City of Champions?

Posted on December 19, 2023 by admin

The air was chilly, but still above freezing when Ann and I arrived in Joliet on Sunday just after noon. Not bad for December.

I’d never heard Joliet called the City of Champions, but there it was in a new-looking mural facing one of downtown’s parking lots. The city’s web site says, unhelpfully, that “[Joliet] is known as the ‘City of Champions’ for it’s [sic] world class bands. Music, art, theatre and history are found throughout the city.”

A line vague enough that could have been AI generated, except that a robot writer probably wouldn’t use it’s for its. That’s a human-style mistake. Just a hunch.

Champions or not, Joliet was a prosperous place once upon a time, and its downtown reflects that. The city could well be a growth hub again someday, once the Sunbelt gets just a little too sunny, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Rather than put it in a park, Joliet situated this sizable tree on the edge of a parking lot, near a dry fountain that I hope runs in the warm months. The tree does make the spot look a little less forlorn.

Downtown Joliet sports some interesting buildings, and we spent a few minutes taking a look. Such as a bank building from a pre-FDIC time when banks dwelt in sturdy-looking edifices with Corinthian columns.

Dating from 1909 with a design by Mundie & Jensen of Chicago, most of whose work wasn’t far from the metro area. It’s still a bank, incidentally.

Nearby are other works of similar vintage.

Even older: the Murray Building, 1886.

A giant guitar marks the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum. I didn’t know Illinois had one of those.

That is because it’s new. So new, in fact, that the galleries aren’t open yet, according to its web site, but the gift shop is. Next time I’m in Joliet, if it is all open, I might drop in.

A look at Google Street View tells me that the guitar was fixed to the exterior sometime after November 2022. There have been museum promotional materials in windows since 2018 at the earliest. Before that, a pinball/video game arcade called The Game Show, of all things, occupied the ground floor (in 2017). Back in 2007, the earliest image available, the building was occupied by Phalen’s Fine Furniture. Guess the Great Recession proved to be the end for that business, as Phalen’s was gone by ’13.

The Illinois Rock & Roll Museum has been inducting artists since 2021, with an inaugural roll that year that included Chicago, Cheap Trick, Ides of March, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, REO Speedwagon and the Buckinghams. Most of those I could see, but Cheap Trick and REO Speedwagon had an Illinois connection? Cheap Trick was from Rockford and REO Speedwagon from Champaign. Shows you what I know.

The connection doesn’t have to be that strong, apparently. As long as the performer was either born in Illinois; started a musical career in Illinois; was based in Illinois; or recorded in Illinois, then he, she or they can be inducted. Note that as of this year, there’s no “she.” That is, not a single female inductee. Better get on that, IR&RM, before someone more vocal than me calls you out on it.

Next to the museum is the former Ottawa Street Methodist Episcopal Church, a structure dating from 1903.

“The Ottawa Street Methodist Church is a two-story, Neoclassical Revival style structure built by George Julian Barnes in 1909 on a Joliet limestone foundation,” says the city. “The structure is a wonderful and bold interpretation of the Triumphant Arch motif as applied to a Neoclassical Revival institutional building.”

These days, the building serves as part of the Joliet Area Historical Museum.

My fingers were getting a little cold, so we didn’t linger for a picture of the former church, as grand as it is. Except for this detail.

For The Good Of Man is inscribed under the side pediment. The church didn’t realize it in 1903, of course, but it’s a good thing it didn’t read To Serve Man.

A block away is another former church building.

Old St. Mary’s Carmelite, which hasn’t been an active religious structure in 30 years. New owners are currently rehabbing the property and by next summer it will be an event venue for “weddings, corporate events, fund-raisers, proms and more,” Patch reports. Good to know. I’d say that’s a good re-use for a neglected church, much better than destroying its unique beauty.

One more pic from our short Joliet walkabout: Joliet himself in bronze, beside the local library.

Seen him before, and I probably will again.

Pontiac-Oakland Museum and Resource Center

Posted on November 30, 2023 by admin

Not something you see very often: a wall of motor oil.

I’d never seen such a thing until I came across it just a few doors down from the Museum of the Gilding Arts, in the Pontiac-Oakland Museum and Resource Center, which also faces the elegant Livingston County courthouse in Pontiac, Illinois. In the case of the museum, Pontiac refers to the car brand of that name, and Oakland does as well, as the predecessor of Pontiacs. Both brands are defunct now, but not in the hearts of enthusiasts.

The many cans of motor oil happen to be a backdrop for one of the cars on display: a 1960 Pontiac Venture.

Nearby are other cars of roughly the same era.

A 1964 LeMans Convertible and a 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge, respectively. Not sure if that counts as a Little GTO.

The collection on display isn’t that large – not compared to Fairbanks or Reno, say – but it was well worth a look. Before its absorption into GM, and in fact before horseless carriages, Pontiac got its start as a carriage maker.

An 1890s product of the Pontiac Buggy Co. “One of a handful known to exist,” its sign said.

Soon enough, Pontiac Buggy founder Edward Murphy began building 2-cylinder runabouts called Oaklands, and later built more successful 4-cylindar models, as products of the Oakland Motor Car Co. GM bought Murphy out in 1909, and focused on Oaklands for some decades. The GM Pontiac model didn’t exist until 1926, and then the Depression killed off the higher-priced Oaklands.

A 1929 Oakland.

A Pontiac sedan of the same model year.

Also on display: marketing odds and ends that emphasize the Native roots of the name.

Some might object these days, but I can’t help suspect that Pontiac – Obwandiyag – able 18th-century leader of the Odawa – might have liked being associated, however tenuously, with such a solid object of commerce.

Wiki, citing a 2002 academic work, notes: “Their neighbors applied the ‘Trader’ name to the Odawa because in early traditional times, and also during the early European contact period, they were noted as intertribal traders and barterers.”

Museum of the Gilding Arts

Posted on November 29, 2023 by admin

The docent at the Museum of the Gilding Arts, a neatly dressed woman about 10 years my senior, wasn’t sure why the museum is in Pontiac – Pontiac, Illinois, that is, where I stopped on Sunday specifically to visit the diminutive two-room museum.

“I’m going to ask about that, because I’ve wondered as well,” she said. “I’ve only been here three weeks.”

Before that, she said, she hadn’t known much about gilding, but had been reading about it and spending time with the exhibits. For a while, I had a personal tour of the place, as she suggested things to look at, such as the various items that had been gilded, including decorative pieces but also machines.

Visit Pontiac is succinct about the place: “The focus of the Museum of the Gilding Arts is the history, craft, and use of gold and silver leaf in architecture and in decoration throughout a history that dates back to the days of ancient Egypt.

“There are examples of gold and silver leaf, artifacts used in the application of the precious metal leaf, and displays showing how leaf was manufactured.

“The exhibit features items from the Society of Gilders’ Swift Collection. The M. Swift and Sons company manufactured gold leaf in Hartford, Connecticut, and began its operations in 1887.”

The docent seemed most impressed by the story of M. Allen Swift, the last owner of M. Swift & Sons, who died at a very advanced age in 2005. The business died with him, having been founded by his grandfather, Matthew Swift, who emigrated as a youth from the UK in 1864. Before he died, Allen Swift had the foresight to preserve old-time elements of his family’s gold leaf factory, including an array of wooden work benches – which are now on display in the back room of the two-room museum.

Each bench sports one of the heavy hammers that late 19th-century workmen used to beat gold.

The 19th century was full of jobs that required great upper-body strength, and gold beater was surely one of them.

“The process of making gold leaf began with quarter-inch-thick gold bars, 12 inches long by 1.5 inches wide,” notes an article in Connecticut Explored about the redevelopment of the Smith factory in our time. “The bars were rolled to a thickness of 1/1000 of an inch and cut into squares. The squares were then dusted with calcium carbonate applied with a brush — often a hare’s foot — and placed between a thin membrane made of the outer layer of an ox intestine.

“These were then stacked, in as many as 300 layers, and repeatedly struck with a 16-pound hammer. The squares were cut again into smaller squares and the process repeated with a 10-pound hammer; the squares were then placed in a mold and struck with a 6-pound hammer. When finished, a layer of 280,000 leaves stood just an inch high.”

What happened to the residue of the ox intestine? Maybe I don’t want to know. Not only a tough job, then, but probably a dirty one as well, and ill-paying unless you were a Swift. Machines took over most of the heavy beating in the 20th century, but I expect it still was a tedious job. More about the museum, which opened in 2015, is at the Society of Gilders web site.

Before I left, the docent told me that I had been the only visitor that day. I was glad to hear it. I hadn’t gone too far out of my way, stopping after I’d dropped Ann off in Normal, and it was worth the small effort to get a glimpse of an entire industry I knew nothing about.

A Few Japanese Woodblock Prints

Posted on November 12, 2023 by admin

About six years ago, when we went an exhibit of early Soviet art at the Art Institute, we also took a look at some Japanese woodblock prints, which were in one of the East Asian galleries. Not Edo-era prints, which I think are better known, but early Showa works.

Such as “Spring Night at Ginza” (1934) by Kasamatsu Shiro.

“Bell Tower in Okayama” (1947) by Kawase Hasui.

“Ginza at Night” (1945 reprint of 1929 design) by Kawakami Sumio.

“Bar Bacchus in Ginza” (1929) by Oda Kazuma, which is actually a color lithograph.

Those two especially would make good postcards.

Ruby City

Posted on October 30, 2023 by admin

I didn’t take many pictures in Austin this time around. But after dinner one night, Tom had to answer a call, and I had a few moments to document a minor example of Austin neon. It’s a good town for neon.

That was the restaurant entrance. The full name of the place is Wu Chow. Good chow, as it happens.

In San Antonio, I was much more attuned to image-making, at least on Saturday, when I was footloose and out to see new things. Such as Ruby City.

Ruby City is a new art museum west of downtown on the not-so-mighty San Pedro Creek. Which is wider at this point than much of the San Antonio River.

“The story of Ruby City — the landmark museum designed by world-renowned architect Sir David Adjaye… — begins with the lucid dream of a dying woman,” Texas Monthly reported just before the museum opened in 2019.

“In the spring of 2007, Linda Pace, at age 62 a legendary patron of contemporary art in San Antonio, understood that her breast cancer, diagnosed a few months earlier, was likely terminal. All the money in the world could not keep the woman born into both the Pearl beer and Pace Foods families alive long enough to see through her final project, a permanent home for her art collection.”

Ideas for the building design came to her in a dream, the magazine reported, and – having skill in drawing and materials ready at her bedside – she drew sketches and provided them to the architect. About a decade after her death, the building was realized. How much the final structure hewed to the dream-images is impossible to know, at least for those of us standing at the base of the concrete walls years later.

I arrived just as the museum opened at 10 in the morning. I’d been encouraged to make an online “appointment” before coming, so I did. Would crowding be an issue at this free museum? Well, no. During my first few minutes there, I was the only visitor. Everyone else worked there, and there weren’t that many of them. It was a little weird being in a gallery in which the employee’s (or volunteer’s) only job is to watch you, except pretend they aren’t really watching you.

Never mind, the entrance asks one and all to “be amazing.” I made a self-portrait.

Be amazing. That’s a tall order. Better to be “interesting” or maybe “remarkable” on a really good day. Much of the artwork inside is at least interesting. A few pieces I’d say were even remarkable, but nothing amazed me much. Maybe I’m jaded.

Actually, this rectangle o’ river rubbish was mildly amazing.

“Riverbank” (2006), by Luz Maria Sanchez of Mexico City. Made from clothing, bags, bottles etc. found in the Rio Grande. Behind it is “Mobile Home II” (2006) by Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist living in London. Its items are connected to laundry lines slowly pulled back and forth by small electric motors.

This one I found remarkable. “Ultimate Joy” (2001) by American artist Jim Hodges. A light bulb artist, at least for this work.

“View of Gorge” (1999) by Anne Chu, an American artist (d. 2016).

Outside is a sculpture garden with three pieces – one of which seemed to be removed for now. No matter, one of the remaining ones is an impressive pile: “5000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire” (1997) by Nancy Rubins.

A final comment on the building itself. Maybe not the color I’d have chosen, though it’s an interesting one. Why aren’t more concrete structures one color or another? Is it too expensive compared with plain dirty white? Imagine how many ugly concrete structures would be a little less ugly with a dash of color.

The National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial

Posted on October 15, 2023 by admin

It’s mid-October and in Chicago at least, that means Open House Chicago, which we’ve attended most years over the last decade. We’ve visited churches, synagogues, temples, office space, libraries, factories, theaters, museums and more as part of the event. Open House is a worldwide phenomenon.

Rain fell heavily Friday night, and was forecast to last into Saturday morning – which it did, also obscuring whatever partial eclipse was above the clouds. The weather didn’t stop us from going out, though it did slow us down some, since driving in the city is like driving through glue even in the best conditions. To make things easier, I decided to head into the neighborhoods east from O’Hare – relatively accessible from our suburb – and on to Lakeview near Lake Michigan, as familiar as a neighborhood can be in Chicago, since we used to live there.

Our first stop was west of Lakeview, however, in the much less familiar Lincoln Square. It was still rainy and quite windy when we arrived at the National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which I hadn’t known about till I saw it on the Open House List.

The weather discouraged outside photos, but I did manage to capture the mural on the side of the museum building, which faces west on Lawrence Ave.

“Cambodian Color” (2017) by Brandin Hurley and Shayne Renee Taylor.

A detail near the museum entrance, and out of the rain.

It’s a small museum, only a few rooms, but enough to provide some testimony and images about the Cambodian genocide – the evacuation of Phnom Penh, forced collectivization, blunt-instrument murders to save ammunition, Tuol Sleng and other death prisons, the Khmer Rouge turning on itself when an agrarian utopia mysteriously didn’t appear — the whole horrorshow of ideology gone barking mad. A somber place to visit, but that should be an element in one’s wanderings.

One of the docents, a young woman I took to be an American of Cambodian ancestry, asked me if I knew anything about the period. Unfortunately, I do. Not unfortunate that I know, but that there was anything to know. I remember reading reports of mass murders in “Democratic Kampuchea” while the Khmer Rouge was still in power and of course after its overthrow, when much more detail came out. I told her simply yes, that I’d heard of it.

The memorial is in the back room of the museum.

Not really visible unless you look very closely is Khmer script up and down the glass panels. A lot of it, in other words. Names.

“Designed within an environment for quiet contemplation utilizing glass, stone, water, and light effects, the memorial includes the individual names of thousands of relatives lost by Cambodians all over the United States,” the museum web site says.

Downtown Dallas Sculpture, 2013

Posted on September 17, 2023 by admin

Wee rain in the wee hours, which makes waking up to go to the bathroom a pleasure, at least once you settle back into bed. The light rain continued after daybreak, and made a pleasant backdrop for staying in bed to read. I expect the grass to respond by re-greening and unkempt-ing.

Ten years ago this month I was in Texas, including downtown Dallas. I visited the Nasher Sculpture Center then, which has the best sculpture real estate developer Raymond Nasher (d. 2007) could buy, and lots of it. Such as a bug-eyed Picasso (“Tête de femme,” 1931).

“La Nuit” (ca. 1902-09) by Aristide Maillol.

And something a little newer, “Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)” (2000) by Sir Antony Gromley.

The Nasher isn’t the only place in downtown Dallas to spot sculpture. Not far away is “Colts in Motion” (1980) by Anna Debska.

As well as “Bear Mountain Red-A Texas Landscape” (1982) by Alice Maynadier Bateman.

It’s a whopper that has outlasted its original corporate patron. A nearby sign says the work was carved on site from a 12.5-ton block quarried near Fredericksburg, Texas, for the building, then known as the Diamond Shamrock Tower (717 North Harwood St.). The company had moved to Dallas from Cleveland not long before – companies moving to Texas isn’t a new thing – but was eventually swallowed by Valero Energy, which is based in San Antonio.

The Less-Crowded Galleries

Posted on August 28, 2023 by admin

Yuriko went to her intermittent cake class on Saturday, which means I got to drive into the city and hang out there for a few hours. I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, since it had been a while.

The big show at the moment is “Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape,” which closes after Labor Day. The exhibit features not only works by the one-eared Dutchman, but also Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard and Charles Angrand.

I’m sure it’s a fine collection of works. But as I could see from the exhibit entrance, the galleries were packed (almost) like rush-hour subway cars. That was a deal-breaker for me, so I sought out other artwork, somewhere in the museum I hadn’t spend much time before. This was easy to do, since it is such a large place.

In fact, I didn’t have to go far. Just downstairs a floor from the Van Gogh et al. exhibit are the galleries of the Arts of the Americas. Few people were around, certainly not as many as the floor above. I had an enjoyable ramble, looking here and there at my leisure, not having to navigate other onlookers.

A few details, such as from Frederic Remington’s “The Advance-Guard,” or “The Military Sacrifice (The Ambush)” (1890).

From “Nouvart Dzeron, A Daughter of Armenia” (1912), by an artist I didn’t know: Ralph Elmer Clarkson.

A fireplace (1901) designed by George Washington Maher.

A lock by one Frank L. Koralewsky, illustrating the Grimms’ “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It won Korwalewsky a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, and I’d say he deserved it.

The more I looked at its detail, the more amazing it seemed.

This statue caught my attention.

I don’t think I’d seen it before. Soon I discovered it was “The Puritan” (1883-86) by the great sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Anyone who can design a thing like the $20 Double Eagle gold piece is great in my book, and I was delighted to find one of his works. Even better, there were more on the wall nearby.

“Jules Bastien-Lepage” (1880).

“Violet Sargent” (1890) (sister of the painter).

And “Amor Caritas” (1897).

Van Gogh is well and good — and probably better on a weekday — but Saint-Gaudens is equally worth the trip to the Art Institute. Another example of the limited imagination of crowds, too. I bet that for every 100 people who’ve heard of Van Gogh, maybe a handful know Saint-Gaudens.

The Peshtigo Fire Museum & Fire Cemetery

Posted on August 27, 2023 by admin

You can drive from Sault Ste. Marie to metro Chicago in a day. It would be a long day, maybe eight or nine hours depending on traffic, construction, etc., but you can do it. I decided against such a long day, breaking the trip roughly in half by spending the last night of the drive around Lake Superior – which I was leaving far behind by this point – in Marinette, Wisconsin.

One reason: so I could enjoy a leisurely drive through the UP, including westward on Michigan 28 and then south on National Forest 13 through Hiawatha National Forest.

These are roads unlikely to make it on conventional best-drive lists, except for one that I might compile myself according to idiosyncratic lights, which might also include the Icefields Parkway, Lake Shore Drive, Alamo Heights Blvd., North Carolina 12 on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, among others that come to mind. That the UP has two such favorite roads says something about the car-commercial driving to be had in the mostly forested UP.

Light enough traffic, at least on National Forest 13, that you can stand on the center line and take pictures at your leisure.

Another thing about NF 13: It took me to Pete’s Lake once upon a few times, and again on August 5, though I didn’t camp this time or experience a thunderstorm or yahoos yelling in the distance. It remains a sentimental favorite spot.

On the morning of August 6, I finally headed home, with one more stop in mind: Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a place that demonstrates, if nothing else, that the human mind is a creature of habit.

That includes me. I only mentioned the town in passing in 2006, when we stopped at the Peshtigo Fire Museum.

The building is a former Congregational church, on the site of a Catholic church that burned down in the firestorm of 1871 – which remains the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Remarkably, the Maui wildfire is, for now, placed at fifth; modernity can’t protect us from everything.

“On the night of October 8, 1871, in Peshtigo, a lumber town about seven miles southwest of the Michigan-Wisconsin border, hundreds of people died: burned by fire, suffocating from smoke, or drowning or succumbing to hypothermia while trying to shelter in the Peshtigo River,” notes USA Today.

“But the fire also raged across Oconto and Marinette counties into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, while another blaze burned across the bay of Green Bay in Brown, Door, and Kewaunee counties.”

No one knows exactly how many people perished in the Peshtigo fire — I’ve seen varying estimates, all in the low thousands — but it was certainly more than in the Great Chicago Fire, which happened the same day. Which one is mostly remembered? Chicago, of course, thus illustrating a habit of mind. Once a thing enters the tapestry of the popular imagination, it can crowd out similar events.

Peshtigo isn’t a large museum, but it is full of stuff.

The museum includes much information and a few artifacts from the fire, though naturally not much survived. The fire itself is illustrated not by photography, but artwork.

Two volunteer docents were on hand to spread the word about the fire. It’s the only distinction for modern Peshtigo, pop. 3,400 or so. One was a woman about my age, the other a woman about Ann’s age. Again, good to see young’ins up on their local history.

Speaking of that, the museum is actually more local history than the single incident of the fire, as important as that is. As such, there are many artifacts from the entire spectrum of the town’s history (including in the basement).

Next to the museum is the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery.

Including survivors of the fire.

Along with many who did not.

Too grim a note to end on. Not far south of Peshtigo is a roadside plaque I’d seen before, but not photographed.

“The most obsessive of all of 45th Parallel markers are the plaque-on-rocks sponsored by Frank E. Noyes,” says Roadside America. “We know that he sponsored them because he put his name on every one.

“Frank was 82 years old, a faithful Episcopalian and 32nd degree Mason, and president, general manager, and editor of The Daily Eagle, a Wisconsin newspaper founded by his dad. For reasons lost to time, he became fixated on the intangible world of latitude in 1938 and put up plaques around his home town of Marinette to mark the halfway line.”

There are other such signs, of course, not of Frank Noyes origin, such as at the Montana-Wyoming border, as seen in 2005.

Except for bathroom and gas breaks, the Wisconsin 45th parallel proved to be the last stop of the nearly 2,000 miles around the lake.

SS Valley Camp

Posted on August 24, 2023 by admin

Temps hit 100 degrees F. today at O’Hare, reportedly for the first time in more than 12 years. I’d have thought it would have been more recently than that, but no. Still, such heat is transient here in the North: Tomorrow’s forecast calls for only 83 for a high, and Saturday a mere 74.

While atop the 21-story Tower of History, whose only purpose is provide a way to gaze at the scenery below, I spied an ore carrier on the Michigan Sault Ste. Marie riverfront. One of the signs on the tower’s observation deck told me it was SS Valley Camp – a museum ship. The kind of information that raises my eyebrows to an “Oh, really?” posture.

So I paid a visit late on the morning of August 5. Glad I did.

The best views of the ship aren’t from the outside, but on top.

The view from near the bridge, looking back toward the stern, which permanently points toward the St. Mary’s River and Canadian Sault Ste. Marie.

The view toward the bow, pointing toward the Michigan Sault Ste. Marie.

The metal plates – which look like solar panels under the bright sun – are in fact cargo hatches, for the Valley Camp in its nearly 50 years as a working ship carried ore and coal and other bulk goods. Visitors are advised not to go roaming around on the hatches, and I could see why, as they would be first-rate trip ‘n’ fall hazards that would land you on some hard, irregular surfaces.

The bridge complex.

Displays of various quarters.

These days the ship is owned by Sault Historic Sites, the same nonprofit that owns the Tower of History. The ship dates from 1917, built for the Producers Steamship Co. as the Louis W. Hill by the American Ship Building Co. in Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie. (And I have to say, in those days, company names were nothing if not descriptive.)

State-of-the-art for 1917, at least according to Lorain newspapermen: “As modern as the genius of man can make her,” the Lorain Times-Herald said at the time. A later owner renamed the ship Valley Camp, in honor of the Valley Camp Coal Co. of West Virginia.

“From 1917 until it’s last voyage in 1966, the 11,500-ton ship logged some 3 million miles and carried in excess of 16 million tons of cargo,” says the museum’s web site. “A length of 550 feet, beam of 58 feet, and depth of 31 feet, the Valley Camp [had] a crew of 32 men. Purchased by Le Sault de Sainte Marie Historical Sites Inc. [now Sault Historic Sites], the ship arrived at Sault Ste. Marie on July 6, 1968, during [the city’s] tri-centennial celebration.”

Topside is pretty cool, but the real museum action is below decks. Much of the interior is given over the displays about the history of the ship, other Great Lakes ships, and the industries they served and continue to serve: photos, models, artifacts and more.

Including a fourth-order, working Fresnel lens.

It wouldn’t be a Great Lakes nautical museum worth its salt — its freshwater — without something from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. In this case, one of the doomed ship’s battered lifeboats.

You can wander around and see much of the original metal and glass guts of the Valley Camp, too.

Cargo Hold #1, a sign told me, hasn’t been converted into museum space. I didn’t need to be told. The yawning space shows just how large the ship is.

The hold did have an exhibit, which looked temporary, about the sad fate of the SS Carl D. Bradley, which went down in a Lake Michigan storm in 1958, taking 33 of its 35 crewmen with it.

A load of grain or coal typically filled that space on the Valley Camp; denser iron ore or taconite filled it only about a third of the way to the top, the sign said. Impressive.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Museums