A postcard I picked up in London in 1988 (probably). A postcard combined with a map. What could be better?
The tube as it was in 1985, according to the date on the card. The struggle to develop a useful diagram of the London Underground has a long and interesting history, something like London itself.
Postcards are sometimes educational, if you let them be. Another of the cards that I dug up this weekend depicts the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC.
I picked it up during my only visit to that city (1985), though to judge by the image, the picture might have been taken ca. 1970. I filled the card with correspondence, even to the point of stamping it, but I never sent it. At some point I removed the stamp for other usage.
Curious about the property, vintage 1908, I looked it up and thus learned about an entire class of hotels — namely, Canada’s grand railway hotels, mostly built by Canadian railway companies in a style that evokes French châteaux: Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific Railway and Grand Trunk Railway.
Some of the properties don’t exist anymore, but many do, such as the recently mentioned Banff Springs Hotel. That there are such palatial hotels is a good thing to know about Canada, I think.
It’s been a year of getting near Canada — Buffalo and Detroit so far — without crossing the line, since the border remains stubbornly closed even now.
That wasn’t the case 15 years ago this month, when we drove from Illinois to Alberta by way of the Dakotas and other places. At the time I wrote: “So, to sum up: very long drives, a lousy exchange rate, high fuel costs. Was it worth it? Was it ever.”
What is it about mountains? Pre-modern generations considered them obstacles to their forward motion. Now that we have mountain roads and tunnels, we admire the view. Do people who live close to mountains take trips to see flatlands? That makes me think of busloads of Swiss out admiring Kansas, but I don’t think it works that way.
Anyway, it was a trip of wide horizons, long roads, lofty mountains, mighty waters (liquid and frozen), endless forests, vivid wildflowers, sweeping Canadian farms, campsites, elk and bears and bison, clouds of mosquitos, national parks, vistas and towns of the tourist and non-tourist variety.
Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks. Too good a vista not to post again.
This looks like a view from some remote spot, but actually I was standing in back of the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, which was a sight all its own.
This view, on the other hand, is roadside on the Icefields Parkway, which remains one of the great drives of my life. A place called Moose Meadows.
More Alberta views.
I told Ed Henderson (d. 2016) I’d take the cap he sent me various places. I haven’t lately, but I did for a while.
The girls had a good trip.
Even if they don’t remember much, in the case of Lilly, or anything at all, in the case of Ann.
Rockford, Illinois, is generally credited with creating the modern sock monkey, and more recently fiberglass sock monkeys were put on display there. There are even sock monkeys at the Midway Village Museum in Rockford.
So how is it Long Grove is getting a sock monkey museum? I’ve only done cursory research, the kind the subject deserves, and I haven’t found a connection. I like to think the Long Grove museum will be run by a breakaway sock monkey faction, rivals of the sock monkey orthodoxy in Rockford, but that’s just me amusing myself.
A short distance from Long Grove’s historic downtown is Long Grove Community Church, which is historic in its own right, built by Evangelical German immigrants in the 1840s.
“With a new century, came many changes,” the church’s web site says, referring to the 20th century. “The church widened her circle of ministry to include local people who were not German-speaking. Two denominational mergers took the church away from her Evangelical roots.
“By 1950, the church had grown so small that the denomination recommended the doors be closed. But God gave the people a vision. Instead of closing their doors, they built Sunday School rooms for children. As people migrated from the city to the suburbs, the area grew and so did the church. By the late 1960s, we had transitioned from a small rural church into a suburban church.”
The Long Grove Cemetery is next to the church.
There isn’t much information on line about this cemetery, despite its clear historic aspects.
But I don’t need a web site to tell me it’s another of the many cemeteries in the Chicago area with immigrant German stones, many dating from the 19th century.
Sometimes you see something odd, and it does you good.
I saw that building over the weekend in Long Grove, Illinois, when I visited the town for the first time in many years (sometime after 2004, but not sure when). Long Grove is a prosperous place in southern Lake County — median household income, $148,150 — and a fairly large suburb, about 12 square miles, with a small historic district at the intersection of Old McHenry and Robert Parker Coffin roads.
Long Grove is host to various warm-weather festivals, including chocolate-, strawberry- and apple-themed festivals, but on July 3 this year the historic downtown was quiet, except for a singer entertaining the outdoor patrons at the Village Tavern. The lack of crowds made for pleasant walking, despite the midday heat, especially among the buildings and shops away from the roads.
Businesses clustering around the intersection include (among others) Balanced Earth Energy Healing, Broken Earth Winery, In Motion Dance, Long Grove Apple Haus, Ma and Pa’s Candy, Neumann’s Cigars & More, Olivia’s Boutique, Signature Popcorn, and the Olive Tap, an “olive oil and balsamic vinegar tasting emporium.”
Luxury goods, in other words, largely dependent on the caprices of the upper-middle class. Just walking around I could tell that last year was hard on the district, since a number of businesses looked permanently closed.
Still, most of them seem to have survived, such as Viking Treasures. It promises Scandinavian gifts and was the only place I saw still insisting on a mask.
Long Grove is also known for its small covered bridge.
“The historical significance of the Long Grove Covered Bridge is all about the iron, not the wood,” Aaron Underwood of the Long Grove Historical Society writes. “… our bridge isn’t an ‘authentic’ covered bridge, but rather an iron truss bridge that had a protective covering added in the 1970s to protect that iron and integrate it into the downtown’s historic theme. The cover is a beautiful copy of a famous covered bridge in Ashuelot, New Hampshire.”
Elsewhere, he wrote: “Our bridge is historic because it is rare. Only two bridges of this type remain in the six county Chicago metro area, and only thirty-five remain in the entire state. It may well be the only bridge in the state of this type with such an ornate pedestrian walkway.”
That doesn’t keep morons from driving too-large vehicles into the covering, however.
High summer is here — I’ve seen fireflies and we can buy Rainier cherries — and holidays are ahead, such as Canada Day, World UFO Day, Independence Day, X-Day, Nunavut Day. Back to posting on July 6.
A fine day to end June, warm and partly cloudy until a massive but short downpour in late afternoon. Dry days ahead, including the July 4 weekend. I’ve been nattering on about the excellence of summer lately, and while I realize a lot of places endure relentless heat during this time of the year, including places I used to live, I’m sticking with my sentiment. I’ve lived here enough winters to appreciate the summers. A Northern summer is much better than this:
Looking at a major news site yesterday, I saw this.
I hope visitors to Alaska or anywhere won’t see such a thing. No bad-taste Florida Man jokes for this, either. I refreshed the page and the picture changed to something fitting the headline.
Our last lunch in Detroit recently was at a Cuban restaurant, Vicente’s. The food was good, but the Cuban lemonade (limeade, really) was wonderful.
The restaurant is on Library Street, across from the Skillman Branch of the Detroit Public Library. On the other side of the library is the enormous Hudson’s Site development. Got a good look at its rising elevator shafts.
The drive home from Detroit was fairly straightforward, but I did take one short detour to Ypsilanti, Michigan. I had to see the (sort of) famed Ypsilanti Water Tower, dating from 1890 and still used as part of the city’s water system.
Wags call it the Brick Dick. There’s a bust of Demetrius Ypsilanti nearby, along with Greek and U.S. flags, but I didn’t care to cross the busy street for a closer look.
More rain today, alternating with drier periods. The grass has responded, as grass does this time of the year, by greening up and lengthening. As soon as we get a full dry day or so, I will respond as I do, using a machine to shorten the growth to a more acceptable bourgeois appearance.
Not everyone waits. Not half an hour after the enormous rains on Saturday, a fellow on the block was out mowing his soggy grass. Is that good for the lawn? I like to believe it is not.
Sunday was a dryish interlude. About an hour ahead of sunset on Sunday, we spent time at Park St. Claire Natural Area and environs.
A nice bit of suburban planning. At certain places, merely looking around doesn’t tell you that you’re surrounded by a metro area of 9.4 million people or so.
Including water features.
I’ll be sorry to see June go.
Not that the rest of the summer won’t have the potential to be just as pleasant. But June 30, or maybe the July 4 holiday, is the end of the beginning of the season. All of the days between those two, and a few more, ought be holidays.
Tremendous rain on Saturday morning. By later in the day, most everything was dry, including my deck. The storm had left behind humidity but also enough wind to lessen that sticky feeling. The rest of the day was cloudy and about 75 F. A fine time to sit outside and do something close to nothing, and otherwise be a bit too leisurely.
From the postcard files: one I sent from Vietnam, dated June 29, 1994. I must have gotten a collection of cards somewhere, maybe a postcard vendor in the street — they were usually older children — and sent all of them. This one says it’s No. 8.
The card says it depicts the central market in Rạch Giá, a city southwest of Saigon, by a photographer named Nadal. It has the look of earlier in the 20th century, and it seems that one Fernand Nadal was active with a camera in this part of the world ca. 1930.
We went that direction to visit the Mekong Delta, but didn’t make it down to Rạch Giá. I sent the card anyway, contrary to my usual practice, probably because I didn’t have that many cards. You couldn’t count on running into postcard-wallahs just anywhere, even in Vietnam.
Clouds mostly obscured the June full moon tonight. Last night was clear, and I watched the might-as-well-be-full moon traverse — appear to traverse — the top branches of a neighbor’s tree off to the southeast just after sunset. I knew it already, but I’m always mildly amazed that you can see the movement — apparent movement — of the moon if you stare at it for a while.
Here are a few things you can see on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, also known as Michigan 1, which goes from downtown to Pontiac, Michigan.
I Googled the signature under the wings later. The artist who created the wings, one Kelsey Montague, only in her 30s, has painted a lot of murals around the world. Yuriko specifically wanted to stop and have her picture taken with it. I expect that happens pretty often.
Early Saturday afternoon, we walked along Woodward, at least lower Woodward from Campus Martius Park nearly to another urban green space, Grand Circus Park. This part of Detroit was alive with pedestrians, though not thronging.
Even more conspicuous were the party bikes.
That one was tooling along Madison St., headed toward Woodward, but there were plenty of the vehicles on Woodward itself, their occupants sharing their merriment with the world. After the first one or two, I thought, not those again, but strangely enough by the time I’d encountered a half dozen or more, I enjoyed their spirited arrival.
You’d think that would be the other way around, but I felt that they were out having a noisy good time, with the noise arriving and departing in short order, so I didn’t begrudge them their noisy good time.
I look up the term party bike as well. Such a vehicle is also known, according to Wiki, as a beercycle, fietscafé, bierfiets, pedal crawler, pedal pub, beer bike, bar bike, pedal bar or bierbike. Europeans invented them.
As I said, Woodward was alive on a Saturday morning, as was much of central Detroit, whatever other problems the city has. Not every North American city of Detroit’s size can say that. Lower Woodward also sports some fine old buildings, recently renovated. Such as the amusingly named Shinola Hotel.
I think it’s funny, anyway. The 129-room boutique property, only open since early 2019, offers rooms at north of $300/night sometimes.
“[The] hotel is part of a multimillion-dollar development project by Shinola, founded by Tom Kartsotis of Fossil watches, and Dan Gilbert’s real estate venture, Bedrock, which has acquired and developed more than 100 properties in the city since 2011,” says the New York Times. “The project, which took two years to complete, also includes an alley behind the hotel with shops and two restaurants: The Brakeman, an American beer hall with an outdoor area, and Penny Red’s, a fried chicken spot.”
The alley.
Further north on Woodward.
The David Whitney Building on Woodward. Outside —
— and inside.
It’s a Daniel Burnham design, completed in 1915 and named for a already-dead local lumber, shipping and real estate baron and owned for decades by his family. “When the Whitney family sold the building in 1966, more than three hundred doctors and dentists had offices here…” an historic site plaque on the building says. “It reopened in 2014, rehabilitated for use as a hotel and apartments.”
The plaque omits the fact that the building was vacant by the 2000s. Doctors and dentists are famously reluctant to move their offices — they’re sticky tenants — such that so many leaving a building speaks volumes about the decline of Detroit. Even the Garland Building, an equivalent building in downtown Chicago, has managed to keep many of its healthcare tenants down to the present.
I’d count Woodward as one of the great thoroughfares of the nation, with theaters and museums and retail lining its way far beyond where we walked, and a remarkable history beginning as an Indian trail long ago. Its 2010s revival was no doubt interrupted by the pandemic, but now the revival is being revived. Good for Detroit. Still, I don’t have any illusions that much of the city, beyond the lively corridor along Woodward, remains the impoverished shell of the place it once was.
Near the intersection of Woodward and Jefferson avenues in downtown Detroit, you can see quite a few things, such as this fellow.
The formal name of the 16-foot bronze, installed on this site in 1958, is “The Spirit of Detroit” by Marshall M. Fredericks. A nearby plaque provides verbiage.
All very optimistic, I’d say. No one knew that the spirit of Detroit would take a considerable beating during the rest of the 20th century.
“One of the most prolific sculptors of the twentieth century, Marshall M. Fredericks is known in America and abroad for his monumental figurative sculpture, public memorials and fountains, portraits, and animal figures,” says the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum in Saginaw. “His sculptures can be found in more than 150 public and corporate locations.”
Behind the sculpture are the seals of Detroit and Wayne County, Michigan, in stone. Behind that is a brutalist wall of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, which is Detroit’s city hall.
From the same vantage, other Detroit buildings of note are visible, such as the Guardian Building.
And One Woodward Avenue, formerly the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building, a 1962 design by Minoru Yamasaki — one of whose buildings we saw in Buffalo not long ago.
Across the street from the “Spirit of Detroit” is another work of considerable size, based on human anatomy: “The Fist.” We didn’t cross the busy street for a closer look, unfortunately.
“Aimed menacingly toward Canada, the giant bronze boxing arm of Joseph Louis Barrow (aka Joe Louis) hangs from a pyramid of poles in the middle of what was once Detroit’s busiest downtown intersection,” says Roadside America. “The 24-foot-long arm — as long as the pyramid is tall — weighs four tons, and gives off the vibe of a medieval siege battering ram.
“Louis was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world (1937-1949) and a big hero in Detroit, where he’d moved when he was 12 and trained at the city’s Brewster Recreation Center…”
Sports Illustrated magazine gave “The Fist” to the the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1986. The museum apparently didn’t think much of it as a work of art, so arranged to put it on display in its current location.
These works were part of the first stop, after Campus Martius Park, on a Preservation Detroit walking tour led by an affable young man who told us this was his first tour since the fall of 2019, since none were held last year. Only four people had signed up for the tour we were on, including us. We walked around for a little more than two hours and even so there were a number of buildings and other sights that the tour didn’t have time for.
For instance, just down the street from “The Spirit of Detroit” and “The Fist’ is the Mariners’ Church, which I saw up close during my 2004 visit.
“Last fall, as I drove briefly through downtown Detroit, I noticed a little church building on Jefferson, a main road,” I wrote in ’04. “I had just enough time to note its name: The Mariners’ Church. Flick-flick-flick went the synapses of dim memory, lighting up again. That’s the church in the song?
“Sure enough. Last month, while I was on foot in downtown Detroit, I wasn’t about to miss seeing it.”
I didn’t know until I checked after this visit, but the Mariners’ Church is part of the schismatic Anglican Church in North America. Our guide didn’t point out the church, but I recognized it right away.
Rather, he spent time discussing the 5.5-million-square-foot Renaissance Center, which certainly makes a mark on the Detroit skyline, even if it took decades to evolve into a part of downtown, rather than an isolated corporate enclave that sucked tenants out of some of Detroit’s more venerable buildings.
One of these days, I’d like to go in and look around. There are even free tours of the place.
Renaissance Center is ’70s international glass. Not far away is a surviving example of Beaux-Arts, the Old Wayne County Building, with a pink granite base, 247-foot tower and bronze sculptures riding high.
The 1902-vintage building is empty these days, owned by a nonprofit. The county moved out about a decade ago. It was a Gilded Age project, all right, since besides the style there was the matter of cost overruns and corruption.
“The building was fraught with controversy from the beginning…” says Historic Detroit. “Wayne County was blasted for overpaying for the land by about $50,000, about $1.27 million today. The land deal ‘aroused grave suspicion,’ the Detroit News wrote in September 1897. Then some 96,000 pounds of steel and iron went missing. There were allegations that the county’s auditors were not auditing or keeping financial tabs on the project. None of the steelwork was done in Detroit, when hometown labor was to be used. Copies of the plans and specifications were not made public. The contractor, M.J. Griffin, was accused of double-charging the county and using four-cut granite instead of the six-cut that the county paid for. There was a grand jury investigation, and a supervisor accused of soliciting bribes was prosecuted, though not convicted.”
Ah, well. The people of turn-of-the-century Detroit might have been cheated but, like New York City Hall, they got a fine building for an elevated price.
“One of the building’s most prominent features is the pair of large sculptures flanking its center tower and portico,” Historic Detroit continues. “The copper sculptures are known as quadrigae, a Roman chariot drawn by four horses. The pieces were done by New York sculptor J. Massey Rhind, who intended the quadrigae to symbolize progress. They feature a woman standing in a chariot led by four horses with two smaller figures on either side.”
This handsome building, at Brush St. and E. Fort St., used to be a tobacco products factory, the guide said.
Turns out Detroit was once a major producer of tobacco products, mainly in the 19th century, when that meant cigars, chewing tobacco and (I assume) snuff, though that might have been considered old-timey even then.
I had no idea. Apparently Ontario used to be an important producer of tobacco, which found its way to Detroit for rolling in such buildings as this. More about the industry is in the excellent Detroit-centric blog, from which I borrowed the above illustration, which is surely public domain.
Just goes to show you: if you’re paying attention when you’re out seeing things, you’ll gain all kinds of useless knowledge, and occasional useful nuggets, such as how to navigate a Michigan left.
The tour continued. I earned my toe blister that day. This is another Albert Kahn building: the 1915-vintage Detroit Athletic Club.
“The Palazzo Borghese in Rome provided Kahn with a model for much of the Detroit Athletic Club, but the idea of using the large impressive windows for the impressive fourth floor dining room — called the Grill Room — came from the Palazzo Farnese,” notes Wiki.
Footnote: In the club’s early decades, no Jewish members were allowed. The club was willing to make an exception for Kahn, who was Jewish, but he declined.
The tour circled back toward the vicinity of Campus Martius Park and took in a few more of Detroit’s magnificent structures, such as those along Capitol Square. The Farwell, whose cornices have been restored.
There hangs another tale of Detroit history and, some would argue, the baneful impact of government overreach. Or, to depoliticize the lesson, an example of the unintended consequences of good intentions.
“Back in 1958, a chunk of stone fell off a cornice of an older building at 1448 Woodward, killing an 80-year-old woman on the street below,” the Detroit Free Press reported. “The City of Detroit responded with a new ordinance requiring the inspection of all cornices, the ornate stone crowns that top off most classically inspired buildings.
“Budget-minded downtown building owners stripped away cornices on their buildings, often leaving a denuded top scarred with patches of mismatched brick. Dozens of buildings were defaced, and a good portion of Detroit’s architectural heritage was lost.”
More recently, Detroit cornices have been restored. Reminds me a bit of the unintended consequences of the British window tax.
The mighty Penobscot Building. the tallest building in Detroit from its completion in 1928 to the development of the Renaissance Center in 1977.
Last on the tour: the Guardian Building.
The outside is colorfully interesting, but nothing compared to the lobby and other interior spaces. I’d say it was worth coming all the way to Detroit, and walking for a couple of hours, just to see that.
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