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.

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.

Thursday Dribs

Posted on March 4, 2021 by admin

Shouldn’t there be drabs as well? Maybe, but I did that not too many Thursdays ago.

“Drib is known in some English, Irish and Scottish dialects from at least the eighteenth century, meaning an inconsiderable quantity or a drop and most probably is a variant form of drip or drop,” says the always interesting World Wide Words.

“The experts are undecided whether the second half is a mere echo of the first, as in reduplicated compounds like helter-skelter, see-saw and hurly-burly, or if drab is a real word in its own right.”

It is a word, but in the sense of dull. The Thursday Drabs would suggest that I passed the day listlessly, but that wasn’t the case at all. For one thing, going out for a walk is now pretty easy and, except when the wind kicks up, not too bad. All the ice has vanished from almost all of the sidewalks. Walking the dog is mostly a pleasure again.

These February scenes are gone as well. Some snow still endures, forming snow archipelagos on lawns, especially in shady northern exposures, but there’s a little less of it every day.

Also good to see: croci emerging from the earth. Some in our back yard, and some especially vigorous patches on the grounds of Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary, where we sometimes walk the dog.

Not long ago, I found a 12 oz. jar of preserves tucked away deep in our canned (and jarred) goods pantry: cherry raspberry preserves, product of Brownwood Farms of Williamsburg, Michigan. That sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it for a moment.

The lid, though tight, sported a light coating of dust. That doesn’t bode well for the edibility of the edibles inside.

Then it occurred to me. We’d bought these preserves way up in Grand Traverse County in the summer of 2007 during a visit. Naturally, this made me a little leery of even opening the thing, much less eating it. But I got it open and didn’t see (or more importantly) smell anything amiss.

Been eating my 2000s-vintage preserves on various kinds of bread since then, here in the 2020s, and it’s delicious. After all, Grand Traverse is justly known for its cherries and raspberries and other berries. I’m glad the preserve was literally true in the case of these preserves.

Ottawa Sights (Not the One in Canada)

Posted on July 28, 2020 by admin

We arrived in Ottawa, Illinois, on Saturday in time for lunch. We decided on carry-out from Thai Cafe on Columbus St., which seems to be the only Thai joint in town. At a population of 18,000 or so, maybe that’s all Ottawa can support.

We took our food to Allen Park, a municipal park on the south bank of the Illinois, and found a picnic shelter. The river’s large and on a weekend in July, home to a lot of pleasure craft.
Sometimes, the river must be angry, such as on April 19, 2013. Got a lot of rain in northern Illinois about then, so I believe it.

Downstream a bit is the Ottawa Rail Bridge, which rates a page in Wikipedia. The current bridge dates from 1898, though it was modified in 1932.

Two large metal sculptures rise in the park, both by Mary Meinz Fanning. The red one is “Bending.”
The yellow one is “Reclining.”
“Fanning was the driving force behind the creation of the red and yellow steel sculptures at Allen Park by the Illinois River in Ottawa,” says a 2010 article in The Times, which seems to be a local paper.

“The 40-foot-tall sculptures, which weigh 17 tons each, were erected in 1982 and 1983 from parts of the 1933-built steel girder Hilliard Bridge that was demolished in 1982 to make way for the present-day Veterans Memorial Bridge. Fanning died of illness Nov. 4, 1995, in Ottawa at age 48.”

Just as you enter the park, you also see a wooden sculpture: one of artist Peter Toth’s “Whispering Giants,” which I’d forgotten I’d heard of till I looked him up again. The one in Allen Park is Ho-Ma-Sjah-Nah-Zhee-Ga or, more ordinarily, No. 61.

Looked familiar. I realized I’ve seen one before —
That one is Nee-Gaw-Nee-Gaw-Bow or No. 59, and we saw it by chance in Wakefield, Mich. about three years ago. Apparently the artist has put up at least one in each state.

Ottawa has a place in U.S. history mainly for two things. One that the town is happy to celebrate: the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. The other is the awful story of the Radium Girls, poisoned by luminous paint at a clock factory in Ottawa in the early 20th century. For a long time, there was no public acknowledgment of that incident. Now there is. But I didn’t know the Radium Girls have a statue in town (since 2011), so we missed that.

We didn’t miss the site of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which is in the shady, square-block Washington Park.
Lincoln and Douglas are there as part of a fountain to memorialize the event. They were cast in bronze in 2002 by Rebecca Childers Caleel.
It would have been more pleasant if the fountain were on, but maybe it was dry for public health reasons in our time. The noontime heat was oppressive, so we didn’t have a leisurely look-around the area as much as we might have otherwise. There are other memorials in the park, and plenty of historic structures nearby, forming the Washington Park Historic District.

Those buildings include the Third District Appellate Court Building (1850s), the Reddick Mansion (1850s), the Ottawa First Congregational Church (1870), Christ Episcopal Church (1871), and a Masonic Temple (1910). A few blocks away, the LaSalle County Courthouse looked interesting, too, but we only drove by.

I managed to take a close look only at the former Congregational Church building.

Gothic Revival in brick. These days, the church is part of the Open Table United Church of Christ.

Wednesday Water & Fire

Posted on May 20, 2020 by admin

Back to posting again on Tuesday. It’s an early Memorial Day this year, five days removed from Decoration Day, and in fact May 25 is as early as it can be under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Next year the holiday swings to the latest possible position, May 31, and then in 2022, it’s square on Decoration Day.

Warmish day today, this Wednesday, a relief from a too cool Tuesday. Pleasant enough to have lunch on the deck. The grass is still squishy underfoot.

Many places in this part of the country have had a lot of rain. Too much in some places. I read today that downtown Midland, Mich., flooded because the rain-swollen Tittabawassee breached a dam not far away. Of course, rain was only the immediate cause. Looks like a whole lot of negligence on someone’s part. Boatloads of litigation, dead ahead.

The story caught my attention mainly because we visited Midland only last year, on September 1, taking a stroll in places that are now underwater.

This evening I went outside to take a few things to the garage. Returning, I noticed a bright object in the sky off to the northwest. It looked like a fire balloon. A single one, drifting along. I was astonished. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever seen pictures of them before, not the thing itself.

Who launched it? Why? Who thought that was a good idea in a suburban area, with rooftops to catch fire? The risk is probably fairly small, but still — that’s not something I want landing near me. On the other hand, the balloon made a pretty sight as it wandered along. I watched it as it went from being a small flickering light to a very small flickering light in the sky, finally disappearing in the distance.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Michigan