaurant that didn’t survive the pandemic. Or simply didn’t survive.

From that vantage, there’s also a good view of the non-Wall Street side of 40 Wall Street.

At William and Pine streets, one of two churches I was able to visit this time in NYC, Our Lady of Victory. I popped in for a few minutes to enjoy the sacred-space quiet.

Further south.

Delmonico’s, by gar.

Or at least its 21st-century iteration, though in a fine old building. I understand there have been a few Delmonico’s down the centuries, since like the Dread Pirate Roberts, the name is the thing. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever heard of the place was years ago in this Charles Addams cartoon, when I didn’t really understand the joke.

I ducked over to Stone Street at this point.

It’s a happenin’ place, on Thursdays anyway.

At South William and Broad is the former International Telephone Building, once occupied by IT&T and designed by Buchman & Kahn in 1928.

Your voice goes wingedly around the world? Notice that underneath the winged figure, there are people using 1920s-style telephones, along with ’20s-style telephone poles with multiple crossarms.

One more place, this one on Broad.

Designed by Kirby, Petit & Green, the American Bank Note Company building dates from 1908. I’m always delighted to see a physical presence of something I’ve only ever read about.

Wall Street

Posted on December 20, 2021 by admin

Not too many streets get to be metonyms, but Wall Street does, which is a little remarkable for such a short street, only eight blocks from the East River to Broadway, or vice versa. During my walk along the street just before sunset, I wanted to take a closer look at the physical street, not its high finance subtext, which I hear about enough as it is.

I started at the East River Waterfront Esplanade, near where Wall Street meets South Street, which is partly under FDR Drive. You can catch a fine view of Brooklyn from the esplanade.

That’s as close as I got to Brooklyn this time around, as opposed to some other trips.

An enlargement of the sidewalk on the easternmost block of Wall Street forms Mannahatta Park, a pleasant place with bushes and trees and benches. Rose bushes bloomed there this December.

More than two centuries ago, the site was New York’s slave market, and surely not a pleasant place. The city erected a sign only in 2015 to mark the doleful history of the site.

At the corner of Water and Wall is 88 Wall Street, these days the Wall Street Hotel, very much an upmarket property (and not where I stayed) that opened only this year in a former office building.

The hotel’s web site has an unusually long and detailed history of the site, which is only fitting, considering the richly layered history of the street. One of the more remarkable snippets of 88 Wall Street history is the fact that a series of two buildings on the site from 1791 to 1870 were owned by a tontine, and known as the Tontine Coffee House and then the Tontine Building. Out of the 203 investors who had funded the coffee house, seven survived to be beneficiaries of the tontine.

The current building, a Beaux-Arts structure designed by Clinton Holton & Russell in 1901, was for a time home to an import company that was, among many other things, the world’s largest dealer in mother-of-pearl. When plastic buttons bottomed out the market for that material, the company went into cultured pearls.

By the time you pass 88 Wall Street, the thoroughfare takes on its famed canyon-like aspect.

Next to 88 is 74 Wall Street. Its entrance caught my attention.

The ever-useful New York Songlines says: “This round-arched building was put up in 1926 as the Seamen’s Bank for Savings Headquarters (hence the seahorses, mermaids and other nautical motifs); the architect was Benjamin Wistar Morris.”

Nautical motifs, all right, though Seaman’s Bank is long gone.

Almost as remarkable, the building seems to be vacant. Then again, maybe not so remarkable. Despite the persistence of Wall Street as an metonym, and the presence of the New York Stock Exchange, the street hasn’t been the hub of U.S. finance in many years; that moved on to Midtown.

Though not on Wall Street, 1 Wall Street Court — the Beaver Building, 1904 — is visible from there.

67 Wall Street, now a residential co-op.

Songlines again: “This 25-story triangular building, originally known as the Munson Building, was designed in 1906 by Kenneth M. Murchison for the Munson Steamship [Line]. From 1931 until 1972 it was the New York Cocoa Exchange.”

63 Wall Street.

60 Wall Street, a 1988 building designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo.

Originally Morgan Bank’s HQ, these days Deutsche Bank occupies it. I found the lobby impressive.

Soon after this point, it’s pedestrians only. Trinity Church isn’t far away.

40 Wall Street.

Lots of history here. A picture of the upper section.

Songlines: “Formerly the Manhattan Bank Building, this was designed to be the tallest building in the world, but was beaten out by the Chrysler Building’s surprise spire…

“The Bank of the Manhattan Company, which eventually became Chase Manhattan, opened its first office here in September 1799. It was founded by Aaron Burr against the opposition of Alexander Hamilton. The New York Stock & Exchange Board, as the NYSE was then called, had its first permanent office here in 1817.

“Donald Trump calls this the Trump Building; please don’t encourage him.”

37 Wall Street.

A familiar name, but Tiffany’s is a fairly recent occupant. Designed by Francis H. Kimball, a very busy New York architect, the building originally housed the Trust Company of America in 1907, and then a series of other banks. The upper floors are now residential.

Before long, one comes to Federal Hall National Memorial, which is behind some scaffolding now.

George looks a bit cut off up there. Looking down pensively, perhaps, on the nation he created.

There’s plenty else on Wall Street that’s perhaps a little less permanent. For instance, sources of affordable food to price-oppressed New Yorkers.

I bought a falafel at that first one, delicious and large enough to make part of dinner two nights in a row.

Also, men working.

Finally, I couldn’t very well come to Wall Street without a look at the NYSE (11 Wall Street), whose after-hours trading floor I got to visit in 2002.

“It’s a primary rain forest of electronic equipment — the guts of the capitalist beast — no, the sinews of the Invisible Hand,” I wrote at the time. Looking at the allegory-stuffed pediment, I’d also say Temple of Commerce.

New York City ’21

Posted on December 19, 2021 by admin

Until a few weeks ago, I assumed that I’d take no more trips for the rest of the year. I’ve had an exceptional year in that way, so another one would be an unexpected cherry on top of the sundae.

Early this month, my company invited me to some meetings and other events at headquarters in downtown Manhattan, so on Wednesday I flew from O’Hare to LaGuardia, returning today. The first thing I noticed in NY is that the redevelopment of LaGuardia is coming along. LGA is on its way to being a real 21st-century airport, rather than the dingy embarrassment it has long been.

On the whole, the weather was cooperative for a visit, clear and cool until Saturday, when it was cool and alternated between drizzle and mist. The pandemic was not cooperative. Some of the events scheduled for my visit were canceled or otherwise disrupted. New Yorkers were eager to be tested at popup facilities.

I had some time to walk the streets and other pathways of the city, especially on Saturday – a low-risk activity, even in the days before the vaccines – and had a few good dine-in meals, in spite of everything. Such as at a storefront on Water Street, Caravan Uyghur Cuisine, where I had a wonderful lamb dish, besides the experience of visiting a Uyghur restaurant for the first time.

From Wednesday evening to Friday morning, I stayed at a hotel at the non-financial end of Wall Street, and spent the whole time in Lower Manhattan, below Barclay St. From Friday evening to this morning, I stayed at a hotel in Midtown East (or Turtle Bay, on 51st) and spent some time around there, though my travels took me back downtown sometimes.

Lower Manhattan is a fairly small district, with its streets roughly hewing to those of New Amsterdam, meaning a grid that’s been dropped and stepped on, unlike most of the rest of the island. That makes for more interesting exploring, but it’s also possible to get disoriented, though never for very long.

During this visit, I had time to look over two streets in detail, Wall and William, though I poked around some others, such as the charming and close-in Stone Street, where a residue of 19th-century buildings overlook 21st-century outdoor bubbles that serve as restaurant annexes.

Spent some time in Battery Park (officially The Battery, but does anyone call it that?), which was alive with tourists and a few buskers late on Friday afternoon. Including this fellow, who was playing Christmas songs on his erhu. He was good, but not drawing much of a crowd, so I gave him a dollar.

I did a lot of walking, but also rode the subway. It was about the same as ever, except for near-universal masks.

Also, no matter how many times I visit New York, and I’ve lost count, and how many times I ride the subway, I still get on the wrong line, get off at the wrong station, and mistake an express for a local. I did all of those things this time, once each. My wayfaring skills are pretty good, but without more practice, are no match for the irregularities of the system, which was welded together more than a century ago from two different competing systems, the IRT and the BRT, which were themselves consolidations of disparate lines.

On Saturday, my only nonworking day in town, I was up early and walked with my old friend Geof Huth from Battery Park, near where he lives, up the greenway along the Hudson River to the city’s newest park, Little Island, a course of nearly three miles. Here’s Geof on Little Island.

We had a grand walk that morning, passing small parks, gardens, memorials, sculptures, recreational facilities, many Hudson River piers, and urban oddities, such as one of the most brutal structures I’ve ever seen, the Spring Street Salt Shed.

One thing I did not do, which I had fully planned to do on Saturday afternoon, was head up to the other tip of Manhattan to see the Cloisters. By now it’s a running joke with myself. Every time I go to New York, I want to see it. I have since a New Yorker friend of mine first recommended it to me in 1983, and a lot of other people have since then. Somehow or other on each trip, something happens to prevent my visit.

This time I was too tired after the grand walk, though I don’t regret the miles along the Hudson. Not only did we see a lot on the land side of the path, we had some excellent views of Jersey City and eventually Hoboken, across the river. Is it odd that I want to go to those places as well someday? Maybe not as odd as it once would have been.

Had some fine views of Lower Manhattan too, such as with One WTC poking into the clouds. I’m going to consider this a vista, since we were raised a bit above sea level.

Though not technically a vista, I did manage to see the length of Manhattan as we left today.

And a good deal else, such as the infamous Rikers Island.

I thought the year of vistas had come to a conclusion after Russian Hill, but no. I squeezed a few more more in.

Wright in Dwight, But Also Odd Fellows, Cobb, and a Relic of Quackery

Posted on December 1, 2021 by admin

Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station is on the edge of Dwight, Illinois, not far from the Interstate, and after our short visit on Sunday, Ann and I went further into town, seeking a late lunch. We found it at El Cancun, a Mexican restaurant in the former (current?) Independent Order of Odd Fellows building, dating from 1916. Looks like the orange of the restaurant has been pasted on the less-colorful IOOF structure.

I didn’t notice IOOF on the building until after lunch, so I didn’t think to ask the waiter about the building, though I did notice that the restaurant space, whose walls were large and colorfully painted, had a gray ceiling that evoked the late 19th/early 20th century. Maybe once upon a time it was a meeting room or bar for the Odd Fellows of greater Dwight.

Even if I’d asked the waiter, I’m not sure he would have known. Got the impression he didn’t grow up in these parts. He was eager to upsell me a margarita, however. I declined. Had the enchiladas verdes, which were quite good, and a classic teetotaler beverage, water.

The IOOF building is across the street from the back of Dwight’s historic railroad station, now a museum. This is the front.

About the depot, more info is easily available. “As with other neighboring central Illinois towns, Dwight began as a locomotive watering stopover,” explains The Great American Stations (now that’s an interesting web site).

“The Chicago and Mississippi Railroad sent surveyors in the early 1850s to this prairie location, and while the stop was just two small buildings and a water tank, James Spencer, Richard Price Morgan, John Lathrop and the brothers Jesse and Kersey Fell of Bloomington participated in laying out a town that they would name for Henry Dwight, who had funded most of the building of this section of the railroad.

“Dwight began growing rapidly in the 1870s, with significant railroad traffic through to Chicago from St. Louis, and the town hired Henry Ives Cobb to design their larger, grander railroad depot.”

Jesse Fell, by golly. Him again. He was definitely a big fish in the little pond of central Illinois.

As for Cobb, he designed the wonderful Newberry Library in Chicago and the phallic but interesting Yerkes Observatory in southern Wisconsin, among many other things.

But for big-name architecture, Cobb’s work isn’t Dwight’s star attraction. That would be the modest Frank Lloyd Wright bank building facing the front of the station. FLW was trying to smash that pre-FDIC paradigm of grand bank buildings, it seems.

Known as the Frank L. Smith Bank when built in 1905, it’s now the Dwight Banking Center of Peoples National Bank of Kewanee. I like the old name better: Frank’s Bank. How many of us get to have our own banks?

Next to the bank is the Fox Development Center, a state-owned facility for treating people with various unfortunate conditions.

Pretty spiffy for a government structure, eh? Originally it was one of the buildings owned by the Keeley Institute, built in 1891 and rebuilt after a fire in 1902 in its current brick-and-stone Greek revival style.

I wasn’t familiar with the Keeley Institute. Here’s the long and short of it: there was a patent medicine for everything in the late 19th century, and the product of one Leslie Keeley, a small town doc, promised to cure alcoholism with injections and liquids to drink. His cure containing a substance whose exact formula was a secret, though Keeley asserted it contained the element gold in one form or another.

Not too many people believed that, but a lot of people believed the Gold Cure might just work, enough to make Keeley a fortune and open up locations around the world that lasted well into the 20th century. The institute’s international HQ was in Dwight.

Curing alcoholism with injections might seem odd to us, but actual medicine was only just beginning to separate itself from patent medicine in those days.

“I will take any liquor habitue there, soddened and saturated by twenty years of alcoholic debauch, sober him in two hours, cut short his worst spree in four hours, take him from inebriety to perfect sobriety without nervous shock or distress, and leave him antipathetic to alcoholic stimulants of every sort and kind inside of three days,” Keeley said of his treatment. He also developed “cures” for opium addition and nervous exhaustion. Ah, if only it were that easy.

Note the slogan on this ad for the Gold Cure.

We Belt The World. Though it’s a little hard to see, that same slogan is still above the entrance of the Fox Development Center, wrapped around a globe in the pediment.

More about Keeley and the Gold Cure is here. Fascinating the things you find on the road.

Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station

Posted on November 30, 2021 by admin

The National Park Service takes more of an interest in the former U.S. 66 than I would have thought. On this page, the NPS lists dozens of historic sites associated with that road, including 12 in Illinois plus a listing on “Illinois Road Segments.”

One of the sites is Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station in Dwight, Illinois, which is about half way between the northwest suburbs and Bloomington-Normal. On the way back to take Ann to ISU on Sunday, we stopped there.

Though called Amber’s by the park service, the name on site is the Ambler/Becker Station, and the NPS does mention the facility’s other designations over the decades it was a gas station (1933 to 1999): Vernon’s Texaco Station and Becker’s Marathon Gas Station.

After the place ended its existence as a car-care facility, it became a tourist attraction. Sure enough, we’d been attracted for a look, though it was closed on Sunday afternoon.

“With the help of a $10,400 matching grant from the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, the Village of Dwight painstakingly restored the station to its former glory, taking the main office and canopy area back to the 1930s and the service bay area back to its 1940s appearance,” the NPS says. “Today, the station serves as a visitor’s center for the Village of Dwight.”

La Salle Churches

Posted on November 29, 2021 by admin

After our walk at Matthiessen State Park on Friday, we went to the town of La Salle and found a mid-afternoon lunch at a sandwich shop called Obee’s. Good sandwiches and chili, too.

Rather than head home right away, we stopped to look at a few of La Salle’s sizable church buildings. None of them were open, but the afternoon light illuminated their exteriors nicely.

First stop: Queen of the Holy Rosary Memorial Shrine.

Once a parish church, these days Queen of the Holy Rosary is a Diocesan Shrine dedicated to Mary in memory of all U.S. veterans. Designed by Arthur F. Moratz of Bloomington, it dates only from the 1950s. A late work for him. I’ve run across Moratz before; he did the Normal Theater.

Not far away (nothing is too far away in La Salle) is St. Patrick’s, a much older church, completed in 1848 to serve the Irishmen working on the I&M Canal. One Patrick Joseph Mullaney did the design.

According to a plaque on the front, St. Patrick’s is the “oldest living parish church in Illinois.” With a resplendent interior, from the looks of these pictures.

Elsewhere in La Salle is a church building that had the look of being closed. Permanently closed, that is.

St. Joseph’s, according to a stone in the wall, dedicated in 1907.

More remarkably, the cornerstone lists the architect: Henry Schlacks, whose work I’ve seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an architect mentioned on the exterior of a church, but he was a pretty big bug among church designers more than 100 years ago.

In any case, St. Joseph’s isn’t listed as an active parish by the local Catholic church, and there isn’t any evidence that any other denomination occupies the place.

On the other hand, St. Hyacinth looks active. Just not open when I happened by.

St. Patrick was originally for Irish immigrants, while St. Hyacinth was for Polish immigrants, a later wave to this part of Illinois. It was completed in 1892 to replace an earlier church that burned down, and was also designed by another prolific church architect, George P. Stauduhar.

I could see other steeples off in the distance, since La Salle is still a low-rise town, and steeples are often the tallest structures around. But the light was fading and the afternoon getting chillier, so we called it a day after Hyacinth.

Matthiessen State Park

Posted on November 28, 2021 by admin

Thanksgiving dinner this year wasn’t quite as conventional as other years: lamb shank with homemade macaroni and cheese (a complex mix of cheeses by Ann) and barbecue-flavored beans. The bread was traditional: the cheapest brown-and-serve rolls I could find. I didn’t forget the olives.

Last summer, on the way back from New Buffalo, Michigan, we bought some grape juice at St. Julian Winery, and had one of those bottles to drink with our Thanksgiving food. All in all, a pleasant meal, not a vast feast.

On Friday, we drove down to Matthiessen State Park, just south of the Illinois River in La Salle County and not far from the better-known Starved Rock State Park. The 1,938-acre Matthessen is a more modest park, but has a good set of trails along, and down in, a winding ravine formed by a creek.

To get to the ravine, you need to go down.

Those stairs lead to a bridge over one part of the ravine. Nice view from the bridge. For perspective, note that there are people at the bottom.

The bottom is accessible by another set of wooden stairs.

Though a few degrees above freezing, there were patches of thin ice here and there on the surface of the creek, which I poked with my walking stick, watching it break into fragments.

On to the other part of the ravine, which we reached by taking this path, then a different set of stairs.

A short section of ravine wall is marked by generations of carvings in the sandstone.

The trail sometimes meant crossing on stones over the shallow creek. A misstep into the creek would have meant uncomfortably wet shoes, at least.

Before long, there’s another bridge and a waterfall formed by a dam that creates Matthiessen Lake. Another set of stairs, not visible in the picture, leads up to the bridge. We did a fair amount of stairclimbing at the park.

Still, a good walk, even on a chilly day, especially since there was little wind down in the ravine.

The park is named for Frederick William Matthiessen (d. 1918), whose land it used to be, with later additions by the state. He was the other zinc baron of 19th-century La Salle County, along with Edward Carl Hegeler, whose house we toured a few years ago.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There