Ty Warner Park

Posted on January 22, 2023 by admin

As Januaries go, this one has been fairly mild so far. Some days of rain, though we got a little snow early this morning that partly melted during the day. No blast of cold air is predicted for tomorrow, but there will be a deeper chill soon enough.

Two years ago, we took a walk in Bemis Woods, which displayed more snow then than it would this year. On the way home, we stopped at Ty Warner Park in Westmont. I can’t remember why. Just feeling nostalgic, I guess, since we used to take small children to play there, and in more recent years, return for the July 4 fireworks.

Ty Warner, as in the Beanie Baby billionaire, who once had his HQ in Westmont and who made a sizable donation to help create the park.

Our personal nostalgia really kicked in at the spray park and the play trains. The girls enjoyed both, though typically in the summer.

I’d forgotten the gazebo.

Shows you how old I’m getting. How could I forget the gazebo?

Beaver Pond

Posted on December 12, 2022 by admin

Chilly outside today but no wind at all, so stepping outside is like entering a really large walk-in refrigerator. Temps were a little warmer on Saturday, when I used Google Maps to scout out someplace to walk. Someplace neither near nor far, and new. I have my standards.

By mid-afternoon, we were at Beaver Pond, a unit of the Bartlett Park District.

About a mile around and flat.

Good spot for an easy walk. The trail doesn’t actually dip into the pond, as on the map. I think that’s where a small fishing platform juts into the water, accessible by the trail.

“Water collects here from a 1.5 sq. mile area of streets, residential properties and undeveloped areas,” says the only sign along the trail. So the place might be named for river-dwelling rodents — none of whom were in evidence on Saturday — but it’s really a detention pond.

Still, a nice trail. Sports spots of grassland.

Houses ring the park, with non-marked lot lines, though I’m sure the property owners and park district know where they are. Some homeowners decorated their patch for Christmas. Such as with an epic-sized snowman.

Sure, top hats are the custom among the snowfolk. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see a snowman wearing something else occasionally? Bowlers can have as much magic in them as top hots, Frosty.

Santa says, Ho ho ho. What, I wonder, do snowmen say for the holidays? Nothing. Climate change got ’em.

Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta

Posted on November 9, 2022 by admin

Remarkably, the election seems to have been anticlimactic. So far, anyway. Probably the best outcome to be hoped for, two sumo wrestlers huffing noisily to a draw. I did my little part, voting about two hours before the polls closed, because it had been a busy day at work, and every time I considered voting early during the last few weeks, I thought, nah.

Even more remarkably, we had lunch on the deck today. This evening at about 8, I sat out there in a light jacket under the waning moon and Jupiter high in the sky, and comfortably drank tea and ate a banana-flavored Choco Pie.

For anyone who’s interested, the International Olympic Committee created a report called “Over 125 years of Olympic venues: post-Games Use.” I can’t speak to the organization’s exact motives in producing such a document, but it seems to be a way to assert that most host cities weren’t stuck with too many white elephants after the Games.

Maybe so. The report notes that of the permanent venues used in both Summer and Winter Games from 1896 to 2018 — there were 817 all together — 85 percent are still in use. Many of those, if not most, already existed when the Games came to town, however.

Those 15 percent of unused venues are what tend to get attention. Or rather, a fraction of them.

“Of the 15 per cent of permanent venues not in use (124 venues), the majority (88 venues) were unbuilt or demolished for a variety of reasons,” the report says, using that charming British style for spelling out % and unbuilt as a verb.

“Some had reached the end of their life, some were destroyed during war periods or in accidents, while others were replaced by new urban development projects or were removed for lack of a business model. The remaining venues not in use are closed or abandoned (36 venues).”

Those last ones would be fodder for urban explorers and editorialists who want to discuss the deleterious impact of the Games on urban spaces. Tellingly, the report notes that Los Angeles isn’t going to build any new venues for ’28.

“The ‘radical reuse’ concept also applies to the training facilities and the Athletes’ Village,” it says.

Guess the IOC is going to have to live with the fact that cities are now hesitant to build spiffy new facilities that mostly benefit the IOC.

Here are photos of some of those abandoned sites. The ones that surprise me are the abandoned swimming pool and amphitheater from the ’36 Games. Sure, those were the Nazi Olympics, but the main stadium has been maintained by a more benevolent German government, why not the pool?

I took a look at that stadium — Olympiastadion — during a walkabout in West Berlin in 1983. That’s only one of two former Olympic sites that I can remember visiting. The other was a facility for the 1976 Montreal Games, the Centre Aquatique, where we went swimming in 2002.

I had these places in mind when I strolled through Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta. Its origins are on display.

The 21-acre park actually isn’t listed in the IOC report, because no sporting activity took place there. Rather, it was intended to be a gathering spot for visitors and spectators, and then a city park once the Games were over, and so it is. A pleasant place to wander on a warm weekend morning.

The park includes green space.

Water features and plazas.

Some structures left over from ’96.

Sculpture from that same year.

“Tribute” by Greek artist Peter Calaboyias, depicting (right to left) an ancient Olympic athlete, a participant in the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, and an Atlanta Games participant.

Poor old Richard Jewell has a memorial too.

Dedicated only in 2021. About time, I’d say.

Lincoln Park Zoo ’22

Posted on September 23, 2022 by admin

Back in 1984, I took a trip to Chicago from Nashville for the Labor Day weekend. That was the first place I ever went after getting a full-time job. I stayed with my friend Rich, whose apartment was in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, where one could live comfortably just out of college.

That’s how long ago it was. Lincoln Park was then emerging from decades as — not full-blown slum, but maybe the St. Charles Place-States Avenue-Virginia Avenue of Chicago, so rents were still relatively affordable. Those days are long over.

During that visit, Rich suggested we go to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which we did. I’ve visited periodically over the decades since then, and always like it. Zoos can be much more than places to take your kids, though they are that too.

The animals, of course, are the prime attraction. Such as the great apes. This one’s a little hard to spot.

Another of his troop was indoors. He was easier to see. Well, if you were up front.

Some Père David’s deer. Native to China, they just barely escaped extinction by being bred in European zoos.

Flamingos. Lots of flamingos. Some sources say the collective is a flamboyance of flamingos, others say a stand.

I also like some of the zoo buildings, such the Kovler Lion House, outside and in.

No lions were to be seen that morning, however. Guess they were taking cat naps out of sight.

A concession stand.

But it’s got style.

A Summery September Saturday in Lincoln Park

Posted on September 19, 2022 by admin

I can’t let International Talk Like A Pirate Day pass without a mention, as I have for so many years. Somehow, that would be wrong. There’s a place in the world for silly days. So here’s a public domain image for the occasion.

“The Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard, 1718” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1920). He’s an American artist I wasn’t familiar with until recently. He’s been mostly forgotten, his style considered outdated.

Summer in its mildest form lingers here in northern Illinois: bright days, little wind, puffy clouds, temps that let you forget whether the air is hot or cold. Good for going out for a long walk (Saturday) or staying at home and sleeping late and then lounging on the deck (Sunday) and reading and watching various bits of visual entertainment.

The Saturday walk was through Lincoln Park in Chicago, from the southern edge northward, along the boardwalk and into the zoo, and back again along the ridge that used to be the lakeshore. I also passed through a crowd at a farmers’ market.

Been a while since my last visit. That too was a late summer stroll.

This time, Yuriko was at her cake class making this —

— which is every bit as good as it looks.

Meanwhile, I took a bus east to Lincoln Park, crown jewel of the Chicago Park District and home to fields and paths and trees and shrubs.

But there’s no forgetting the surrounding city.

I didn’t seek out monuments this visit. The park is dotted with them, as much in the background as the tree canopy or bushy undergrowth for most people, who are missing messages in bottles from the past.

I did pause at Hans Christian Andersen, whose bronze dates from 1896. It gave the impression that he was enjoying the shade.

“The Hans Christian Andersen Monument Association [local Danes] commissioned John Gelert to produce the sculpture,” park district says. “A Danish immigrant, John Gelert (1852–1923) arrived in Chicago in 1887, receiving his first commission for the Haymarket Riot Monument two years later.

“Gelert portrayed the children’s author sitting with a book in hand and a swan at his feet, alluding to his world-famous story, ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ The artist explained that ‘he had the advantage of studying several good photographs of Andersen taken at various times in his life.’

“Gelert displayed the Hans Christian Andersen Monument along with his now-missing Beethoven Portrait Bust at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. (Installed in Lincoln Park in 1897, the Beethoven bust was stolen in 1970.)”

Elsewhere, in the shade of the Schiller statue, in fact, a small brass band did some tunes al fresco.

On the whole, the walk was good.

As I saw printed on the side of a truck parked on a street running through the park.

Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve, Again

Posted on September 7, 2022 by admin

On Monday, which was like a Sunday in terms of work schedules, we took a walk at the Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve in Palatine, a not-too-far-away suburb.

We’ve been here before, I told Yuriko.

We have?

I couldn’t remember exactly when (till I looked it up), but I knew that we had — and we’d seen guys playing Frisbee golf there. Besides a walking trail, the preserve includes a disc golf course. It still does.

Something I noticed this time that I never did before: the players were all carrying bags with more than one disc inside. Maybe a half dozen discs. Like a golfer has different clubs, a — disc-er? — has different discs for different shots? Must be.

We didn’t go to toss discs, but just to walk.

And read a bit.

Gold is a prime color of late summer.

This little memorial, under a tree, looked fairly new.

This Tony Esposito? Probably so, considering his long tenure with the Chicago Blackhawks.

Amble in Lords Park, Elgin

Posted on July 18, 2022 by admin

Rain fell overnight on Friday and into the wee hours of Saturday, which re-greened the grass some. It’s been dry enough so that I haven’t mowed in a few weeks, but now it looks like my bourgeois householder impulses (as spotty as they can be) are going to kick in, and I’ll be out there some late afternoon soon, adjusting the height of the grass.

But not yet. After the rain, Saturday was warm and a little steamy, but that didn’t keep us from popping out to Elgin for a lunch from Gabuttø Burger, and then a visit to Lords Park in that same suburb. It’s been a few years since our last visit to the place, whose contour rolls slightly and that the city keeps manicured.

The 108 acres of the park are lush green in July, after recent rains and a rainy spring.

One of the park’s distinctions is a small zoo, which has existed in one form or another as long as the park — over 100 years. Once upon a time, that included a bear pit, but that kind of animal display has mostly disappeared. The zoo doesn’t have bears at all these days. Except for some large examples, it’s mostly farm animals these days.

No dogs allowed in the zoo — we brought ours on this particular trip — so we didn’t go in. Still, you can see a number of the animals by walking around the perimeter, including some buffalo and elk, besides a few farm animals.

We took a stroll around the park’s large pond.

At one of the benches under some shade, we saw a family dressed in Sunday clothes, with perhaps another relative or a family friend taking portraits. A young man and woman, with what looked like twin girls, maybe three or four years old. For some of the pictures, the visibly pregnant woman held a set of sonograms in front of her.

At least two quinceañeras and a wedding seemed to be under way. That is, we saw more than one cluster of people dressed for those kinds of occasions, out and about with photographers.

The actual celebrations were probably in the Pavilion, a handsome structure erected in 1898 to replace a structure that had burned down after only a few months in existence. The earlier building had gone up shortly after local landowners (George and Mary Lord) gave the land for the park to the city.

We didn’t go inside — events were going on, after all, and we had a dog. The City of Elgin notes in its web site: “The elegant Pavilion features a Victorian banquet facility with hardwood floors, vaulted ceilings, picket doors, large windows with scenic park views, a covered wrap-around porch, and outdoor ceremony grounds with ponds, fountains and wooden bridge.”

Well, we did see the “ceremony grounds,” as pictured above. I don’t know that I’d call Lords Park a hidden treasure, exactly, but it is obscure (unless you live nearby) and a good spot to amble.

Lindenwood Cemetery & Johnny Appleseed Park

Posted on July 12, 2022 by admin

I didn’t see the grave of Art Smith in Fort Wayne early this month. I wasn’t looking for it, because I’d never heard of Art Smith. Only after reading about Lindenwood Cemetery a few days ago, and some time after I visited there, did I find out about him.

Along with a fun pic.

Art Smith, early aviator, Bird Boy of Fort Wayne. In 1915, he took Lincoln Beachey’s job as a exhibition pilot at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, after Beachey carked it in San Francisco Bay. Smith himself had a date with aerial death, but that was later, while flying the mail in 1926. He’s been at Lindenwood ever since.

An aside to that aside. According to Wiki at least, Smith was one of only two men trained to fly the de Bothezat helicopter, also known as the Jerome-de Bothezat Flying Octopus, which was an experimental quadrotor helicopter.

That tells me that among those magnificent young men and their flying machines — you know, early aviators — Smith must have been especially crazy even in that fearless bunch, whatever his other skills as a pilot or virtues as a human being.

Lindenwood Cemetery dates from 1859, and is the Fort Wayne’s Victorian cemetery. It looks the part. All together about 69,000 people rest there, and at 175 acres, it’s one of the larger cemeteries in Indiana. As usual, I arrived in the mid-morning, by myself.

I did see one noteworthy burial soon after arrival. That is, the memorial itself seemed to make that claim. He founded two churches, so the claim seems to have some merit.

It’s a forested area, as I’m sure was intended.

With open spots.

A scattering of funerary art.

A chapel.

An occasional mausoleum. I’ve never seen one quite like this one.

An apartment block necropolis? I hadn’t seen one quite like that, either. A more modestly priced option, probably, at least at one time.

Calvin Smith (1934-88) is remembered by someone. Someone who brings treats, including the North Carolina soda Cheerwine.

Which brings me to Johnny Appleseed, promoter of cheer cider. Hard cider, that is, something elided over in school stories about the career of John Chapman, or at least the ones I heard.

A contemporary image.

He too is buried in Fort Wayne but not, befitting his reclusive reputation, among the crowds at Lindenwood. This is Johnny Appleseed we’re talking about. He has his own park.

When I realized I was driving near his grave on Saturday evening before sunset, I took a detour to Johnny Appleseed Park, most of which features standard-issue municipal facilities, such as ballfields and picnic tables and sheltered event spaces. But one section includes Johnny’s grave.

That’s not actually the gravesite, but rather a sign about Johnny Appleseed. The nurseryman reposes on top of the hill behind the sign.

I read the sign and learned a thing or two. I didn’t know, for instance, that Chapman was also a missionary for the Swedenborgians.

“Johnny

Appleseed”

John Chapman

He lived for others

Holy Bible

1774-1845

It took me a moment to notice the apples scattered around the stone. Then I noticed the apple trees planted around it. Nice touch.

Downtown Fort Wayne

Posted on July 7, 2022 by admin

RIP, Will Friend. I didn’t know him well, but did meet him at events over the years, and we got along. I didn’t realize he was quite that young.

Toward the end of the afternoon on Saturday, we took a walk in downtown Fort Wayne. Not long after parking the car, this caught our attention.

Not just any pedestrian bridge, but the historic Wells Street Bridge over the St. Marys River. A sign on the 1884 truss bridge names the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Akron, Ohio, as the bridgebuilder.

For nearly 100 years, vehicular traffic crossed the bridge, but in 1982 it became a pedestrian walkway. A view from the bridge, toward a less-developed part of the city.

After you cross the bridge, there is another elevated walkway, this one over a small section of riverbank. The blue building in the background is a block of riverside apartments, under construction. Move to Fort Wayne, young members of the laptop class. While rents don’t exactly seem cheap there — I don’t think anywhere counts as that anymore — there have to better deals than in the large cities.

The walk offers a view of the Fort Wayne — skyline isn’t quite the word. A view of a few larger buildings in the background, with Promenade Park in the foreground. We soon rested a while at that park, lounging around on iron chairs at an iron table, drinking soda. Rest: always an essential part of any walkabout.

Occasional party boats ply the St. Marys.

Away from the river is Freimann Square, home of the aforementioned Anthony Wayne statue, as well as a fountain and flower beds.

Not far is the Allen County Courthouse, designed around the turn of the 20th century by Hoosier architect Brentwood Tolan.

The figure on top, I’ve read, is a copper Lady Liberty that turns, as a vane does, with the wind.

A few decades pass and you get art deco. In this case, the Lincoln Bank Tower, another of those structures started just in time — 1929. Design by another Hoosier architect, Alvin Strauss.
It could have been the German American Bank Tower, but for some hard-to-figure reason the bank changed its name in 1918.

The Japanese Friendship Garden, on a tenth of an acre near the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, was gift of one of Fort Wayne’s sister cities, Takaoka. I had to look it up, even though I probably passed through it on a train the fall we went to Hida-Takayama. I suspect most Japanese, faced with the name Fort Wayne, would have to look it up, too.

The museum was closed when we got there, but the garden is always open. Bonus: the garden also features a 2002 time capsule under a rock, slated for a 2027 opening.

Elsewhere downtown: Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Dating from 1860, it is the oldest church building in Fort Wayne, with its Gothic design attributed to Rev. Msgr. Julian Benoit.

Vigil mass was about to start, but we got a peek.

It isn’t the only sizable church around. A few blocks away is St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Not open. Too bad, looks like quite a looker inside.

Jerome Huppert Woods

Posted on June 21, 2022 by admin

As forecast, temps didn’t break 80 degrees F. on Saturday. A good day to hit the trail.

A trail, anyway. The one we hit happened to be the Des Plaines River Trail, which parallels the river of that name, on a short section through Jerome Huppert Woods. The place might be named for this man, a casualty of WWII. How many Jerome Hupperts have there been? He was from Wisconsin, so that would be a little unusual, but hardly impossible.

The woods are a small slice of undeveloped land along the river. My guess would be that the Cook County Forest Preserve District was able to acquire most of the land along the Des Plaines because it is prone to flooding. A little further from the forest preserve land at that point, the suburb of River Grove surrounds the area, and it’s fully developed.

The reach the trail proper, you go along a connecting trail from a parking lot and recreation field to a short, graffiti’d tunnel under a road.

There’s enough undeveloped land in the area to support some large fauna, looks like.

I don’t look at the creature and think Bambi. Rather, I think, deer ticks, vector of Lyme disease. Best to keep your distance. Still, it was nice to see.

Recent rains seem to have created, or at least enlarged, a stagnant pond that isn’t visibly connected to the river.