Category Archives: Parks

Allen J. Benson Park. Or, the Illinois-Indiana Border Obelisk.

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I have a certain fascination with borders, probably dating back as long as I’ve been looking at maps just for fun, which is a long time now. I seem to have written about them a lot as well, something I didn’t realize until I checked.

Such as the posting about the meeting of British Columbia and Alberta; of Banff National Park and Kootenay National Park; and on the Continental Divide. Or the U.S. Canadian border just south of Vancouver. Or the borders we crossed in 2005 and 2006 and another posting about them again. Or the Tennessee-North Carolina border. Or Missouri-Kansas. Or Texas-Louisiana.

Not long ago, I had an encounter with a closer border: Illinois-Indiana. But not just any point on that long line — as far northwest as you can go in Indiana and still be on land, because the NW corner of the state is actually a point in Lake Michigan.

This is what you see at the Illinois-Indiana line just a few feet from Lake Michigan, while you are standing in Indiana.
A weatherworn, graffiti-scarred limestone obelisk. This is a closer view.
“In 1833, as Chicago and the Midwest were starting to grow, Congress ordered a new survey of the boundary between Illinois and Indiana,” says Chicago History Today, which asserts that the obelisk is the oldest public monument in Chicago. “When the survey was completed, a 15-foot high limestone obelisk was put in place on the shore of Lake Michigan, straddling the state line.

“By the 1980s the marker was isolated and neglected among the rail yards. Allen J. Benson, a ComEd executive, convinced the company to sponsor its restoration, in conjunction with the East Side Historical Society and other interested groups. In 1988 the marker was moved 190 feet north to its present location, just outside the [ComEd coal-fired power plant] gate. A new base was added at that time.”

Though moved into an area created by landfill, I understand that the obelisk still straddles the north-south Illinois-Indiana border, which a few feet further north heads out into Lake Michigan. It’s also the border between the city of Chicago and the city of Hammond. (Chicago extended out this far in massive 1889 annexation, which is yellow on the map.)

There’s a plaque near the obelisk that says the small area (maybe inside the fence) is Allen J. Benson Park to honor the exec, who has since died. The power plant closed in 2012, and its former site, a brownfield on the Indiana side of the line, is being redeveloped to be home to a data center.

When the plant was up and running, the marker didn’t look quite so forlorn: in the 2011, according to a Wikimedia image, three flagpoles and some trees were in the vicinity — but no metal fence — and there were plaques on the side of the obelisk with the state names. Guess they were stolen. Such is life in the big city, but I’m glad this curiosity from the 19th century still stands.

Riverside

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I’ve known about Riverside, Illinois, for years, and used to pass through it every weekday in the late ’90s and early ’00s when I took the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Metra line to work downtown. One thing I could see from the train window was the fine brick station.

As well as the town’s former water tower, not far from the station. The building underneath the tower is now the town’s park and recreation department.
Riverside is a special place beyond what you can see from the train. But I never got around to a longer visit than a train stop, so on Saturday morning, inspired by the fact that some of its buildings were part of Doors Open Illinois — not to be confused with Open House Chicago, or Doors Open Milwaukee — we drove to Riverside for a look around.

“Starting [in 1869] with a blank canvas of 1,600 acres of purchased farmland, the Riverside Improvement Company arranged for a complete utility infrastructure — water, sewer, and gas for lighting,” WTTW says. “They called their brand-new community ‘Riverside’ for the Des Plaines River that flows through the site.

“To design and plan the village, they hired Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, whose Central Park success a decade before had made them superstars of design.

“Olmsted’s signature approach was to create a picturesque, landscaped topography. Inspired by the winding Des Plaines River, he eschewed a standard city grid, instead creating a series of curvilinear streets that wound across each other — a pattern that resulted in dozens of tiny triangular mini-parks.”

These days, Riverside is still a prosperous suburb, as it was intended to be from day one. We parked near the station and first got a better look at the station’s handsome interior.

As well as a closer look at the former water tower.
Unfortunately, it isn’t open to the public for a climb. Too bad. Even local vistas are usually worth the effort. A view of Riverside from that perch would probably be a fine thing.

A nearby former pumping station is now a small museum devoted to Riverside. Mostly it sports photographs on the wall of earlier times in the town.
The three volunteers inside, local ladies all, seemed really glad to see us. I expect that word never really got out about Open Door Illinois, and the little museum doesn’t get that many visitors anyway.

They told us a bit about the town and the structures we’d been looking at. For example: parking is usually possible near the train station, even on weekdays, which is unusual among suburban Metra stations. Most commuters walk or ride bicycles to the station, one of the volunteers said. Probably just as Olmstead wanted it.

More from WTTW about Riverside: “In 1871, when the Great Fire decimated Chicago and before Olmsted’s plan was fully executed, the developers went bankrupt. But before long, Riverside picked up momentum again, with community resident and notable architect William LeBaron Jenney stepping in to complete the town plan, and other notable architects of the day such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan designing homes.”

One of the aforementioned mini-parks is next to the train station: Guthrie Park.
Named after a local luminary, not the folk singer. There are an assortment of commemorative plaques attached to rocks ringing the flag pole in Guthrie Park. Some of them honor men, presumably locals, who were killed in the Great War.

Rev. Hedley Heber Cooper, d. May 26, 1918. War was dangerous for chaplains, too.

Private Albert Edward Moore, d. July 19, 1918.

There’s also a plaque for a soldier who died not long after the Armistice, but here at home. A little late for the flu, but still possible. Accident, maybe.

Sgt. James P. Quinn, d. February 4, 1919, Camp Logan.

Near Guthrie Park is the Riverside Public Library, completed in 1931, which looks like a church. The architect is given as Connor & O’Connor, or simply “Mr. Connor” in this timeline.
On the inside it looks even more like a church. A certain kind of church, anyway.

The library is the only one I’ve ever seen with an Olmsted collection.

The collection takes up a number of shelves in its own special niche.

Leif Erikson and His Rose Garden

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According to Wiki, which cites a book called Vikings in the Attic: In Search of Nordic America by Eric Dregni (2011), there are statues of Leif Erikson in Boston, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Paul, Duluth and Seattle.

According to Leif Erikson.org, there are also statues of him in Reykjavik, as well as Newport News, Va.; Trondheim, Norway; Minot, ND, Eiríksstaðir, Iceland; Brattahlid (Qassiarsuk), Greenland; Cleveland (a bust); and L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

That’s not counting the more generic Viking Big Ole, who stands in Alexandria, Minn., home of the pretty-sure-it’s-a-hoax Kensington Runestone.

I’ve seen the Chicago Leif Erikson myself; it’s in Humboldt Park. Now I’ve seen the one in Duluth. Here it is.

Carved on the plinth are the Viking’s name and “Discoverer of America 1000 A.D.” Also that the statue, designed and executed by John Karl Daniels, was erected by the Norwegian American League (no hyphen) of Duluth and “popular subscription.” It was “presented to the city” on August 25, 1956.

I wonder what Leif, an obscure chieftain from a remote island 1,000 years ago, would make of his current modest fame, which came to his name more than 800 years after his death. Modest fame, but then again, how many other 10th/11th-century figures are so well known in the 20th/21st century?

Who among the teeming billions on the Earth now, through some completely convoluted and unpredictable set of circumstances across the centuries to come, will be remembered at the beginning of the fourth millennium, for reasons impossible to imagine?

A stout iron fence surrounds the statue, I guess to discourage casual vandalism, but ardent vandals, statue revisionists, or garden-variety wankers could climb the fence without too much trouble. As far as I know, there hasn’t been much grumbling about old Leif, though skinhead lowlifes apparently try to co-opt a statue of the lesser-known Icelandic explorer Thorfinn Karlsefni in Pennsylvania each October 9.

That being Leif Erikson Day. Time And Date.com says: “October 9 was chosen because it is the anniversary of the day that the ship Restauration arrived in New York from Stavanger, Norway, on October 9, 1825. This was the start of organized immigration from Scandinavia to the USA. The date is not associated with an event in Leif Erikson’s life.”

Some context for the Leif Erikson statue in Duluth: it’s in Leif Erickson Park (sometimes styled Erikson) and next to the Leif Erikson Rose Garden, also known as the Duluth Rose Garden. It has some fine plantings.
The garden “was begun by Mrs. John Klints, a native of Latvia, who wanted to give her adopted home of Duluth a beautiful formal rose garden similar to those she’d known in Europe,” says Public Gardens of Minnesota. “It opened in 1965 within Leif Erickson Park, with 2,000 roses, all arranged in gently curving beds surrounding an antique horse fountain. Here it remained for 25 years….

“A vast and ambitious city redevelopment project, and a clever Department of Transportation solution to the termination point of the freeway entering Duluth, resulted in the new location of the rose garden. The garden reopened in 1994 after four years of construction… again as part of the new Leif Erickson Park.

“The six acres are still formal in nature and still have the fountain and gazebo from the original garden, but the beds are now two long beds and four circular beds. There are now in excess of 3,000 roses and 12,000 non-rose plantings, including day lilies, evergreen shrubs, mixed perennials and an herb garden.”

Good to see the garden’s gazebo. It has a nice view of Lake Superior. That’s what this country needs, more public gazebos.

Enger Tower

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Whenever possible, I recommend finding a high perch to see the territory around you. Ideally, a spot reached without much danger of bodily harm. Even better, a structure created just for that purpose. Best of all, a structure open to the public at no charge, like the handsome Enger Tower in Duluth, which we climbed on July 29.

In full, the Enger Observation Tower. At least that’s what it says on a plaque just inside the entrance. That plaque also says that it’s named after Bert J. Enger (1864-1931), “Native of Norway, Citizen of Duluth.”

Enger was an immigrant who made good in the U.S., and left money for building the tower. Crown Prince Olav of Norway came all the way to Duluth to dedicate the structure in June 1939 (Olav wasn’t king until the 1950s, many eventful years later). A separate plaque notes that King Harald, the current Norwegian monarch, re-dedicated the tower in 2011 after renovations.

The blue stone tower rises 80 feet on top of an already high hill, so the view is terrific: Downtown Duluth, St. Louis River and St. Louis Bay, Superior, Wis., and the rolling greenery north of town.

Enger Tower

During our visit, the light was best for capturing images to the north of the tower, including woods and the park’s golf course.

The tower wasn’t the only attraction at Enger Park. There were gardens too.

Full of flowers enjoying the short boreal summer.

Oz Park

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Oz Park is a mid-sized green space on the North Side of Chicago, bounded by W. Webster Ave. on the north and W. Dickens Ave. on the south, though there’s a patch of it south of Dickens; and N. Larrabee St. on the east and N. Burling St. on the west, which is a block east of Halsted.

After strolling north on Halsted recently, I visited Oz Park. Baseball fields and tennis courts take up much of the park, and people were using them to the fullest the day I wandered by. A fair share of the park is wooded or grassy, with walking or bicycling paths snaking through. Occasionally life is a walk in the park.

Oz Park is a successful example of urban renewal. That movement gets a bad rap, and it mostly should, but there are worthwhile spots as a result.

“In the 1960s, the Lincoln Park Conservation Association approached the City of Chicago in efforts to improve the community, and the neighborhood was soon designated as the Lincoln Park Urban Renewal Area,” the Chicago Park District says.

“The urban renewal plan identified a 13 acre-site for a new park, and in 1974, the Chicago Park District acquired the land. In 1976, the park was officially named Oz Park in honor of Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919), the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Baum didn’t live in Lincoln Park, but he did live in Chicago, so close enough. Certain aspects of the park honor his work, such as the Emerald Garden.

In more recent decades, Wizard of Oz characters have come to the park, such as the Scarecrow, who’s at one of the Emerald Garden entrances.
“In the early 1990s, the Oz Park Advisory Council and the Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce commissioned artist John Kearney to create a Tin Man sculpture, installed in October 1995, the Cowardly Lion, installed in May 2001, and the 7 ft., 800 lb. cast bronze Scarecrow, installed June 2005,” the park district says. “In Spring 2007 Dorothy & Toto joined their friends in the park.”

Being first, the Tin Man is the most prominent, standing in a highly visible spot where Larabee, Webster and Lincoln Ave. meet (Lincoln’s a diagonal that passes by the northeast corner of the park).

West of the Tin Man are Dorothy and Toto, standing back a bit in the shade.
Note the Ruby Slippers, not Silver Shoes. Artist’s prerogative, I guess.

I didn’t see the Cowardly Lion, but I figured he was elsewhere was in the park. As he is.

Allerton Park Statues

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Below is an example, which I chanced across recently, of something you stop reading after only a moment. Full stop, no need to go on, or ever to think about the subject again.

Ever wonder what Daphne and Velma were up to before they met Scooby-Doo and the rest of the Mystery, Inc. gang? A new live-action…

Besides gardens, the Robert Allerton Park & Retreat Center features a number of sculptures. About 100 these days, I’ve read. Robert Allerton collected them, and when he owned the property, there were many more.

Still on display in the Walled Garden is “Girl With a Scarf,” by Lili Auer.

Near the Allerton manse are a number of works, such as this sphinx-like limestone piece, one of two near each other, created by John Joseph Borie III, the architect who designed the house.

It doesn’t count as sculpture, but nearby is a koi pond.

A little further from the house is this figure, about which I have no information.
Out on a tall pedestal between the Bulb Garden and the Peony Garden is a copy of Auguste Rodin’s “Adam.”
Further along is a place called the Avenue of the Chinese Musicians. It is an odd place.

Allerton bought the statues in England long ago.
Given the size of Allerton Park, there are plenty of other places and artworks scattered around that we didn’t get to, some with evocative names, such as Fu Dog Garden, House of the Golden Buddhas, the Sun Singer and the Death of the Last Centaur. Maybe next time.

Allerton Park Gardens

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The Robert Allerton Park & Retreat Center (and why “center”?) is an expansive place, much of it wooded. Because of high humidity last Saturday, we didn’t walk along many of the wooded paths, though I made a mental note that fall, maybe October, would be a fine time to do so.

We did take a look at some of the formal gardens. Such as the Brick Walled Garden.

We walked between the long, tall bushes leading away from the visitors center to find other gardens.

The shrubery forming the row looked like it could be part of a complex maze, but it wasn’t, since it ran in straight lines. Also, it was fairly porous.
This was called the Chinese Maze Garden, and I suppose it would be a challenge for people a foot tall.

The Bulb Garden.
The blooms were off at the Peony Garden, unfortunately. But I liked the wall next to it.
The Annual Garden was fenced in to keep deer out.
A water sprinkler was also running. I spent a refreshing few seconds under it.

The Robert Allerton Park & Retreat Center

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One of the main rewards of looking at maps is finding places you didn’t know about, interesting places that sometimes become destinations. Not too long ago, I was scanning a map of the area near Champaign, and came across the Robert Allerton Park & Retreat Center. Curious, I looked it up.

Soon, I decided that besides Arthur and Arcola, our other main east-central Illinois destination on Saturday should be Allerton, which covers more than 1,500 acres in rural Piatt County, not far from Monticello, Illinois.

Robert Allerton (1873–1964), whose father was one of the founders of the Chicago Stock Yards, and who thus inherited a fortune, set about building an English-style manor house around 1900 on land along the upper Sangamon River. A handsome house it is.

These days, the property belongs to the University of Illinois. Allerton, presumably tired of paying the taxes on it, donated it to the school in 1946. The manor house, besides being rented for events, is a conference center and not open for tours.

Too bad. But the grounds and gardens are extensive, and punctuated by sculpture from the time of Allerton. They are open, and at no charge. More about that tomorrow.

At the Tip of Manhattan

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“Charging Bull,” a 7,100-pound bronze at Broadway and Whitehall St. in Downtown Manhattan, seems even more popular than the statue of Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia, which certainly has its fans. My evidence is only anecdotal, judging by the number of people I saw around each, trying to take a picture. Rocky had a short line of people waiting to take their picture with him (in 2016, some 40 years after the movie came out).

But the Bull draws a crowd. In front of it:
Along with those eager to shoot its backside:
I was in New York City all of last week, where I met many of the editors of the company I now work for, plus writers and other staff, at an office in Downtown (Lower) Manhattan. Also during the trip, I spent time with a few old friends and their spouses, and my youngest nephew and his girlfriend. I even had a little time to walk around town, especially Downtown, which I enjoyed despite chilly air and some drizzle.

One of my walks took me to “Charging Bull,” which had its start as one of the heaviest works of guerilla art ever made, by Arturo Di Modica in the late 1980s. Now it’s a fixture on the tourist circuit, located almost as far south as you can go on the island, though not quite.

As is “Fearless Girl,” a much newer installation by Kristen Visbal, dating only from last year, and which was positioned to face the bull as an ad for an exchange-traded fund. I watched as one person after another posed with “Girl.”

Apparently Di Modica doesn’t like his work being upstaged by a little girl, but I can’t say that I much care. What’s interesting to me is their power as tourist magnets. Not many statues have that.

The statues are adjacent to a nice little park that has the distinction of being the first public park in New York, Bowling Green.
Note the fence. It rates a plaque, which says that the park was “leased in 1733 for use as a bowling green at a rental of one peppercorn a year. Patriots, who in 1776 destroyed an equestrian statue of George III which stood here, are said to have removed the crowns which capped the fence post, but the fence itself remains.”

The Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House rises over the park, roughly where Fort Amsterdam stood long ago.
The present structure dates from the early 1900s and was designed by Cass Gilbert, who’s best known for the Woolworth Building further uptown. These days, the building is home to a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian, as well as the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Off to each side of the building, allegorical figures stand above; tourists loll below.
Across State Street from the building, in Battery Park, is a curious flagpole. Officially it’s the Netherland Monument. This is the base.

According to NYC Parks: “This monumental flagstaff commemorates the Dutch establishment of New Amsterdam and the seventeenth century European settlement which launched the modern metropolis of New York City. Designed by H.A.van den Eijnde (1869-1939), a sculptor from Haarlem in the Netherlands, the monument was dedicated in 1926 to mark the tercentenary of Dutch settlement, and the purchase of the island of Manhattan from Native Americans.”

How many people crowd around the bronze bull? Dozens at a time. Around the Dutch flagpole? None. Fitting, I guess. Bulls used to get their own cults. Flagpoles, not so much.

The Dutch flag wasn’t flying on the pole.

But at least I saw New York City flag, which is based on the tricolor of the Prince’s Flag of the Dutch Republic. Not as striking as the Chicago flag, but not bad at all.

Museo Nacional de Antropologia

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Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, is also in Chapultepec Park, not too far from Castillo de Chapultepec. The park was fairly busy three days after Christmas.

Maybe the park is always busy on nice days. It’s a nice park, with a lot of recommend it, including water features.
On the other hand, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is reputedly a fairly busy one for travel within Mexico. Many residents of Mexico City leave for vacation spots on the coast, and people who live in other parts of Mexico come to the big city, so that might have added to crowds at Chapultepec Park and some of the other sites we went to.

Interestingly, the two main languages I heard in passing at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia were Spanish and American English. Not as much British English or French or German or Japanese as I’d expect in a museum of its high calibre. You can’t go into the Art Institute of Chicago on a busy day, for instance, and not overhear Frenchmen and -women or spot gaggles of Japanese in their tour groups.

Maybe August is when the Euro-tourists come in numbers to Mexico City, and the Japanese as well, during O-Bon. Or maybe Mexico City isn’t quite the draw that Mexican beaches are.

The National Museum of Anthropology is a creation of the 1960s, and looks every bit of it. The building was designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez — who also collaborated on the New Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, more about which later — Jorge Campuzano, and Rafael Mijares Alcérreca.

This is the view from the back of the sizable interior courtyard, looking at a mammoth example of modernist construction.
The hefty structure perched over the courtyard, which got me thinking about the potential for seismic activity, at least while I was standing under the thing, is known as el paraguas, the umbrella.

This is what the shaft looks like from closer up. A stone umbrella shaft.
The light was poor for photography as I stood under it; this is a better image of el paraguas, through which steady cascades of water rush to the ground. Maybe “umbrella” is a wry Mexican joke on the nation’s uneven infrastructure.

The museum’s exhibition halls surround the courtyard — 23 rooms in all, displaying a vast array of artifacts from all over the country and across millennia, including but hardly limited to such diverse peoples as Olmecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs, Mayans and of course Aztecs (please to call them the people of Mexia), whose hall has a place of prominence at the back.

The museum has possession of more than 7 million archaeological pieces and over 5 million ethnological pieces, so the best any single person, even a curious one, can hope for is an interesting sample. Such as at any mega-museum. I feel like we got a good sample, such as bones and artifacts from the Tlatilco culture, which flourished in the Valley of Mexico around 3,000 years ago.
A Cabeza Colosal of the Olmecs, 1200-600 BCE, found near Veracruz. Colossal head indeed.

Specifically, the San Lorenzo Colossal Head 2 (also known as San Lorenzo Monument 2). To quote Wiki, it “was reworked from a monumental throne. The head stands 2.69 metres (8.8 ft) high and measures 1.83 metres (6.0 ft) wide by 1.05 metres (3.4 ft) deep; it weighs 20 tons. Colossal Head 2 was discovered in 1945 when Matthew Stirling’s guide cleared away some of the vegetation and mud that covered it.

“The monument was found lying on its back, facing the sky, and was excavated in 1946 by Stirling and Philip Drucker. In 1962 the monument was removed from the San Lorenzo plateau in order to put it on display as part of “The Olmec tradition” exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1963. San Lorenzo Colossal Head 2 is currently in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.”

A sculpture from Teotihuacan featuring Mictlantecutli, god of the dead.
The people that built Teotihuacan — more about that place later, too — flourished in the early centuries of the common era, but the city was so completely abandoned 1,000 years later that even the Aztecs weren’t sure who had lived there.

Here’s clear proof that ancient Mexico was visited by space aliens, right there in the museum.
He’s wearing a space helmet, after all. What more evidence do you need, except maybe a bottle of Tang? I might be mistaken, but I think images of this very stela appeared in books and TV shows about ancient astronauts when I was a lad, a time when they were fashionable.

The idea lives on. Wrote one Paul Seaburn just last year: “So many statues, carvings, paintings and artifacts from the Mayans depict what appear to be aliens or alien spaceships, it’s hard to argue that all of them either have logical non-ET explanations or are hoaxes.”

I dunno, Paul, I don’t find it at all hard to argue the “non-ET explanations.”

Here’s El Creador, found in Morelos State and dating from the late first millennium of the common era.
Here’s a figure found at the Templo Mayor, a site that’s been excavated in recent decades at the historic center of Mexico City.
Speaking of which, I liked this model of Tenochtitlan.
Finally — among the many, many things in the Mexia (Aztec) hall, is the Mona Lisa of the museum, so to speak: The Sun Stone, famed icon of Mexico.
The Sun Stone certainly had a lot of admirers. I admired it myself. Maybe the Conquistadors did as well, since for some reason they didn’t destroy it, though the stone was eventually buried, only to be rediscovered near the end of Spanish rule, in 1790.

Much more about the Sun Stone is available online, including this article by an academic, Khristaan Villela, based in New Mexico. An artist’s interpretation of the central part of the stone is here.

“Since its rediscovery, the Calendar Stone has been displayed vertically, as if it really were a clock,” writes Villela, who refers to it as the Calendar Stone. “But the form and imagery of the sculpture closely link it to sacrificial altars, upon which the Aztec emperor, probably Moctezuma himself, ascended to sacrifice noble captives to feed the sun and earth.

“The most closely related monuments to the Calendar Stone are the Stone of Tizoc and the Stone of Moctezuma I.” Which happens to be only a few feet from the Sun Stone.

“Both are large basalt disks, with solar imagery on their upper faces,” Villela continues. “But whereas these other monuments display the conquests of Aztec rulers on the sides of their cylindrical forms, the Calendar Stone shows images related to the sky on its shallow carved side.”