The Old Jewish Cemetery & The Pinkas Synagogue, Prague

Posted on March 27, 2025 by admin

Memory’s a dodgy bastard, so I’ll never be sure whether or not I saw souvenir golems for sale in Prague in 1994, when I bought a book of Golem stories. Maybe there were some, but those were the early years of the post-communist tourist economy. It takes a while to ramp up the tourist merch. I am sure, however, that I saw them in just about every gift shop we visited in the Czech capital in 2025. Some smaller, some larger, some gray, many the color of a dirty orange flower pot.

I decided not to buy one, though it might have been a good office-shelf companion to my figure of Ganesha or the meditating Bigfoot. But you never can be sure about golems, and since I don’t have the learning or wisdom of Rabbi Loew of Prague, the thing might get out of hand.

I also don’t remember any of the historic synagogues being open during my first visit. I’ve read that the nonprofit that manages them, the Jewish Museum in Prague, was only re-established in 1994, so I expect that most of the structures were still closed in those days.

One place that was open in ’94 was the Old Jewish Cemetery (Starý židovský hřbitov), but only for a glimpse.

Now you can take a stroll through the cemetery, which is adjacent to the Pinkas Synagogue (Pinkasova synagoga), on a stone path that snakes through the grounds. That’s one thing we did on March 11. It remains one of my favorite cemeteries.

I like the seeming chaos of the stones. Not only were people buried close to each other, they were interred in layers. I’ve read that as the cemetery grew more crowded, and use of an ossuary wasn’t an option, more soil was added, and new layers of the dead were added. You do notice, being there, that the ground tends to be higher than street level in most places, with the cemetery walls holding in the excess earth.

Burials occurred from the early 15th to the late 18th centuries. A few of the stones were also marked with modern plaques, denoting a notable permanent resident. Such as one Avigdor Kara (d. 1439).

Or Wolf Spira-Wedeles, mentioned here in passing. By the time he died (1715), some notables were receiving larger memorials, such as his.

I remembered to take a few black-and-whites.

Monochrome suits the texture and austere beauty of the Old Jewish Cemetery, I believe.

The adjacent Pinkas Synagogue hasn’t had a congregation in a long time. In our time, it serves as a memorial to the Czech Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Inside you can visit two floors.

On the walls on both floors are the names of the dead, and their birth and death dates, if known, inked by hand.

About 80,000 names in all.

Qutb Minar, Delhi

Posted on March 24, 2025 by admin

When it comes to historic ruins in Delhi, the Mughals aren’t the only game in town. Qutb Minar, a 238-foot pre-Mughal legacy of the Delhi Sultanate, rises above the southern part of the metro, part of a larger complex that’s a World Heritage Site. That was how it went for us as tourists in modern India. Another day, another World Heritage Site.

I’d say Qutb Minar deserves its modern status.

Casual visitors can’t climb to the top any more and I’m not sure I could have anyway. “Access to the top ceased after 2000 due to suicides,” asserts Wiki. But you can stand right under the tower and behold the detail, as we did on the afternoon of February 20.

Monumental structures this old come with extra layers of marvel, at least in my reckoning. It’s one thing to admire a tower like Tokyo Skytree or Burj Khalifa, which are certainly impressive, but whose construction also had the benefit of all sorts of machines and experts in their use — enormous cranes come to mind, as do CAD systems with more computing power than the entire Apollo program.

On the other hand, Qutb Minar is essentially an artful stack of brick, one of whose characteristics turned out to be longevity. I’m certain some machines were available for the task, but I also imagine much of the building involved human and animal power. How did builders beginning around AD 1200 – around what, AH 620? — undertake such a feat? It only goes to show that machines might augment the result, but technique lies in the human mind.

Various sources tell me that Qutb Minar counts as a minaret for the nearby Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque, built around the same time and now a ruin, and as a “victory tower.” That is, presumably to remind the local population who was in charge now: one Qutb al-Din Aibak, the Ghurid-aligned conqueror of Delhi and founder of the Delhi Sultanate, whose military efforts were part of the hard-to-follow wave of Central and South Asian conquests and counter-conquests that played across centuries now remote.

The Ghurids, who were Tajiks, seem to be one of those peoples that pop up in history with some regularity, a minor group from somewhere remote from most urbanized civilizations, suddenly expanding by conquering its neighbors and basically kicking butt for a few centuries across a wide area before fizzling out. They also had the distinction of being also first Muslim conquerors of north-central India.

Quwwatu’l-Islam is noted for any number of reasons, including its columns.

Their distinctiveness has been long noted. From Treasure spots of the world, by Walter Bentley Woodbury (1875): “… no two columns of this structure are alike, and this peculiarity applies also to the almost endless number forming the colonnade surrounding the building… the portico of the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque framing the courtyard area consists of columns/pillars from destroyed Hindu and Jain temples…”

Views of the courtyard.

Details. including what look like restorations.

In the middle of the courtyard is the Iron Pillar, covered with faint inscriptions.

Three Raj-era tablets offer translation in Arabic, Hindi and English. Perhaps not up to the latest translation standards, but worth a read all the same.

The pillar is an echo of an even earlier time, created during the Gupta Empire in the fourth to the sixth centuries as reckoned by the Gregorian calendar, and thought to laud the warrior deeds and memory of Chandragupta II (d. 415), also known as Chandra. What is it doing at Quwwatu’l-Islam? Brought from somewhere else as a bit of loot by one ruler or another many years after its creation, though exactly who or when or from where are matters of scholarly debate.

More.

The grounds also include a surprising amount of green space.

We only spent a short time in Delhi, but it didn’t seem overloaded with green space.

Tokyo Skytree & Senso-ji

Posted on March 23, 2025 by admin

I’ve been seeing ads recently for a fine-looking daypack (carryon pack, the ad calls), since the bots surely know that I just did such things as take airplanes to far-flung destinations, use a credit card overseas and bought the likes of an e-sim. The daypack’s array of pockets and their layout seem useful, too. Then there’s the price: $300. No.

As if to try to answer my immediate objection, soon a new ad for the same item appeared: “Why would you buy a $300 pack?” it asks. I don’t stick around for the answer. I have a fine daypack already. More than one, in fact, were pressed into service during the RTW ’25. One went on my back into the airplane, the other, empty, was waiting in the checked bag for light duty during the trip.

For all the years I spent in Japan, Tokyo didn’t represent much of that time. All together I spent maybe a week there, including a delightful visit in November 1993: young marrieds out on a long weekend. Wish I could remember the name of the minshuku where we stayed, somewhere in the sprawl of Tokyo. I close my eyes and I can see its tidy lobby, paper walls, delicate prints, narrow dark stairs, tatami underfoot. Our hosts were most hospitable, from a long line of inn keepers, I think. On the wall was a framed drawing of a banjo by Pete Seeger, along with his signature. Some decades earlier, he had stayed there.

This time we stayed in a guest room at the residence of Kyoko and her husband and two nearly grown children not far from the University of Tokyo, and had a pleasant visit. Good to see old friends, wherever they are. Yuriko and Kyoko go way back. Kyoko spent time in Texas, Corsicana specifically, and we traveled with her to Arizona in ’97. After Lilly was born, she came to Chicago to help out for several weeks.

One thing we missed in the early ’90s was Tokyo Skytree, rising 2,080 feet over Sumida Ward, and for good reason: the tower was completed only in 2012 as a TV tower and a tourist attraction. We arrived in the afternoon of February 14.

Who has the wherewithal to build such things in the early 21st century? In Japan, anyway, railroad companies do, in this case Tobu Railway Co. Ltd., a Kanto regional line that offers some sweet destinations, including the mountain resort of Nikko and the hot springs around Kinugawa Onsen, both of which I only know by reputation. Naturally, Japanese RR companies are never just that, and in this case while transport remains a core business, the conglomerate also includes entertainment venues, hotels, a commercial real estate and construction arm, and retail operations, especially department stores at major terminals.

Judging by my previous and recent experience at the department stores owned by regional RRs, the department store not only isn’t dying in Japan, it flourishes. They are serving a much more dense population, of course, and one that travels by train, but there’s also that matter of stocking goods people want to buy, including basements full of exceptionally good food. The stores’ bustle is something American department stores can only dream about in their dying reverie.

Up in the Tokyo Skytree bulb are a couple of tourist observation decks. The combo ticket, while expensive, isn’t outrageously more than just visiting the lower deck, so we opted for access to the deck at 350 meters and the narrower one at 450 meters, one after the other. It turned out to be easier to take good pictures from the lower level.

Busy, but not sardine-can busy.

Now those are some views, showing just how dense metro Tokyo is.

Below is the Sumida River, which wasn’t always so densely populated.

Night on the Sumida River – Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1881

“Night on the Sumida River” by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1881

Three hundred fifty meters high? That’s well and good, but nothing as impressive as more than a thousand feet: 1,150, to be almost exact.

Window washers came by as we looked out at 350 meters. Hanging, as far as I could tell, by two wires attached to their car, and not their persons. They seemed pretty blasé about that, but anyone who felt otherwise (like me) would be in the wrong line of work.

On the other side of the river, and visible from the tower, is Senso-ji temple, in the Asakusa neighborhood. We still had some afternoon light after visiting Skytree, so we decided to go to the temple, a short train ride and a longer walk away. A long pedestrian street (Nakamise-dōri) goes through Asakusa to the temple grounds.

Hōzōmon gate.

The temple’s other gate is known as Kaminarimon, and if I’d known about its noteworthiness, we’d have backtracked a bit to see it. Apparently we entered the Nakamise-dōri at the middle, and so missed Kaminarimon (and it took me a while to figure that out just today). Ah, well.

There has been a Buddhist temple on the site since our 7th century, with the usual history of fires and rebuilding down the centuries, including the most recent cycle in the 20th century. The early 1945 air raids destroyed the temple, but rebuilding was complete by the 1970s. Said to be one of the most-visited religious sites in the world, the temple has the advantage in that regard of being square within the world’s most populous metro.

The temple is dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, which might also help explain its popularity. Who doesn’t need some compassion sometimes? Kannon is popular when it comes temple dedications, with Shitennō-ji, Kiyomizu-dera and Sanjūsangen-dō also dedicated to Kannon, all in the Kansai region, and all of which I visited at one time or another.

The Main Hall.

No shortage of visitors.

Not a bad afternoon in Tokyo, visiting popular structures from the 21st and 7th centuries, respectively, and being fully alive in the present.

The Kamakura Daibutsu

Posted on March 17, 2025 by admin

Mere hours after I returned home on Friday evening, an intense burst of wind ’round midnight toppled the Wisconsin Buddha in my back yard, among other things, such as most of our back yard fence. Guess it’s better that I’m here to deal with the debris in the yard, calling our insurance company, etc.

Setting the Wisconsin Buddha upright was an easy part of cleaning up the back yard. Our little blue-green statue may serve as a reminder of the impermanence of things, but it hasn’t been completely destroyed by time. Yet.

You can also say the same for the much larger, much better known Kamakura Daibutsu, or the Big Buddha of Kamakura, a city on the edge of metro Tokyo-Yokohama. We visited on a cool and sunny, pleasant day in mid-February. It sure looks permanent, but you could say that’s illusion.

Something else to consider when you face a bronze of this heft: Does the size of a Buddha, or more exactly Buddharūpa (depictions of Buddha), matter when it comes to conveying Buddhist ideas?

I can’t call myself expert enough to answer that, but somehow I suspect not. When it comes to impermanence, my small Buddha would seem to have just as much to teach. Just not as many students.

The Big Buddha at Kamakura dates from a period in Japanese history known as the Kamakura period, which is all of our 13th century and more, and a time that, for a while anyway, this seaside town was the hub of government for the Japanese islands: an early shogunate, emerging from the winning side of a bloody war between clans, and in fact the moment in history when the samurai caste consolidated its power. How cool is that? We’re talking about a capital founded by samurai, for samurai.

Buddhist sects flowered under the new order, I think not coincidentally, and with enough vim to leave behind temples and memorials of all sorts in the region – such as the massive bronze Daibutsu. These days, it attracts tourists in numbers probably undreamed of by earlier centuries, when trickles of pilgrims or scholars or mystics came.

The seated Buddha, 43 feet or so to the top of his head, weighs about as much as seven and a half Mack trucks with trailers. It is an Amida Buddha that began as a large long-gone wooden statue, a structure much more impermanent than the bronze that came later (about AD 1252), its existence due to a vigorous new branch of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan in Kamakura times. Down the centuries since then, various halls built around the giant have burned down and been rebuilt (but ultimately not) and the statue itself has been damaged in earthquakes and floods and repaired and restored and listed as a special site, including part of a nomination as a World Heritage Site.

Nice peripheral details.

For ¥50 extra, about 50 cents, you can go inside. For a moment, I was giddy as a schoolboy. I get to go inside a giant, ancient Japanese statue?

The status shows its age – how susceptible it is to the passage of time – its impermanence – more in there.

Looking into the head of the Kamakura Daibutsu.

Outside again. How is it that the metal giant has such graceful lines?

It’s popular.

Having your photo made at a tourist site: near universal, isn’t it? It’s regarded as tinged with silliness, this custom. Some people think that, anyway.

No. Revel in it.

Corpus Christi Cathedral

Posted on January 22, 2025 by admin

First stop last Thursday in Corpus Christi, Texas: Corpus Christi Cathedral, which is in downtown on a rise that’s probably good protection against hurricanes.

The cathedral was dedicated in 1940. That’s later than a lot of cathedrals, but not so recent that modernism enters the picture, such as at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in Los Angeles. Previously, the seat of Catholic Diocese of Corpus Christi had been at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but when it was damaged by fire in 1938, the church tasked Oklahoma architect Charles Monnot (d. 1962) to design a new one.

“Monnott – a devout Catholic — showed much interest and talent in designing places of worship,” says the Cultural Landscape Foundation. “During the early decades of the twentieth century, when the Catholic church was building extensively across several southwestern states, Monnot was designated as the architect on a multitude of projects.”

Besides Corpus Christi, he did the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, seat of the Oklahoma City Archdiocese, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower in San Antonio, as well as other churches, monasteries, chapels, and convents in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado.

Spanish Colonial Revival style, it’s called. A stylized interpretation of early Spanish missions. It has a handsome interior.

The floor.

There is a good collection of stained glass. Such as the loafs and fishes, miracle of.

St. Pius X, who established the Diocese of Corpus Christi, and Pius IX, figures I haven’t seen that often in stained glass.

But not never: At the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago, Pius IX is seen promulgating Ineffabilis Deus, which defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. He’s probably doing that in the Corpus Christi window as well, and not handling the famed laundry list in the Sordidum Lauandi Dei incident, in which Pius refused to have the papal laundry done outside the Vatican walls after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy and the loss of the Papal States in 1870.

Tannenbaum ’24

Posted on December 15, 2024 by admin

The Christmas tree business is still mostly fragmented, with some 16,600 farms growing Christmas trees on nearly 300,000 acres in the United States, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture. Some farms are large – a wholesaler called Holiday Tree Farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley asserts that it ships 1,000,000 trees a year, grown on 1,500 acres. But no single entity dominates.

Good thing, too. If an outfit called CTree Group controlled, say, 50 percent of the market, we’d have to buy an annual subscription to receive our trees in December.

The cash money I spent today at a Christmas tree lot with no name here in the northwest suburbs pretty much went straight into the pocket of the farmer. And I mean that literally. That’s where he put it.

He and his (I assume) wife, both of whom looked roughly my age, except more grizzled from spending much more time outside, were stationed at the small trailer, taking money, chain-sawing the stumps and netting the whole trees, for easier transport. These things they did for me. I asked whether theirs were Michigan trees. Over the years, some of our trees have been, including those from the UP. No, Wisconsin. Just as good, I told them.

The thought that the money goes directly to the owner makes it less annoying that the price was up again this year ($65), and that many trees in the lot were priced at over $100, a price I’m sure not to pay. But not completely un-annoying.

The lot, as many are, is set up on an underutilized section of parking in a nondescript strip center. But not completely nondescript. I was glad to see the record store is still there, though I’ve never been in.

I hadn’t noticed this before, also in the strip center.

An organization I’d never heard of. Even so, I have to admit the name Mountain of Fire & Miracles Ministries has a peel of thunder and a whiff of brimstone about it. Makes you sit up and pay attention.

Some detail.

I took it for an independent Protestant sect of the homegrown sort, but no. This location is an outpost of MFM, a Nigerian Protestant sect – at least, in the sense that it isn’t Catholic — founded in 1989. Here’s something from the church’s web site, under “Mission and Vision” as one of the objectives of the ministry:

To build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. MFM is an end-time church where we build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. An end-time church is a church where a sinner enters with two options: he either repents or does not come back, contrary to the present day church where sinners are comfortable and find things so easy and convenient.

I don’t know much about the organization, not really, considering how ignorant I am about most things Nigerian. Still, its presence tells me that there must be more Nigerians here in the northwest suburbs than I realized. The world not only comes to Chicago, it comes to the Chicago suburbs.

Chapel of the Transfiguration

Posted on October 4, 2024 by admin

The place to contemplate the great outdoors is usually outdoors. But not quite always.

About a month ago, we entered Grand Teton National Park at the Moose Entrance. Not far inside the park is the Chapel of the Transfiguration.

Rustic, the style is called. A picture window behind the altar, looking toward the Cathedral Group of mountains, was clearly no accident. Liturgical east in this case points to the grandeur of Creation.

The chapel has stood in this spot in Wyoming for nearly 100 years, built to serve guests at the various dude ranches that existed in the area before it was a national park. Grand Teton became a national park in 1929, with President Coolidge inking the bill at the tail end of his administration, but even then the chapel wasn’t in the park, which didn’t expand down to Moose until 1950.

Transfiguration is an Episcopal chapel, associated with St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson, Wyoming. St John’s, a large log structure over 100 years old, is just off the busy main street in that town, a little apart from the many shops and restaurants and attractions. We spent a while in Jackson before entering the Grand Teton NP, including a visit to St. John’s.

The church was open, but no one else was there. If any place qualifies as the beaten path, Jackson, Wyoming is it. And as usual, it took about a minute to get off the beaten path.

One-of-a-Kind Montana Shops

Posted on September 18, 2024 by admin

US 287 north from Helena, Montana, is a little short on signs of human habitation.

Eventually, you come to the Census-designated place called Augusta, pop. 300 or so. Part of its Main Street is US 287, featuring the sort of things you expect in a small-town main street.

A main street in Montana, that is.

There are other ideas about what the flag should look like, and considering the wave of new state flags, it might be changed.

Then there was this house stuffed to the gills with stuff, offering that stuff for sale. A lot of stuff. A resale business dealing in stuff, let’s say. No formal name that I could see.

We couldn’t pass that by. The mind boggles at how this accumulation accumulated, and you should boggle your mind every now and then. The place was so jammed that I had to be conscious of every movement, lest I bush into something and cause of an avalanche of stuff.

Lots of stuff outside, too.

Say, whatever happened to Lash LaRue?

Just curious. I’m not enough of a fan to buy a beat-up $20 comic book, though I bought a few postcards unrelated to LaRue or Westerns or even movies.

In fact, I didn’t know much about LaRue, so I later read one of his obituaries. He died only in 1996, with B Westerns having long passed him by. Even by the early ’70s that was the case, as reflected by the Statler Brothers’ catchy 1973 bug-in-amber song, “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?” (Who died in 1987.)

Just west of the western entrance of Glacier NP, on US 2 in the town of Columbia Falls, Montana, is Ten Commandment Park, a.k.a. God’s Ten Commandments Park. I hadn’t read that Roadside America article or heard about it in any way. But I saw it. Couldn’t pass that by either. Not retail, strictly speaking, but there were items for sale inside. Or, I suppose, available for a donation.

The welcome center is along a U-shaped driveway that sports many billboards.

Some exhorted one and all to follow a specific Commandment; others were pro-religious quotes from famed U.S. presidents; and yet others lauded Jesus.

I had to go in.

A fellow of about my age, large and gray bearded, was there to greet me. Frankly I expected a bit more witnessing from him. Instead, he told me to look around, let him know if I wanted to buy anything, and he offered license plate-sized Ten Commandments and Jesus magnets for free. Also, a few free snacks. That was it.

Helena, Montana

Posted on September 17, 2024 by admin

Missing a hike around Devils Tower meant we had time for other things, including a fine second breakfast in Hulett, Wyoming (pop. 300+). I asked the waitress what it was like a few weeks earlier, during the Sturgis Rally.

“Crazy,” she said, adding that the rally started on her third day on the job, for that extra measure of crazy.

She and her husband and daughter had been living on a boat for five years until recently, she also said, including a sail through the Panama Canal once. She mentioned that almost in passing, as if five years on a boat is something people often do, followed by relocating far away from any oceans. Though not Sturgis-busy, the place had more than a few customers, so I wasn’t able to get more detail.

We had time to look around Sundance, Wyoming before we left. Turns out Harry A. Longabaugh spent some time in the local jug for a bit of thieving near Sundance, and so he became known as the Sundance Kid. The town of Sundance (pop. just over 1,000) wants you to know this, communicating it to passersby with a memorial in the town’s main municipal park.

Despite his long history of criminal shenanigans, that was apparently the only time he was imprisoned. Guess you can get away with a lot when you have the dashing good looks and vim of a young Robert Redford.

The drive from Sundance into Montana and on to Helena took up most of the day on August 21.

Billings, Montana, bears further investigation if we’re ever out that way again. All it takes to impress me sometimes is a terrific lunch, and that we found at Spitz Mediterranean Street Food in downtown Billings. It didn’t seem like a chain – and I’d never heard of it – but there are about 20 of them, and it seems that Billings can support one. Other locations are in such usual-suspect retail markets as southern California, Denver, Portland, Ore. and DFW.

We spent the night in Helena and woke the next morning to more than a hint of a wildfire in the air, from elsewhere in Montana, but less than an air action day.

We planned to drive to the entrance of Glacier NP that day, but we couldn’t leave the capital of Montana without seeing the capitol. Front and back.

Inside.

Stained glass is a little unusual in a capitol, but not unheard of.

Murals are more common. Some clearly from an earlier period.

More recent murals depict scenes like this, the cooperative spirit between native and settler women.

On display in the Montana House of Representatives chamber – and the reason its door is always locked, to protect it, a sign said – is the painting “Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians at Ross’ Hole,” by Montana artist Charlie Russell (d. 1926). It is a highly esteemed work of his.

In situ:

Only a few blocks from the capitol is the Cathedral of St. Helena, which is undergoing exterior renovation.

It was open.

Some magnificent stained glass.

Before leaving town, we visited downtown Helena.

Soon we made our way to N. Last Chance Gulch Street, which is a pedestrian thoroughfare. At least, that’s what Google Maps calls it.

The Helena As She Was web site says of this street, in answer to what its real name is:

“The answer is: Both. Last Chance Gulch is the name of the actual gulch in which gold was discovered in 1864. The thoroughfare which was built down the Gulch was originally named Main Street. It remained that way for some 85 years, until July 20 1953, when acting Helena Mayor Dr. Amos R. Little, Jr. signed an ordinance officially changing the name of Main Street to Last Chance Gulch. Both names are still used locally for what was once the grand thoroughfare of Helena’s business district.

“Last Chance Gulch meanders as it does because it was originally routed between mining claims; it was not designed that way to lower fatalities from stray bullets, as some promotional literature has claimed.”

Stray bullets, eh? Helena wouldn’t be the only place that trades on a history of (fortunately) long-ago violence. That kind of thing is a dime a dozen west of the Mississippi, and not unknown to the east.

Along N. Last Chance Gulch. And there is a S. Last Chance Gulch, though we didn’t walk that far.

We found Taco del Sol on N. Last Chance Gulch. Unlike Spitz, a standalone operation.

If you want tasty nachos in Helena, Montana, Taco del Sol is your place.

South Dakota Dash ’24

Posted on September 13, 2024 by admin

The first day of the trip was a slog from Illinois through Wisconsin and most of southern Minnesota. The second day, August 19, we woke up in Luverne, Minnesota and went to bed in Sundance, Wyoming. Less of a slog, mainly because we stopped a few places in South Dakota along I-90.

First of all, Sioux Falls. How can you stop in Sioux Falls and not see the falls?

Hard to believe, if you crop things right, you’re in a city of around 200,000. Sioux quartzite, it’s called.

Once a hub of water-power industries — the ruins of a mill are on the grounds — these days the falls travel through the municipal Falls Park. Sioux Falls has thoughtfully erected an observation tower on top of a rise in the park, for better views.

Naturally, we went to the top, for the view of the falls, downtown Sioux Falls, and – off in a different direction – a major Smithfield meat processing plant. Sioux Falls isn’t just about credit card HQs, the result of a race-to-the-bottom concerning usury laws. It still has industry, too.

Before leaving town, we sought out the Cathedral of St. Joseph, a work by Emmanuel Louis Masqueray (d. 1917), another of those famed architects mostly lost to time. Among other things, he was chief of design at the 1904 St. Louis world’s fair (one of the four fonts of the modern world).

It was open. Not all city churches can say that on a Monday.

Nice. Westward on I-90, at one of the rest stops, we found a much smaller religious structure, though elegant in its simplicity.

It too was open.

Lunch that day was in the burg of Kennebec, SD (pop. 281), which happened to have a place, Benji’s Diner, with a distinctive ag-town vibe, and serious meat on the menu.

It’s a little hard to tell, but there’s beef under that sea of gravy, and I found it mighty filling. Signs on the highway promote the SD beef industry and beef eating on principle, and they get no argument from me.

We took a look around town. When I saw this, I concluded that every town, no matter how small, has one of these murals as a little expression of civic pride. Seems that way, anyway.

Kennebec is the Lyman County seat.

The built environment isn’t just buildings.

Despite our large lunch, we managed to stay awake for the drive to Wall, SD, stopping for a few minutes at Wall Drug and then Badlands National Park, where we spent a few hours. That decision factored heavily into what happened next in Wyoming, more about which later. Enough to say that by the end of the day, we were in Sundance, Wyo.

But we weren’t done with South Dakota. For reasons I won’t bore anyone with, especially myself, we had to backtrack the next day to take care of a minor issue with the car, so it wouldn’t be major later on. For that, we went to Rapid City, which we had bypassed the day before. I’m glad we got to go, because the mechanical issue didn’t actually take long to deal with, which left us with time to see a bronze James K. Polk.

Plus U.S. Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge, among other U.S. presidents at street corners in downtown Rapid City that I managed to see.

“When a local man noticed people interacting with a temporarily placed statue of President Lincoln outside the Hotel Alex Johnson [in downtown Rapid City], an idea sparked. This man was Don Perdue, and he came up with the idea to put a president on every corner in Downtown Rapid City,” explains Visit Rapid City.

“It took a lot of convincing, a lot of fundraising, and hours of research before it started. In 1999, Perdue proposed the idea to the city as a way to honor the legacy of the American Presidency. The project was approved and in 2000 the first four presidents were unveiled: George Washington, John Adams, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush… Over the next ten years, a group of local artists worked to create and place all 40 of the remaining statues.”

I didn’t have time to see all of them. Or the inclination. It was in the low 90s F. that day, so I only wanted to spend a few minutes seeking them out, while Yuriko more rationally waited in our air conditioned car.

She was willing to get out and look at Rapid City’s older attraction a few minutes later, however: Dinosaur Park. I later checked with my brother Jim. He said he does indeed remember, a little, our family’s visit to the park in 1960, before I was born.

There’s a good view of Rapid City from atop the park’s hill.

But you’re up there to look at wire-mesh-frame dinosaurs with concrete skins, originally dating from the 1930s but obviously maintained into our time and (maybe?) tinkered with a little to more closely match current thinking about dinosaurs.

Even better, I learned that the park was originally a WPA project, consciously designed to draw tourists to Rapid City with something distinctive. Of all the various WPA projects one can encounter, this has to be unique among the lot.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Religious Sites