New Buffalo

Posted on July 19, 2021 by admin

A Mediterranean pattern has set in, here on the brief plateau of high summer. I’m taking as many meals as possible out on my deck.

Not long ago, we went to Buffalo, so by my idiosyncratic lights, that meant we ought to visit New Buffalo too. So we did on Sunday. Good thing that town is only about two hours away, assuming good traffic, which in no safe assumption. Even so, it isn’t that far, with New Buffalo hugging the eastern shore of Lake Michigan just inside the state of Michigan, only about two miles north of the Indiana line.

New Buffalo has been a nearby vacation destination for metro Chicago for many years. I first visited in 1987, when I spent a short time at the vacation house of a Chicagoan I knew, and went back occasionally after that, though not in about 20 years.

A lot of people go for the public beach, but Waikiki crowded, it isn’t.

We didn’t spend long this time, since it was nearly 90 F, and our idea of a good beach is an almost empty one in the 70s F. It was nice to see the lake, though. And the marina.

A boat belonging to the Berrien County sheriff’s office, docking.

Not far inland from the marina is the town’s commuter rail station.

Not much to look at, but the station and the line facilitated New Buffalo’s growth in the early 20th century, providing easy access from Chicago in the days before the Interstate or major suburbs. Come to think of it, if I were planning to be in New Buffalo and nowhere else for more than a few hours, that would be the way to come, so as to avoid pain-in-the-ass traffic jams south of Lake Michigan.

We parked on a leafy residential street and walked a couple of blocks to the main tourist street. One of New Buffalo’s two main streets is Whittaker, which connects the shore with I-94. About three blocks of Whittaker is lined with retailers, restaurants and new-looking residential properties, such as these.

That told me that, except probably for recessionary downturns of a few years at most, the second home and residential rental business in New Buffalo has expanded over that last few decades, taking advantage of the fondness among well-to-do people for parking themselves close to water. Not an ambition I share, but water does have its allures.

The street wasn’t overly crowded on Sunday, a very warm summer weekend day, but busy enough. We wandered around and looked in some stores, and came away with a t-shirt, refrigerator magnet and some postcards, as one does.

Interesting mural.

I’ve been able to find out that it’s painted on the side of Michigan Mercantile Building, home to a recently opened Starbucks. At the end of a short alley under the mural is the New Buffalo Farmstand by Mick Klug Farm. As for the mural, it looks new as well, but that’s all I know. I didn’t check for a signature.

A detail.

One reason we spent the day in New Buffalo was to have lunch at Redamak’s.

Since 1946 is a telling detail, since the restaurant is on Buffalo Street, the town’s other major thoroughfare. It isn’t a pedestrian-friendly road and the train doesn’t go there, so for Redamak’s to prosper in its early years, it needed car traffic — which was booming about then.

Currently the place is owned only by the second family ever to own it, which makes for continuity. I had a good hamburger there more than 30 years ago, and we had good ones there on Sunday: one with bleu cheese for me, a barbecue burger for Yuriko.

The road out front is also U.S. 12. Ah, where does that go? I wondered as we waited on the porch for a table. My phone wasn’t connected to the Internet at that moment, so I had to wait to find out. Just like in the not-so-old days.

All the way from Detroit to Aberdeen, Washington, running almost 2,500 miles, it turns out. We had a table next to a window. There’s something satisfying about sitting in a storied burger joint that looks out on a 2,500-mile highway. Not a nostalgia-industry highway like the defunct U.S. 66, but a genuine active part of the U.S. highway system in the 21st century.

High Summer Debris

Posted on June 30, 2021 by admin

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.

Grilling & Gabfest ’21

Posted on June 15, 2021 by admin

A most social weekend. On Friday night, a zoom.

Not because we feared contagion, but because miles and miles separate Illinois, Tennessee and Washington state.

Early on Saturday afternoon, a phone call — the standard kind, no pictures involved — with a old friend in Texas. I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve known him since the Nixon administration.

Late in the afternoon, other old friends, though not quite as long-standing (all less than 40 years), came to visit and I grilled dinner for them, despite heavy rain for about an hour beginning at 2. The deck was dry by 4, and we had a fine time sitting around there into the early evening, engaging in actual conversation, with comments about how great it was to meet in person again after skipping last year. It was.

One of my guests brought some Space Station Middle Finger beer, a product of Three Floyds Brewing Corp. of Munster, Indiana. Today, I posed one of the empty bottles on top of the now-cold grill.

Nothing like an amusing label. Nice caps, too.

I tried a bottle. I’m hardly one to judge beer, but it did have a smooth flavor going down.

Main Street, Buffalo (NY 5)

Posted on June 7, 2021 by admin

At about 8:30 this evening, as dusk settled in, I was reading out on the deck. I glanced up and spotted a brilliant rainbow. It had been cloudy and slightly misty much of the day, but no real rain. The clouds off to the west were pink and gray.

I could see almost all of the arc, which stretched from due east to south-southeast. Should I tell the rest of my family? I did, and remarkably they got themselves outside in time to see the glorious multicolored curve, which lasted all of about five minutes.

In Buffalo, Main Street is a main street, running northeast from downtown roughly to the border with Amherst. Because we stayed in Amherst over our Memorial Day weekend trip, it proved to be the best route into the city and downtown, so I drove it more than once. Much of the street also counts as New York State Route 5, a highway that runs from the Pennsylvania line on Lake Erie to Albany.

Main is a busy commercial street, marked by various restaurants, retail establishments, public buildings and more. As you head into Buffalo, you’ll also see Grover Cleveland Golf Course, University at Buffalo South Campus, St. Mary’s School for the Deaf, Sisters of Charity Hospital, one edge of Forest Lawn Cemetery, Canisius College, and two restaurants we visited on different days: Lake Effect Diner and Anchor Bar.

The former.

The latter.

Originally a Philly diner, new owners relocated Lake Effect to Buffalo in 2002 and restored it to its ’52 chrome-and-neon self. I had a good Reuben sandwich there. Anchor Bar, which sports a sizable collection of motorcycles along its walls, and a truly enormous collection of old license plates and other bric-a-brac, claims to have invented the Buffalo wing. Whatever the truth of that, we had the wings, and they were a tasty highlight of the trip.

After lunch at Anchor Bar on May 30, we drove along Main Street to see other things. Or rather, I did. Lunch had been heavy, and Yuriko napped in the passenger seat. I drove along, parked on the side of the street — there was always plenty of parking — and walked around for a few blocks, and then repeated the process a few blocks further on. That was when I spotted the KEEP BUFFALO A SECRET mural.

That isn’t the only mural on Main. Late last year, two local artists, Edreys Wajed and James “Yames” Moffitt, collaborated on a mural commissioned by the Albright-Knox Public Art Initiative.

Then there was this. Sigh.

A handsome block.

It includes this delightful find: the former home of McDonnell & Sons who, as the building itself still says, were “dealers in every variety of granite work — monumental and building.”

Vacant now, as it has been for many years. According to this short history of the company, McDonnell & Sons moved to Buffalo from Massachusetts in 1884 and stayed in business until about 1968. The perfect place for a hipster bar, if you asked me, though restoration would cost a pretty penny.

The Catholic Center, which is another building on Main with a backstory.

A nice bit of art deco, designed by Monks & Johnson of Boston and completed in 1930. Until 1982, it was HQ for Courier Express newspaper. The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has owned the building since 1985.

The figures toward the top, which I didn’t notice until I looked at my pictures, are famous printers (such as Ben Franklin). This site has better pictures of them and some detail.

One more Main Street building for now.

The Beaux-Arts Sidway Building, designed in 1907 with a two story addition in 1913 by McCreary, Wood & Bradney of Buffalo. An office building originally; these days, loft apartments. Curious, I checked the rents. About $1,200/month for a one bedroom. The average in Manhattan would be three times as much at least, and even in or near the Chicago Loop, twice as much. That’s the Buffalo discount, I guess.

Shuffle Off To Buffalo

Posted on June 1, 2021 by admin

Just back yesterday evening from 72 hours in Buffalo. Roughly. Not quite 72 hours over Memorial Day weekend and not quite all in Buffalo, though we were in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA the whole time.

Three days isn’t enough to drive to Buffalo from northern Illinois and spend a worthwhile amount of time. Like Pittsburgh, that would be a four-day venture. So we flew. First time since early 2020. Except for mandatory masking at the airports and on the planes, everything was about the same as it used to be, including holiday-weekend crowds. One of our flights was on a Boeing 737 MAX-8, and clearly we lived to tell the tale.

We, as in Yuriko and I, arrived late Friday night and made our way to Amherst, New York, a Buffalo suburb, where we stayed. We were up early the next morning to spend most of the day at Niagara Falls State Park. I was fulfilling a promise I made in 1996, when we arrived at the falls in March to find the American Falls still frozen. I told her we’d come someday when the liquid was moving again, and so we did.

That wasn’t the whole first day. I discovered that nowhere is very far away from anywhere else in this corner of New York state by driving north along the Niagara Gorge, stopping at Lewiston and Fort Niagara, and then returning to Amherst.

On Sunday, we weren’t up quite as early, but we made it to downtown Buffalo in the morning for a walkabout. As promised by various sources, the city has some first-rate architecture, most especially Buffalo City Hall. Late in the morning, after a brief stop at Tim Horton’s — they’re everywhere in metro Buffalo — we toured the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, formerly the Ansley and Mary Wilcox home.

Lunch that day was on Main Street at the Anchor Bar, which specializes in Buffalo wings and claims their invention, but in any case the joint didn’t disappoint. Afterward, Yuriko napped in the car while I spent time looking around Main Street, which includes Buffalo’s theater district and Saint Louis Roman Catholic Church.

Also, this mural.
Created by local t-shirt designer David Horesh and painter Ian de Veer, it’s highly visible when you’re traveling southbound on Main.

Could it be that current Buffalonians might not want millennials, or more importantly, tech-industry millennials with high incomes, to show up in droves to drive up prices for everyone else? Maybe. Not sure Buffalo has the tech ecosystem, as they say in the biz, to support such an influx. Then again, in the vicinity of the mural are places probably supported by people with at least some disposable income, such as Just Vino, the House of Masters Grooming Lounge, Hair to Go Natural, and Fattey Beer Co. Buffalo.

I had a mind to visit Delaware Park afterwards, since a Frederick Law Omstead park is always worth seeing, but we ended up sampling it merely by driving around it. Looks like a nice place to while away a warm afternoon.

By that time, Sunday afternoon, it was fairly warm in greater Buffalo. Rain had clearly fallen the day before we arrived, and cool air arrived afterward, taking temps down into the low 50s early Saturday, when we got to Niagara Falls. Did that matter? No. It wasn’t cold enough to freeze anything.

On Monday I got up early and visited the splendid Forest Lawn Cemetery, permanent home of President Fillmore and Rick James, among many others. Later, we drove to Lockport, New York and spent some time along the Erie Canal. As long ago as elementary school, I heard about the Erie Canal, but had never seen it. We also took a tour of one of the manmade caves near the canal, where rapid water flows formerly powered local industry.

Back in Buffalo for a satisfying lunch at Lake Effect Diner, housed in a chrome-and-neon diner car dating to 1952. Then we drove south via surface streets to Lackawanna, where you can see the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory, our last destination for the trip.

Why Buffalo? There was that promise to visit the falls, of course. But I also wanted to see Buffalo. My single previous experience there had been a quick drive-through in 1991 after I saw Niagara Falls for the first time, from the Canadian side. Every city of any size has something interesting. A lot of smaller places do as well. So we shuffled off to Buffalo.

Pre-Holiday Nattering

Posted on May 26, 2021 by admin

Back again after the Memorial Day weekend, when it will be June already. June, now that’s a fine month.

Lilly arrived for a short visit today. We all went out to a restaurant to eat this evening. Sounds ordinary, but that was the first time since March 2020. We went to the last place we all went together that month, SGD, or So Gong Dong, a Korean place with about a dozen locations in the Midwest and on the Eastern seaboard. It’s a wonderful place, glad it survived.

My meal.

As usual with a commencement program that lists everyone’s full names, I spent some time during Ann’s graduation on Monday examining those names, and again just now. As usual, the variety is remarkable.

Last names, for instance: Ahmed, Awdziejczyk, Bhandar, Cwik, Degrazio, Garcia, Gomberg, Jayawardena, Jones, Kaspari, Kobe, Lavrynovych, Mapembe, McCoy, Michalowski, Nguyen, O’Connor, Onilegbale, Picadi, Schoefernacker, Shah, Stribling, Wang.

Common names aren’t so common. There are no Smiths and two Joneses, three Browns and one Johnson (and a single Johnston) and a pair of Williamses. There are four Garcias and three Sanchezes but only two Gonzalezes and one Hernandez and one Gomez. Rodriguez is fairly common: seven. No one is named Kim, though there is a Lim. The aforementioned Wang is the only one.

Far and away the most common surname among the Class of ’21 is Patel. How many? Twenty-one. It’s a common name from Gujarat state on the west coast of India, and apparently Patels are well-represented in the diaspora.

One reason: Idi Amin. “When Idi Amin turfed out some 100,000 Indians (mostly Gujaratis) from Uganda in 1972, most of them descended on Britain before peeling off elsewhere,” notes the Economic Times of India. The timing was right, since the U.S. had junked its racist immigration policies that effectively kept out most South Asians only in 1965.

“There are said to be more than 500,000 Patels scattered across the world outside India, including some 150,000 each in Britain and the US,” the paper continues. A good many in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, clearly. Then there’s this associated term, which I’d never heard before.

During research for an article not long ago, I came across the persnickety food site Eat This Not That!, whose very title screams judgmentalism. One article is called “20 Vegetarian Foods That Are Surprisingly Aren’t.”

The subhead: These supposedly animal-free foods will make you gag, regardless of your dietary lifestyle.

I don’t have anything against principled vegetarianism or veganism, though I don’t plan to be either. But I do think an article that essentially says, Look how gross food additives are! is an exercise in simplemindedness. Overthink just about any food and you can say it’s repulsive.

The additives the articles objects to include animal bones, sheep’s wool, pork fat, shellfish, bird features, beaver musk, crushed beetles, fish bladders, pig hooves and calf stomachs. I don’t see that list and think, ew, gross. I think damn, human beings are awfully clever, using the most unlikely things to improve our food. Is that not a virtue among primal peoples anyway — using every part of the animal?

My favorite entry:

If you’re eating … Lucky Charms
You’re also consuming … Animal Bones
Those marshmallow moons, clovers and horseshoes are made with gelatin, derived from animal collagen (aka cartilage, skin, tendons, bones). True veg-heads — and those who keep kosher, and cannot mix milk and meat — have known this for years, staring regretfully at the taunting leprechaun. Also containing gelatin: Smorz, Fruity Marshmallow Krispies, and Rich Krispies Treats Squares.

There may be legitimate reasons not to eat a lot of sugar-coated cereal, but animal collagen doesn’t strike me as one of them.

Thursday Crumbs

Posted on May 20, 2021 by admin

Warm and windy today. The wind died down some in the evening, and I had a pleasant time sitting on the deck drinking tea and reading. At advanced middle age, these are pleasures you appreciate.

Speaking of an advanced age, I’m glad to see Elvis Costello is still recording catchy tunes. He released an album in October — his 31st — called Hey Clockface, with the title track, “Hey Clockface / How Can You Face Me?” The video is as charming as the song.

He shares writing credit for the song with Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, since it incorporates part of “How Can You Face Me?” Not the sort of music Elvis Costello did 40 years ago when I saw him at VU, but I wouldn’t have appreciated it then anyway.

I left YouTube on autoplay after Waller’s “How Can You Face Me?” and left the room for a few minutes. When I came back, the Bratislava Hot Serenaders were playing, a band I hadn’t heard of before.

A word I hadn’t heard of before.

Clearly a commercial coinage in our time. But who knows? It might evolve over the decades or centuries into something unimaginably perverse.

The U.S. birth rate might be declining, but there are some births. I knew that the Social Security Administration keeps track of baby names, but I didn’t know until recently that the agency maintains a web page devoted to them, new and old.

Not a bad list in 2020, mostly traditional names, such as Olivia, Charlotte, Sophia, Elijah, William and James, rather than some of the trendy names of recent decades, none of which I’ll cite. I’m mossbacked when it comes to a few things, and baby names is one of them.

Thursday Extras

Posted on May 13, 2021 by admin

This was in a window we walked by in west suburban Wheaton not long ago. I like the neon. Who doesn’t like neon? Who doesn’t like gelato? I’d never had any gelato until I went to Florence. That was a great place to experience it for the first time.

We didn’t stop by for any gelato. We did buy a couple of most delicious pastries at a nearby place called Suzette’s.

I found this card in Peoria recently. Near Bradley U. Not at the store itself, but while picking up food at Jerk Hut, where we bought some tasty jerk chicken.
Interesting that the students of Bradley, some of whose parents weren’t around for the original iteration of hippies, would support such a business. Then again, the key might be in that now-obsolete code term tobacco accessories.

I heard a few seconds of an ad on YouTube recently featuring a young Brit walking along the Thames, with the Tower Bridge in the background, to make absolutely sure we know he’s British, as if his dialect didn’t tell us that. He said something along the lines that such-and-such was going “redefine the way you think about men’s makeup.”

Fat chance, ya limey bastard. I can sum up my thinking on men’s makeup in one pithy sentence that isn’t going to change: I’m never wearing any.

Got a press release the other day from someone — some automated mailing list — that doesn’t appreciate my commercial real estate beat.

“With #chlorophyll and #chlorophyllwater trending on social media, I wanted to put Chlorophyll Water® (the only bottled, pre-made chlorophyll drink on the market) on your radar, as it’s selling out in retailers across the country,” the release asserted.

“A favorite amongst Kourtney Kardashian, Rosario Dawson, Mandy Moore and Aly Reisman, Chlorophyll Water® is a plant-powered purified water enhanced by nature with the addition of Chlorophyll, a key ingredient and the distinct green pigment in plant life.”

I probably won’t be a consumer of that product, but who knows? Chlorophyll might be tastier than I think. Also, glad to report that I’ve only heard of two of those celebrities, only one of whom I can acknowledge has some talent.

Received some direct mail the other day promising better lawns through chemistry. It is spring, after all. As chilly as temps have been, it’s still green out there. Anyway, on the outside of the envelope, it says:

Dandelions. Crabgrass. Weeds.

Act now to stop those lawn problems and receive your 20% neighborhood discount.

Plus a FREE Core Aeration. See details inside.

Problems, you say? I say it’s biodiversity. The suburbs need it, too.

This is a gimme letter envelope I had to scan, from a statewide advocacy org with its eye on utility rates. I suspect the risk is pretty small, considering the distinct history of the two states.

You know, in some other context, some other organization might be sending letters screaming, Texas Cannot Become Illinois.

A Couple of Hours in Freeport

Posted on May 3, 2021 by admin

The week after I returned from Dallas was second-dose vaccination week for all of us in our house. When I set things up in late March, the only first-shot appointments were at far-flung pharmacies in northern Illinois, meaning the boosters would be at the same places. By the time I got back, I had the sense that I could have rejiggered things to get shots closer to home. But I didn’t. I still wanted to go to those places.

Such as Freeport, Illinois, the only town of any size between Rockford and Galena, and actually much bigger than the latter (23,700 vs. 3,100). When driving into Freeport, I saw a sign advertising a Wrigley Field replica, or miniature, or something. It wasn’t hard to find after our vaccination was done.

Little Cubs Field, it’s called, which is used for Little League, T-ball and other events, and completed in 2008 by serious Cubs fans.

The bicycle in that picture belonged to one of about a half-dozen boys, all maybe about 10 years old, who were hanging out at Little Cubs Field when I arrived and started taking pictures.

“Are you a tourist?” one of them asked me.

“Yes, I’m just passing through,” I said.

“They always take pictures,” another of the boys said to yet another, not me. The first boy then asked where I was from, and I simplified matters by telling him Chicago. I got the sense that he felt that was quite a distant location. A reasonable thing to think at 10.

Off they went, and I took some more pictures.

A short drive away, in Freeport’s small downtown, is its Lincoln-Douglas memorial. I couldn’t very well pass that up.

Every place they had a debate has a memorial now. This was the first of the statues to memorialize one of the events, unveiled in 1992, but hardly the last. Chicago sculptor Lily Tolpo (d. 2016) did the bronzes. Both she and her husband Carl did Lincolns.

The memorial also featured a plaque on a rock.

Not just any plaque, but one dedicated by TR in 1903. A president, I believe, who understood the gravitas of the office he held. Probably felt it in his bones. Not all of his successors have.

We were about to leave, but couldn’t help noticing an ice cream shop next door to the memorial.

The Union Dairy Farms, founded in 1914 and serving ice cream since 1934. We couldn’t pass that up, either, figuring it had to be good. Was it ever.

Bottle Cap Alley

Posted on March 21, 2021 by admin

My brother Jay and I had lunch at the Dixie Chicken in College Station, Texas, while visiting Texas A&M in the spring of ’14. It isn’t far from campus. I wanted to visit A&M because I’d heard about it all my life. My grandfather was an Aggie, Class of 1916, and I knew people my age who went there, but I’m certain I’d have heard about it anyway, growing up in Texas.

I’d never heard of Bottle Cap Alley, which is next to Dixie Chicken. Soon I learned about the place.
It’s the kind of place that tends to be shunted off into the “quirky attractions” ghetto. I don’t care much for that word, with its slight whiff of condescension. Maybe that’s just my take, but anyway I’d prefer to call Bottle Cap Alley odd or peculiar.

Underfoot were bottle caps. Lots of bottle caps (and cigarette butts and leaves, but never mind). A peculiar feeling, walking on bottle caps.

Bottle caps and I go back a long way. During grade school, I was an assiduous collector, accumulating a mass of them in a box that had once held a television — back when TVs were serious pieces of furniture. From that mass, I found examples of all sorts of caps and glued them to large pieces of cardboard, a couple of hundred at least, including some prized examples that Jay picked up for me in Europe in the summer of ’72.

I lost interest later, around junior high, as one does. The mass in the box are long gone, maybe delivered to a recycler. But the caps on the boards are still in a closet in the house where my mother used to live, and where my brother Jim now lives. I might retrieve them someday or, just for the fun of thinking about it, leave them for my heirs to find even further in the future, unexplained.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Food & Beverage