The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park

Posted on July 17, 2016 by admin

The museum building of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock cantilevers over the south bank of the Arkansas River. Hope the structural engineer planned for events like the next major movement of the New Madrid Fault.On June 27, after seeing the Mount Holly Cemetery, I drove over to the presidential library by myself, not wanting to subject Ann to another museum just then. All I had to do was make it back to the hotel room in time to pack before checkout time. The facility is one of 13 presidential libraries/museums run by the National Archives and Records Administration; now I’ve been to eight of them, nine if you count the Eisenhower Library, which I’ve been told we visited when I was small.

So I know what to expect: a museum that puts the best face on whichever administration it’s about, regardless of party or historic circumstance. Keep that in mind, and no presidential library will drive you to distraction because of your opinion about this or that president. You can have fun with it, though, imagining exhibits that will never happen, such as I AM NOT A CROOK carved over the entrance of the Nixon Library or an animatronic Monica Lewinsky at the Clinton Library.

Polshek Partnership designed the property (these days, Ennead Architects), with the exhibition design by Ralph Appelbaum Associates. According to sources inside and outside the exhibit hall, the space was inspired by the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin. I haven’t seen the Long Room, but the exhibit hall of the Clinton Library certainly is long, as you’d expect looking at it from the outside.
The exhibits are a mix of photos, reading and artifacts, mostly in chronological order down the length of the second floor, and on the third floor as well, as well as in 14 alcoves detailing various events during Clinton’s terms of office. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a little hard to view a period as history when you remember it as an adult. Then again, he’s been out of office 15 years, and the early years of the Clinton administration especially are a little fuzzy, since I was still out of the country.

The blue boxes — 4,536 in all, according to the museum — contain records from the White House Office of Agency Liaison, which deals with requests to the president or first lady from the public. “The records in these blue boxes represent approximately 2-3% of the entire Clinton Library archival collection, which we estimate at approximately 80 million pages.”

Among the artifacts on display: saxophones. Jefferson had his violin, Truman had his piano, and Clinton had his sax (and I’ve read that Chet Arthur played banjo; just picturing that makes me smile).

Something unexpected on display was a Chihuly, “Crystal Tree of Light,” one of two works the artist did for White House celebrations on December 31, 1999. Always good to happen across a Chihuly.

The museum also sports a replica Oval Office, designed to look like it did in the ’90s. Every presidential museum worth its salt has an oval office. This one has the distinction of being full-sized.
The full name of the facility refers to a park as well, and indeed it includes land along the Arkansas River. Best of all: there’s a nearby former railroad bridge, fully renovated and open for pedestrian and bicycle traffic since 2011.
The Choctaw, Oklahoma & Gulf RR built the bridge in 1899. That’s a railroad I’d never heard of, and for good reason, since it was swallowed by the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific RR by 1904. After all, the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride.

It’s a fine 19th-century work of iron, but even so illuminated by large 21st-century LED lights.
By the 1990s, the 1,600-foot structure had long since passed out of service as a railroad bridge, and was going to be dismantled. Instead, the City of Little Rock took possession, to make it part of a system of trails along the Arkansas River.

The bridge offers a nice view of downtown Little Rock.
And the river.
All in all, it’s a good location for a presidential library. It isn’t crowded in by urban or suburban surroundings, like most I’ve seen, though Hoover’s is in a distinctly rural setting.

The Nashville Parthenon

Posted on July 12, 2016 by admin

Here’s my thought about Prime Day, which I’d never heard of before: I have enough stuff. I don’t need more stuff, certainly not from Amazon, unless the nonstore retail behemoth is willing to sell me (say) $20 gold pieces at face value.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen enough things, so Lincoln’s birthplace wasn’t enough in the way of monumental structures on the our trip, GTT 2016. Not at all. The very next day, we went to see the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park, after I queried Ann to make sure that she didn’t remember our visit eight years ago. This time, she will.

The Parthenon was as crowded on a Saturday morning in the summer, as you’d expect. It’s also the sort of place that inspires picture-taking.

Since it’s well known, there’s little point in detailing the history of Nashville Parthenon — its origin as a temporary plaster building at the Tennessee Centennial Expo in 1897; the permanent sandstone replacement in the 1920s; and the addition of the monumental statue of Athena inside in 1990. But I will add something the late Dr. Ned Nabors told me — told the class I was in — about the columns.

Each of the columns in the original Parthenon leans slightly inward, to give the appearance of being straight. That too is a well-known feature. If the columns were magically extended upward, they would converge about a mile and a half in the sky. Thus each column in the original was slightly different; each was carved to be unique.

In modern times, such uniqueness would be painfully expensive, so the columns of the Nashville Parthenon are exactly alike. To achieve the lean, the floor under part of each column is raised slightly. But enough to be apparent if you look down at the bases of the columns. Besides the building material, that’s one of the main differences between the original and the one in Nashville. (And that no one’s used Nashville’s to store gunpowder yet.)

Alan LeQuire’s Athena Parthenos, 42 feet tall and brightly painted, as the Greeks no doubt did saw her, commands the temple’s naos.

She inspires poses.

We also spent some time in the Parthenon’s lower level, looking at its collection of paintings, and the exhibit about the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. The expo celebrated the centenary of Tennessee’s 1796 statehood, though held in 1897 (like the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a year after the anniversary). Fittingly, the site of the expo later became Centennial Park.

Ilene Jones Cornwell writes: “The Centennial Exposition, held May 1 through October 30, 1897, was ‘essentially a fair on a grand scale,’ wrote A. W. Crouch and H. D. Claybrook in Our Ancestors Were Engineers. Attractions included 12 large buildings featuring exhibits on the commercial, industrial, agricultural, and educational interests of the state; a ‘midway’ including Egyptian, Cuban, and Chinese villages; a ‘Giant See-saw’ designed by local engineer and steel fabricator Arthur J. Dyer; Venetian gondoliers on newly created Lake Watauga; a Venetian Rialto bridge designed by local architect C. A. Asmus; parades and ‘sham battles’ by the Tennessee Militia; fireworks and other entertainment; and a 250-foot flag staff designed by E. C. Lewis. Major Lewis also had conceived the idea to create a replica of the 5th century B. C. Athenian Parthenon to house the art exhibit, then commissioned local architect W. C. Smith to make the needed drawings….

“After the Exposition closed, all buildings except the Parthenon were torn down and removed. The success of the Exposition, as well as the progressive movement of the late 19th century to establish public parks, planted the seed for Nashville’s park system. In 1901 Mayor James Head appointed five men, one of whom was Major E. C. Lewis, to the new Board of Park Commissioners. Negotiations were begun by the city in early 1902 with the owners of the 72-acre Centennial Park to purchase the land for a permanent city park. After months of complicated offers and counter-offers, described in The Parks of Nashville, Nashville Railway and Light Company purchased Centennial Park and its title was presented to the city park board on December 22, 1902.”

Even by about 11 that morning, it was too hot to spend much time wandering around Centennial Park, which was too bad, since there are a variety of other things there besides the Parthenon.

Such as a large locomotive that the park has — and how many locomotives are there in public parks? Must be a web site or guide book about that, but I’m too lazy to find it. But not too lazy to look up the Centennial Park locomotive: a Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis 4-8-4.

Also, I either never noticed, or had forgotten, the Robertson monument, which is a freestanding column. It isn’t far from the Parthenon, so we walked by it.
Cornwell again: “When negotiations had begun to purchase the Centennial land, [Major Lewis] purchased the 50-foot granite shaft for $200, then his fellow-commissioner Samuel A. Champion ‘resolved that it be erected in the park as a monument to the memory of James Robertson.’ Lewis also purchased the flat-stone base for $10 in 1903 to remain beside Lake Watauga as a memorial to the Centennial Exposition. A new granite base was needed to support the heavy shaft after its relocation, but no record has yet been found of the base’s creator or its procurement. Wherever the massive base originated, Johnson described the monument’s creation in The Parks of Nashville: ‘With a tripod made of three large oak logs and block and tackle, Major Lewis raised the shaft into position and then constructed the foundation beneath it.’ The granite shaft and its base weigh a total of 52.5 tons.”

Robertson, the “Father of Tennessee,” co-founded Nashville with John Donelson in 1779. For a moment I thought he and his wife might be buried there in the park, but then I remembered seeing his grave some years ago at the Nashville City Cemetery, where many early Tennesseans not named Andrew Jackson repose (he’s at the Hermitage).

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park

Posted on July 11, 2016 by admin

“Where are we going?”

“Lincoln’s birthplace,” I told Ann on the morning of June 24 as we left Elizabethtown, Ky. “It’s about 10 miles off the Interstate. Bet his parents were glad to have a place near the highway.”

Ha, ha, Dad, was the reaction.

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park is in fact about 10 miles east of I-65, a roadway built much later than the Lincolns’ cabin or even the monumental building erected on the site 100 years later, with its groundbreaking on February 12, 1909. TR was there that day to wield the ceremonial trowel, which is now on exhibit at the visitors center.

So is a statue of the Lincoln family. It includes the only depiction that I’ve seen of toddler Abraham Lincoln, with his parents and older sister Sarah. John Russell Pope, who also lived long enough to do the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, and a good many other things, designed the birthplace memorial.
“Built on the knoll above the sinking spring where many believe the Lincoln cabin originally stood, the Memorial Building at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park was constructed between 1909 and 1911 in an effort by the Lincoln Farm Association to commemorate the life and accomplishments of the sixteenth President of the United States and to protect his ‘birth cabin,’ ” notes the NPS.

“Pope’s design of the building included many symbolisms related to Abraham Lincoln, including fifty-six steps leading up to the building to represent the fifty-six years of Lincoln’s life. Sixteen windows in the building and sixteen rosettes on the interior ceiling are there to remind visitors that Lincoln was the sixteenth president.”

Inside is the fake Lincoln cabin.
Haven’t got an historic relic? Make one that looks right, especially during the late 19th century, when touring exhibits were a way to make money. (Read about promoter Alfred Dennett and the fake cabin here.) According to the NPS, the structure now characterized as a cabin that “honors” the original. Sure, why not – and besides, the faking of the cabin was so long ago (1890s) that it too is of historic interest.

Up the road (US 31E) from the monument a bit is Lincoln Boyhood Home, which is only a few structures, all re-creations, but none made of marble or granite. From there, of course, the Lincolns moved to Mississippi and Abraham grew up to be a leader of the Confederacy… no, that was Jefferson Davis, also a Kentucky boy born in the early 1800s. Geography is destiny? I’m not smart enough to know.

Hodgenville, Ky., which is between the birthplace and boyhood home, does what it can to make passersby stop for a little Lincoln at the local “museum,” which mostly seemed like a gift shop. Also, the town traffic circle has a statue of an adult Lincoln and a boy Lincoln.

One more thing I saw on US 31E, south of the birthplace: a ghost sign on the side of a barn that said SEE ROCK CITY. If I’d been able to pull off to the side of the road at that moment, I would have, to take a picture (and baffle Ann). It was not to be. But it was there.

The 606 in ’16

Posted on June 20, 2016 by admin

On Saturday we went to the city for a few hours. Yuriko went to a cake-making class offered by a woman she knows who lives near Humboldt Park. I was the driver, since it’s complicated to get there by train and bus, and driving in the city unnerves her.

As it should, with cars everywhere, parked and in motion, operated by sometimes careless or aggressive drivers and often closer than you think; delivery trucks blocking the way; road construction crews doing likewise — though the rough surfaces and potholes never seem to go away; buses acting as if they own the road; bicyclists passing between you and parked cars suddenly and with inches to spare; random pedestrians all over the place, a few with no sense; people opening their car doors in front of you without warning, emerging onto the street (some with children in tow); large intersections without the benefit of turning signals; and stretches of street being resurfaced, but not completed just yet, which on a dry June day raises clouds of dust through which you must pass.

Then there’s the matter of parallel parking. Yuriko doesn’t care for it. A lot of people would say the same. I never knew how to do it until I moved to Chicago in the late ’80s. Then I learned it well. It’s an essential skill for owning a car in the city. I also learned what to expect driving in a place like Chicago. Or New York or Boston or Washington DC or Atlanta or Miami or Dallas or Los Angeles or Seattle — all harrowing in their own sweet ways.

I’ll say one good thing about driving in Chicago, though: it’s easy to know roughly where you are all the time. The streets mostly form a grid, with major streets at regular intervals, and just about every street, even the most minor, marked with an easy-to-see, well-placed and legible street sign. Not every city has such luxuries, and I mean you, Boston.

With Yuriko at her cake class, I had a couple of hours to kick around in the late morning. The Puerto Rican Festival in Humboldt Park, Fiestas Puertorriqueñas, was slated to start at noon, as evidenced by people carrying the commonwealth’s well designed flag into the park and the flag being flown by a lot of passing cars. Here’s a vendor selling some.Since the event wasn’t actually under way, I went elsewhere. I visited St. Mary of the Angels church about 20 blocks to the east, taking a North Avenue bus, and then walking back, partly on the 606, the same linear park we visited on its opening day a little more than a year ago.

This time I saw a bit more of the trail’s eastern end, though not quite to the east terminus. At around 11 am in mid-June, the sun is high and the trail very warm. Temps were in the upper 80s F. That didn’t keep people away.
I was glad to see that the landscaping on the edges is now more lush than a year ago. Also, development of the land nearby continues apace.I also noticed that the trail is short on shade. Most of the year, that wouldn’t matter, but in summer it’s important. Even the trailside parks weren’t particularly shady. At Park 567, where the trail crosses over Milwaukee Ave., there were only three or four spots under trees offering any significant shade. I was lucky enough to be able to sit by myself in one sizable pool of shade, though I would have shared the space if anyone had asked.

I got a look at the trail’s first art installation, the serpentine “Brick House,” by a sculptor named Chakaia Booker.I’ll consider the title whimsical, since no bricks are involved, or any obvious connection to the song celebrating feminine pulchritude. It’s made of stainless steel and recycled tire rubber. Put in last fall, the piece attracts children, who instantly want to climb it.I would have spent more time on the trail, but I’d forgotten a hat (though not water). The shade, provided by mature trees, is better on many of Chicago’s neighborhood streets, so after about a half mile, I walked the rest of the way on small streets, as well as along North Ave., whose buildings also provided shade at that time of the day, at least on the south side of the street. I’m not the devil-may-care teen I used to be, who sometimes walked miles in clear 90-plus degree weather in San Antonio or Austin.

The Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park

Posted on June 7, 2016 by admin

In 2003, close to the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Wrights’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, Patrick Jonsson noted in the Christian Science Monitor that “the choice of location unwittingly sparked a quarrel over the genesis of manned flight: Was this barrier island near the town of Kitty Hawk merely a stepping-off point for an idea hatched in Ohio — or part of the very inspiration of flight?

“For its part, North Carolina boldly stated its claim a few years ago with license plates that boasted ‘First in Flight.’ It was followed by Ohio’s ‘Birthplace of Aviation’ claim a few years later. And in the late 1990s, North Carolina again moved first to put the flyer on its state quarter, taking a lot of oomph out of Ohio’s ‘Pioneers of Flight’ motto.

“But in the 100th year of flight both states have put rivalry aside, realizing the skies could not have been cleaved without the benefits of both locales.

” ‘In Dayton, they proved that powered flight was practical; at Kitty Hawk, they proved that it was possible,’ says Bob Petersen, a park ranger at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.”

The national historical park is scattered around greater Dayton, including a Wright Brothers-Paul Dunbar museum (pictured below) along with one of the brothers’ bicycle shops; the Huffman Prairie Flying Field; an aviation exhibit at a open air museum in Dayton; Paul Laurence Dunbar’s house; and Orville’s mansion after aviation made him wealthy. We only had time and energy for the Wright-Dunbar museum and the Wright bicycle shop, which are on Williams St. west of downtown Dayton.
The focus of the museum, at least when it comes to the Wrights, is less about them as aviators, and more about their pre-Flyer lives growing up in Dayton, including other members of their family that aren’t well known, such as sister Katharine and brother Lorin.

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s exhibits were interesting mainly because I didn’t know much about him. Seems like he had a fine ear for verse, and literary success in spite of the misery of being a black man in the 1890s. He’s also called an influence on Langston Hughes. I’m no expert, but after reading some of Dunbar’s poems, I can see the point.

This is the debt I pay
Just for one riotous day,
Years of regret and grief,
Sorrow without relief.

Pay it I will to the end
Until the grave, my friend,
Gives me a true release
Gives me the clasp of peace.

Slight was the thing I bought,
Small was the debt I thought,
Poor was the loan at best
God! but the interest!

— “The Debt,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

The museum also features exhibits about the Wright printing business and then their bicycle shops. Lest we forget, the nation was in the grip of a bicycle craze in the 1890s, and for good reason: in a world of horse-drawn vehicles, it was a great new way to get around.

The re-created bicycle shop is next to the Wright-Dunbar museum, in the original building, which just barely escaped demolition.
It’s the only Wright bicycle shop location left in Dayton. Another one — they operated more than one over their career in bicycles — is now at Greenfield Village in Michigan, and the sites of one or two more have been demolished in the last 100-plus years.

Inside are artifacts such as bicycles and a lot of bicycle parts, photos, and more. Remarkable how familiar an early safety bicycle looks. Basic bike design hasn’t changed that much.

The Rio Grande Rift

Posted on April 24, 2016 by admin

Our first trip after Y2K didn’t end civilization as we know it was to San Antonio and then Santa Fe, by way of some other places in New Mexico, in April 2000. Those other places included Albuquerque, Madrid, NM and Bandelier National Monument and Los Alamos.

Here’s a roadside view of the Rio Grande as it runs through New Mexico. It isn’t an international border at this point, but is an unusual land form nevertheless.

I didn’t realize until much more recently that I was looking down at a rift. Or that, to quote the various scientists who put together this page about the rift, “most rifts are found along mid-ocean ridges. Only a few are located on land, such as the Rio Grande Rift, East African Rift (sometimes referred to as the Great Rift) and Lake Baikal, a lake-filled rift in Russia.”

I’m not exactly sure where the overlook was, but my guess would be along New Mexico 4 just outside of the national monument, and looking over the river into another section of the monument. Note the haze in the distance. That’s probably one of the controlled burns occurring when we visited. Soon, as in the very next month, a controlled burn became uncontrolled.

This is New Mexico 4, probably looking the other way from the outlook.

This is Lilly. A lot of the pictures I took on that trip involved her. Call it the first-child photography syndrome, though she was two and a half by this time.

She’s at breakfast in the place we stayed in Santa Fe. The reason we documented that particular moment (I think) was that we weren’t entirely sure she’d behave during breakfast — that is, stay seated and eat her food without much fuss. But she did. I guess she was just then learning to appreciate the joys of breakfasts on the road.

The Nicholas Conservatory & Gardens

Posted on April 17, 2016 by admin

As a destination from the northwestern suburbs of Chicago, Rockford has a number of advantages. For one thing, it isn’t that far. It’s easy to drive there, visit one place at least, maybe eat a meal, and then come home. But it’s far enough not to be in the northwestern suburbs. There are still wide-open farm fields between here and there, and some smaller towns. Someday metro Chicago and metro Rockford might well conurb, to make up a verb, but that hasn’t happened yet.

None of that would matter if there weren’t a few interesting places to see in Rockford, but there are. Such as the Klehm Arboretum, a fine warm-weather destination, or the Anderson Gardens. The Rock River is also worth a look, with its various pedestrian-oriented amenities.

I wrote in 2003 about our visit to the riverside, “We drove a short ways north of downtown, looking for a more expansive park at which to finish off the afternoon. We found it on the other (west) bank of the Rock River, at the Sinnissippi Gardens and Park, which had a greenhouse that was already closed…”

These days, the greenhouse is permanently closed. It was replaced by the Nicholas Conservatory, which opened in 2011. I’d read about its development and opening, but didn’t get around to taking a look at it until Saturday, when we drove to Rockford exactly for that reason. Saturday, April 16, 2016 here in northern Illinois was as warm and pleasant as a spring day can be, the complete opposite of only a week earlier, the miserable cold April 9. That was an impetus to go.

We weren’t disappointed by views of the Rock River (more lyrically, the Sinnissippi River) from near the new conservatory. People were out along the riverside trail, but not a throng of them.

Waterfowl were out too.
A stone’s throw from the river — if you’re inclined toward that kind of mischief — is the conservatory.
The facility’s web site is a little thin on facts, but it does say that it’s “the third largest conservatory in Illinois, offering an 11,000-square-foot plant exhibition area complete with water features, seating areas, and sculptures, all in a tropical plant setting.”

I’d guess that the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the Garfield Park Conservatory, both in Chicago, are both larger — I’m fairly certain of that — but whatever its relative size, the Nicholas Conservatory is an elegant construction, and LEED Gold besides. More about its creation here.

Denman Estate Park

Posted on March 22, 2016 by admin

Last year I was looking at a Google Maps map of San Antonio and noticed an odd green blob tucked away in a neighborhood just northwest of the junction of I-10 and Loop 410, an area not too far from where I grew up, but not within my usual orbits. Higher resolution revealed that it was called Denman Estate Park. What?

“The City of San Antonio purchased 12.52 acres of land from the estate of philanthropist Gilbert Denman Jr. in 2007 at a cost of $2,561,081,” the city’s web site says, with a cost-precision sometimes found in public documents. “An adjacent 7.70 acres were purchased by the University of [the] Incarnate Word. In 2010, Gilbert Denman Jr. Estate Park, 7735 Mockingbird Lane, opened as a jointly used park and a retreat center for UIW.

“Park amenities include a 0.5-mile walking trail, labyrinth, picnic benches and tables, parking, fencing and lighting. It also features a monument hand-built in Gwangju, Korea, by Korean craftsmen and artists who traveled to San Antonio to assemble it. The City and UIW entered into a joint use agreement in which UIW maintains the property and uses the buildings as a retreat center.”

I knew had to take a look at that. I finally did so when I had a few free hours in San Antonio during my most recent visit. I arrived in the early afternoon, parked my car, and found the short path to the park’s small pond, which also has a path all the way around it. The hand-built “monument,” on the banks of the pond, is a striking little structure — especially for being in South Texas — in a nice setting.

“Pavilion” is a better word for it in English, and in fact that’s the word a nearby plaque uses.

“This pavilion is a replica of the traditional Korean pavilion style of the southern provinces,” the plaque says. “The pavilion, traditionally used as a place of reflection and reception by scholars and gentlemen, embodies the beauty and harmony created by nature and structure.

“It is hoped that this ‘Pavilion of Gwangju’ will offer many opportunities to strengthen the friendly relationship between Gwangju and San Antonio, as well as inspire an in-depth understanding of Korean culture and traditions by the American public.”

A noble sentiment, but I have a feeling K-pop reaches more Americans than other kinds of Korean culture and traditions. The pavilion seems to have been a gift from Gwangju to San Antonio. It isn’t clear whether Gilbert Denman himself had anything to do with its placement, since the structure was dedicated in 2010, six years after his death.

The pond was partly ringed with cypress trees with a vast number of cypress “knees” — the woody bumps that emerge near the base of the trees — a term I just learned.

Elsewhere on the property is the former Denman manse (I assume), which is closed to casual visitors. No doubt the university uses for events and rents it for weddings and the like.

Not far from the house is “AMA Maria,” a mermaid sculpture with strategically placed flowing hair, a fish tail, and human legs.

Oddly enough, the plaque on the base of the statue also includes its latitude and longitude to six decimal places: LAT. 29.467831 LON. -98.467490. Turns out there are a fair number of these statues in various parts of the world, including three others in Texas. It was something I’d absolutely never heard of before.

A site called mermaidsofearth.com tells us that “the Amaryllis Art for Charity project is placing AMA mermaid statues all over the world, with each mermaid statue uniquely made and customized for its location… The statues are for sale, with about one third of the proceeds dedicated to a charity jointly chosen by the project organizers and the local sponsors.”

It isn’t clear from that whether the statues are for sale in situ or whether they’re bought and put in places like Denham Estate Park. Never mind, there’s one there now. More about it is here.

Finally, who was Gilbert Denman Jr. (1921-2004)? A handy obit published by the Porter-Loring Funeral Home in San Antonio offers a few details about his charmed life, which included being born to a wealthy family and presumably doing well himself as a prominent attorney in San Antonio. Like Robert L.B. Tobin, he was also a notable local philanthropist.

One of his many acts of philanthropy, according to the obit, involved donating “his extensive collection of Greek and Roman artifacts to the San Antonio Museum of Art. The collection, among the finest of its type in the nation, is housed in the Denman Gallery of the Ewing Halsell Wing at the museum.”

The good people of San Antonio are clearly better for his Antiquities collection. I will be better for it, once I get around to visiting the San Antonio Museum of Art again sometime. It’s been a long time since I’ve been there, since the late ’80s at the latest, before the creation of the Denman Gallery in 1990. The big deal exhibit the last time I remember being there was Nelson Rockefeller’s large collection of Latin American folk art, which arrived as a permanent part of the museum’s collection in the mid-80s.

Lady Bird Lake, Austin

Posted on March 20, 2016 by admin

Just for grins the other day, I let Google suggest a second word for “Austin.” This is what I got.

Austin and Ally
Austin Butler
Austin Rivers
Austin Mahone
Austin Texas
Austin Powers
Austin Peay
Austin Weather

Austin and Ally is apparently a Disney Channel show that I’ve had the good luck never to have heard of, much less seen. Austin Powers I’ve heard of, but I’m pretty sure I can live the rest of my life and not regret missing all of the movies featuring that character, and Austin Peay is the school. At least the city and the weather are on the list. The others? Eh.

“Austin skyline” should be on the list. Seeing the Austin skyline in 2016 is like seeing a child again after a few years, when you think (or say), “My, how you’ve grown.” Here’s a view of the Austin skyline in early March 2016, seen from the south shore of Lady Bird Lake, which I still think of as Town Lake.
Lady Bird Lake isn’t particularly old, created only in 1960 by the damming of the Colorado River as a means of flood control. It also happens to be a conveniently located public amenity, owned by the public in the form of the City of Austin.

Lady Bird Johnson didn’t want the lake renamed in her honor while she was still alive, even though she’d been instrumental in beautifying the shores of the lake in the 1970s, as well as creating a recreational trail system near the lake. As soon as she’d passed in 2007 (has it been that long ago?), the city renamed the lake. I don’t object to that like I do the “Willis Tower” — Lady Bird clearly deserves the honor — I just thought of it as Town Lake for so long that it’s the first thing that comes to me, recalling earlier walks along its shores, and a canoe ride on it years ago in the company of a high school friend.

March 5, 2016, was an excellent day for a walk along Lady Bird Lake: warm but not too warm, in the presence of other recreational walkers and joggers and cyclists, but not too many.

Being a warm Saturday afternoon, the lake was alive with human-powered boats of various kinds, including some racing shells, and people renting watercraft at lake’s edge.

Tom and I were feeling too middle-aged for that kind of excursion, but we did start our walk on the south shore just west of the Congress Street Bridge. Officially, it’s the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge, named for the governor of Texas of that name, though I don’t know if anyone uses the name any more than the Queensboro Bridge is called the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.

Not the most elegant bridge, but it is famed in tourist lore as the home to many, many bats, the majority of which emerge at dusk to fly off to do whatever it is that bats do by night (eat bugs and fight crime, maybe).

I’ve never seen the spectacle myself. Looking up at the underside of the bridge, Tom informed me that the bats probably haven’t returned from wintering in Mexico, but when they’re in residence, they live beneath the road deck in gaps between the concrete structures. Wiki at least asserts that it’s the world’s largest urban bat colony, numbering 750,000 and 1.5 million when the bats are in town, a variation in estimate that points to the natural difficulties of a bat census.

It’s possible to walk all the way around the lake on the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail, another name that few probably use. Of course Tom and I did no such thing, but we did go a considerable way, making it past the I-35 Bridge, including a walk over the trail’s Boardwalk, completed only in 2014.

The Trail Foundation tells us that “due to many issues, including private property holdings and topography, there was a 1.1-mile gap in the Trail at Lady Bird Lake, the 10-mile hub in Austin’s hub-and-spoke system of trails. Along this gap, users previously had to divert onto the narrow sidewalk and travel along busy Riverside Drive, crossing 35 busy business entrances and other points of conflict… to travel east or west and use the south side of the Trail.”

Studies were done, votes cast, money raised, plans made, and eventually the metal-railed boardwalk over the lake (but near the shore) was created as a public-private effort. Many good things are done that way. And should be.

Austin’s fortunate to have such a fine place to take a stroll.

Spring Valley Winter

Posted on January 25, 2016 by admin

On Friday, I went for a walk in a place I don’t usually visit in the winter, because I happened to be driving by: Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary, though sometimes I go as northern Illinois is emerging from winter.

The recent snows have been modest, but enough to cover the trails and the ground.

In about four months, this same view of thick bushes along the trail will be a mass of green as dense as any in more torrid zones.
It was also time to document Doc Baker’s stone, also along the trail, put there in 2002. One of his life’s achievements was the founding of the Rotary Club of Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates. I have nothing bad to say about the Rotarians. The fellow who hired me for my first job in Chicago in ’87 was a Rotarian, and occasionally we had lunch at Rotary Club 1, which was on Michigan Ave. at the time.
Doc Baker seems to have been well liked. Good for him.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Parks