Portuguese Mix

Posted on June 6, 2024 by admin

Early last year, I ordered a number of 4″ x 6″ tabletop flags from an online vendor that doesn’t happen to be Amazon. I have pocket change and postcards and tourist spoons and all kinds of bric-a-brac from the places I’ve been, so why not flags? One for each nation I’ve visited.

So I ordered a Portuguese flag last week, to add to the collection. While Macao was still administrated by Portugal when I visited in 1990, it was too much of a stretch to say I’d been to Portugal, until last month.

Something I never noticed on the flag – behind the shield of Portugal, which has a lore of its own – is an armillary sphere, a model of objects in the sky. A navigators’ tool, among other things, which fits Portuguese history nicely. A cool design element.

We saw other representations of the globe — terrestrial or celestial — at Pena Palace in Sintra.

This one at Jerónimos Monastery.

For sale at the Cod Museum, canned fish. At fancy prices.

For sale at a Portuguese grocery store, canned fish. At everyday prices.

In case you didn’t buy enough canned fish in the city, at the airport there’s a branch of Mundo Fantástico Da Sardinha Portuguesa, a sardine store on the Praça do Rossio.

For once, the Google Maps description is accurate: “Souvenir shop showcasing fancy tins of Portuguese sardines in a wacky, circuslike atmosphere.” You can even sit on a sardine throne.

The “Beer Museum” off Praça do Comércio seemed more like a restaurant and bar, but anyway you have to have a beer at a place like that, and I did. A Portuguese brew whose name I was too much on vacation to remember.

I wasn’t awed by the beer, which was good enough, but I was awed by this display. That’s one artful wall of beer.

We didn’t make it to the castle overlooking Lisbon (Castelo de São Jorge), so I can’t comment on the view from there. I will say that the roof of our hotel offered a pretty good one.

Looking up at the city is another kind of vista. There’s a ferry port (and subway station) on the Tagus near Praça do Comércio. Step outside there, and some of the city is visible. The stone tower is part of Lisbon Cathedral.

We emerged from the subway one morning and spotted this.

Monumento aos Mortos da Grande Guerra. I had to check, and found out that about 12,000 Portuguese soldiers died in WWI, including in France but also fighting the Germans in Africa. The memorial is on Av. Da Liberdade.

Europe, in my experience, is pretty good at putting together leafy boulevards.

That’s a tall order for a sandwich shop. We didn’t investigate the claim, either the number of steps, nor the state of mind.

At Basílica de Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, we encountered this fellow.

Rather Roman looking, and I mean the ancient Roman army, not “prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire.” At first I thought he might be Cornelius the Centurion, but the key clue is HODIE (“today”) written on the cross, meaning he’s Expeditus. I don’t ever remember seeing him depicted in a church. The patron of urgent causes, among other things.

We saw a flamenco show in Barcelona last year, but no fado in Lisbon. We did see a fado truck, however.

We ate at the Time Out Market Lisboa twice.

There was a reason it was crowded. Everything was a little expensive, but really good. Such as this place, whose grub was like Shake Shack.

The last meal of the trip wasn’t at Time Out Lisboa, but a Vietnamese restaurant with room enough for about 20 people. It too was full.

Spotted at one of the subway stations we passed through more than once. Alice in Wonderland‘s fans are international in scope.

On the whole, the Lisbon subways are efficient and inexpensive, and the lines go a lot of places. Even so, elevator maintenance did seem to be an issue. There were times when our tired feet would have appreciated an elevator, but no go.

Scenes from Parc Eduardo VII, which includes green space and gardens but also elegant buildings.

There was an event there that day, at least according to those blue signs, that had something to do with the Portuguese Space Agency. I didn’t know there was such a thing. I’d have assumed Portugal would participate in the ESA, and leave it at that. But no, the Agência Espacial Portuguesa was founded in 2019, and is looking to create a space port in the Azores.

We didn’t investigate the event any further, but we did look at the tiles on the building. Nice.

Among the kings of Portugal, there was no Edward VII – only one Edward, who reigned from 1433 to 1438 – so when I saw it on the map, I figured it was for the British monarch of that regnal name. Yes, according to Wiki: “The park is named for King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, who visited Portugal in 1903 to strengthen relations between the two countries and reaffirm the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance.”

Lisbon manhole covers. Maybe not as artful as some of the other street details on Lisbon, but not bad.

I saw S.L.A.T. a fair amount. Later, I looked it up: Sinalização Luminosa Automática de Trânsito – Automatic Traffic Light Signaling.

Down in Belém, On the Shores of the Tagus

Posted on May 29, 2024 by admin

Even as the longest river on the Iberian Peninsula, the Tagus doesn’t come with much in the way of associations, at least in the English-speaking world, unlike the Thames or the Rhine or the Danube or even the Vistula or the quiet-flowing Don.

Still, when the River Tagus reaches Lisbon, and reaches the ocean, it has an impressive width. But there’s more to it than that. This was a disembarkation point for the wider world for the seafaring Portuguese, and did they ever disembark.

The view is from the Belém district of Lisbon, at the western edge of the city. The Metro doesn’t go out that way; the mass transit option is a streetcar (tram), which we took early in the afternoon of May 15, riding out first to see Belém Tower (Torre de Belém).

A sturdy relic of the time when Portugal was out remaking the world, and from a time (the 16th century) when stone fortresses offered some protection against invasion by sea. An impressive work, and impressively popular.

So popular that we decided to take a stroll by the river rather than wait in that line.

Vendors set up shop near the tower, even if that only meant putting down a rug and one’s wares. If I’d been in the market for a hat, I might have bought one from her. The sun that might have inspired business for her was mostly behind clouds that day.

Other, more formally organized vendors, had vehicles or carts.

A few minutes’ walk east of the tower is the Monument of the Discoveries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos), which is a lot newer than the tower. In fact I’m almost as old as the monument, which was erected in 1960. So more a relic of the Salazar dictatorship than the far-flung Portuguese maritime empire. Still, as concrete (and rose-color stone) goes, it’s an impressive bit of work.

Two rows of Portuguese notables from the Age of Discovery line either side of the monument, including some well-known figures, such as Afonso de Albuquerque, Bartolomeu Dias, Francis Xavier, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and Pedro Alvares Cabral. Others I had to look up: Pedro Nunes, for instance, a mathematician who worked on navigation, and who sounds like he ought to be better known outside the world of mathematics.

Who leads the line of statues looking out to sea? At 26 feet tall, Prince Henry the Navigator, of course.

Only the Fool in His Heart Says There is No Cod

Posted on May 20, 2024 by admin

One of the sweeping plazas in Lisbon is Praça do Comércio, with an entrance marked by a sizable arch populated by allegories and historic individuals, all in stone. The plaza’s centerpiece is an equestrian statue of King Joseph I of Portugal, the Reformer. Ringed on three sides by long structures, the praça otherwise stone-tiles its way down to the Tagus River.

Jose I (d. 1777) had the misfortune to be king when the 1755 earthquake struck. The plaza was once home to Ribeira Palace, residence of Portuguese kings since the early 16th century, but the earthquake and fire took it down, along with most of the rest of the city. The disaster reportedly spooked Jose so much that he preferred to live in large tents afterward, and for the rest of his life.

Terreiro do Paco (Ribeira Palace Yard) by Dirk Stoop, 1662

In our time, the crowd makes it way to the riverfront. As we did last Monday. As well we should, to take in the views of the wide Tagus, along with buskers and other entertainment, such as a fellow building sand sculptures in a narrow strip just off the plaza stones.

After 1755, the plaza took its current form, with its ring of buildings sometimes occupied by government offices, but more recently restaurants and bars catering to tourists. And the Centro Interpretativo da Historia do Bacalhau.

That was a find. A museum devoted to codfish. We lucked into it.

Above the ticket desk: depictions of drying cod. Life-sized? At first I thought no, but later saw photos of enormous cod filling small boats, so maybe so.

The Portuguese love their codfish, have for centuries, and you should too, the museum insists in subtle ways. It didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting for us to agree that codfish were manna from the sea. At least it is in the hands of the Portuguese cooks whose fish we sampled during our time in Lisbon. Just a small sample, but a delicious one.

The place is part maritime museum, with models of the cod fleets and fishing tools; part cooking museum, with cod dishes illustrated and videos showing cod preparations; and part devoted to the geopolitics of countries along the Atlantic coast of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, as they affected the North Atlantic and its fisheries.

A detail from 20th century poster glorifying Portuguese fishermen hard at work feeding the nation. Apparently that notion was something the Salazar regime encouraged, even though the industry was diminished from its glory days a few centuries before.

Cod isn’t just integral to Portuguese history or essential to its cuisine, the museum says.

It’s a fun fish, too.

Oakton College

Posted on May 8, 2024 by admin

We’re in that rarefied period when neither the heater nor the cooler kicks in much. You could say God is my HVAC. It won’t last.

How many community college campuses have enough outdoor sculpture to qualify as a sculpture garden? Say, a dozen pieces or more. It’s an odd question, but it occurred to me at Oakton College in Des Plaines as we walked around recently, taking in the fine spring day and an assortment of outdoor sculptures on that campus.

That online search didn’t take long. If you wanted to figure out which community colleges have sculpture gardens, looks like the International Directory of Sculpture Parks & Gardens would be your go-to source. For all its insanity, the Internet continues to amaze.

Copses of trees and bushes ring the college’s wide parking lots, giving its small cluster of buildings a semi-suburban feel. A small creek runs through campus, and signs next to a small bridge over it say Turtle Xing, with turtle silhouettes on the yellow traffic signs to remind us to watch out for shelled reptiles in easy-to-smash spots. Not sure I’d ever seen one of those kind of warnings before.

The sculpture isn’t off in some field. A representative is right there in your face at the edge of a parking lot.

A little more subtle, but just as close to the parking lot.

Closer to class buildings.

“Pink Hydrant 15” by musician and sculptor Irwin Hepplewhite.

Never mind, I made that up.

“Silver Oak” by Barry Tinsley (1983). A Chicago artist, still apparently active. Glad to hear it.

I had to puzzle that for a moment. Chi-ca-guo.

Of course, Chicago, “wild onion,” a version of an Algonquin word for the weedy onion marshes where the Chicago River met Lake Michigan, pre-Fort Dearborn.

This was good to learn: a certified wildlife habitat.

I know there’s a nonprofit and good intentions behind that designation, but I can’t help but laugh a little. Where is this certificate posted, anyway? Can animals request a copy?

I know where it must be: in this building.

That’s a show-stopper: The Margaret Burke Lee Science and Health Careers Center, a 2010s addition to campus. Modernist glass blended with Prairie School (?) and I’m too dense to know what else, but there’s some exceptional design skill on display in the structure, which is perched next to the campus’ central pond. Maybe the other buildings, presentable enough but a little ordinary, envy Margaret for her green-tint good looks.

Design by Legat Architects, a regional practice. Nice work, Legat.

Have You Ever Been to Nacogdoches?

Posted on April 25, 2024 by admin

When planning our most recent trip, devising its dumbbell structure of three days on the road, five in place, and four more on the road, it occurred to me that with a little southward jiggering from Dallas, we could visit Nacogdoches, Texas, one of the oldest towns in the state, rife with history: home to prehistoric Indian activity and the establishment of a Spanish mission in the 18th century, base of filibusters and other rebellions in the early 19th, mentioned famously in a late John Wayne movie, and much more.

All that would have been a reason to come, but mainly I wanted to visit my old friend Kirk, resident of the town for nearly 40 years. We hung out mostly in high school, but had known each other as far back as elementary school, ca. 1970.

In exchanging text messages ahead of the visit, we couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other, but finally decided, once Yuriko and I met Kirk and his wife Lisa at their home for lunch on April 13, that it was probably in April 1986 at the wedding of a mutual friend of ours in Austin.

That’s a long time. We had a good visit, a good reconnect – I find it good to reconnect – spending most of the afternoon with them, hearing about life in Nacogdoches, his medical practice there, their raising six children, all grown.

Later in the day, Yuriko and I spent a little time in downtown Nacogdoches, which offers a more sizable square than most towns, even in Texas, handsome on the whole, with a scattering of specialty retail in the area, but mostly still professional services, city government offices and other utilitarian activities.

Mural detail a block from the square, facing a parking lot.

We arrived during the 12th annual Nacogdoches Wine Swirl, just by raw chance. I’d never heard of a “wine swirl.” The brick streets around what I took to be the courthouse were closed to cars. People clustered here and there and lined up for wine.

The square doesn’t surround a courthouse, but rather a former federal building, now the Charles Bright Visitors Center. Nearby is “The Gateway,” depicting doughty American pioneers traveling the Old San Antonio Road into Texas, a fairly recent work (2013) of Michael Boyett.

“The ticketed wine event will showcase Texas wineries and local and regional food trucks and shopping vendors along the historic brick streets,” Visit Nacogdoches says regarding the event. More marketing at work, with the goal of furthering Nacogdoches as a day-trip town.

That Texas has wineries is not news. I went with Jay to visit one of the earlier ones in the Hill Country in the mid-70s. But did Central Texas wine makers come all the way to Nacogdoches to sell their wares? Further investigation tells me there’s an established wine-growing biz in East Texas.

“But, what if I were to tell you that East Texas has over 30 wineries and vineyards just waiting to be explored?!” Totally Texas Travel breathlessly says. Even if that isn’t the precise number, I’ll take even a paid travel site as a reasonable source the existence of wineries here.

Moreover, there’s a marketing invention called the Piney Woods Wine Trail.

The Piney Woods Wine Trail? In East Texas? That goes against stereotype, and I won’t have it. They make (and drink) either beer (domestic beer, closer to Texas-made the better) or hard liquor, the closer to homemade the better. That’s what I get for traveling into East Texas, a busted stereotype.

Chicago Riverside Stroll

Posted on April 2, 2024 by admin

Intense periods of rain marked the day and into the night, with snow ahead. A nonsticking April sort of snow, but still carried by stiff unpleasant winds. A rearguard winter wind, and winter winds blow only in one direction. In your face.

It was merely chilly Saturday before last when we strolled down Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue in the evening in downtown Chicago, partly along the Chicago River. Some old favorites rise in that area, such as Marina City.

Idly curious, I looked up some listings for condos in the building. For less than $300,000, one can buy a 500-square foot unit, listed as zero beds, one bath. I wonder what that means in context: a Murphy bed? Not like some utilitarian job you might have found in the Kramdens’ apartment, but maybe something a little more upmarket. Are there upscale Murphy beds? Of course there are.

At more than 60 years old, Marina City doesn’t count as the newest and poshest, but it has historic appeal, and has any other residential complex seen a fast-moving auto pitched out of its parking garage into a river? Such happened for The Hunter (1980), the last Steve McQueen movie. A bad guy’s fate, if I remember right.

The Wrigley Building, legacy of a chewing gum fortune. What more to say about the masterpiece on the Chicago, open now these last 100 years?

The courtyard north of the building is formally the Plaza of the Americas, which I’m sure only tour guides call it. On windy days the flags of the OAS fly over the plaza. Does the actual flag of the OAS also? Its design: Let’s wheel all the national flags together. It’s a recognized way to organize flags, but on a flag?

At the west end of the plaza is a bronze Benito Juárez, a gift of Mexico to the city of Chicago in 1999, with one Julian Martinez listed as the artist (not this artist). At night, Juárez doesn’t catch the light very well.

These golden wings are a newer addition to the plaza, 2022, and supposedly temporary. Another of the pairs of wings that have sprouted worldwide, though these are sculpted, not painted.

“Wings of Mexico” by Jorge Marin. A little digging around, and I see that he did “El Ángel de la Seguridad Social,” which we spotted in Mexico City.

Thursday Cha-Chings

Posted on March 7, 2024 by admin

Ann came home for spring break today. I offered to subsidize her expenses on a romp somewhere, even a mild sort of romp like my spring breaks of yore, such as to cloudy St. Petersburg, Florida, where we stayed at the condo belonging to the grandmother of one of our party (she wasn’t there) and found one of Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy records stashed away in her record collection. But Ann preferred to come here.

Remarkably, the fellow who produced The First Family in 1962, one Bob Booker, is still alive at 92, at least according to Wiki. Of course, he was only 31 then.

Saw this phrase at a supermarket recently, on banners hanging from the ceiling. Cha- ching!

The point in this case was to persuade shoppers that the store offers low, low prices. Save some cha-ching here or some such. I think most people understand that the phrase refers to cash register noise, and thus hard cold cash in one way or another, but it made me wonder how many people any more have even heard a cash register make a sound like that?

Because I am of a certain age, I have. I’m pretty sure the dime store I patronized ca. 1970 still had mechanical registers. But that was long ago, and even then the sound was a little old-timey. Now even the smallest stores in the nation’s remote backwaters use electronic registers, whose signature sound is a muffed beep-beep-beep that’s weak tea when it comes up to conjuring up images of drawers full of money. And yet cha-ching! lives on. Just another shiny bit in the jewel cave of English.

One more pic from Devon Ave. in Chicago on Sunday.

The mural is just outside the entrance to Cary’s, the bar I went to. As far as I saw, this was the only reference to Alice in Wonderland around. Why is it there? Why not?

Street View tells me that this small mural is a recent addition, too. It wasn’t there the last time the All-Seeing Eye passed by in November 2022. The bar’s wonderful neon sign has been there longer, appearing sometime between August 2007 (the first image available) and May 2009. That was a period of economic disruption, so maybe the bar did well enough to spring for the sign.

This from the NYT today: “President Biden has selected his education secretary, Miguel Cardona, to be the so-called designated survivor during Thursday night’s State of the Union address, a grim moniker meant to ensure at least one decision maker survives if a calamity were to wipe out the nation’s leadership assembled at the Capitol for the speech.”

Grim moniker, huh? Journalism might be a sickly industry, but journalese turns of phrase live on. Hard to imagine anyone actually saying that.

As for the office, the Secretary of Education is 15th in line to become president (vice president being first), which means that “designated survivor” is probably the only ghost of a chance of succeeding to the top spot, without the usual rarefied politicking of a presidential run, that the Secretary of Education has.

How long has that been a cabinet-level position? Right, the first one was during the Carter administration. Carving Education out of Health, Education and Welfare was, in fact, a campaign promise that he was able to keep, for what that was worth.

Jack, Ray & Lewis

Posted on February 20, 2024 by admin

At the corner of N. Genesee Street and W. Clayton Street in Waukegan, catercornered across the intersection from the Genesee Theatre, stands a man and his violin in bronze.

It took me a while to figure out the alligators. Nice touch.

Jack Benny, favorite son of Waukegan, has stood there waiting to regale an audience since 2002, in a work by Illinois artist Erik Blome.

People my age only caught the tail end of Benny’s career, and it was years before I realized he could actually play the violin. Or maybe my mother told me that, and I forgot. The radio clips I heard de-emphasized his skill in favor of comedy. Now, of course, it’s easy enough to find clips showing just how talented he was.

A block west of Benny is a newer work, one depicting another Waukegan favorite son: Ray Bradbury, in a work called “Fantastical Traveler” by Zachary Oxman. It’s newer than Benny, erected in front of the Waukegan Public Library only in 2019, on Bradbury’s 99th birthday (he didn’t live to see it, having died in 2012).

I’d come to town to see Lewis Black, playing at the Genesee on Sunday evening, who channels profane rants into comedy that makes me laugh, which is all I ask of comedy. A lot of people feel the same way about him. But he’s an acquired taste, and not for the easily offended: during the show, I saw at least two couples leaving. One person might just be going to the bathroom, but when two leave together in the middle of the act, I guess they feel offended.

Some of his rants are political, but you could hardly call him partisan. I saw two audience members leave soon after he had the temerity to point out that the 2020 presidential election was not, in fact, stolen. Because, he said, no one as disorganized as the Democrats could pull off such a thing.

I wonder how those people didn’t know what they were going to see. A large number of Lewis Black clips are available on YouTube and, indeed, that’s how I heard of him at all. Even better, they’re old man rants, which he has aged into (he’s 75). Seeing him rant as a younger man – a few of those are on YouTube as well – just isn’t the same.

Before the show, and before sunset, I got a look at the Genesee, another former movie palace, dating from 1927, that survived the perils of the later 20th century and is now live theater.

Many nostalgia acts come there. Peter Frampton, for instance, is scheduled to play the Genesee on March 30. I know that because he was prominently advertised in the lobby. Man, he’s lost almost all of his hair since 1976.

Some years ago, I saw Al Stewart at the theater, as the opening act – the only time I’ve ever seen him as an opener – for the band America. That time I spoke with Al’s sometime sideman Dave Nachmanoff, who was in the lobby, and told him that America was fine, but I’d come to see Al. I hope he relayed that to Al.

After Lewis Black, I was able to look around the interior.

Not as unbelievably posh as the Rialto Square – few are – but a fine space.

21c Hotel Museum, Louisville

Posted on January 17, 2024 by admin

Not quite the depth of cold today as the three days before. I think temps reached double digits, reckoned in Fahrenheit, and tomorrow we’ll enjoy a balmy 20 F. With a little more snow, and sliding temps for the weekend. Such is January.

One of our more interesting moments in Louisville at the end of ’23 came at the lower level of a downtown hotel. I took a moment to rest on a bench.

Soon, Yuriko joined me.

It’s a little hard to tell with still images, but the letters appeared to drift downward and then rest on your reflection. Up close, the letters looked like this.

We were looking at an art installation next to a bank of elevators.

Back in the 2000s, I wrote at least one article, already lost to time, about a new boutique hotel in Louisville, of all places. The redevelopment of a number of derelict downtown warehouses, joined for the purpose, created the 21c Hotel Museum. I brought my professional skepticism to the task. Saving warehouses is a good idea, and if the market can bear high-priced hotel rooms in downtown Louisville, fine.

But the hotel was supposed to be a contemporary art museum as well, as its founders were art collectors. I doubted that it was much of a museum, though without any evidence one way or the other. It just sounded like the sort of claim a new boutique hotel would make: put a few paintings in an empty room on the property, call yourself a museum, elevate your room rates.

That was in a time – before the panic of 2008 – of a number of boutique hotel rollouts, often smaller brands owned by very large hotel chains, each angling for something to make it stand out, at least superficially, from the sameness of the mainstream brands.

That all was in the back of my mind when, on December 30, we dropped by 21c Hotel Museum.

A gilded statue stands watch outside: “David (inspired by Michelangelo)” (2005), which is double the size of its inspiration and largely fiberglass, by Turkish artist Serkan Özkaya.

I hadn’t thought about the 21c in a number of years, so even as I entered, I wasn’t expecting much. I was wrong. As a museum, the place is fair-sized, its art in galleries on the hotel’s lower level, and it has an interesting collection.

I couldn’t find the description of the metal tornado near the ceiling, but I liked it.

Details of other works at the 21c. A series of faces.

All of the works are recent vintage, as in 21st century. Fitting the name. Though the Louisville redevelopment was the first of them, there are currently eight 21c Hotel Museums, owned by Accor, including others in Bentonville, Ark., Chicago, Cincinnati, Durham, NC, Kansas City, Mo., Lexington, Ky. and St. Louis. Each has exhibit space, collectively totaling 75,000 square feet.

Best of all, you can just wander in and look at it. No admission, no questions asked.

Down the hall from the “Text Rain” is a work tucked away in a utilitarian lower space outside a window, “Cloud Rings” by Ned Kahn (2006). Its sign says: A series of devices that continuously shoot rings of fog up into an exterior sunken courtyard space.

We spent a fair while watching it at work.

Cool. Black and white was just the thing for it.

Main Street, Louisville, But Not the World’s Largest Baseball Bat

Posted on January 16, 2024 by admin

Deep cold these last few days, so we passed the time, including the MLK holiday, in 21st-century central heated space, that is, home. Filed papers, hauled my boxes of postcards out of the closet for a look and a touch of reorganization – not to the point of being highly organized, though – and removed ornaments and lights from the Christmas tree and in one brief expedition into the frozen waste of our back yard, deposited the tree out there.

Should I burn it? Makes a glorious flame, if only for a few seconds. We shall see.

Wonder when the owner of this vehicle removed the Nativity.

Whenever that was, I have to say that I’d never seen that familiar display in this unusual location. For all I know, however, it could be the next big thing in honoring the First Christmas.

We spotted Bethlehem on wheels in east Louisville on the evening of December 29. The next morning we made our way to Main Street in downtown Louisville; and we returned to the area just before we left town on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Some blocks are exceptionally handsome.

The valuable facades of these pre-Great War vintage buildings look to be, in some cases, saved for later development behind them. Maybe mixed-use, largely residential but also specialty retail. I could imagine that outcome.

Not all of the street features refurbished leftovers from the late 19th century. Rising at W. Main and 5th Street is a behemoth occupied by a for-profit healthcare behemoth, the Humana Building. Designed by Michael Graves in 1985. Look up postmodern and I think you’d see an image of this building.

The structure is such a behemoth that it was impossible to get the building all within a shot, standing across the street from it. Still — something of a bird of prey vibe, seems like. Mecha-Owl?

It stands on the site of the Kenyon Building, pictured here in 1927.

The Kenyon itself no doubt replaced earlier, smaller structures. Louisville emerged as a city with rapidity in the early 19th century, with Main its first focus.

“West Main Street was the first street in the city,” Louisvilleky.gov notes. “The first businesses to line West Main Street included an attorney, grocer, boardinghouse, auctioneer, merchant, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, tobacco inspector, blacksmith, engineer, physician, hatter, tallow chandler, barber, painter, upholsterer, insurance company, plasterer, druggist, and brewer.”

How many of those professions remain on Main Street? I’m not going to do anything like work to find out, but my guess would be attorneys and insurance companies, certainly, maybe an engineer or two, some physicians, and merchants, depending on how you define that. Very likely no blacksmiths, hatters or tallow chandlers.

In our time, Main is also a street of some curiosities. Such as Jane Fonda in microgravity.

Nightspot Barbarella apparently didn’t survive the pandemic. This is the entirety of the last note from Barbarella on Facebook (October 5, 2021): “Permanently closed bitches!!! Loved y’all. It was a wild ride. But the roller coaster has come to an end!”

That last image is the Metropolitan Sewer District 4th Street Flood Pump Station, since 2022 adorned with a mural called “Hope Springs – The Wishing Well” by local artist Whitney Olsen. The linked press release also makes mention of the recently completed, fully invisible tunnel under the city — the Waterway Protection Tunnel, four miles long and 18 stories below ground, to capture surges of storm water. I’m no engineer, but that sounds pretty impressive

A more-or-less empty plaza, formally called Riverfront Plaza/Belvedere, extends from Main to a view of the Ohio. Part of the plaza is built over I-64.

Off in the distance an outline of a statue is just barely visible from Main. I imagined that the statue honored Muhammad Ali. As long ago as 1978, the city renamed a major downtown street after him, though not without resistance that’s completely unimaginable now; and the sizable Muhammad Ali Center is also downtown.

But no: the 1973 work is much more traditional, honoring Louisville founder George Rogers Clark, who has, of course, a larger memorial elsewhere. (The Ali Center is in the distance behind him in my image.)

Felix de Weldon did the statue. He’s better known for the Marine Corps War Memorial (Iwo Jima Memorial) at Arlington National Cemetery and, interestingly, he also did the Malaysian National Monument (Tugu Negara) in Kuala Lumpur. I have a vague memory of seeing that, in wilting tropical heat. Weldon did much more over a long life. His partial listing of public sculpture on Wiki begins with King George V in 1935 and ends with another sort of king, Elvis Presley, in 1995.

The George Rogers Clark bronze dates from 1973, but there is another more recent statue on the plaza: York, the only black member of Lewis and Clark’s expedition and as such the first African-American known to cross the continent, in a 2003 work by Ed Hamilton.

Coming to the Corps of Discovery as Clark’s personal slave, York has quite a story, and an especially awful one after the expedition returned, only much recognized in recent decades (see 37:23 and after in this lecture). No doubt York would have preferred freedom after the trek to the Pacific and back was over, instead of honors 200 years later, but the former isn’t in anyone’s power these days, while the latter is.

The plaza also offers nice views of the Louisville skyline. The Galt House hotel is a whopper: at 1,310 rooms, reportedly the largest in Kentucky, plus 130,000 square feet of meeting space and six restaurants. Developed in the 1970s, the hotel bears a name that’s an homage to a series of earlier hotels called Galt, one with a particularly colorful history that was the site, in ’62, where one Union general offed another Union general with a pistol shot at close range.

THE MURDER OF GEN. NELSON. ON page 669 we publish an illustration of the ASSASSINATION OF GENERAL NELSON BY GENERAL J. C. DAVIS, which took place ten days since at Louisville. Our picture is from a sketch by our artist, Mr. Mosler, who visited the spot immediately after the affair.

Even more remarkably, the Galt is owned by a single family, not an transnational. A single, sometimes quarreling family, but there isn’t so much remarkable about that.

The 35-story 400 Market, with the domed top, is the tallest building in Louisville.

Look the other direction and spy the mighty Ohio.

Stairs lead from the plaza down to a riverfront park developed in the 1990s, but late December wasn’t a good time for such a stroll, even though the drizzle had abated by the last day of the year. Some other warmer time, perhaps. Whatever the merits of that park, I doubt that it can erase the fact that the Robert Moses gash that is I-64 largely cuts downtown Louisville off from the river – the very reason there is a city in the first place.

Main Street plaques, along with metal bats, honor baseball players along the way.

Roberto Clemente is one of 60 honorees in the Louisville Slugger Walk of Fame, which stretches on sidewalks from the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory on Main St. to Louisville Slugger Field a little more than a mile away. We decided not to visit the baseball bat factory itself, which includes the world’s largest baseball bat (bigger than “Batcolumn in Chicago? Yes, by 19 feet.). Still, we walked by a few other bronze bats and home plates embedded in the sidewalk.

Is Chico Escuela is among the honored? I have to wonder. He should be. Considering that he’s fictional, the plaque wouldn’t have to bother with tedious stats. All it would have to say (naturally) is, “Baseball been barra, barra good to me!”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Public Art