Vestiges of Marshall Field’s

Posted on January 12, 2023 by admin

Back to posting on January 17, out of respect to the legacy of Dr. King, because a holiday’s a holiday, and also since it’s nice to have a little time off not long after a sizable stretch of holidays, which can be a bit tiring.

We’re just ahead the pit of winter, but for now anyway the weather isn’t that bad. “Pit” is an inexact term, of course, but I think of it as the last week of January and the first one of February, more or less. Since the Christmas freeze, temps have been more moderate, but I expect another gelid blast sometime soon.

The following is a reminder that, once upon a time, department stores were the disruptors.

“The development of the department store posed a serious threat to smaller retailers,” explains the Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Many small merchants tried to rally the public against the new behemoths, but they failed to gain much support. Rather than rally to the side of traditional merchants, Chicago shoppers embraced the new form of retail.

“The opening of the new Marshall Field’s State Street store in 1902, only a few years after anti–department store protests, signaled that this newer type of institution had won the admiration of consumers. The opening was a sensational event, and the store decided not to start selling items on its first day of business so that more of the eager public would be able to pass through.”

Ah, if only passing through the building were quite as awe-inspiring here in the fraught 21st century. Still, a visit has its moments of visual splendor. If you look up.

I need to spend more time looking this masterpiece. In person, I mean. Closer views are available on higher floors, but it’s a wow even from the ground floor. Worth the crick you might get putting your neck in just the right position to see it.

“The highlight of the Marshall Field store was the Tiffany Dome (1907), a glass mosaic covering six thousand square feet, six floors high,” EOC says.

Not just any glass, but a special kind of glass that Tiffany & Co. had just invented. State-of-the-Victorian-art amorphous solids in a glassy myriad of hues, in other words.

The Marshall Field Building’s other yawning space – a building that takes up a city block has ample room for yawning spaces – is worth the uplook too.

A building of this kind also has a practically limitless supply of engaging detail. Some of it is literally underfoot, and by literally, I mean literally.

Back on the seventh floor, not long after noon, we wandered through a not particularly busy clutch of quick-service restaurants. At some point, department store management erased the longstanding and high-quality casual food service in the basement, and reconfigured parts of the seventh floor for food service.

Near the restaurants is a corner with floor-to-ceiling windows. Hard to pass those up, so we didn’t. We took in the views from northwest corner of the building.

Looking north on State St.

Looking west on Washington St.

A few years ago, the ornate venue originally known as the Oriental Theatre, which started as a 1920s movie palace, took a new name, Nederlander. After theater impresario James M. Nederlander (d. 2016). Doesn’t he count as a New Yorker? Guess his company would argue that it is national, as indeed it is.

Elsewhere on the seventh floor is a pocket-sized, plain hallway with a small exhibit of figures from Marshall Field Christmas windows on State Street, which were as much holiday tradition at the store as decorating the Walnut Room or hiring a Santa Claus, with thousands of Chicagoans and tourists seeing the windows every year and developing fond memories of the place.

As recently as 2015, the windows were inventive expressions of the window designers’ art.

The items on display in the hall aren’t particularly old: most are from this century. Such as from 2004.

2006.

A luminous creation from 2005.

I could write more – say, 1000 words – contrasting these artifacts with the 2022 State Street Christmas windows, but I don’t need to. Here’s one of the storied windows this Christmastime.

One could take the current owners of the building to task for this diminished creativity, but it isn’t the cause of anything, only a symptom.

I can’t end on that sour note.

While taking pictures at an elegantly decorated part of the seventh floor, I caught an image of a passing lass, elegant as her surroundings.

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Posted on January 9, 2023 by admin

Early in the morning of June 5, 1942, coincidentally as the fateful Battle of Midway was underway thousands of miles away, workers were loading anti-tank mines into railroad boxcars at the Elwood Ordnance Plant in rural Will County, Illinois. It was war work, and occasionally as dangerous as being on a front line.

An unknown event triggered a massive explosion that morning at Building 10 of the plant, killing at least 48 workers and injuring almost as many. More than 80 years later, at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, you can see a statue honoring those men.

Carved on the plinth is June 5, 1942 Explosion, along with lists of names, plus two more names under March 24, 1945 Explosion, which I assume is a later incident, though there isn’t any other information on hand to tell me. In fact, I wasn’t completely sure there was an accident in June 1942 until I looked it up later, so as memorials go, this one could use a little more exposition.

Still, its heart is in the right place. Those men died in the war every bit as much as the American flyers over the Pacific at the Battle of Midway, and deserve a memorial too. Apparently it took a while for them to get one; not too long ago, the Chicago Tribune published a story about it, though even now I’m not sure if the statue we saw used to be at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, or is a second one.

Elwood Ordnance Plant was part of a larger facility eventually known as the Joliet Arsenal, which once totaled 23,542 acres with nearly 1,400 structures. At its WWII peak, about 22,000 people worked there.

Now most of that acreage is the tallgrass prairie, devoid of many people but not without reminders of its past.

We arrived mid-afternoon on December 29. As large as it is, we only had time for a small section, starting at the Midewin Iron Bridge Trailhead. A short trail from there leads to a bridge across Illinois 53, but also to a set of tracks that go deeper into the tallgrass prairie.

We walked to the tracks.

Clearly they used to be roads.

Now these roads are called the Group 63 Trail, which is a 3.5-loop around the Group 63 bunker field. The road cutting through the middle, however, is the Group 63 Spur. The location of the worker memorial is at the added red dot (I also added the trail names, since Google maps isn’t quite that complete).

Along the spur, which we walked, are abandoned concrete bunkers, relics of long-ago munitions manufacturing. There were more along the southern branch of the Group 63 Trail, which we also walked.

That particular bunker is open, supposedly the only one on the trail. All that’s inside are a few benches. The acoustics are interesting, though. It would be a good place for a very small concert.

Other bunkers — most of them, and there were many — are overgrown. In the summer, they must be almost completely obscured.

On we went.

Near the Group 63 Trail, a large part of the tallgrass prairie is a range reserved for buffalo, fenced off and with signs telling casual visitors to stay out. But there also are a few small viewing platforms on your side of the fence to watch for buffalo. I’m sure they’re out there, but we didn’t see any that day.

We barely even saw any other people, despite the relative good weather. So we enjoyed an experience of remoteness, without actually being remote — you can faintly hear traffic along the highway, after all. This isn’t the first time I’ve found that off the beaten path isn’t really very far off.

Plan B Travels at the End of ’22

Posted on January 5, 2023 by admin

Since Tucson was a no go, we decided to spend the same three days, December 29 to 31, visiting new sights close enough to home to be at home, come bedtime. A suite of day trips, that is. If you can’t go far, go near.

On the first day, we drove southward to near our old west suburban haunts, stopping first in Darien, Illinois, which is home to the National Shrine of St. Thérèse. I’d visited the shrine by myself at some point ca. 1999, but took no notes and made no photos, so I didn’t remember much. Besides, I’d read that a new shrine building was completed only in 2018, so it counted as a new place for me.

I’d also forgotten that Thérèse of Lisieux is also known as the Little Flower of Jesus. The entrance of the new shrine announces that, silently, as you enter.

Later that day, we made our way further south to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Strictly speaking, we’d been there before as well, all the way back in the summer of ’04. I told Yuriko we’d been there, but she didn’t remember. Maybe I remember because I spent a lot of time that day pushing Ann’s stroller along an uneven grass path under a hot sun. I seem to have left that part out of my posting about it, however.

On the other hand, Midewin is large, with about 13,000 acres and 30 miles of trails open to the public, so I’m sure we walked through an entirely different part this time – one with visible reminders of the area’s time as the site of an ammunition plant.

The sun wasn’t an issue this time.

On December 30, we made our way to a different sort of human environment: downtown Chicago, by way of driving to near O’Hare, parking the car, and riding the El into town. Without planning to, we found something downtown we’d never seen before, an art exhibit in the underground Pedway.

The Art of American Victorian Stained Glass, featuring well over a dozen windows from the late 19th century and early 20th. Wow. Well hidden and remarkable.

We also spent time in other parts of downtown, including a walkabout inside holiday- season Macy’s. I’ve been there any number of times, of course, but this time I appreciated the place with new eyes. One conclusion: it ain’t no Marshall Field.

Well, some things are the same. Macy’s still has the holiday horns hanging on State Street.

One of these days, I ought to give State Street the Wall Street or William Street treatment, but I’d have to be by myself to do so. State Street might not exactly be a great street, but it still has character.

By that, I mean skyscrapers from the early days of steel-reinforced buildings. Also, astonishingly intricate ironwork from a time when a department store (the vanished Carson Pirie Scott) could afford such things.

Actually, the Louis Sullivan building at State and Madison — the (0 0) of the street numbering system in Chicago — was built in 1899 for the retail firm Schlesinger & Mayer; Carson Pirie Scott was a Johnny-come-lately when it bought Schlesinger in 1904. These days there’s a Target in the lower floor. Sic transit gloria tabernae, I guess.

On the last day of 2022, we headed away from metro Chicago again. We’d considered Starved Rock State Park as a destination, but I wanted something new, so we went to Buffalo Rock State Park, which is more-or-less across the Illinois River from Starved Rock. Nice little park.

Afterward, the weather was good enough, and the temps just warm enough, to allow us to eat Chinese takeout at a picnic table in Washington Park in Ottawa, Illinois, in our coats. The last time we were there, it was hot as blazes.

Didn’t look around too much this time, though someday I want a good look at the many churches along Lafayette St. in Ottawa. I did take a look at LaSalle County’s Civil War memorial.

A closer look at the base –

– reveals that even the names of the Honored Dead are no match for Time.

Get Your Kicks at the Route 66 Association of Illinois Hall of Fame and Museum

Posted on December 19, 2022 by admin

Those three ships that come sailing in on Christmas Day in the morning will be trapped in ice this year, according to the National Weather Service.

That’s the forecast for 8 a.m. Central on December 25. Bitter temps, unless you happen to be on the West Coast or in Florida, and even those places will be relatively chilly. Bah, humbug.

On Saturday I drove down to Normal to pick up Ann, leaving a little early so that I could drop by the Route 66 Association of Illinois Hall of Fame and Museum, which is in the handsome former city hall and main fire station of Pontiac, Illinois, a building that dates from 1900.

The building, now called a museum complex, is home to more than the Route 66 museum, which is on the first floor. Other floors feature a “Life on the Titanic” exhibit, the Waldmire Experience (more about its namesake later), a local war museum and a room devoted to the music of the Civil War. You might call it an eclectic mix.

You might also call the Route 66 museum itself that. It’s a large room full of a lot of stuff. Just what a local museum should be.

Regional, really, since it covers the road formerly designated U.S. 66 as it passed through Illinois, from Chicago to East St. Louis, with such towns as Dwight, Pontiac, Bloomington-Normal, Lincoln, and Springfield along the way.

Display cases along the walls are devoted to each of those towns and others on the Illinois stretch, stuffed with pictures and photos and items, and arrayed in order from north to south (or the other way, if you start there). Plenty of other artifacts are placed freely on the floor or are on the walls.

Old gas pumps. Even during the golden age of Route 66, you needed gas.

A wall of Illinois license plates, one for each year from 1915 to 1984.

Trivia for the day — when did Illinois first put Land of Lincoln on its license plates? The wall tells us. 1954. The same words are on IL plates even now.

Something I didn’t know that the museum mentioned: from 1907 to 1917, Illinois issued aluminum disks to show registration, something like taxi medallions. Car owners affixed them to dashboards. The Illinois Motor Vehicle Act, which required motorists to register each vehicle with the Secretary of State’s office, became law in ’07, and specified the two-inch diameter disks.

The centerpiece of the room is Bob Waldmire’s custom-fitted ’72 VW microbus. Views outside and in:

Looks like he was a collector of bric-a-brac after my own heart. As a young artist, Waldmire (1945-2009) “determined that he would spend his life creating art that celebrated the history of Route 66,” according to a brochure I picked up. He apparently spent a lot of time driving the microbus along the historic route.

Until he upgraded to a modified school bus, that is.

The bus is parked behind the museum complex and is sometimes open for tours. Not when I wandered by. Just another reason to drop by Pontiac again, which will be easy enough during the back-and-forth to Normal over the next few years.

Anticipating Arctic Air

Posted on December 15, 2022 by admin

Cold rain well into the night yesterday, enough to wake the sump pump. The good thing was, it didn’t ice everything over today.

Still, we’re on the cusp of a chill. Cold enough by Christmas Eve to snap off bits of Santa’s beard, looks like.

But that’s nothing to the jolly immortal elf. Has he ever got some stories about the Little Ice Age.

In the course of my day today, I was reading about the Lehigh Valley distribution market, which is one of the nation’s largest in square feet (and throughput, I assume). Distribution, as in the system of warehouses that concentrate and store goods until they’re shipped to stores or otherwise delivered to customers. You know, the agglomerations of mostly characterless but highly efficient and valuable buildings that most people drive by without a passing thought. But they’re buying in stores and elsewhere, keeping the whole distribution system in motion.

Then it occurred to me that otherwise I didn’t know jack about the Lehigh Valley. So a little reading followed. The area’s industrial history is deep.

How is it I didn’t know anything about the Lehigh Canal?

Now I do. Glad I got out of bed today.

Another reason I’m glad I made the commute downstairs to my office was my discovery early this evening of Allison Young singing “When I’m With You (Christmas Every Day).”

“I’m hearing some delightful strength and control that wasn’t there in years past,” says one of the YouTube comments. I’ll second that, but add that she was delightful enough in years past (and not too many years past).

Art Institute Spaces, Small and Large

Posted on December 8, 2022 by admin

I’d like to say I visited this room recently — looks interesting, doesn’t it? — but I only looked into the room.

An English great room of the late Tudor period, 1550-1603, according to a nearby sign. I couldn’t get in because one inch within this room equals one foot in an actual room of that kind, so at best I could get a hand in.

The Art Institute doesn’t want anyone to do that, and for good reason, since random hands would completely wreck any of the Thorne Miniature Rooms. So they are behind glass in walled-in spaces, and not at eye level for someone as tall as I am.

Still, I leaned over to look in. The fascination is there. Not just for me, but for the many other people looking at the rooms on Saturday. Each room evokes a different place or time, heavily but not exclusively American or European settings.

English drawing room, ca. 1800.

French library, ca. 1720.

Across the Atlantic. Pennsylvania drawing room, 1830s.

Massachusetts living room, 1675-1700.

The fascination isn’t just with the astonishing intricacy of the work, which it certainly has, but also the artful lighting. Artful as the light-play on a Kubrick set. I know those are electric lights in the background, but it looks like the rooms are lighted the way they would have been during those periods. With sunlight, that is.

“Narcissa Niblack Thorne, the creator of the Thorne Rooms, herself had a vivid imagination,” says the Art Institute. “In the 1930s, she assembled a group of skilled artisans in Chicago to create a series of intricate rooms on the minute scale of 1:12.

“With these interiors, she wanted to present a visual history of interior design that was both accurate and inspiring. The result is two parts fantasy, one part history — each room a shoe box–sized stage set awaiting viewers’ characters and plots.” (More microwave oven–sized, I’d say.)

Thorne (d. 1966) had the wherewithal to hire artisans during the Depression by being married to James Ward Thorne, an heir to the Montgomery Ward department store fortune, back when department stores generated fortunes. Bet the artisans were glad to have the work.

It wasn’t my first visit to the Thorne Rooms, but I believe I appreciate it a little more each time. I know I feel that way about the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, which I also visited on Saturday.

The Thorne Rooms are an exercise in constrained space. The Trading Room is one of expansive space. So much so that my basic lens really isn’t up to capturing the whole. Still, I try.

No one else was in the room with me. It is a little out of the way, in museum wayfinding terms, and it is the artwork, rather than being mere protective walls and climate control, so maybe people pass it by.

Not me. I spent a while looking at details.

Overhead.

Such a grand room. Victorian ideas at work, striving to add uplift to a space devoted to grubby commerce. I’d say they succeeded.

“Designed by Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and his partner, Dankmar Adler, the original Chicago Stock Exchange was completed in 1894,” the museum notes on a page that also extols the room as a place where as many as 300 people can meet.

“When it was demolished in 1972, sections of the Trading Room, including Sullivan’s elaborate stenciled decorations, molded plaster capitals, and art glass, were preserved and used in the 1976–77 reconstruction of the room here at the Art Institute.”

I attended an event there myself for some forgotten reason about 20 years ago. Suits and ties (a while ago, as I said), dresses, and drinks in hand, the room hosted such a crowd with ease. If I had 300 people to entertain, I’d certainly consider renting the place.

Armistice Day 2022

Posted on November 11, 2022 by admin

It occurred to me not long ago, though it’s been true for a good many years, that every bit of writing, photography, film and other work created during the Great War is in the public domain. So I went looking for images of the first Armistice Day or thereabouts.

At the front. Really something to celebrate.

Paris.

London.

New York.

Actually, there’s some hint that the NYC pics are from November 7, when the AP erroneously reported that an armistice had been signed. No matter. The celebratory spirit is there.

Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park

Posted on November 10, 2022 by admin

Today was probably the last warm day of the year. For the next week and then some, at least, the chill will be on. Lunch and dinner were on our deck.

On the morning of October 15, a warm, clear Saturday in Atlanta, I got up early (for me) and walked from my short-term rental apartment in the Mechanicsville neighborhood to Garnett Station (on Marta’s Red and Gold Lines), mostly via Windsor Street, which was quiet and largely devoid of people.

From the station, I took the train to Peachtree Center, after which I spent time in Centennial Olympic Park.

The CNN Center is adjacent to the park, so I went there for a look too. Also, to find a bathroom, since the management of Centennial Olympic Park, in a gesture I take as hostile to the public at large, hasn’t bothered to re-open the park’s public bathrooms that closed during the pandemic emergency.

CNN employees can ride that tall escalator through a model Earth.

Soon after, I went to catch a streetcar — called a tram on the maps — which stops just outside the park. But I had a little time before the next arrival, so I looked around. In the vicinity of the park, you can see this building, whose name or address I didn’t bother with. Its Pac-Man-ish features, which appear to be the profile of a bold bird, move.

Then it changes its pattern, and they move some more.

The Ferris wheel Skyview Atlanta, another feature of that part of downtown, wasn’t moving yet.

After a short ride, I arrived at the streetcar stop near the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park and Preservation District.

I have the MLK park service publication in front of me. Don’t let anyone tell you that QR codes are better, NPS. The paper pamphlet unfolds in a way a smart phone image cannot, and it allows things to jump out at you in a way they can’t.

As soon as I unfolded it completely, the beginning of a sentence jumped out at me.

“In the twelve or so years that Martin Luther King, Jr. led the American Civil Rights Movement…”

Twelve years. Making Martin Luther King Jr. a bright meteor in American history, an illumination of the better angels of our nature, that’s over and done all too soon. Except that his legacy, his ethical bequest to the nation and the world, is hardly over and done.

The park captures the geography of Dr. King’s early life: a line from his birthplace and boyhood home on Auburn Avenue to his church — the church of his father and grandfather — also on Auburn, only blocks away.

When the King family led Ebenezer Baptist Church, it met here, a building now known as Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage Sanctuary. It was completed in the 1920s and restored in recent years to look like it did in the 1960s.

Not open. Some kind of maintenance going on, I think. I’d liked to have seen the inside.

This is the Horizon Sanctuary, a 1999 structure, where the church gathers now.

It isn’t part of the park, but on its border, next to the main visitor center and museum devoted to Dr. King and his times. The church isn’t a relic of the past either, its congregation robust these days. Its pastor, Sen. Raphael Warnock, is in the thick of trying to win a full term in the U.S. Senate.

Close to the historic church and also on Auburn, Dr. and Mrs. King repose in a tomb perched on a circular island, the focus of a deep blue reflecting pool running the length of a brick plaza. Promenade might be a better way to put it, considering that people were strolling the length of it.

An eternal flame on the grounds.

I spent some time in the museum. A fair amount to read and view, but the most poignant artifact was the wagon that carried his coffin.

Outside the museum, there’s a garden with a mouthful of a name: The Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream” World Peace Rose Garden.

Also on Auburn, his birth house.

It’s on the left. On the right is a book store and the museum shop. Tours of the birth house were already booked for the day.

“Auburn Avenue was the commercial, cultural, and spiritual center of African American life in Atlanta prior to the civil rights movement,” says the New Georgia Encyclopedia. ” ‘Sweet Auburn’ boasted a concentration of Black-owned businesses, entertainment venues, and churches that was unrivaled elsewhere in the South.”

The street had been renamed Auburn in 1893; originally it had been Wheat Street.

“During the next two decades, as restrictive Jim Crow legislation was codified into law, the city’s African American population became confined to the area between downtown and Atlanta University and to neighborhoods on the city’s east side, known today as the Old Fourth Ward,” the encyclopedia notes.

“It was during this period that Auburn Avenue first achieved prominence as a commercial corridor and became home to the city’s emerging Black middle class.

“Ironically, Auburn’s civic activism led to its undoing. As the NAACP and local voting-rights organizations, from their Sweet Auburn offices, lobbied state and local governments for an end to segregation, and as native son Martin Luther King Jr… led the crusade for civil rights before a national audience, the street began its steep decline. With the legal barriers to integration removed, many Auburn shopkeepers moved their businesses to other areas of the city, and residents began migrating to Atlanta’s west side.”

Historic No. 6 Fire Station, which is part of the park.

The NPS says: Built in 1894 in Romanesque Revival style, the fire station stood guard over the city for nearly 100 years. In the 1960s, it became one of Atlanta’s first racially integrated firehouses. It closed in 1991.

So before the ’60s, Atlanta firehouses were segregated. How nuts is that?

Besides sites associated with Dr. King, Auburn still features some shotgun houses, which mostly aren’t part of the park.

Plus some larger houses. This one is home to the Historic District Development Corp.

Eventually, I wandered beyond Auburn to a parallel street, Edgewood Avenue. It’s an active commercial street in our time, with various establishments.

Plus murals.

I had a late lunch of breakfast food at Thumbs Up, a diner. Its outside wall.

Eggs and pancakes, done up right. Worth the half-hour wait sitting outside.

The Georgia State Capitol

Posted on November 8, 2022 by admin

It’s been a good year for visiting U.S. capitols. Four all together: Utah, Nevada, California and most recently, Georgia. I believe that makes about 40 exteriors over the years, about 30 of which I’ve ventured inside, and not counting two provincial parliaments in Canada. Not sure about a few of those, because memory is an uncertain thing.

The Georgia State Capitol is in the thick of downtown. It has an impressive dome.

The painted copper statue that looks so small from the ground is known as Miss Freedom, dating from 1889, only a year after the capitol was completed. It’s about 26 feet tall, weighs over 1600 lbs. and is wearing a Phrygian cap, a detail one has to read about to know.

Fittingly, gold leaf from near Dahlonega, Georgia, adorns the dome. One of these days, I need to visit that place, to take in the historic mint. I’d toyed with the idea this time, but stuck around Atlanta instead during the day or so after the conference. The capitol was the first place I went when I had some free time.

The legislature isn’t in session now, and besides, a capitol is an office building — and a lot of people don’t work as much as they used to in offices. So the place was practically deserted. I wandered around the quiet marble halls, a design by Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham of Chicago, no less.

The rotunda. Plain, but still worth a look.

The chambers. Closed, but with nice big windows to peer through.

The capitol also has a museum aspect to it, as many capitols do. Including something I’d never seen before in any capitol. Or anywhere that I can remember. A two-headed calf.

The unfortunate beast was born in Palmetto, Georgia in 1987, a nearby sign said. Other curiosities were on display at the capitol, too, but none quite so curious.

Or maybe this is.

It took me moment to realize it was Jimmy Carter, as governor. That isn’t quite the face the nation outside Georgia got to know in the late ’70s. Also, it’s odd that there’s no mention that Gov. Carter went on to, you know, some other office. Even the California capitol acknowledged that Ronald Reagan was more than governor for a spell.

Besides Jimmy, there’s a decided mix of other historic personages on display, some too famous to need naming. A chronological posting:

Interesting, but I was more delighted to find Button Gwinnett. Not only has this been a year for visiting capitols, but for Button sites too.

“Brief but brilliant was the career of Button Gwinnett, Revolutionary Patriot,” the bust says, emphasis on brief.

Guess I need to visit the Button Gwinnett House someday, to really be a complete Button tourist. Or was it really his house?

Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, Sacramento

Posted on November 2, 2022 by admin

Urban churches are often locked when no service is imminent, but on the other hand, sometimes a side or rear door is open, while the main doors won’t budge. That was the case at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Sacramento.

A fuller view. The nicely written Wiki entry is worth quoting a bit:

“Among the first of thousands to seek his fortune in the Sacramento region during the California Gold Rush, Patrick Manogue had aspirations that differed from many of his fellow fortune seekers. His goal was to earn enough money to finance a trip to Paris, where he planned to enroll in seminary college and become a Roman Catholic priest.”

So he did, eventually becoming Sacramento’s first Catholic bishop in 1886.

“Inspired by churches he’d seen in European plazas, Manogue worked to secure property just one block away from the State Capitol, with a dream of building a cathedral in Sacramento. Manogue modeled the cathedral after L’Eglise de la Sainte-Trinite (The Church of the Holy Trinity) in Paris.”

The building, design attributed to Bryan J. Klinch, a San Francisco architect of Irish birth, was dedicated in 1889.

“Traditionally, cathedrals are built with the main altar on the east end, to reflect ‘Jesus coming like the rising sun in the east,’ ” the cathedral web site says. “While the exterior of the cathedral is Italian Renaissance, the interior was fashioned after the Victorian style of the day. Much of the decor was painted in a style called trompe l’oeil….”

Above the altar hangs a 13-foot crucifix with a crown overhead that is 14 feet in diameter, with a combined weight of almost a ton. They are held up by aircraft cables.

Side chapel art.

A little detail.

Gets right to the point, doesn’t it?

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US History