Vietnam 1994, But the Postcard Picture is Much Older

Posted on June 27, 2021 by admin

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.

Woodward Avenue, Detroit

Posted on June 24, 2021 by admin

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.

Downtown Detroit Walkabout

Posted on June 23, 2021 by admin

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 David Stott Building.

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.

Campus Martius Park, Detroit

Posted on June 22, 2021 by admin

Just how long ago was it? One of those nagging questions. In this case, I was wondering when the last time I’d been to downtown Detroit. I couldn’t remember until I looked it up.

Right. Seventeen years. This time we arrived on Saturday morning. After visiting St. Joseph Shrine, we repaired to Campus Martius Park, which counts as a green spot in the heart of downtown Detroit, and which was still being developed the last time I was in the area.

When I went looking for information about the history of the park, I was amused that the Downtown Detroit Partnership hadn’t gotten around to writing anything. And yet the dummy Latin evokes the origin of the original Campus Martius, which even dummy students of Latin (as I was) know was the gathering place in the early Roman Republic for legions before they went out to kick barbarian butt, and later was home of the Pantheon.

The Michigan Territory borrowed the name not directly from Rome, it seems, but a place in Ohio. In the 19th century, citizens gathered at the Detroit Campus Martius in war and peace, but the spot was neglected in the 20th century, becoming mostly just a place through which cars passed.

In the 21st century, Campus Martius was reinvented as a park to help bring new life to downtown. It’s a fine bit of urban planning. Why do I think that? Because it features not only things to do and look at, but chairs with actual backs on which it’s actually fairly comfortable to sit during the warm months. How many cities don’t understand how important that is, perhaps worried that the homeless might find someplace to sit? Many.

The park also includes a cafe, a small stage, a bit of green space, a fountain, a sandy “beach” in summer and an ice rink in winter, a view of impressive buildings, and an embedded zero milestone, which is called the Point of Origin.

As I understand it, all of the Detroit area’s mile roads, such as the famed 8 Mile Road, measure from this point.

The Michigan Soldiers and Sailors Monument is also part of Campus Martius Park, which seems reasonable.

“The Soldiers and Sailors Monument is among Detroit’s oldest pieces of public art and was one of the first monuments to honor Civil War veterans in the United States,” Historic Detroit says. “It was announced by Gov. Austin Blair in 1865 that money would be collected to erect a tribute to Michigan’s soldiers killed in battle. Detroit, being the largest city, won the right to the monument.

“The cornerstone for the monument was laid July 4, 1867, but not in Campus Martius, where the monument stands today… a special committee of the [city] council resolved in September 1871 that the best place for the monument was the open square in front of City Hall.

“The bronze and granite sculpture was formally unveiled on April 9, 1872, though some of its statues were not added until July 18, 1881… The Classical Revival monument stands more than 60 feet tall and was sculpted by Randolph Rogers, an Ann Arbor native who studied at the Academy of St. Mark in Florence, Italy, under Lorenzo Bartolini.”

In 2003, the monument was moved about 150 feet to the south as part of the creation of Campus Martius Park. According to carving in the plinth, a time capsule was entombed there as well in 2004, to be opened on July 23, 2104.

The First National Building, just southeast of the park. An Albert Kahn design completed in 1930.

An array of buildings.

In the foreground, the Qube, previously known as the Chase Tower, another Albert Kahn work, but from a later year: 1959. Behind it to the left is the magnificent Guardian Building, more about which later, and the Penobscot Building, another 1920s masterpiece.

One of the more sizable buildings towering over the park is the 985,000-square-foot One Campus Martius, a 2003 development of Bedrock Detroit, the real estate arm of billionaire Dan Gilbert’s empire. Michigander Gilbert has developed, and probably more importantly, redeveloped a lot of properties in Detroit.

Poised at the entrance of One Campus Martius is “Waiting,” a mildly unnerving 17-foot bronze by Brooklyn-based artist Brian Donnelly, also known as Kaws.

“ ‘Waiting’ is another high-profile acquisition by real estate magnate Gilbert and his wife, who purchased the statue for their growing Detroit Art Collection — a wide-ranging portfolio of immersive installations and public art that span Bedrock’s real estate portfolio downtown,” notes the Detroit Free Press.

Campus Martius Park was just the beginning for us that morning. We’d come for a 10 o’clock walking tour of downtown Detroit lead by Preservation Detroit, and that’s where it started; more about that soon.

The Edsel & Eleanor Ford House

Posted on June 21, 2021 by admin

Major thunderstorm last night, especially around 10:30, when I had a mind to take out the trash. Soon my phone started making a racket. It was sounding a tornado warning. That and the lightning and the heavy rain persuaded me to postpone my outdoors task until around midnight, when the storm had blown over. Naperville, a good ways to the south, had the worst of it.

Last Friday afternoon in greater Detroit, we made our way to Grosse Pointe Shores to see the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, a 20,000-square-foot mansion on the shore of Lake St. Clair completed in 1928. The Fords hired Albert Kahn, who seems to have done everything in metro Detroit, to design the place.

The Fords had liked the cottages they’d seen in England, especially in the Cotswolds, including such features as stone roofs, vine-covered walls and lead-paned windows. Not only did the Ford House design reflect English inspiration, the Fords had paneling, fixtures and other bits and pieces of Old England brought over for installation in the new mansion, back when that sort of thing was possible.

All in all, a handsome set of rooms to wander through. Such as barrel-vaulted Gallery, the largest room in the house. Sizable events were (and are) held here.
“The Gallery… is paneled with sixteenth-century oak linenfold relief carved wood paneling,” notes Wiki. “Its hooded chimneypiece is from Wollaston Hall in Worcestershire, England; the timber-framed house had been demolished in 1925 and its dismantled elements and fittings were in the process of being dispersed… [the] barrel-vaulted ceiling for the Gallery was modeled on one at Boughton Malherbe, Kent, England.”

A handsome living room. Too handsome ever to be a living space, I think, and no doubt clutter wasn’t allowed, or at least the staff made sure it disappeared.

This looks more livable: an upstairs art deco bedroom, one of the more modern rooms designed by Walter Dorwin Teague. You can imagine leaving newspapers and magazines and books lying around in a room like this, with a globe or two sitting around as well. Not visible in my picture are the number of radios the Fords had built into various pieces of furniture.

An attached complementary bathroom.

In Edsel Ford’s private office, I noticed a flag behind glass.

Adm. Byrd had taken the flag with him on his flight over the South Pole, and gave it to Ford — who had supported Byrd’s expedition, besides being the president of the company that built his airplane, a Ford trimotor — along with a handwritten letter. In another part of house is a flag Byrd took with him on his North Pole expedition.

One more item inside the house: a copy of a portrait of Edsel Ford by Diego Rivera. The artist wasn’t so much of a red that he wouldn’t take money from a leading captain of industry.

Outside, as you’d expect, the house has an expansive view of the lake.

Plus swarms of mayflies, some of which decided to land on my shirt. They didn’t bite or do anything but appear in large numbers in my vicinity.

We asked a Ford House worker about them, learning that they’re known locally as fishflies. This is their high season, when they are most likely to swarm.

St. Joseph Shrine, Detroit

Posted on June 20, 2021 by admin

We made use the long weekend partly to pop over to Detroit and a handful of its suburbs. On Saturday morning at about 8:30, we arrived at St. Joseph Shrine, which is just northeast of downtown in the Eastern Market district, a large church tucked away on a small street.

The church has been a shrine only recently. “Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron announced today that he has granted the title of Archdiocesan Shrine to St. Joseph Oratory, in recognition of the parish’s service as a popular place of pilgrimage and its abundant availability of the sacraments,” the diocese announced in a press release early in 2020.

“The parish… has since 2016 been under the spiritual and pastoral care of the Canons of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a society of apostolic life founded in 1990 with a special focus on the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite…

“St. Joseph Shrine was founded in 1855 as a German Catholic parish. The current church building was completed in 1873 and was listed in 1972 on the National Register of Historic Places, deemed ‘of national importance’ in part because of its beautiful stained glass…

“The arrival of the Institute in 2016 prompted the re-establishment of St. Joseph as its own parish, renamed St. Joseph Oratory to highlight the community’s particular dedication to prayer and availability of the sacraments.”

“Oratory” is still kicking around the maps and articles like this. No matter. One Francis G. Himpler (1833-1916) designed the church, while Franz Mayer of Munich did the stained glass. Much better images can be found at this Curbed article about the building’s recent restoration. I was glad to see restoration work in progress.

I took a quick look around the area and found this building cater-cornered across the intersection from the church.
A small commercial building developed long ago, which will never make any lists or have any articles written about it. Over the front door it says, GABRIEL RICHARD INSTITUTE. It doesn’t look occupied, however.

Gabriel Richard is well known in the history of Detroit, and vestiges of the institute can be found online, such as here, but it isn’t a subject I care to dig into further. The building does have a cool mosaic on one wall, though.

From that point across Gratiot Ave., a major thoroughfare running into downtown, are more murals.
Looks like the legacy of a mural-painting event only a couple of years ago.

Abrahamsen Park

Posted on June 16, 2021 by admin

It’s nice, and a little astonishing, to discover a park you didn’t know in your part of the suburbs, especially when it’s pleasant to walk through. I’ve been in the northwest suburbs going on two decades, yet I had no notion of Abrahamsen Park until the other day.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I regularly drive by one part of the park, which fronts a small but important road, and from that vantage you can see the park’s baseball diamond, basketball court, tennis court and playground. All those things are available closer to home — and it’s been years since I’ve needed a playground — so I never gave Abrahamsen much thought.

Turns out there’s a walking path as well. It begins behind those facilities and runs a quarter mile or so along a small creek through a neighborhood. That is, through fenceless back yards facing the creek and walking path. I expect it’s known almost only to people who live nearby, so hidden is it. As I walked, I reveled in the obscurity of it.

This time of the year, even in a dry June, the way along the creek is lush.

At one end are towering trees.

Eastern cottonwoods (Populus deltoides), I think, and I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look that up.

Our Lady of Victory Basilica and National Shrine, Lackawanna

Posted on June 14, 2021 by admin

The last place we visited over Memorial Day weekend in greater Buffalo was Our Lady of Victory Basilica and National Shrine, which is in south suburban Lackawanna, New York. We drove south from Lockport just after noon, had lunch in Buffalo at the Lake Effect Diner, and continued south on surface streets to Lackawanna, mainly U.S. 62, which is Bailey Ave. and then South Park Ave.

That course takes you through areas well-to-do and ragged, residential and industrial. Greater Buffalo might be like a smaller version of greater Chicago, but on our drive through the heart of the MSA, we found an essential difference: it’s much easier to get around Buffalo.

Maybe the holiday weekend had something to do with that, but I suspect the difference between 1.1 million people living on the edge of a Great Lake and 9.4 million people living on the edge of another Great Lake was the determining factor. Driving through metro Chicago is often like driving through glue. Buffalo proved much more pleasant as a driving experience.

The basilica stands at South Park Ave. and Ridge Road in Lackawanna.

The church was open. I believe only two other people were there when we visited.

“The artists who painted the murals, sculpted the statues and painstakingly produced the basilica’s 134 stained-glass windows were also members of an international team,” the Buffalo News reported, as reposted here.

“– Architect Emile Ulrich, a graduate of the Academy of Paris, was in Cleveland when the call came from Baker.
— Italian born Gonippo Raggi masterminded the artwork. His oil paintings can be seen throughout the shrine. When he died at age 84 in 1959, Raggi was the subject of a New York Times obituary that credited his work in more than 100 churches on three continents.
— Buffalonian Marion Rzeznik of Poland assisted Raggi. Rzeznik studied sculpture in Krakow, Vienna and New York City.
— Otto Andrle, a Buffalo-native, crafted the stained-glass windows.”

All that talent was brought together in the 1920s to build the basilica by the Venerable Nelson Henry Baker (1842-1936), an exceptionally talented and energetic priest. One of his talents, useful almost anywhere with a money economy, was fundraising. Besides the basilica, which started construction when Baker was 79, over the course of his vocation he founded a hospital, high school, elementary school, an infant home, a home for unwed mothers and a boys’ orphanage.

A bronze Baker is across the street from the basilica.

Not far away is Mary.
Baker declined credit for his many legacies, it seems, with his quote on the matter on the pedestal.

The Erie Canal

Posted on June 13, 2021 by admin

On our last day in metro Buffalo, we drove to Lockport, New York, late in the morning to see the Erie Canal. Even in my South Texas elementary school, and in U.S. history classes later, we heard about the Erie Canal. It probably was of special interest to my high school U.S. history teacher, the estimable former Wobbly Mrs. Collins, who grew up in Buffalo. Yuriko, on the other hand, heard nothing about it in Japanese schools; no reason she would.

I’ve heard the songs, too. The oft-recorded one about the loyal mule (which Bruce Springsteen does wonderfully, paying homage to Pete Seeger). The more fun one is about drunkenness among bargemen (and -woman), which I expect was true enough to life in the early days of the canal. The obscure Yellow Jack version, incidentally, used Lockport as a backdrop for the video.

Despite all that, I’d never gotten around to seeing the canal with my own eyes. So it was time. Naturally, we visited only the smallest slice, since the canal stretches more than 360 miles.

Lockport’s an interesting spot on the canal because it originally had five locks, which is unusual enough to have its own name: Flight of Five Locks, to allow the canal to cross the Niagara Escarpment. For the 1820s, I expect it was state-of-the-art engineering.

We got there at about 10:30 and knew we were in the right place.

There were other signs as well.

Looking east, from the bridge over the locks.
As usual, an historic site isn’t as simple as somewhere or something that magically hasn’t changed since its most interesting period. In structure, and certainly a lot of other details, the canal as we saw it isn’t how the 19th-century bargemen would have.

To the left in the picture is the original canal locks, the five of the name. It’s a narrow passage compared to the wider channel on the right, which involves two locks covering the same distance as the older five locks. In the early 20th century, the state of New York upgraded its canals, including the Erie, to form the New York State Barge Canal system. That’s when wider channel was built, no doubt state-of-the-art in its time.

Such a change made for much faster commercial movement on the canal. Of course that’s an obsolete virtue now, though the wider canal still makes for the more expeditious movement of pleasure craft, which are all that use the waterway anymore. The last commercial vessel to ply the Erie Canal, or rather that branch of the NYS Barge Canal system, was the Day Peckinpaugh, which quit service in 1994. Later than I would have thought.

Apparently there was (in effect) a Day Peckinpaugh class of ships on the NY canals. “After her 1921 maiden voyage, she was followed by over a hundred similar motorships on the Barge Canal,” notes the Waterford Maritime Historical Society. A lot more about the ship, at first unimaginatively called the Interwaterways Line Incorporated 101 and built to traverse the Great Lakes as well, can be found here.

We took a tour that started with a walk along the canal. Here is one of the two locks filling or draining, I forget which.More boats.

The hill side.

The “Upside-Down Bridge.” It’s a railroad bridge over the canal in Lockport, build just before the canal was improved.

“This bridge is a multi-span railroad bridge built in 1902 by the prolific and noteworthy King Bridge Company of Cleveland, Ohio,” says HistoricBridges.org. “The main span which crosses the river is a Baltimore deck truss. The bridge was referred to as the ‘Upside-Down Bridge’ because as a deck truss, it looks like a through truss positioned upside-down.”

Near the bridge, the tour turned into a man-made cave in the hill, a water tunnel (hydraulic raceway) built in the 19th century using muscle power, hand tools and black powder.

The raceway used to power local industry, opening for tourists in 1977. That happened, it seems, because the natural cave in the limestone under Lockport proved disappointing in the 20th century, and possibly a locus of fraud in the 19th century.

It was dark in there.
The tour also involved a short boat ride in part of the tunnel that’s partly flooded still. A novelty, certainly, but not for anyone even a little claustrophobic. I figure they stay away from commercial caves anyway.

Out in the sun again, we looked around town a little more. The west entrance of the locks is visible from Big Bridge.

A sign near Big Bridge (built 1914) claims that at 399 feet, the bridge over the canal at that point is one of the world’s widest. Maybe so, but it’s completely undistinguished in every other way.
One more sight in Lockport.
A fairly recent (2015) mural called “Guardian of the Waters” by Augustina Droze and Bruce Adams. Its plaque says: “The mural is inspired by the history and engineering marvel of the Flight of the Five Locks, which opened a path to the West, inspired inventions that changed the world, and gave rise to the city of Lockport, NY.”

Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo

Posted on June 10, 2021 by admin

The UB Council of the University of New York at Buffalo, in its wisdom, has effaced the name of President Millard Fillmore from the institution, which he also founded. Fillmore himself, however, will remain undisturbed for now at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo. Also in the Fillmore family plot are his two wives, his children and one of his mother-in-laws.

The 13th President of the United States is one of about 152,000 permanent residents of Forest Lawn. The cemetery is a splendid example of the Victorian rural cemetery movement, realized in thickets of headstones and a profusion of funerary art and ornate mausoleums inhabiting a lush landscape of grass underfoot and leaves overhead (in the warmer months, anyway). I arrived just after opening on the morning of May 31. I only had time for a slice of the place.

Spanning over 269 acres, Forest Lawn was founded in 1849, and is home to early Buffalo politicos, businessmen, artists, musicians, lawyers, doctors, inventors, a wife of Irving Berlin, the mother of Aretha Franklin, and 17 unknown victims of the Angola Horror train wreck of 1867. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mausoleum for the cemetery that wasn’t built until 2004 and there’s a statue of Seneca Indian chief Red Jacket dating from 1851.

Lorenzo Dimick (1842-1888) might have been a criminal in Buffalo who evaded justice by fleeing to Canada, but in death there was no problem for him to return to his native city for burial under a fine piece of funerary art.

A squib about him is here. I am able to read the full story in the NYT archives, so I will relay that he committed insurance fraud in Buffalo, was duly convicted, and skipped town. Good thing for him a border was handy, presumably before cooperation between the United States and Canada in such matters. Or maybe some bribery went down.

The Firemen of Buffalo and Erie County are honored with a statue and a plaque.
The Schickel memorial. From what I’ve been able to tell, Bernhard Schickel (1820-1884) owned a beer hall. That could get you the dosh you need to pay for such finery in stone.

The Blocher Memorial is the kind of array that gets its own articles.

“The story of Nelson W. Blocher combines fact and folklore,” begins Atlas Obscura, which is to say we don’t know everything, or even very much for sure. “Local legend claims…” only affirms that further.

“Within the structure, enclosed by glass, are Italian Carrara marble statues depicting a romanticized scene of Blocher’s final moments. Blocher himself lies on a sarcophagus slab, clutching his Bible, while his parents look on,” AO says. “Above Blocher is an angel (possibly modeled after [his lost love] Katherine) who watches over him, or, perhaps calls him to heaven.”

Near a creek that runs through the cemetery —

— is a bust of Verdi. Hm. I didn’t think was buried here, and he isn’t. He’s at the Casa di Riposi per Musicisti in Milan.

The table says:

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Giuseppe Verdi is credited with having invented the Italian national operatic style. Born the son of a poor grocer in LeBoncole, Italy, Verdi began composing at age 13… His best known works include Rigoletto, Aida, Il Trovalore and La Traviata.

Forest Lawn thanks the City of Buffalo, Buffalo Arts Commission and the Federation of Italian American Societies for this bust sculpted by Dr. Antonio Ugo of Palermo, Italy… It is dedicated this 28th day of September, 1996, in tribute to the many accomplishments of the Italian-American community in this cemetery, the City of Buffalo, and all of Western New York.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There