Chance the Snapper Has Gone Home

Posted on August 25, 2019 by admin

I left for college for the first time 40 years ago today. So long ago that I flew on Braniff to get to Nashville, as I like to say. At least to anyone who might remember that airline.

Nothing so milestone-like happened today. At least I don’t think so. Sometimes you quietly pass by milestones and only realize it in retrospect, if then.

Sometimes that’s literally true. On the Trans-Siberian, I knew that some kind of post is visible from the train marking the “border” between Asia and Europe, as you cross the Urals. I missed it. I think I was concerning myself with lunch at that moment.

One place we went today was the former home of Chance the Snapper. That is, Humboldt Park in Chicago. Chance has been returned from the park’s lagoon to Florida. Presumably Florida Man brought him to Chicago at some point.

Temps today were warm but not too hot, so we took a walk around. Plenty of ducks and geese to see. Lilypads, too.
But presumably no gators to bother the people who rent paddleboats.

We’ve visited the park a number of times, including for a look at its various artworks, but today we discovered a curious snail sculpture near one of the footpaths, but also partly covered by bushes.

According to the Chicago Park District: “In 1999, teenagers involved in a Chicago Park District program known as the Junior Earth Team spent several months learning about nature in Humboldt Park. The JETs developed an interpretive trail and provided sculptor Roman Villarreal with notes and sketches for a series of artworks.

“For this project, Villarreal and the students produced three carved artworks that are scattered and remain relatively hidden throughout the park. The three pieces relate to the theme of air, water, and earth. Among the trio is a two-foot tall snail sculpture located northeast of the Humboldt Park Boat House that bears the inscription ‘breathe oxygen.’ ”

Calvary Cemetery, Evanston

Posted on August 21, 2019 by admin

I’ve taken elevated trains between Chicago and Evanston on and off for years. The CTA Red Line has its north terminus at the Howard Station in Chicago, and from there you ride the Purple Line into Evanston.

For a short stretch just north of Howard, the Purple Line passes Calvary Cemetery, which is also called Calvary Catholic Cemetery on maps. It’s a sizable burial ground, with nearly 40,000 permanent residents, stretching from Chicago Ave. along the elevated tracks nearly to Lake Michigan.

So I’ve seen the cemetery from on high for decades, but never wandered the grounds. I decided to do that on Saturday after visiting the American Toby Jug Museum, since the cemetery is only a few blocks to the south.

The monuments and stones are seemingly spaced more widely than usual for a cemetery of mid-19th century vintage. But among the standing stones are a lot of markers flush with the ground, so it’s hard to appreciate the cemetery’s denseness at first.

There are some mausoleums. This one, strangely, had no name on the exterior that I could find.
Ambrose Plamondon, founder and head of the Plamondon Manufacturing Co. in Chicago, a maker of machinery who died in 1896 of an “obstinate pulmonary trouble of long standing.”

His son Charles is interred there as well. He too was a prominent Chicago businessman, but he and his wife Mary had the misfortune to book passage to the UK on the Lusitania in May 1915.

“The couple celebrated their 36th wedding anniversary, 6 May 1915, while on board Lusitania,” says the Lusitania Resource. “Both Charles and his wife Mary were lost in the sinking. Their remains were washed up on the Irish coast, blackened with coal dust, suggesting that they had been sucked into one of the funnels. Both bodies were recovered and identified.”

Here’s the Cuneo family mausoleum, perched on a modest hill.
I’ve happened across the Cuneos before. They acquired an Italianate mansion, now a museum, from ruined businessman Samuel Insull during the Depression. We visited it nearly 10 years ago.

I presume this is patriarch and printing baron Frank Cuneo (1861-1942) in a niche in the front of the structure.
IMCalvary Cemetery Evanston Cuneo You’d think his wife Amelia (1864-1891) would be the other bust adorning the structure, but this face looks a little old for a woman who seems to have died in her 20s giving birth to her fourth child, or at least soon after.

So this is probably Frank Cuneo’s mother, Caterina Lagomercino Cuneo (1828-1900). Maybe she counted as the tough old matriarch and wouldn’t be denied her place of honor.

Most of the Cuneos are interred in the above mausoleum, but not all of them. Frank and Amelia’s eldest son John, who died in 1977, has his own mausoleum not far from his parents and siblings.

There is some funerary art at Calvary.

Including stones whose wear speaks of their impermanence.
A group memorial to the Religious Sisters of Mercy, who have a long history in Chicago.

A number of Chicago mayors are buried here as well, most notably Jane Byrne, who died in 2014. Charlie Comiskey, the baseball boss, is here. Didn’t see either of them, but I wasn’t looking. I was just looking around.

Gentlemen Who Invented Pharmacy

Posted on August 13, 2019 by admin

Not long ago I was finally inspired to find out something that has eluded me for many years. Maybe eluded isn’t the word. I haven’t tried to nail down the information very hard. Or at all, because it isn’t that important.

Non-importance shouldn’t be an obstacle to curiosity, however. So I did some looking around and found out that the statue mentioned in passing by the wisecracking and ever-so-tight Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises — literally in passing, since the characters are walking by it — is that of Pelletier and Caventou, which in the mid-1920s was on the Boulevard St. Michel.

Wiki: “In 1820, French researchers Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou first isolated quinine from the bark of a tree in the genus Cinchona – probably Cinchona officinalis – and subsequently named the substance.”

Sun (Chapter 8): “We walked down the Boulevard [St. Michel]. At the juncture of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau with the Boulevard is a statue of two men in flowing robes.

” ‘I know who they are.’ Bill eyed the monument. ‘Gentlemen who invented pharmacy. Don’t try and fool me on Paris.’ ”

This is what that statue looked like in the time of Sun, courtesy of a card from the collection of Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé. Erected in 1900.
As far as I can tell, Rue Denfert-Rochereau — actually Avenue — doesn’t meet Boulevard St. Michel in our time. Close, but not quite. Either the streets have been reconfigured in 90 years or Hemingway was wrong.

In any case, the statue of two men in flowing robes is gone. One of many Paris bronzes melted down by the Germans during the occupation, various sources tell me. Now Pelletier and Caventou have a less literal memorial, or at least they did as of last summer, according to Google Street View.

A reclining figure on a plinth at Boulevard St. Michel and Rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée, evidently part of a fountain, since the memorial is called La fontaine des pharmaciens. Maybe the figure’s stricken with malaria. If I ever make it back to Paris, I’ll make a point of walking by. But I probably won’t be tight.

Chicagoland’s Most Obscure Statue

Posted on August 8, 2019 by admin

Just south of I-90 in the major Chicago suburb of Schaumburg is a district populated almost completely by small- and mid-sized businesses that don’t have any consumer-facing operations, or if they do, they’re elsewhere. It’s a district of single-story office properties ringed by parking lots and connected by streets that are only busy early in the morning or late in the afternoon.

Since this is a reasonably prosperous suburb, some attention has been paid to landscaping, with trees, bushes and grass growing between the buildings and among the lots. But there’s no escaping the fact that the area is an office space equivalent of the 20th-century residential areas of the village, which are spread out. Fashionably dense, the area is not. You need a car around here.

Not long ago I had some business to attend to in the area, and I happened upon a small street named Penny Lane. If you’re the right age, that’s going to make you smile a little, though on this Penny Lane there’s no barber showing photographs or banker with a motorcar or fireman with an hourglass.

But this is on Penny Lane.
I had to stop for a minute and look at that. Luckily, Penny Lane doesn’t have much traffic. None besides me at that moment, in fact. The plaque on the plinth says:

Presented to
THE AMERICAN FOUNDRYMEN’S SOCIETY
by
THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COMPANY
Designed and sculpted by patternmaker Bob Jones
and cast by the employees of the Louisville Foundry Div.
December 3, 1984

On the statue itself, on the receptacle receiving the molten iron, is the following:

FIRST IRON POURED
JAN 17 1949
LOUISVILLE FOUNDRY

The iron statue is on the grounds of the American Foundry Society’s headquarters on Penny Lane. Formerly it was the American Foundrymen’s Society, which sounds like a workers’ organization, but it is (and always has been, I think), an industry trade organization for metalcasting.

The statue was among the last items cast in the Louisville foundry, which IH closed in 1983. Iron’s a little unusual for such a work, but it looks painted and well-tended by the organization. Even better, it has to be the most obscure statue, at least among those on public view, in the Chicago area.

Jaume Plensa, Here and There

Posted on August 4, 2019 by admin

Here’s a line from The Sun Also Rises that I didn’t much appreciate until recently. In one of the many conversations among the protagonists, the subject of the character Mike’s bankruptcy is broached:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

A lot of things happen that way. Learning often happens that way. Or at least awareness. Fortunately, I don’t have the experience of bankruptcy in mind. Still, a minor example of gradually-suddenly just happened to me.

Back in 2008, we visited the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Mich. One of the works was by Jaume Plensa, “I, you, she or he…”
In 2014, I took note of Plensa’s monumental head, temporarily placed in Millennium Park in Chicago, “Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda.” I also knew at the time that the Catalan artist had also done Crown Fountain in the park as well.

Interesting that the vitriol against “Dreams” in the comments of this Chicago Reader item obsesses about the size of the head. When I happen across public art, I judge it by an admittedly subjective standard: does it make the space more interesting? By that standard, all the Plensas I’ve seen are successful works.

Today I was looking at pictures I’d taken in August 2013, and happened across these — two images of the same work in Chicago.
“Self Portrait With Tree,” by none other than Plensa. I’d forgotten about it, and when I took the picture, probably didn’t associate it with the other works of his I’d seen. “Self Portrait” was next to the Hancock Tower on E. Chestnut St. I checked the Street View of that block, dated July 2018, and the work is gone. It was put up by the nearby Richard Gray Gallery, so perhaps it found a buyer.

All that is the gradual part. Somehow or other, Plensa hadn’t made much of an impression on me over the years. But when I looked at the 2013 images, I suddenly wanted to know more about him, since I don’t make a close study of sculpture or public art. If I had, I would have known how widespread his works are. (Had we walked further along Buffalo Bayou in Houston in May, we’d have come across yet another.)

Is it important that I know this? Maybe, maybe not. But better to err on the side of knowing something, however small.

Scovill Sculpture Park

Posted on July 31, 2019 by admin

First, we drove across Lake Decatur on US 36. Later, we walked near the shore of the lake, though at that point a fence was between us and the lake.
We didn’t mind, because we were taking a late afternoon stroll on Saturday at Scovill Sculpture Park. As these things go, the lake is old — almost 100 years, a project of civic improvement that also happened to be very useful for corn wet-milling. A.E. Staley, of corn products fame (see yesterday), had a major hand in the creation of the lake by damming the Sangamon River upstream in the early ’20s.

On the other hand, the sculpture park, on Decatur Park District land between the Scoville Zoo and the Decatur Children’s Museum, isn’t that old — only about three years. Interestingly, the sculptures aren’t permanent fixtures, but leased from the artists. After a few years, a new crop is brought in. According to my sources, the second set of 10 is in place now.

“My Favorite Things,” by Travis Emmen.
“Calibration,” by Luke Achterberg.
“Absence,” by Joseph Ovalle.
“Urban Forest,” by Richard Herzog.
“Rybee House 2,” by Stephen Klema.

The park also includes the Scovill Oriental Garden, which has elements of Chinese and Japanese gardens.

Of course the park has a gazebo.
As well it should. Here’s a book or database for someone to create someday: The Great Gazebo Gazetteer.

Our Second Decatur This Year

Posted on July 29, 2019 by admin

On Saturday, I wondered how many U.S. cities and towns are named for Stephen Decatur. Later I looked it up: Counting Decatur City, Iowa, and a ghost town in Missouri of that name, 17 — not counting counties, of which there are six among the several states.

Now mostly forgotten except by the Navy and naval history enthusiasts, he had his moment. He even took a lethal bullet in a duel, though Commodore Decatur isn’t known as well as Alexander Hamilton for that distinction. Lin-Manuel Miranda needs to get on the stick and write Decatur: A Musical of Kicking Barbary Pirate Asses.

Decatur’s moment also happened to be when towns and counties were being named in the United States. Decatur, Illinois, has the largest population of any of them, edging out Decatur, Alabama by some thousands of souls, even though the Prairie State Decatur has been shrinking in recent decades.

We spent most of Saturday afternoon in Decatur, Illinois, our second visit to a city of that name this year. Though the more northern Decatur isn’t quite the industrial town it used to be, a number of large manufacturers are still in evidence, such as Mueller Co., more about which later. Downtown Decatur seemed in fair shape as well. Good enough for a walkabout late in the afternoon, when the heat was ebbing away.

Decatur’s signature structure is the Transfer House.
“The Transfer House was erected in 1895, replacing a smaller shelter dating from 1892,” writes H. George Friedman Jr., whose page features many pictures. “The City Electric Railway paid $500 toward the $2,700 building fund subscribed by local merchants and property owners, and agreed to furnish and maintain the building. As its name implies, it was used as a central transfer point for all the streetcar lines (and later the bus lines) in the city.”

Designed by W.W. Boyington, of all people. That only seems odd to me because we visited another one of his works just last week, the Old Joliet Prison. So there’s nothing really odd about it. The man got a lot of commissions.

Remarkably, the Transfer House was originally located at Main and Main streets — that always sought-after address, at least among commercial real estate investors. Decatur still has a north-south Main and an east-west Main, and their meeting looks like an ordinary intersection, though there is a statue of young A. Lincoln nearby.

In 1962, the city moved the Transfer House to its current location in Central Park, near a fountain.
The park also features a memorial to the Macon County’s Civil War soldiers.
On the back of the base, a plaque says:

Grand Army of the Republic
Organized in this city
April 6, 1866
Erected by Dorcas Society,
and Other
Patriotic Citizens

Not erected until 1904. Maybe funds were in short supply for years, but then the people of Decatur realized their veterans didn’t have much longer.

Near Central Park are a number of buildings, including this one sporting one of Decatur’s murals, featuring Mike Elroy, a recent mayor.
Driving into town we saw a more interesting mural featuring Bob Marley on the side of a record store building, but we didn’t stop for it.

A former Universalist church building, originally erected in 1854.
The handsome Merchant Street, formerly a hive of scum and villainy.

Further from the park was the equally handsome Library Block, home these days to a brewpub and other businesses.
The Decatur Masonic Temple, looking a lot like a WPA post office.
The First United Methodist Church of Decatur.
As with many city churches, it would have been nice to get inside for a look, but no go.

At first, I thought this might be the entrance to an eccentric dentist’s office, an oral equivalent of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

But no: it’s the entrance to the Sol Bistro restaurant.

The Joliet Area Historical Museum

Posted on July 23, 2019 by admin

RIP, Debbie DeWolf. One Monday morning in 1988, when I was working at the Law Bulletin Publishing Co. in Chicago, the company receptionist — whose name I forget — reportedly called the company long distance from Kansas or Nebraska or the like and said she wasn’t coming to work that day. Or ever again.

Shortly thereafter, a young woman named Debbie DeWolf took her place. She was one of the more effervescent people I’d ever met and she ultimately make a career at the LBPC well beyond answering phones. I hadn’t spoken with her for many years before her death, but it was sad news.

On Sunday, Ann and I spent some time in Joliet. We noticed that the Blues Brothers pop up in odd places around town, such as on the wall of an auto parts business and at the main entrance to the Joliet Area Historical Museum.

That’s pretty remarkable traction for not only fictional characters, but for characters created more than 40 years ago. Then again, Jake’s nickname was “Joliet,” and he was seen being released from the Joliet Correctional Center when The Blue Brothers opened (and come to think of it, he was back in the jug at the end of the movie), so I guess Joliet can claim him.

Better than the city being associated forever with the prison. The museum doesn’t particularly downplay the long history of the prison, but it isn’t exactly celebrated either. In any case, it will probably be a few more decades before “prison” stops being the first answer in a word association game with “Joliet.”

It’s a longstanding tie. In 1972, Chicago songwriter Steve Goodman recorded a song called “The Lincoln Park Pirates,” about an aggressive Chicago-based towing service that regularly ransomed cars. It included the following lines:

All my drivers are friendly and courteous
Their good manners you always will get
‘Cause they all are recent graduates
Of the charm school in Joliet

The Joliet Area Historical Museum is a well-organized example of a mid-sized local history museum, with thematically grouped artifacts and reading material. In its main exhibition hall, the centerpiece re-creates a section of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which passed through Joliet. The view from the first floor.
The view from the second floor, with stained glass from a demolished local church in the background.
Another transportation-related artifact: a Lincoln Highway signpost.
As it happens, the Lincoln Highway still runs through Joliet, half a block south of the museum, as U.S. 30. There’s also a sign in downtown Joliet marking the intersection of the Lincoln Highway and a branch of the former U.S. 66.

The museum does acknowledge the prison. In fact, there’s an entire gallery devoted to artwork made from material and debris and found objects from the former pen, or paintings inspired by it.

Even here, there’s no getting away from Jake Blues.
“Fight Girl,” “Caught” and “Jake” by Dante DiBartolo. Interestingly, the images are painted on metal shelving scavenged from the prison.

Part of the former prison burned in 2013 — arson — and some of the burned items were later used for art as well. Such as a scorched TV set for “Ren-ais-sance Man” by Terry M. Eastham.
I didn’t see a title for this one.
Remarkably, the work is by a 7th grader named Sophia Benedick. The words on the work are, “It’s Never Too Late to Mend.”

There is also a room in the museum devoted to John Houbolt. He was the NASA aerospace engineer who pushed successfully for lunar orbit rendezvous for Apollo, a concept that made the landing possible by 1969. I’d read about him before (and seen him depicted in the superb miniseries From the Earth to the Moon), but missed the detail that he went to high school in Joliet.

Besides the museum, we spent a short time in downtown Joliet. One of these days, I want to attend a show at the Rialto Square Theatre. Supposed to be pretty nice on the inside. The outside’s not too bad either.
On the grounds of the Joliet Public Library downtown is Louis Joliet himself.
Unlike Jebediah Springfield, he didn’t purportedly found the town or anything. Joliet just passed this way.

Woodstock Walkabout

Posted on July 22, 2019 by admin

At noon on Saturday, the sun was high and mighty and toasting northern Illinois well into the 90s F. Later in the afternoon, an unexpected storm blew through. Unexpected because I hadn’t looked at any weather reports. By late afternoon, the storm was over and temps were in the pleasant 70s.

A good time to take a short walk in Woodstock, Illinois, which might be one of the state’s most pleasant towns. A good place to start was Woodstock Square. At the very center of the square is a GAR memorial to Union soldiers and sailors from Woodstock, which was founded in 1852.
What’s a town square without a gazebo?
Strolling south from Woodstock Square, I passed by the Blue Lotus Buddhist Temple. I noticed it on a previous visit to Woodstock.

I don’t believe these statues were there the last time. It’s been seven or so years, after all. Plenty of time to add a few depictions of Buddha.
The temple isn’t the only religious site in the vicinity. Cater-cornered across the street is Woodstock’s First Church of Christ, Scientist. Not far away are the First United Methodist Church and the Unity Spiritual Center of Woodstock.

I’d come to Woodstock to see Greg Brown at the handsome Woodstock Opera House. He’s a vastly underappreciated singer-songwriter-story teller from Iowa.

It was dark after the show, but I didn’t want to hurry away from Woodstock. Besides, I’d read that there was a new(ish) mural just north of Woodstock Square. So it is, in an alley — which the town calls a “pedway” — off Main Street next to Classic Cinemas Woodstock Theatre.

The mural honors the likes of Groundhog Day, filmed locally and remembered elsewhere in town.

Orson Welles, who spent part of his youth in Woodstock.

The town also remembers Chester Gould, though the Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock closed a number of years ago.
The alley features two statues as well. One is a wood carving of Woodstock Willie, presumably the town’s answer to Punxsutawney Phil, created by carver Michael Bihlmaier.
Oddly enough, also near the mural is a small bronze of Welles by a local artist, Bobby Joe Scribner.
According to the information sign near the work, it’s the only statue of Welles on public display in the United States. Interesting that it depicts an older Welles. His Paul Masson period, you might say.

Randyland

Posted on July 17, 2019 by admin

After a heavy downpour cooled down the hot afternoon on July 6 — Pittsburgh seemed awfully tropical this time of the year — we made our way to Randyland. When I was poking around before the trip for Sights To See, I discovered Randyland. Yep, that looks like a sight to see, was my instant conclusion.

“Randyland is the labor of love of Pittsburgh artist Randy Gilson, a local artist and neighborhood renovator,” Atlas Obscura says. “Over the years Gilson has almost singlehandedly turned a blighted neighborhood corner in Pittsburgh’s Mexican War Streets into one of the most colorful spectacles in the city.”

The exact boundaries of Randyland are a little vague. But I know that it includes this colorful building at the corner of Jacksonia and Arch streets.

Maybe this colorful building on Jacksonia.
And the space in between those buildings. Most definitely that space.
Drizzle was still coming down when we reached Randyland, but that didn’t stop us from entering the space — a sign welcomes all — for a look-see. There’s something colorful everywhere you look.

Randy greeted us and we spent a few minutes talking. Though this video might be scripted, it gives you a pretty good idea about how Randy behaved: he was effusive. He seemed genuinely glad to see us, the nth group to wander into his colorful compound. He asked our names and where we were from. He told us it was important to be ourselves and be happy.

In case the isn’t there, Randy greets you anyway in life-sized cutout form.

Later, he went next door, which he said was his studio, but we did see him again before we left, since we bought a couple of t-shirts and a button from him. They were reasonably priced, especially when compared with the merch at the Andy Warhol Museum gift shop. Besides, Warhol is dead, as opposed to effusive and very much alive Randy Gilson. It’s good to support living artists when you can.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Public Art