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 Old Joliet Prison, Interrupted

Posted on July 24, 2019 by admin

Though it’s interesting, we didn’t go to Joliet on Sunday just to see the Joliet Area Historical Museum. The drive’s a bit far for that. About a year ago, I read that the museum had started offering tours of the former Joliet Correctional Center, which closed in 2002. I knew I wanted to do that, and so Ann and I went.

These days the site is called the Old Joliet Prison — a much better name. As you look at the massive stone walls and guard towers and the barb-wire residuum, no weasel word like “correctional” will do. It was a prison.

The tour groups meet in front of the former prison’s administrative building. Convict labor built the prison in the 1850s, with a design by W.W. Boyington, who also designed the Chicago Water Tower.
It’s also the site of the 1915 murder of Odette Allen, wife of the prison’s warden, a story that the guide told us almost at once. Blunt force to her head, body set on fire in her room, a young black inmate fingered for the crime but not executed because there was too much doubt about his guilt, though he spent the rest of his life in the prison. Later I read about the incident, as relayed here.

One curious detail to the story (I thought): “That afternoon, [Warden Edmund] Allen bought his wife a $3,000 diamond ring. He was going to present it to her that evening at dinner.”

That’s an insanely expensive ring, about $76,000 in current money. Allen was independently wealthy? Maybe running a large state prison had its graft opportunities in the early 20th century. This is Illinois we’re talking about, after all. But enough to buy that kind of rock for his wife?

Anyway, the former administrative building hasn’t been stabilized yet, so we had to enter the grounds through one of the prison’s sally ports.
Almost immediately after our entrance, heavy rain started to fall. The tour leader took us into some of the few structures open to visitors, in hopes that the rain would slack off.

So we got to see some solitary confinement cells, with the only light from windows and cell phones.
Along with the former prison hospital and its abandoned equipment.
The prison has been closed for 17 years. In the early years of its abandonment, the place was pretty much no man’s land, prone to looting, arson and vandalism. Graffiti relics of those days are still visible.
The rain kept coming.

Soon thunder and lightning started. Since much of the tour is outdoors — most of the buildings are still unsafe — that meant the tour had to be cancelled. In a few moments of lighter rain, we all left the way we had come. I got a few pictures of the wet grounds as we exited.

We can re-schedule at no extra charge at a later time. I figure that might be October, when it certainly won’t be hot, and the risk of thunderstorms is a little less.

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.

Rivers of Steel: Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark

Posted on July 16, 2019 by admin

It seems to be a misnomer, “Rivers of Steel,” at least as it applies to the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark, yet that’s part of the official name. The Carrie Blast Furnaces produced pig iron, not steel. The facility, which is just outside Pittsburgh, then sent the iron across the Monongahela River to the vast steel works in Homestead, Pa., site of the 1892 battle between strikers and company goons (professional goons: Pinkertons).

So I’d call it Rivers of Iron. Or maybe Rivers of Molten Iron, which sounds more badass. But never mind, that’s just me picking the sort of nits that allow me to be a half-way decent editor.

We arrived at the Carrie Blast Furnaces in time for the 11 a.m. tour on July 6. The day was blazing hot. Fitting for visiting a place whose heat must have been hellish year-round when it was in operation.

The furnaces were originally built in 1881 and acquired by Andrew Carnegie in 1898, becoming part of U.S. Steel a few years later. They closed in 1978. These days, Allegheny County owns the site and a nonprofit manages it, including tours.

The abandoned pig iron foundry — actually two surviving furnaces along the river, #6 and #7, with the rest razed — is a hulking empire of rust and dust and bricks and voids. Enormous pipes rise into the sky. Twisted metal goes this way and that. Our guide’s constant reminder on pebble paths peppered with debris: watch your step. We watched our step, but when standing still, peered as much as possible into Pittsburgh’s, and America’s, industrial past.

Some soaring elements.

Closer to the ground.

Rusty fixtures.

The king of the complex: one of the blast furnaces.

I listened to the explanations of what certain things were, and how the process moved along, but I don’t have a knack for metallurgy, so most of it didn’t stick. I did get the message about how dangerous and hard the work was, especially in the early days.

The site is also a nexus for graffiti and outsider art. The largest piece of outsider art was created some decades after the foundry was abandoned.

“In 1997, when the furnaces were in the hands of the privately owned Park Corp., a group of local artists entered the site, illegally, with the intention of constructing something from the materials that stayed when industry left: steel tubing, copper ties and wire from electrical conduit,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says.

“Every Sunday for a year, the crew crawled through a hole in the fence, carrying their lunches and a few tools… The artists, whose seven head shots are posted on the exterior of the pump house, fastened the deer’s head on the ground and then lifted it atop the neck using a boat winch.”

Graffitists also roamed the site in its abandoned days. Inside a large shed (where the tour began), the walls are covered with it.

Elsewhere in the complex is a wall on which graffiti is now officially allowed.

“On this wall, it’s art,” the guide said. “Everywhere else, it’s vandalism.”

The Andy Warhol Museum

Posted on July 15, 2019 by admin

The earliest memories I have of Andy Warhol are probably him being mocked by comedians, which I must have internalized somewhat. I didn’t give him much thought in my youth, and if I did, he was the weirdo who painted soup cans and oddly colored portraits of movie stars. Later I regarded his work is stuck in ’60s, as dated as go-go dancing or Hair.

More recently his work has grown on me. Maybe in part because he didn’t stick in the ’60s. That was his heyday, certainly, but half a century later, and more than 30 years after the artist’s death, Warhol is still packing ’em in at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which originally opened in 1994.

But I’ve come to appreciate him for more than enduring popularity. I’m no authority of any kind on his art, but I understand a little about its context now, and see that he was doing new and intriguing things, or sometimes just odd or strange things. Taking his considerable talent as an illustrator in all sorts of curious directions. Making things that are still interesting to look at and think about, which is one of my crude baselines for judging an artist.

Though footsore from a day of tourism, we joined the crowd at the museum on the evening of July 5. The extra Friday hours and half-price admission helped attract us, but we probably would have gone anyway. Pittsburgh has a number of worthwhile fine arts museums, as do a lot of other places. Nowhere else has a museum devoted to Andy Warhol.
Richard Gluckman, who is known for his museum work, redesigned the building to be a museum. Originally built in 1911 as a multistory warehouse, the structure now sports seven floors of galleries and exhibition space, with the permanent Warhol exhibits taking up the top four floors.

Warhol’s early and student work, as well as his time as a commercial artist in the 1950s, takes up the seventh floor. On the sixth floor are ’60s works; the fifth floor features ’70s works; and the fourth floor exhibits works from the ’80s.

In some ways, his early works are the most interesting, simply because they are less familiar. On display on the seventh floor, for instance, are ink drawings of women and produce trucks (1946), “Seven Shoes” (third image down), which Warhol did for a shoe brand in the 1950s, and the risque “Female in Corset and Stockings,” which probably wasn’t for a client.

Equally interesting are items about Warhol’s childhood and youth. Such as a large, blown-up photo of his high school graduation picture. The face is him, and yet not any Warhol you’re used to seeing. Turns out Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh had a childhood and an adolescence, as opposed to the comedian-fodder artist who appeared fully formed in New York with frizzy white hair, painting Brillo boxes.

Also interesting to learn about Warhol: he was the son of Lemko immigrants and he remained a practicing Ruthenian Catholic all his life.

The sixth floor displays the most familiar Warhol output: soup cans and other consumer product-inspired items, celebrity portraits in assorted hues, and clips from his early movies, all 1960s vintage. Most of these are so well known — so absorbed into the tapestry of 21st-century American culture — that I don’t feel the need to link to any images. Even so, I look at the soup cans now and think, interesting idea for 1962. Also, who eats Pepper Pot?

Google Image “soup can” and one of the things high in the results offers a silk screen of “Tomato Soup” for sale. For $500. Not even a limited edition. Presumably the Warhol Foundation is getting a cut. Warhol was an astute businessman as well as an artist, and I think that would make him smile.

All that said, I’m not paying that much for an open-edition silk screen of “Tomato Soup,” however interesting the original concept might have been.

The ’70s and ’80s galleries sported such interesting, or amusing, items such as the “Vote McGovern” (1972) and “Space Fruit: Lemons” (1978). An entire gallery wall featured “Mao Wallpaper,” which he created in 1974 but which the museum reprinted a few years ago, probably to put on the wall. Anyway, it’s there, along with “Skulls” on the same wall (individually, not in a group of six). I like to think that’s a comment on the millions Mao murdered, but I’m not sure the museum would say that.

One gallery display of late-life Warhol output was a complete surprise: computer-generated art. Specifically, Amiga generated.

According to the museum: “In the summer of 1985, Warhol was given his first Amiga 1000 home computer by Commodore International and enthusiastically signed on with the company as a brand ambassador.

“For their launch, Commodore planned a theatrical performance, which featured Warhol onstage at Lincoln Center with rock ’n’ roll icon and lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry. In front of a live audience, Warhol used the new computer software ProPaint to create a portrait of Harry. He later made a series of digital drawings including a Campbell’s soup can, Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus,’ and flowers.”

These images are on display in the gallery, though for most of the past decades, they languished on obsolete Amiga floppy disks. “In 2014, we collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Museum of Art to extract the saved files from Amiga floppy disks held in our archives collection,” the museum notes.

That was something I knew nothing about, since I wasn’t paying attention to Warhol or the Amiga in 1985, though I knew a fellow in my office who still had one of the machines in the mid-90s that he said was still working.

Warhol died in 1987. The Amiga display made me wonder what he would have done on the Internet, had he lived only a few years longer. Probably odd and maybe interesting.

After we left the museum, we walked across what used to be the Seventh Street Bridge, which is mere feet away. In 2005, it was renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge. Dating from the ’20s, it’s a self-anchored suspension bridge that has held up better than the original Silver Bridge, which was of a similar design.

I don’t know how Pittsburghers feel about that name; maybe hardcore Yinzers didn’t take to it. But it’s a fine name for a bridge — goes somehow with the neighboring bridges, named for Roberto Clemente (Sixth St.) and Rachel Carson (Ninth St.) — and I was happy to walk across it.

Point State Park & Pittsburgh Walkabout

Posted on July 14, 2019 by admin

RIP, Patricia Deany, mother of our dear old friend Kevin Deany, and a kind and gracious lady. She passed last week at age 90.

At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers is Point State Park, a 36-acre triangular patch of land that may well be featured in every bit of tourist literature ever published about Pittsburgh since the park’s creation nearly 50 years ago.

But that’s no excuse not walk over to the park from downtown Pittsburgh and make a circuit around the fountain at the tip of the park, which is what we did after lunch at the Oyster House on July 5.
That image makes it look like no one else was there, which wasn’t true at all.
The park offers views of various other parts of Pittsburgh, such as Mt. Washington and the Duquesne Incline.

Or Heinz Field, home of the Steelers. There ought to be a giant ketchup bottle in there somewhere.

Away from the fountain, there’s a view of the Fort Pitt Bridge, which carries I-376 across the Monongahela. It replaced the Point Bridge, which was destroyed, along with the Manchester Bridge, to make way for the park.

Besides being a pleasant green space with views, the park makes various nods to the early history of Pittsburgh. An irregular path of sidewalk follows the outline of Fort Duquesne, the French outpost. Elsewhere other sidewalks mark the outline of the somewhat larger Fort Pitt, the succeeding British outpost, also in the classic star (Bastion) shape.

The U.S. flag is a little unusual. Not in having 13 stars, but in that they aren’t the circular arrangement you usually see. Then again, no one specified how the stars in the canton should be arrayed in those days (and maybe we should go back to that).

On one edge of the park is the Fort Pitt Block House, Point State Park’s only surviving structure from colonial times, built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt. It has endured since then in its original spot, for many years as a residence, more recently as a relic.

Our walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh started at the Block House, led by an energetic young woman, native to Pittsburgh and eager to talk about various places and buildings, though less about design and more about history.

Naturally, the names of Pittsburgh robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick came up a lot, including the story about a dying Carnegie writing a letter to the estranged Frick asking for a meeting, presumably in the spirit of reconciliation.

Les Standiford tells the story, via NPR. A man named Bridge, who delivered the letter, was Carnegie’s assistant.

“Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s ‘Highlands’ up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.

” ‘Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,’ Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.’ ”

Whatever else you can say about the steely-eyed bastard Frick, at least he had no illusions about his benevolence, as Carnegie seemed to have had. Our guide also mentioned the taller Frick building next to Carnegie’s, and in fact pointed them out. They are both now overshadowed by more recent Pittsburgh buildings, of course.

At one point, we passed by a building associated with both Carnegie and Frick, along with a lot of other Gilded Age and later tycoons: the Duquesne Club on Sixth Ave.
Founded in 1873 and still a social club for the wealthy, its current home, a Romanesque structure designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, opened in 1890. Just in time for Carnegie and Frick to discuss, possibly over brandy and cigars, the busting of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Speaking of labor history, not far away from the club, I noticed this historic marker.
The founding convention of the AFL was in a Turner Hall. Our guide didn’t mention that, and I asked her about the Turner Hall. She hadn’t heard it. To be fair, I’d never heard of Turner Halls until recently either. To be extra fair, I’m not guiding walking tours of a major American city, so I consider that a small lapse on her part.

The Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, unlike that in Milwaukee, is no more. The site is now called Mellon Square, a 1950s park-like creation paid for by the Mellons to go with the development of Alcoa’s new headquarters building at that time.

Alcoa isn’t there any more, and the building is now known as the Regional Enterprise Tower, but it still has its distinctive aluminum skin. The New York modernists Harrison & Abramovitz designed it.

I’ve read that a Beaux-Arts palace of a theater, the Nixon, was destroyed to make way for Alcoa, causing some consternation even in the tear-it-down midcentury.

Another historic marker that I noticed (that also wasn’t on the tour).
Why Pittsburgh? I wondered. I looked it up later. NPR again: “Slovak culture is everywhere in the Steel City. It’s home to the Honorary Slovak Consulate, a handful of social clubs, cultural centers and annual holiday festivals dedicated to maintaining and celebrating Slovak traditions.

“ ‘Allegheny County has the highest percentage of all of the counties in the United States, not just Pennsylvania, of people who claim Slovak heritage,’ said Martin Votruba, head of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Slovaks and Czechs formed a group called the Czecho-Slovak National Council of America. Because there were so many Slovak immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Votruba said it seemed like the perfect location to have a big meeting on Memorial Day in 1918.”

Along the way, we looked at a work of public art in Pittsburgh, a 25-foot bronze fountain centerpiece at Agnes R. Katz Plaza by Louise Bourgeois, completed in 1999. The eye-like smaller bronzes are actually benches, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

By the time we got to the U.S. Steel Tower, the tallest building in Pittsburgh, a light rain was falling. It would continue at varying strength through the rest of the walk.

No aluminium for this behemoth, rather steel and lots of it. This too is a Harrison & Abramovitz design. The company made steel for its own building, a newish product at the time, corten or weathering steel, which ends up with a dark brown oxidation over the metal to protect the structure from the elements and obviate the need for paint. (The steel still has many surprising uses.) According to our guide, however, until recently the building skin had an unfortunate habit of spitting granules of this rust onto the sidewalks and people below.

Aluminium, steel and then glass. Fitting for the HQ of PPG, also a stop of the tour. Founded in 1883 as Pittsburgh Plate Glass, these days PPG is a supplier of paints, coatings, optical products and specialty materials.

The complex is actually six buildings, all opening in the early 1980s as part of the effort to revive downtown Pittsburgh. By that time, Johnson/Burgee were the go-to NY architects, so they designed the PPG. Rain prevented me from making a good image, but the tallest of the buildings towers over a plaza that features an ice rink in colder weather. It looks like this on a sunny day.

Toward the end of the tour, we made a stop at a place on Smithfield St. that has no marker of any kind and in fact isn’t distinctive in any way, except for one thing: it was the site of an early nickelodeon, thought to be the first theater anywhere devoted exclusively to movies, as opposed to a live theater with a few machines tucked away to separate patrons from their coins.

“The first exclusive moving pictures theater in Pittsburg and the world was opened in 1905 by Harry Davis and John P. Harris in the Howard Block, west side of Smithfield street, between Diamond and Fifth avenue,” one E. W. Lightner wrote in 1919.

Diamond St. is no longer called that. Oddly enough, the change to Forbes St. was made as late as 1958. I’d imagine that would have been hard to do.

Lightner continues: “Curious to say, the second exclusive picture theater of the world was opened in Warsaw, capital of Poland, by a Pittsburg Polander, who saw the Davis-Harris adventure and recognized the possibilities of presenting so wonderful and profitable a development in his native country.”

“The original and only ‘Nickelodeon’ was opened at 8 o’clock of the morning and the reels were kept continuously revolving until midnight. A human queue was continuously awaiting the ending of a performance and the emptying of chairs. Inside an attendant would announce, ‘show ended,’ and spectators would be hustled gently to the street and new spectators welcomed, seated as quickly as possible, and the picture would again respond to the magic reel.”

As you can see, it was pretty much a nothing site when Google Images came by.

Still looks that way in July 2019. There ought to be a marker there at least, or maybe even a hipster bar with a nickelodeon theme.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel

Posted on July 10, 2019 by admin

Chapel has a cozy connotation: little chapel in the woods, wayside chapel, goin’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married, etc. That doesn’t mean you can’t find some sizable edifices that are chapels all the same, such as the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, or the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

Late on Friday morning we arrived on campus to see the sizable chapel, funded by condiment money in the 1930s.
More specifically, the will of ketchup baron Henry Heinz (d. 1919) vaguely provided for the development of a building for religious training and social events at the university. His children and the university administration ultimately decided on a soaring neo-Gothic structure, designed by Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder, who was known for his university work. Apparently the chapel was nondenominational from the get-go.

Looking toward the sanctuary.
Toward the back of the nave. The organ has 4,272 pipes, and when we were in the chapel, an organist was filling the space with soft practice notes.
Both transepts feature dual banks of some astonishingly tall stained glass windows: 73 feet tall, designed by Charles J. Connick’s Boston studio.
I found a pamphlet that tells me that the four tall windows each have a theme: Temperance, Truth, Tolerance and Courage. Some of the characters depicted in those windows are religious figures, as you’d expect, such as the Virgin Mary, Moses, King David, St. Francis, St. George and Joan of Arc.

Others are less expected, such as Sir Isaac Newton. With Edmund Halley down in the corner, helping prove Newton’s laws of motion.
Or President Lincoln.
Or Dorethea Dix.
That’s just a small sample. “The windows, which highlight an equal number of women and men, contain sacred and secular figures from history, literature, and science,” the chapel web site says. There are 391 figures in all.

Pittsburgh ’19

Posted on July 7, 2019 by admin

Independence Day fell on a Thursday this year, creating a four-day window of opportunity to go somewhere. So late on the afternoon of July 3 we headed east, spending the night near Toledo, Ohio. On the 4th, we drove on to Pittsburgh, where we spent three nights and two full days, returning after an all-day drive today.

We stayed at a hotel in the pleasant Moon Township, Pa., not far from Pittsburgh International Airport. The days were hot and steamy and punctuated by vigorous rainfall in the afternoons — supposedly typical for western Pennsylvania in July, though it was a lot like home this summer. Anyway, even occasional heavy downpours didn’t slow us down much.

The road from metro Chicago to Pittsburgh, if you take the Indiana East-West Toll Road and then the Ohio Turnpike, takes you smack through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We spend a few hours walking its trails on July 4 as a stopover on the way to Pittsburgh.

Getting up early(ish) on July 5, we first went to the Duquesne Incline, one of Pittsburgh’s two funiculars, and rode it up and down. At the top we took in the hazy morning view of the city and the meeting of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. My thinking about funiculars: when you find one, ride it. My thinking about the Monongahela: that’s just a damned fun name to say.

Next we drove to the Oakland neighborhood and spent time at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, the Heinz Memorial Chapel — the church that ketchup built — and the Cathedral of Learning and some of its highly artful, internationally themed rooms, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Lunch on the first day was at the the Original Oyster House on Market Square, which is known as Pittsburgh’s oldest bar and restaurant, and which serves up a mighty fine array of seafood. From there we repaired to Point State Park at the meeting of the rivers, site of a French and then British fort in the days before American independence, and the seed of modern Pittsburgh. That’s also where our lengthy guided walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh began, which took up the rest of the afternoon.

That should have been enough for the first day, but our momentum carried us on to the Andy Warhol Museum for a few hours in the early evening, taking advantage of its longer hours on Fridays. A suburban location of Primanti Bros., a local chain, provided a hearty dinner that night.

The second day, July 6, wasn’t quite as busy, but we got around. Late in the morning, we took an extensive tour of Carrie Furnace, a hulk of a former blast furnace complex on the Monongahela. It reminded me greatly of the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, though the scale was even larger. After all, Birmingham was the Pittsburgh of the South, not the other way around.

After lunch in a nondescript but decent Chinese restaurant, we visited the Frick Pittsburgh, whose grounds include his mansion, a museum with his art, a greenhouse, and a carriage and antique auto exhibit. We saw the greenhouse and the auto exhibit.

After treating ourselves to some hipster ice cream late in the afternoon, we went to one more place, despite thunder and rain: Randyland.

It’s the kind of outsider art phantasmagoria beloved by the likes of Roadside America or the Atlas Obscura. For good reason. As Roadside America puts it, the place is a “circus-colored oasis of sunny vibes on Pittsburgh’s formerly grim North Side.”

Two East-Central Illinois Memorials As Different As Can Be

Posted on June 19, 2019 by admin

Our recent short trip to east-central Illinois and west-central Indiana found us spending two nights in Champaign, last Friday and Saturday. During the day on Saturday, we drove east on U.S. 150 and a short way on I-74 into Indiana. Then we headed south on Indiana 36 to Terra Haute, stopping in Dana.

Returning from Terra Haute, we took U.S. 150 westward — that road jogs oddly to the south from Danville, Illinois — and caught Illinois 133 in Paris, Illinois, a town that sorely needs a replica Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe or some such to distinguish it. That road takes you to Arcola, a town we’re familiar with. From Arcola it’s a straight and not too interesting shot back to Champaign on I-57.

So it was a rectangular driving course (roughly east-south-west-north), good for a day trip, despite the heavy rain at times. It’s been a rainy spring and early summer, which we noticed must be damaging crops, since a lot of corn and soybean fields were covered by large puddles (an item from Ohio about the problem).

The sites associated with Ernie Pyle and Eugene V. Debs, honoring Hoosiers of somewhat different cast, were our main destinations. But I had a couple of minor destinations in mind as well. One was an obscure memorial in the obscure town of Oakland, Illinois, which is Coles County. I had passed that way 12 years earlier. Here’s what I said then about the Oakland town square:

“The place was gloomy. Maybe it was just the overcast skies… Still, I wanted to see the monument in the middle of the square. It was Memorial Day, after all. Someone had decorated the edges of sidewalk leading to the monument with small flags, forming a spot of color in the square, so that was something. The monument consisted of two statues sharing one plinth, one of a soldier and the other sailor, clearly World War I vintage, with the names of locals who had participated in that war carved in the plinth. All of it was weathered and dark.”

I wanted another look. In 2019, the square’s a little better looking (officially it’s the Oakland Centennial Park). The monument, a lot better looking. The darkness this time was from the recent rain.
Maybe it was refurbished for the centennial of the war or its own centennial, since carved in stone is the memorial’s dedication date: May 30, 1919 — the first Decoration Day after the Armistice.

I’d forgotten about this item in the town square, a 77mm Feldkanone 16 German artillary piece. A local prize of war, I guess.

In Arcola, I wanted to see something we’d overlooked last year: the Hippie Memorial. How we missed that, I don’t know, since it’s less than a block away from that town’s Raggedy Ann and Andy sculptures, which we saw.

The Hippie Memorial is a very horizontal structure and an example of vernacular art. Better still, a vernacular memorial, which isn’t that common.

Hippie Memorial Arcola Illinois

Just how much recognition does ☮ get these days? I wonder.

Hippie Memorial Arcola Illinois Nearby, a sign offers the dedication speech, made by the widow of the creator, local eccentric Bob Moomaw, almost exactly 20 years ago. The text seems the same, but the background is a lot more psychedelic than it used to be.

Hippie Memorial Arcola Illinois Sure, why not honor the hippie movement? It’s been subject to retroactive derision all out of proportion to its risibility. You can argue that hippies were yet another flowering of bohemianism, a periodic occurrence that’s helped keep things interesting since the Romantic movement at least.

The Eugene V. Debs House

Posted on June 18, 2019 by admin

Tucked away among the buildings and open fields of Indiana State University in Terra Haute is a structure from the Gilded Age, but also associated with the golden age of socialism in the United States: the Eugene V. Debs House.

We arrived in the mid-afternoon on Saturday, in time to take a detailed tour from an exceptionally knowledgeable guide, but not for an event earlier that day in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Pullman Strike.

Debs led the strike, of course, and for his trouble was tossed in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois, for six months — an event that radicalized him. After he got out, his commitment to socialism never wavered.

The museum’s event involved a book signing of a new volume about the Pullman Strike — The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America by Jack Kelly — and a reading of “Liberty,” the speech that Debs delivered to a crowd of thousands of supporters in Chicago after his release from Woodstock Jail, on November 22, 1895.

It was a speech I’d never read, so I looked it up later. Credit to Debs for giving good speeches in an era when political discourse hadn’t yet been dumbed down to semiliterate 280-character bursts. A couple of selections:

“Out of range of the government’s machine guns and knowing the location of judicial traps and deadfalls, Americans may still indulge in the exaltation of liberty, though pursued through every lane and avenue of life by the baying hounds of usurped and unconstitutional power, glad if when night lets down her sable curtains, they are out of prison, though still the wage-slaves of a plutocracy which, were it in the celestial city, would wreck every avenue leading up to the throne of the Infinite by stealing the gold with which they are paved, and debauch Heaven’s supreme court to obtain a decision that the command ‘thou shalt not steal’ is unconstitutional…

“I remember one old divine who, one night, selected for his text George M. Pullman, and said: ‘George is a bad egg, handle him with care. Should you crack his shell the odor would depopulate Chicago in an hour.’ All said ‘Amen’ and the services closed.

“Another old sermonizer who said he had been preaching since man was a molecule, declared he had of late years studied corporations, and that they were warts on the nose of our national industries, — that they were vultures whose beaks and claws were tearing and mangling the vitals of labor and transforming workingmen’s homes into caves.”

The museum staff was giving away souvenir ribbons, replicas of the ribbons worn by supporters who greeted Debs when he got out of Woodstock. We got one.

The house is both a house museum of the period, with many of the Debs’ possessions, as well as a museum about labor organizing, American socialism — Debs was adamant that the ideology wasn’t some imported Euro-virus — and the fight against government overreach, as expressed by siding with the bosses in the ’90s and the sedition laws of the First World War.

It was a pretty nice house for its time, vintage 1890. I understand that Debs caught some flack for living in a comfortable house. Comfortable with a few touches of affluence, since his wife Kate brought some money to the marriage. Some of the fireplaces feature cobalt blue porcelain tiles imported from Italy, the mahogany dining and parlor furniture is pretty nice, and a display case sports the Debs’ set of Haviland china.

Of course that’s the kind of lightweight criticism that politicians and activists of all stripes receive. The house was clearly upper-middle class for the time, but so what? The Debs were supposed to live in a shotgun shack? Besides, bread and roses.

Also on display are a number of depictions of Debs. This one is by Wisconsin sculptor Louis B. Mayer (not the movie mogul).

LM could also be Louis Mayer. In any case, this is also a sedition trial-era work.

Plus plenty of buttons from Debs’ many runs for president.
In the house’s attic, which was once merely storage, all of the walls are covered with murals. The centerpiece is Debs in campaigning mode.
One of the smaller details on the mural walls, but one I liked best, is a campaign button from 1920. Debs received 3.5 percent of the popular vote, more than any other socialist candidate for U.S. president, before or since. While in federal prison.
The museum notes: “The murals were painted by John Laska, former Professor of Art at Indiana State University and active Foundation member. Completed in 1979 after three years of hard work, the murals depict Debs’ life and time in chronological order…”

The Ernie Pyle museum reminded me of a long-ago English teacher of mine, Mr. Swinny. The Debs museum reminded me of another long-ago teacher, Mrs. Collins. She taught us freshman U.S. history. About 60 at the time, she grew up in Buffalo and — I think I remember this correctly — had been a Wobbly as a young woman.

That would have been during the Depression, after the heyday of the Wobblies, but still. Mrs. Collins wasn’t shy about throwing in some labor history and using texts sympathetic to socialism, most notably The Jungle. Naturally, Debs came up as well.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History