Downtown Buffalo

Posted on June 6, 2021 by admin

Last Sunday morning, May 30, we were up fairly early and spent time in downtown Buffalo. I had a walking route in mind, inspired by a walking tour map I’d seen on line, but we pretty much disregarded that and used the “hey, what’s that building over there?” technique to set our path.

After parking in a garage, the first thing we spotted was Millard Fillmore. In bronze.

A work of New York City sculptor Bryant Baker, from the early 1930s, next to Buffalo City Hall. Naturally, President Fillmore has attracted the ire of removalists, who want to take his memory to task for signing the Compromise of 1850, especially the odious Fugitive Slave Law, and for being the standard-bearer for the Know-Nothings. Not for being mentioned as a mediocre president in song and story.

Fillmore’s on the southeast corner of the building. On the northeast corner is the Baker bronze of Grover Cleveland, who was mayor of Buffalo before he was ever president.

Buffalo City Hall is a famed bit of architecture, for good reason. Chicago has a handsome city hall, as does New York City and other places, but I’ve seen none more impressive than Buffalo.

Local architects Dietel, Wade & Jones did the soaring art deco design, with completion in 1931. I’ve read there’s an observation deck on the upper floors, but it was closed on Sunday. Actually, most of downtown Buffalo seemed closed on Sunday. A 24/7 city, it is not.

City Halls faces Niagara Square, which has been a focal point for the city for a long time, and continues to be in the news.
The obelisk is the McKinley Monument, designed by the architects of the 1901 world’s fair, Carrere and Hastings.

East of City Hall, facing Lafayette Square, is the Liberty Building, developed in 1925 for Liberty National Bank.

At one time the bank had been German American Bank, but the bankers thought better of that name during the 1910s dust-up in Europe. Just to hammer home the patriotic point, there are replicas of the Statue of Liberty atop the building.

The Rand Building, completed in 1929.
One M&T Plaza, completed in 1966 and looking every bit of it. A design by Minoru Yamasaki, who’s best known for the destroyed World Trade Center in NYC.

A detail of Ellicott Square, designed by Charles Atwood of D. H. Burnham & Co. and completed in 1896. The lobby is supposed to be like the Rookery in Chicago, which would be high praise indeed, but the building wasn’t open for a look.

The splendid Guaranty Building, originally the Prudential Building, also completed in 1896. A Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler tour-de-force.

Across the street from the Guaranty is St. Paul’s Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York. Richard Upjohn, who designed Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan, did the original design in the 1840s. After a bad fire in the 1880s, Robert Gibson did the renovation.

The Sunday service was in progress and we sat in for a while, with a good view of the resplendent interior.

Those were the buildings we had energy for. Some details along the way, such as the Buffalo city flag.

In the street across from the cathedral are Toynbee tiles.

Been a while since I’ve seen any. The last time was St. Louis, maybe 20 years ago. An examination of the spot on Google Streetview tells me that these particular tiles appeared after 2011 but before 2015, and one of the tiles says 2013. So they might not be the work of the original tiler, whomever that might be, but does that even matter? The obscure oddity has a life of its own, and it’s good to know that they’re still being created and you can still see them with your own eyes.

Flags of Insurrection

Posted on January 7, 2021 by admin

That doesn’t look too bad for January.
Been reading a lot about the insurrection today, partly because it’s my job, partly as an American citizen who ought to take an interest in the political illness gripping the nation. With any luck, in retrospect, yesterday will be the day the fever broke. But I’m not betting the mortgage money on it.

Oddly enough, Quartz published an article about the flags carried by the insurrectionists. I was inspired to look into the matter when I noticed some flags that I didn’t recognize in the many photos of the event.

Besides the modern U.S. flag, many others are recognizable, of course, such as the 13-star U.S. (Betsy Ross) flag, the Confederate battle flag, the Gadsden Flag, the U.S. Marine Corps flag and the Thin Blue Line flag.

Even odder, according to Quartz, “the flags of Canada, Cuba, Georgia, India, Israel, South Korea, and South Vietnam were spotted in the mob.” Go figure.

Some I’d never heard of: the Republic of Kekistan flag, the Three Percentage flag and the VDare/Lion Guards of Trump flag. Usually ignorance is a bad thing, but I’m glad I’ve never heard of any of those before.

Yellow Hat in Indiana

Posted on January 7, 2020 by admin

That the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center is on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, seems like it ought to be a surprise. But no. Diasporas of all stripes come to North America to enrich our tapestry.

But why Bloomington? More than 50 years ago, Thubten Jigme Norbu (d. 2008), the Dalai Lama’s brother and also an exile, accepted a position at Indiana University, founding one of the United States’ first Tibetan Studies programs.

“In 1978, a donation of 108 acres of land in southeast Bloomington enabled Norbu to found the Tibetan Cultural Center…” Bloom Magazine says. “With the help of volunteers and donations, multiple structures have been built over time, among them the only stupa (religious monument) dedicated to the more than one million Tibetans who have died since the beginning of the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, as well as other structures rarely found outside of the Himalayan region, including a mani korlo (prayer wheel house).”

We arrived at the TMBCC on the morning of December 28. There’s more than one stupa on the grounds.
The prayer wheel house. It reminded me of the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in Mongolia.

The grounds wind through wooded land and eventually you come to the Kumbum Chamtse Ling Monastery.
Behind the monastery is another structure — and a lot of prayer flags.
While inside the monastery, we were told that a fire puja ceremony was in the offing behind the building. I’ve read about them since, but find the concept hard to get my head around, so I’ll leave the details for others to explain.

I just know what I saw and heard. Monks chanted, built a fire and burned a variety of materials, such as grain and flowers. Under a tent to one side, more monks chanted. People watched from another tent, and under yet another stood a table arrayed with the items to be burned.

Not quite sure how long we watched and listened to the chanting. I didn’t understand a lick of it, yet somehow it was mesmerizing.

Southern Indiana at the End of the 2010s

Posted on January 5, 2020 by admin

A new decade is underway, and don’t let nitpickers tell you otherwise. At midnight as 2020 began — the beginning of the 2020s — I stepped outside for a listen, as I do most years. Pop-pop-pop went the fireworks in the freezing air.

If you know where to look in southern Indiana, about 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis, you’ll find yourself standing near a Tibetan stupa. I did that myself ahead of the New Year.
We wanted to take a trip between Christmas and New Year’s, but nowhere too far or expensive. In that case, weather is the main variable. A blizzard, or even heavy snow or subzero temps, would have kept us home. But post-Christmas forecasts called for mild temps until December 30 throughout our part of the Midwest.

So on December 27, we drove to southern Indiana by way of Lafayette and Indianapolis, stopping in the former but not the latter. We arrived in Lafayette just in time to visit the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, and take a look at the sculpture garden and nature walk behind it.

That evening we arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, where we spent the next three nights. Bloomington is home of the largest branch of Indiana University, one boasting nearly 50,000 students and the Kinsey Institute besides. But just after Christmas, the place is practically deserted. A ghost university.

On December 28, we spent much of the morning at the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center, which is out on the edge of Bloomington. We saw the stupas and the prayer wheels and flags and the Kumbum Chamtse Ling Monastery. We also happened to be there in time to see a fire puja ceremony.

We spent most of the afternoon that day in rural Brown County at the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, hilltop home and studio of the landscape painter of that name in the early 20th century. We also popped over to Nashville, Indiana, where we’d been in 2002. Instead of artwork, we bought lunch there this time.

The day was good for walking around outside — nearly 60 degrees F. and cloudy, but no rain. About as pleasant as you’re going to get in late December. The next day was nearly as warm, but rain fell on and off all day, sometimes heavily.

A good day for indoor sites. On the morning of the 29th, we headed south, deep into the rolling hills of southern Indiana, to visit the striking West Baden Springs Hotel, a grand hotel of the past revived only in recent years, along with its former rival and current sister property, the French Lick Springs Hotel, one-time home of Pluto Water.

After a lunch stop in Paoli, Indiana, we went to Marengo Cave, a limestone show cave under the small town of Marengo, and spent more than an hour among the stalagmites and -tites and flowstone. Near the cave’s entrance, a bonus site: a 19th-century Hoosier cemetery, whose weather-beaten stores were picturesquely wet with the most recent weather.

The 30th proved to be cold, though not quite cold enough for snow or ice. We drove home in the morning, stopping only for gas and rest stops. Strong winds blew. Sometimes strong enough to push the car slightly to the side. I white-knuckled the steering wheel a few times as a result.

The wind gusts also captured flags and pulled them straight. Here is Indiana’s flag at a rest stop. Better than those with a state seal slapped on: a golden torch and 19 stars, to symbolize Hoosier enlightenment and the state’s place as 19th to join the union.

Colonial Williamsburg

Posted on October 29, 2019 by admin

Things to bring to Colonial Williamsburg: money, walking shoes, water (especially in summer) and — I can’t stress this enough — some historical imagination. Not everyone has much. I understand that. Still, if you can’t bring much historical imagination to your visit, best to go somewhere else.

A look at a few of the recent “terrible” reviews of Colonial Williamsburg on TripAdvisor illustrates the point (all sic).

Mrpetsaver: This place is like that fort or museum with old buildings common in some communities, but on a larger scale.

My kids got bored very quickly and so did I. Most of the staff are great and professional dressed up in costumes, but aren’t acting. Instead, they discuss how the original inhabitants did their different jobs etc.

Dewpayne: It has some very interesting sites but there so far away you get bored it’s more about the shops and selling water I wouldn’t recommend it.

zebra051819: This historical site was a huge disappointment and I would not recommend spending your time here. There must be more informative sites where one could gain an appreciation of Civil War history.

Mrpetsaver is right, though. Colonial Williamsburg is a larger version of an open-air museum. It is an open-air museum. One on a grand scale, the likes of which we’d only experienced — sort of — at Greenfield Village.

Colonial Williamsburg shouldn’t be confused with Williamsburg, Virginia, which is a town of around 14,500 on the lower reaches of the James River. As a 21st-century American town, it has the usual amenities, such as honky-tonks (maybe), Dairy Queens and 7-11s, where you can buy cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate-chip cookies.

Colonial Williamsburg, on the other hand, occupies 173 acres and includes 88 original buildings and more than 50 major reconstructions. All of Colonial Williamsburg is within modern Williamsburg, but not all of modern Williamsburg involves Colonial Williamsburg. A fair bit of it doesn’t, according to maps.

A hundred years ago, Williamsburg was a small college town with a history, namely as the second capital of Virginia when it was a prosperous tobacco colony. No doubt the story of how Colonial Williamsburg came to be in the early 20th century is fairly complicated, with a number of major players, but I’m going to oversimplify by saying that Money wanted it to happen, as persuaded by Preservationism.

Money in the form of Rockefeller scion John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had the deep pockets necessary to start the purchase and restoration of the historic sites, and Preservationism in the form of W.A.R. Goodwin (1869–1939), rector of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, who felt alarmed that the 20th century was eating away at the area’s historic structures.

Colonial Williamsburg is a odd hybrid of past and present, but also of museum and neighborhood. The foundation that runs the museum doesn’t play it up — and some of the disappointed TripAdvisor reviews note it ruefully — but it turns out that you don’t need a ticket to wander along the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.

Cars aren’t allowed on the streets during museum hours, but visitors are perfectly free to park a few blocks away and walk around. That’s because the town of Williamsburg still owns the streets and sidewalks, making them public thoroughfares.

Also — another thing the foundation doesn’t dwell on — people live in Colonial Williamsburg. “There are dozens of people — families, couples, college students — who live in some of the historic homes of Colonial Williamsburg,” says Local Scoop. “Many of the homes are original colonial-era buildings; others were rebuilt based on historical accounts to look like the homes they once were.

“It’s not a perk available to everyone. To live in the Historic Area, one has to work at Colonial Williamsburg or be an employee at the College of William & Mary. In all, there are 75 houses rented through the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation…”

I found this out when I was there, and pretty soon I started noticing that a fair number of the houses had small signs denoting them as private residences. I also noticed a few people doing neighborhood sorts of things, like jogging or walking their dogs, as opposed to tourist sorts of things.

So why buy a ticket? That’s so you can see the interiors of the many buildings flying the Grand Union flag. They mark the open-air museum’s buildings.
Also, your ticket gets you into some Colonial Williamsburg events, many of which involve reenactors. So we got tickets. At $45 each, and no student discount (grumble), that’s more than Henry Ford/Greenfield, in the same league as some theater tickets and some theme parks, and less than other theme parks (whose mascot is a Mouse).

At that price, I was determined to wear out my feet. So we did, spending October 14 from late morning to late afternoon at Colonial Williamsburg. At the end, I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth. I’m a sucker for open-air museums, for one thing, but more than that, it is a special place with a lot to see and think about, if you add a dash of historical imagination.

You walk from the visitor center along a wooded path until you come to the historic buildings. The first one of any heft is the Governor’s Palace.
Maybe no grand thing back in England, but for colonial Virginia, a worthy residence for the gov. What you see now is a reconstruction from plans and, according to the guide on the interior tour that we joined, archaeological investigation of the materials left when the building collapsed in a fire in 1781, not long after Gov. Jefferson had decamped to Richmond.

When it burned, the structure was being used as a hospital for men wounded at the Battle of Yorktown. All of them but one escaped the fire, the guide said. I told Ann we should listen for that unfortunate fellow’s ghost. She told me to shush.

From there we wandered down the Palace Green to Duke of Gloucester St., pretty much the main street of the historic area. The view from the other end of the Palace Green.
Nearby is the Bruton Parish Church. It isn’t one of the Colonial Williamsburg buildings, but people go in as if it were. We did. A couple of parishioners were on hand to tell visitors about the church.
The building dates from the 1710s, but according to this history, it didn’t look much like the original by the mid-1800s, after various alterations and modernizations. Like Colonial Williamsburg, the church was restored to its 18th-century appearance only in the early 20th century.

The church’s graveyard was fenced in, but you could get a pretty good look at it anyway.
Some of the stones were close to the church itself.
The stone of Letitia Tyler Semple, one of President Tyler’s many children. A handful of stones were inside, flush with the floor of the church, as you see in old English churches. W.A.R. Goodwin has one of those.

We spent the rest of the day looking at and entering various structures on or near Duke of Glouchester St., such as the Geddy Foundry, the Courthouse, the Market Square, the Magazine, the Printing Office, the Silversmith, Bakery, Apothecary, and Raleigh Tavern, where we saw two reenactors: one playing Marquis de Lafayette and other James Armistead Lafayette, who spied for the Patriots at the Marquis’ request, and, after some inexcusable delays by the state of Virginia, finally won his freedom for his service.

Duke of Glouchester St.
The Magazine and its arms.
The Courthouse and nearby stocks. No rotten tomatoes on hand for tossing.
Duke of Glouchester St. Courthouse

Botetourt St.
The reconstructed Capitol was the second-to-last place we visited, taking a late-afternoon tour. Nicely done, I thought, though the authenticity of the redesign has been questioned.
The last place was Charlton’s Coffeehouse, where a foundation employee (“costumed interpreter”) in 18th-century garb showed us around and served visitors either coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Most of us tried the chocolate, as Ann and I did. Colonial hot chocolate included a variety of flavors not usually associated with modern hot chocolate. If I remember right, almonds, cinnamon and nutmeg in our case, but no rum. Our time is decidedly more abstemious than Colonial days when it comes to alcohol. Tasty anyway.

Some people expect the costumed interpreters to be actors (see above). To varying degrees they were in character, but mostly their job was to explain what went on in a particular building, and in the places like the foundry and silversmith and printing office, demonstrate some of the 18th-century work techniques. I had no complaints.

The fellow in the foundry turned out pewterware before our eyes and the young woman who showed us around the coffeeshop was informative and entertaining, telling us for instance the story of the tax collector (under the Stamp Act, I believe) who was greeted at the coffeehouse by a committee (mob) of citizens who suggested he find other work for himself. Wisely, he did.

There are restaurants at Colonial Williamsburg in some of the “taverns,” but I didn’t want to spend time at a sit-down restaurant when there were other things to see. So we subsisted on snacks during the visit, which are available in Colonial-themed small stores here and there on the grounds.

The 21st-century snacks were good.

The American Civil War Museum

Posted on October 22, 2019 by admin

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind when we got to the American Civil War Museum in Richmond on October 12. I expected an easy drive from where we parked, near the capitol, to the museum, which is at the site of the former Tredegar Iron Works on the James River.

No such luck. The Richmond Folk Festival had gummed up everything along the river, blocking all vehicular access, so after some time in sluggish traffic, we went back to the same parking lot near the capitol — luckily my receipt was good for the whole day — and walked the half mile or so to the museum. Not a bad walk, but it made me tired ahead of a walk through a museum. Such is the tourist experience, sometimes.

At first I thought the museum was in the multistory brick building.
Wrong again. That building houses the visitors center and a Civil War museum associated with the Richmond National Battlefield Park, a NPS entity that encompasses that part of Tredegar along with a dozen Civil War sites around Richmond.

The new building for the American Civil War Museum — opened just this year — is the modernist structure next to the brick building, though it incorporates some of the other Tredegar ruins. Designed by a local architectural firm, 3North, the museum isn’t overly large, coming in at 28,000 square feet.

We spent a couple of hours at the museum. Though a little frazzled when I got there, I soon got into the groove of the place and mostly enjoyed my time there. Ann did too. The permanent exhibits wind through the first floor, featuring things you’d expect in a museum devoted to the history of a war: military and civilian artifacts, photos, maps (though not enough), things to read, a few interactive kiosks, audio narratives and videos and so on.

Perhaps the most striking features are the large-scale photographic images placed on various walls or hanging over display cases. They are images of people alive during the conflict, and are all colorized. Only a few years ago, the colorization might have bothered me, but since seeing They Shall Not Grow Old, I appreciate artful colorization, which the museum manages to do.

Some of the artifacts were particularly intriguing, such as the carvings that prisoners of war made from whatever material they had at hand, some of them exceptionally fine — that they then traded for food or tobacco or whatever else they badly needed. Other artifacts edged into the realm of oddities, such as a fossilized biscuit from the siege of Vicksburg and a luckless soldier’s a pocket journal, split by the bullet that killed him.

As at a number of other museums I’ve seen focusing on the 19th century, the most unnerving artifacts are the medical tools. The American Civil War Museum has a collection on display, along with a some poor bastard’s primitive prosthetic arm.

I also encountered some incidents and stories about the war that I’d never heard. Of course, the Civil War is a sprawling subject, with countless untold or undertold narratives. The museum has a knack for illustrating some of them. For instance, the New York Draft Riot is covered in some detail. No surprise there. But so is the lesser-known Richmond Bread Riot of 1863. Always good to learn about something like that.

As interesting and informative as the museum was, I came away feeling a little unsatisfied. I wasn’t sure why. On later reflection, I worked it out. It isn’t that the museum eschews glorifying the Lost Cause, which I’m sure bothers some people. I wouldn’t have expected anything else from a museum created by serious historians.

Rather, I missed the generals ‘n’ battles approach to the story of the war. Though not as pernicious as the Lost Cause, modern historians usually shy away from that too.

The museum mentions many of the military engagements of the war, sometimes in some detail, but that isn’t the thrust of most of the exhibits. Rather, the American Civil War Museum takes an almost sociological approach to the war.

That is, how the war affected all of 19th-century American society. Soldiers, naturally, but also white civilians, male and female, blacks, free and enslaved, immigrants and others. Is that a good way to organize a civil war museum? Probably yes. Still —

That I felt the absence of generals ‘n’ battles says more about me, and how I’ve conditioned myself with the books I’ve read and the movies I’ve watched and the battlefields I’ve visited over the years, than it does any historic study of the period. Even so, that’s how I felt.

The Richmond National Battlefield Park facility next door, which we also visited (though for a much shorter time), seemed more traditional in that regard, if only because it focuses on the fighting around Richmond. There you can see large maps depicting the movements of armies, for instance.

I can’t be the only one who feels this way. Oddly enough, the American Civil War Museum acknowledges that, perhaps unconsciously, in its gift shop. Generals ‘n’ battles is alive and well there.

In the form of Lee and Grant bobbleheads, for one thing.

Models of the submarine boat Hunley and the ironclad Virginia.
Generals of the Civil War playing cards, but also Joshua Chamberlain playing cards.
The Chamberlain cards struck me as oddly specific. Wonder if the same card maker has a line of, say, Jubal Early playing cards?

The shop also had a nice collection of flags. Such as this one, which you don’t see too often. I had to look it up.
The Battle Flag of the First Corps, Army of Tennessee.

Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery

Posted on August 7, 2019 by admin

I had a little time to kill before The Comedy of Errors started in Aurora on Saturday, so I consulted Google Maps and found a nearby cemetery to visit. Riverside Cemetery, which is south of Aurora in the town of Montgomery, Illinois, and which is also on the Fox River.

Not bad. Some trees, many upright stones. Not much in the way of land contour or funerary art, though.

I found what are probably the oldest stones: 19th century.
As far as I could see, only one obelisk of any size.
Marking the burial site of one V.A. Watkins. Big fish in this little pond.

Later I read that, according to Find A Grave, there’s one noteworthy person buried at Riverside: Bernard Cigrand (1866-1932). I didn’t happen across his stone. He rings no bells. Not even a slight tinkle. He was a dentist, but his stone also says FATHER OF FLAG DAY.

Point State Park & Pittsburgh Walkabout

Posted on July 14, 2019 by admin

RIP, Patricia Deany, mother of our dear old friend Kevin Deany, and a kind and gracious lady. She passed last week at age 90.

At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers is Point State Park, a 36-acre triangular patch of land that may well be featured in every bit of tourist literature ever published about Pittsburgh since the park’s creation nearly 50 years ago.

But that’s no excuse not walk over to the park from downtown Pittsburgh and make a circuit around the fountain at the tip of the park, which is what we did after lunch at the Oyster House on July 5.
That image makes it look like no one else was there, which wasn’t true at all.
The park offers views of various other parts of Pittsburgh, such as Mt. Washington and the Duquesne Incline.

Or Heinz Field, home of the Steelers. There ought to be a giant ketchup bottle in there somewhere.

Away from the fountain, there’s a view of the Fort Pitt Bridge, which carries I-376 across the Monongahela. It replaced the Point Bridge, which was destroyed, along with the Manchester Bridge, to make way for the park.

Besides being a pleasant green space with views, the park makes various nods to the early history of Pittsburgh. An irregular path of sidewalk follows the outline of Fort Duquesne, the French outpost. Elsewhere other sidewalks mark the outline of the somewhat larger Fort Pitt, the succeeding British outpost, also in the classic star (Bastion) shape.

The U.S. flag is a little unusual. Not in having 13 stars, but in that they aren’t the circular arrangement you usually see. Then again, no one specified how the stars in the canton should be arrayed in those days (and maybe we should go back to that).

On one edge of the park is the Fort Pitt Block House, Point State Park’s only surviving structure from colonial times, built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt. It has endured since then in its original spot, for many years as a residence, more recently as a relic.

Our walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh started at the Block House, led by an energetic young woman, native to Pittsburgh and eager to talk about various places and buildings, though less about design and more about history.

Naturally, the names of Pittsburgh robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick came up a lot, including the story about a dying Carnegie writing a letter to the estranged Frick asking for a meeting, presumably in the spirit of reconciliation.

Les Standiford tells the story, via NPR. A man named Bridge, who delivered the letter, was Carnegie’s assistant.

“Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s ‘Highlands’ up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.

” ‘Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,’ Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.’ ”

Whatever else you can say about the steely-eyed bastard Frick, at least he had no illusions about his benevolence, as Carnegie seemed to have had. Our guide also mentioned the taller Frick building next to Carnegie’s, and in fact pointed them out. They are both now overshadowed by more recent Pittsburgh buildings, of course.

At one point, we passed by a building associated with both Carnegie and Frick, along with a lot of other Gilded Age and later tycoons: the Duquesne Club on Sixth Ave.
Founded in 1873 and still a social club for the wealthy, its current home, a Romanesque structure designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, opened in 1890. Just in time for Carnegie and Frick to discuss, possibly over brandy and cigars, the busting of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Speaking of labor history, not far away from the club, I noticed this historic marker.
The founding convention of the AFL was in a Turner Hall. Our guide didn’t mention that, and I asked her about the Turner Hall. She hadn’t heard it. To be fair, I’d never heard of Turner Halls until recently either. To be extra fair, I’m not guiding walking tours of a major American city, so I consider that a small lapse on her part.

The Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, unlike that in Milwaukee, is no more. The site is now called Mellon Square, a 1950s park-like creation paid for by the Mellons to go with the development of Alcoa’s new headquarters building at that time.

Alcoa isn’t there any more, and the building is now known as the Regional Enterprise Tower, but it still has its distinctive aluminum skin. The New York modernists Harrison & Abramovitz designed it.

I’ve read that a Beaux-Arts palace of a theater, the Nixon, was destroyed to make way for Alcoa, causing some consternation even in the tear-it-down midcentury.

Another historic marker that I noticed (that also wasn’t on the tour).
Why Pittsburgh? I wondered. I looked it up later. NPR again: “Slovak culture is everywhere in the Steel City. It’s home to the Honorary Slovak Consulate, a handful of social clubs, cultural centers and annual holiday festivals dedicated to maintaining and celebrating Slovak traditions.

“ ‘Allegheny County has the highest percentage of all of the counties in the United States, not just Pennsylvania, of people who claim Slovak heritage,’ said Martin Votruba, head of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Slovaks and Czechs formed a group called the Czecho-Slovak National Council of America. Because there were so many Slovak immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Votruba said it seemed like the perfect location to have a big meeting on Memorial Day in 1918.”

Along the way, we looked at a work of public art in Pittsburgh, a 25-foot bronze fountain centerpiece at Agnes R. Katz Plaza by Louise Bourgeois, completed in 1999. The eye-like smaller bronzes are actually benches, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

By the time we got to the U.S. Steel Tower, the tallest building in Pittsburgh, a light rain was falling. It would continue at varying strength through the rest of the walk.

No aluminium for this behemoth, rather steel and lots of it. This too is a Harrison & Abramovitz design. The company made steel for its own building, a newish product at the time, corten or weathering steel, which ends up with a dark brown oxidation over the metal to protect the structure from the elements and obviate the need for paint. (The steel still has many surprising uses.) According to our guide, however, until recently the building skin had an unfortunate habit of spitting granules of this rust onto the sidewalks and people below.

Aluminium, steel and then glass. Fitting for the HQ of PPG, also a stop of the tour. Founded in 1883 as Pittsburgh Plate Glass, these days PPG is a supplier of paints, coatings, optical products and specialty materials.

The complex is actually six buildings, all opening in the early 1980s as part of the effort to revive downtown Pittsburgh. By that time, Johnson/Burgee were the go-to NY architects, so they designed the PPG. Rain prevented me from making a good image, but the tallest of the buildings towers over a plaza that features an ice rink in colder weather. It looks like this on a sunny day.

Toward the end of the tour, we made a stop at a place on Smithfield St. that has no marker of any kind and in fact isn’t distinctive in any way, except for one thing: it was the site of an early nickelodeon, thought to be the first theater anywhere devoted exclusively to movies, as opposed to a live theater with a few machines tucked away to separate patrons from their coins.

“The first exclusive moving pictures theater in Pittsburg and the world was opened in 1905 by Harry Davis and John P. Harris in the Howard Block, west side of Smithfield street, between Diamond and Fifth avenue,” one E. W. Lightner wrote in 1919.

Diamond St. is no longer called that. Oddly enough, the change to Forbes St. was made as late as 1958. I’d imagine that would have been hard to do.

Lightner continues: “Curious to say, the second exclusive picture theater of the world was opened in Warsaw, capital of Poland, by a Pittsburg Polander, who saw the Davis-Harris adventure and recognized the possibilities of presenting so wonderful and profitable a development in his native country.”

“The original and only ‘Nickelodeon’ was opened at 8 o’clock of the morning and the reels were kept continuously revolving until midnight. A human queue was continuously awaiting the ending of a performance and the emptying of chairs. Inside an attendant would announce, ‘show ended,’ and spectators would be hustled gently to the street and new spectators welcomed, seated as quickly as possible, and the picture would again respond to the magic reel.”

As you can see, it was pretty much a nothing site when Google Images came by.

Still looks that way in July 2019. There ought to be a marker there at least, or maybe even a hipster bar with a nickelodeon theme.

A Slightly Less Gelid Day

Posted on January 31, 2019 by admin

Zero degrees Fahrenheit isn’t warm at all, unless compared with 20 degrees below that. I spent a few minutes out early this afternoon — with temps actually at 5 below or so — and it was tolerable for what I needed to do, which was make sure the garage door closed.

Very low temps cloud the electronic eye, I think. At least, rubbing the lens clear seems to help.

“Surfing” never seemed like the right verb for wandering around the Internet. Maybe that’s why you don’t hear it much anymore, 20 years after it was common. Wander, meander, ramble — these seem better. More descriptive of the way I approach the Internet anyway.

The polar vortex loose on the Upper Midwest naturally led me to read a bit about Antarctic exploration, some about Shackleton but also, in a classic online tangent, the ship Southern Cross, which sailed on the lesser-known British Antarctic Expedition (1898-1900), a.k.a. the Southern Cross Expedition (and not Kingsford Smith’s aircraft, which I heard about years ago in Australia).

The Southern Cross was mostly a sealing vessel and eventually she went down with all hands in the North Atlantic — 174 men — in the 1914 Newfoundland Sealing Disaster, an incident about which I knew nothing.

Reading about that led me to information of the Newfoundland sealing industry, something I also knew nothing about. Here’s a short item about that industry, with footage of Newfies bounding around on dangerous ice floes in the days before the Canadian equivalent of OSHA.

That naturally lead to other information about Newfoundland. Apparently there’s a Newfoundland tricolor, but it’s not the official flag. There’s a song about it anyway.

I looked up the official Newfoundland and Labrador flag. Not bad, exactly, just a little odd. Though it had one designer, it looks like a compromise between two factions of the same committee.

Duluth & Environs ’18

Posted on August 5, 2018 by admin

When I was very young, I had a U.S. map puzzle that I put together who knows how many times, fascinated by the individual shapes of the states. Some states more than others, including Minnesota, with its rough northern border, more-or-less straight-back western border, concave eastern border and pointy southeast and especially northeast corners.

The northeast corner still holds some fascination, and for more than just the shape. There’s the lure of the North Woods, and Lake Superior is always calling. Enough to inspire a short trip. On July 27, after I finished my Friday work, we hit the road for a five-night trip to Duluth and environs.

Since reaching Duluth means crossing northwest all the way through Wisconsin, a few points in that state were part of the trip as well, especially Eau Claire, where we spent the first night at a spartan but tolerable chain motel.

From Saturday afternoon until the morning of Wednesday, August 1, we stayed at the non-chain Allyndale Motel, a notch up from spartan. It’s in west Duluth, almost at the edge of town, but actually Duluth isn’t that large, so the location wasn’t bad.

I guessed that the Allyndate dated from the golden age of independent motel development, namely the 1950s. The details were right, except no bottle opener attached to a surface somewhere in the room. Just before we left, in a talk with the owner, I was able to confirm that vintage. The first rooms dated from 1952, he said, with later additions.

Before checking into the motel that first day, we spent a short while in downtown Duluth, walking along E. Superior St., which features shops and entertainment venues, including a legitimate theater, art house cinema and a casino. Rain, which had been holding back on the way into town, started to come down hard, so we ducked into the Duluth Coffee Company Cafe long enough to wait it out over various beverages.

That evening, we took in a show at the Marshall W. Alworth Planetarium, which is part of the University of Minnesota Duluth. The recorded show, narrated by Liam Neeson, was about black holes, and then an astrophysics grad student (I think) talked about the night sky. Many planetariums don’t bother with live narration anymore, so that was refreshing.

On Sunday we drove along much of the winding and often scenic Skyline Parkway in Duluth, stopping along the route to take in the sweeping view of the city, as well its twin city of Superior, Wis., and a large stretch of Lake Superior, from the Enger Tower in the aptly named Enger Park.

There happened to be a coffee and ice cream truck in the park, so Lilly had iced coffee and Ann had ice cream. The truck showed its regional pride in the form of a Minnesota flag.

The design needs work, like many Midwest state flags. Here’s an alternative.

Late that morning we saw Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge up close, along with other parts of Canal Park and lakeside spots. The lofty bridge — crossing the entrance to Lake Superior from St. Louis Bay — is the Eiffel Tower of Duluth, a stand-in for the city that appears in a lot of places, including a refrigerator magnet that we brought home. (But I refuse to use the i-word.)

In the afternoon, we headed northeast from town along U.S. 61, which follows the shore of Lake Superior. That region, I discovered, is known locally as the North Shore. We made it as far as Gooseberry Falls State Park.

On Monday, July 30, we headed north, mostly via U.S. 53, to Voyageurs National Park, which is hard by the Canadian border. The trip up and back from Duluth is a little far for a single day, but ultimately seemed worth the effort. Besides, something about the symmetry of visiting Voyageurs NP and Big Bend NP during the same year appealed to me.

As the girls slept late on the last day of July, I made my way to Superior, Wis., and visited the Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center, a small military museum. WWII is increasingly distant, and except in Wisconsin, the memory of air ace Bong’s deeds has faded. But he had his moment.

The main event of July 31, our last day in town, was the Great Lakes Aquarium, which is in downtown Duluth, on St. Louis Bay not far from the Aerial Lift Bridge and Canal Park. The aquarium’s distinction is that it focuses on freshwater creatures.

Late that afternoon, I struck out again on my own to see one more place: Forest Hill Cemetery, which is in the hills northeast of the University of Minnesota Duluth. My kind of site, not the girls’.

On August 1, we got up early and drove home, stopping only to eat lunch in Madison. I wanted to take Lilly to Ella’s Deli, since she wasn’t with us last year when we went. But it’s closed.

Too bad. Wonder what happened to all the oddball stuff Ella’s had. Instead we found Monty’s Blue Plate Diner. Not as much whimsy on the walls as Ella’s, but the food was good.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Flags