The South Shore Cultural Center

Posted on August 31, 2016 by admin

The South Shore Cultural Center at 7059 S. South Shore Dr. in Chicago started off as the South Shore Country Club. “In 1905, Lawrence Heyworth, president of the downtown Chicago Athletic Club, envisioned an exclusive club with a ‘country setting,’ ” the Chicago Park District says. “Heyworth selected unimproved south lakefront property, often used for fishing and duck hunting, for the new country club.

“The club’s directors hired architects Marshall and Fox, later known for designing many of Chicago’s most luxurious hotel and apartment buildings, including the Drake Hotel. For inspiration, Heyworth provided a photograph of an old private club in Mexico City, but asked the architects to exclude expensive embellishments…

“Enjoying immediate success and social importance, South Shore Country Club quickly outgrew its facilities. Marshall and Fox were hired to build a new clubhouse, incorporating the original ballroom. Constructed in 1916, the larger and more substantial reinforced concrete building, like the original, was designed in the Mediterranean Revival style.”

So it remains to this day. I have fond memories of the place, since I attended Wendy and Ted’s wedding there 20 years ago last month, but I hadn’t been back since. (The Obamas had their wedding reception there as well in 1992.) Since Oak Wood Cemetery isn’t far away, I decided to swing by and look around again.

This is the front. If you turn around at that point, you’ll see a long, lush garden planted on the narrow boulevard that serves as the driving entrance to the property.

The back. Or maybe that’s actually the front, since it faces Lake Michigan. Wendy and Ted stood just inside those large windows to take their vows, while the audience looked toward them and out toward the lake. A very nice setting.
Some deferred maintenance. It’s 100 years old and belongs to the city, after all.
But the inside still looks resplendent. According to the city, “the country club’s membership peaked in the late 1950s. Simultaneously, many African-Americans began settling in South Shore. Because the private club excluded black members, it went out of business in the 1970s. In 1974, the Chicago Park District purchased the property to expand its lakefront facilities.”

I walked all the way around the building and through it, also taking in a few views of the lake from the South Shore Cultural Center. From a rocky shore.
From the property’s small beach.
I sat for a while at a picnic table nearby, and the ambient sound was an audio parfait. The waves crashed against the shore; the wind blew; and the cicadas in the nearby tree made their buzz.

A warm Saturday, but almost no one else was there. Not sure why. It isn’t the best beach on Lake Michigan, but not the worst either. Maybe there were algae blooms in the water or something else noxious that I couldn’t see.

GTT 2016 This & That

Posted on July 21, 2016 by admin

“We’re going to see some bears,” I told a groggy Ann as we drove through Nashville on the Saturday morning we were there.

“I don’t want to go to a zoo.”

“Not those kinds of bears.”

These kinds of bears.
Standing concrete bears, snowballs in hand, ready to toss them. To cut ’n’ paste from the now-defunct Nashville City Paper (March 15, 2004): “The polar bear statues have long been a symbol of the community of Edgehill. They were the creation of the late Gio Vacchino, who owned the Mattei Plaster Relief Ornamental Company around 1930. They were constructed as advertisements for the Polar Bear Frozen Custard shops on Gallatin Road and West End Avenue, which closed after World War II.

“Edgehill resident Zema Hill bought the bears and placed them in the neighborhood in the early 1940s. He placed two in front of a funeral home and two in front of his house where they eventually became a symbol and part of the culture of Edgehill. They stood at 1408 Edgehill Ave. for more than 60 years. The two funeral home bears were sold to a North Nashville resident in 1952.”

The fate of the funeral home bears remains unknown. The two formerly at 1408 Edgehill – which I used to see frequently, since I lived on Edgehill a few blocks away for a year – are now fixed at the corner of Edgehill and 12th on public property.

In Memphis, we made a brief stop to look at some other animals. Living creatures this time, the Peabody Hotel ducks. The two on the right are easy to see, but there were a few others on the left of the fountain in the lobby.
I can’t remember when I first heard about the ducks. Maybe as far back as college. When I knew we’d be passing through Memphis, I checked to make sure they still residing in the hotel lobby fountain. So they are. We didn’t see the ducks march, but we did see the ducks.

“How did the tradition of the ducks in The Peabody fountain begin?” the hotel web site asks, and proceeds to answer with a story that’s a little vague, but never mind: “Back in the 1930’s Frank Schutt, General Manager of The Peabody, and a friend Chip Barwick, returned from a weekend hunting trip to Arkansas. The men had a little too much Tennessee sippin’ whiskey, and thought it would be funny to place some of their live duck decoys (it was legal then for hunters to use live decoys) in the beautiful Peabody fountain. Three small English call ducks were selected as ‘guinea pigs,’ and the reaction was nothing short of enthusiastic. Thus began a Peabody tradition which was to become internationally famous.®

“In 1940, Bellman Edward Pembroke, a former circus animal trainer, offered to help with delivering the ducks to the fountain each day and taught them the now-famous Peabody Duck March. Mr. Pembroke became the Peabody Duckmaster, serving in that capacity for 50 years until his retirement in 1991.”

The hotel, true to modern form, is also quick to point out that “raised by a local farmer and a friend of the hotel, each team of Peabody Ducks lives at the hotel for only three months before retiring from their duty and returning to the farm, where they are free to live as wild ducks… the hotel recognizes its resident waterfowl as wild animals and does not domesticate them or treat them like pets.” Good to know.

In Little Rock, we visited the state capitol just before we left town.

It’s somewhat austere, but I was really taken with the gold-leaf dome interior.
The Cass Gilbert Society notes that “the Arkansas State Capitol, designed and constructed over the course of some eighteen years, was the product of one political investigation, two architects, and three governors…. As executed, the [capitol] is constructed of gray granite with a pedimented entrance section below the dome, flanked by colonnaded wings terminating in pedimented pavilions, each with a shallow dome over the legislative chamber within. The dome rises from a colonnaded drum and is surmounted by a lantern. The building has been characterized as having ‘the transverse stairhalls and the clear articulation in three blocks of Gilbert’s Capitol of Minnesota, but its simplicity is almost raw.’ ”

In Texarkana, a place I’d only ever passed through, I decided it was high time to drive down State Line Ave. and visit the Texarkana U.S. Post Office and Courthouse. Here’s a shot of the building I took despite the rain, taken while standing on the border, which is helpfully marked on the pavement. A sign also says the location is at LAT 33 25 29.8 N and LONG 94 02 35.2 W.
I didn’t need to visit the courthouse, but went through a metal detector on the Texas side and then through a door on the Arkansas side to enter the post office, a wonderful ’30s-style federal facility, complete with brass-plated mail boxes and cages for the tellers. The tellers are on the Arkansas side, the mail slot on the Texas side. I mailed a postcard. Sure, it’s an imaginary line, but I had some fun with it.

One strategy when evaluating online reviews is to toss out the very high and very low ratings, something like in competitive gymnastics. Gushing praise may well be a plant, and shrill invective might be from people who would complain about the seat cushions on a lifeboat. Then read other reviews with some skepticism, but not too much. Pretty much like you’d read anything else.

In this way I decided that the Austin Motel in Austin and the Havana Hotel in San Antonio would be reasonably good places to stay for a few days each. Turned out I was right.

The Austin Motel started off as a tourist court in 1938, and while updated (AC, wifi, that kind of thing), it retains some of the old charm, while not costing the moon despite its popular location in SoCo. Everything was basic, but without some of the petty annoyances motels dish up sometimes, such as a squeaking, rattling, noisy air conditioner. It also had some nice touches: a real key on a brass key ring, for instance, but no bottle opener fixed to one of the room surfaces — it needed that.

The motel also features a rusting shell of a car next to its parking lot, vintage late ’30s, now the centerpiece of what looks to be a xeriscape.
The Havana Hotel has a nice location in downtown San Antonio, near the Riverwalk and the Tobin Center. The property started as a company hotel in 1914 and while modernized (you know, AC, wifi) retains many of the charms of the original design, such as high ceilings and dark woods. Though a little more expensive than the Austin Motel, you got a little more, such as a hip Italian SMEG refrigerator in the room.

One more thing: the Greetings From Austin mural off funky 1st St. “On the southern exterior wall of Roadhouse Relics, this mural first adorned the neighborhood business in 1998,” writes Cris Mueller in Austinot. “Artist and owner Todd Sanders and his friend Rory Skagen recreated this iconic Austin postcard on the side of the building to add light to a neighborhood that, at the time, was taking a turn for the worst.”

It was renovated in 2013 and looks pretty fresh. Roadhouse Relics, incidentally, sells neon signs. How very Austin.
I could have waited until the people had cleared away, but what good would that be? People make the shot more interesting.

The William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park

Posted on July 17, 2016 by admin

The museum building of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park in Little Rock cantilevers over the south bank of the Arkansas River. Hope the structural engineer planned for events like the next major movement of the New Madrid Fault.On June 27, after seeing the Mount Holly Cemetery, I drove over to the presidential library by myself, not wanting to subject Ann to another museum just then. All I had to do was make it back to the hotel room in time to pack before checkout time. The facility is one of 13 presidential libraries/museums run by the National Archives and Records Administration; now I’ve been to eight of them, nine if you count the Eisenhower Library, which I’ve been told we visited when I was small.

So I know what to expect: a museum that puts the best face on whichever administration it’s about, regardless of party or historic circumstance. Keep that in mind, and no presidential library will drive you to distraction because of your opinion about this or that president. You can have fun with it, though, imagining exhibits that will never happen, such as I AM NOT A CROOK carved over the entrance of the Nixon Library or an animatronic Monica Lewinsky at the Clinton Library.

Polshek Partnership designed the property (these days, Ennead Architects), with the exhibition design by Ralph Appelbaum Associates. According to sources inside and outside the exhibit hall, the space was inspired by the Long Room in the Old Library at Trinity College, Dublin. I haven’t seen the Long Room, but the exhibit hall of the Clinton Library certainly is long, as you’d expect looking at it from the outside.
The exhibits are a mix of photos, reading and artifacts, mostly in chronological order down the length of the second floor, and on the third floor as well, as well as in 14 alcoves detailing various events during Clinton’s terms of office. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a little hard to view a period as history when you remember it as an adult. Then again, he’s been out of office 15 years, and the early years of the Clinton administration especially are a little fuzzy, since I was still out of the country.

The blue boxes — 4,536 in all, according to the museum — contain records from the White House Office of Agency Liaison, which deals with requests to the president or first lady from the public. “The records in these blue boxes represent approximately 2-3% of the entire Clinton Library archival collection, which we estimate at approximately 80 million pages.”

Among the artifacts on display: saxophones. Jefferson had his violin, Truman had his piano, and Clinton had his sax (and I’ve read that Chet Arthur played banjo; just picturing that makes me smile).

Something unexpected on display was a Chihuly, “Crystal Tree of Light,” one of two works the artist did for White House celebrations on December 31, 1999. Always good to happen across a Chihuly.

The museum also sports a replica Oval Office, designed to look like it did in the ’90s. Every presidential museum worth its salt has an oval office. This one has the distinction of being full-sized.
The full name of the facility refers to a park as well, and indeed it includes land along the Arkansas River. Best of all: there’s a nearby former railroad bridge, fully renovated and open for pedestrian and bicycle traffic since 2011.
The Choctaw, Oklahoma & Gulf RR built the bridge in 1899. That’s a railroad I’d never heard of, and for good reason, since it was swallowed by the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific RR by 1904. After all, the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride.

It’s a fine 19th-century work of iron, but even so illuminated by large 21st-century LED lights.
By the 1990s, the 1,600-foot structure had long since passed out of service as a railroad bridge, and was going to be dismantled. Instead, the City of Little Rock took possession, to make it part of a system of trails along the Arkansas River.

The bridge offers a nice view of downtown Little Rock.
And the river.
All in all, it’s a good location for a presidential library. It isn’t crowded in by urban or suburban surroundings, like most I’ve seen, though Hoover’s is in a distinctly rural setting.

The Nashville Parthenon

Posted on July 12, 2016 by admin

Here’s my thought about Prime Day, which I’d never heard of before: I have enough stuff. I don’t need more stuff, certainly not from Amazon, unless the nonstore retail behemoth is willing to sell me (say) $20 gold pieces at face value.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen enough things, so Lincoln’s birthplace wasn’t enough in the way of monumental structures on the our trip, GTT 2016. Not at all. The very next day, we went to see the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park, after I queried Ann to make sure that she didn’t remember our visit eight years ago. This time, she will.

The Parthenon was as crowded on a Saturday morning in the summer, as you’d expect. It’s also the sort of place that inspires picture-taking.

Since it’s well known, there’s little point in detailing the history of Nashville Parthenon — its origin as a temporary plaster building at the Tennessee Centennial Expo in 1897; the permanent sandstone replacement in the 1920s; and the addition of the monumental statue of Athena inside in 1990. But I will add something the late Dr. Ned Nabors told me — told the class I was in — about the columns.

Each of the columns in the original Parthenon leans slightly inward, to give the appearance of being straight. That too is a well-known feature. If the columns were magically extended upward, they would converge about a mile and a half in the sky. Thus each column in the original was slightly different; each was carved to be unique.

In modern times, such uniqueness would be painfully expensive, so the columns of the Nashville Parthenon are exactly alike. To achieve the lean, the floor under part of each column is raised slightly. But enough to be apparent if you look down at the bases of the columns. Besides the building material, that’s one of the main differences between the original and the one in Nashville. (And that no one’s used Nashville’s to store gunpowder yet.)

Alan LeQuire’s Athena Parthenos, 42 feet tall and brightly painted, as the Greeks no doubt did saw her, commands the temple’s naos.

She inspires poses.

We also spent some time in the Parthenon’s lower level, looking at its collection of paintings, and the exhibit about the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. The expo celebrated the centenary of Tennessee’s 1796 statehood, though held in 1897 (like the Columbian Exposition of 1893, a year after the anniversary). Fittingly, the site of the expo later became Centennial Park.

Ilene Jones Cornwell writes: “The Centennial Exposition, held May 1 through October 30, 1897, was ‘essentially a fair on a grand scale,’ wrote A. W. Crouch and H. D. Claybrook in Our Ancestors Were Engineers. Attractions included 12 large buildings featuring exhibits on the commercial, industrial, agricultural, and educational interests of the state; a ‘midway’ including Egyptian, Cuban, and Chinese villages; a ‘Giant See-saw’ designed by local engineer and steel fabricator Arthur J. Dyer; Venetian gondoliers on newly created Lake Watauga; a Venetian Rialto bridge designed by local architect C. A. Asmus; parades and ‘sham battles’ by the Tennessee Militia; fireworks and other entertainment; and a 250-foot flag staff designed by E. C. Lewis. Major Lewis also had conceived the idea to create a replica of the 5th century B. C. Athenian Parthenon to house the art exhibit, then commissioned local architect W. C. Smith to make the needed drawings….

“After the Exposition closed, all buildings except the Parthenon were torn down and removed. The success of the Exposition, as well as the progressive movement of the late 19th century to establish public parks, planted the seed for Nashville’s park system. In 1901 Mayor James Head appointed five men, one of whom was Major E. C. Lewis, to the new Board of Park Commissioners. Negotiations were begun by the city in early 1902 with the owners of the 72-acre Centennial Park to purchase the land for a permanent city park. After months of complicated offers and counter-offers, described in The Parks of Nashville, Nashville Railway and Light Company purchased Centennial Park and its title was presented to the city park board on December 22, 1902.”

Even by about 11 that morning, it was too hot to spend much time wandering around Centennial Park, which was too bad, since there are a variety of other things there besides the Parthenon.

Such as a large locomotive that the park has — and how many locomotives are there in public parks? Must be a web site or guide book about that, but I’m too lazy to find it. But not too lazy to look up the Centennial Park locomotive: a Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis 4-8-4.

Also, I either never noticed, or had forgotten, the Robertson monument, which is a freestanding column. It isn’t far from the Parthenon, so we walked by it.
Cornwell again: “When negotiations had begun to purchase the Centennial land, [Major Lewis] purchased the 50-foot granite shaft for $200, then his fellow-commissioner Samuel A. Champion ‘resolved that it be erected in the park as a monument to the memory of James Robertson.’ Lewis also purchased the flat-stone base for $10 in 1903 to remain beside Lake Watauga as a memorial to the Centennial Exposition. A new granite base was needed to support the heavy shaft after its relocation, but no record has yet been found of the base’s creator or its procurement. Wherever the massive base originated, Johnson described the monument’s creation in The Parks of Nashville: ‘With a tripod made of three large oak logs and block and tackle, Major Lewis raised the shaft into position and then constructed the foundation beneath it.’ The granite shaft and its base weigh a total of 52.5 tons.”

Robertson, the “Father of Tennessee,” co-founded Nashville with John Donelson in 1779. For a moment I thought he and his wife might be buried there in the park, but then I remembered seeing his grave some years ago at the Nashville City Cemetery, where many early Tennesseans not named Andrew Jackson repose (he’s at the Hermitage).

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park

Posted on July 11, 2016 by admin

“Where are we going?”

“Lincoln’s birthplace,” I told Ann on the morning of June 24 as we left Elizabethtown, Ky. “It’s about 10 miles off the Interstate. Bet his parents were glad to have a place near the highway.”

Ha, ha, Dad, was the reaction.

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park is in fact about 10 miles east of I-65, a roadway built much later than the Lincolns’ cabin or even the monumental building erected on the site 100 years later, with its groundbreaking on February 12, 1909. TR was there that day to wield the ceremonial trowel, which is now on exhibit at the visitors center.

So is a statue of the Lincoln family. It includes the only depiction that I’ve seen of toddler Abraham Lincoln, with his parents and older sister Sarah. John Russell Pope, who also lived long enough to do the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, and a good many other things, designed the birthplace memorial.
“Built on the knoll above the sinking spring where many believe the Lincoln cabin originally stood, the Memorial Building at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park was constructed between 1909 and 1911 in an effort by the Lincoln Farm Association to commemorate the life and accomplishments of the sixteenth President of the United States and to protect his ‘birth cabin,’ ” notes the NPS.

“Pope’s design of the building included many symbolisms related to Abraham Lincoln, including fifty-six steps leading up to the building to represent the fifty-six years of Lincoln’s life. Sixteen windows in the building and sixteen rosettes on the interior ceiling are there to remind visitors that Lincoln was the sixteenth president.”

Inside is the fake Lincoln cabin.
Haven’t got an historic relic? Make one that looks right, especially during the late 19th century, when touring exhibits were a way to make money. (Read about promoter Alfred Dennett and the fake cabin here.) According to the NPS, the structure now characterized as a cabin that “honors” the original. Sure, why not – and besides, the faking of the cabin was so long ago (1890s) that it too is of historic interest.

Up the road (US 31E) from the monument a bit is Lincoln Boyhood Home, which is only a few structures, all re-creations, but none made of marble or granite. From there, of course, the Lincolns moved to Mississippi and Abraham grew up to be a leader of the Confederacy… no, that was Jefferson Davis, also a Kentucky boy born in the early 1800s. Geography is destiny? I’m not smart enough to know.

Hodgenville, Ky., which is between the birthplace and boyhood home, does what it can to make passersby stop for a little Lincoln at the local “museum,” which mostly seemed like a gift shop. Also, the town traffic circle has a statue of an adult Lincoln and a boy Lincoln.

One more thing I saw on US 31E, south of the birthplace: a ghost sign on the side of a barn that said SEE ROCK CITY. If I’d been able to pull off to the side of the road at that moment, I would have, to take a picture (and baffle Ann). It was not to be. But it was there.

St. Mary of the Angels

Posted on June 21, 2016 by admin

St. Mary of the Angels is a church in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, not to be confused with Our Lady of the Angels, the former Catholic school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood and site of a disastrous fire in late 1958. (I can recommend To Sleep With the Angels (1996) by David Cowen and John Kuenster, an excellent book about that fire that I read when I worked at Fire Chief magazine.)

Completed in 1920, St. Mary of the Angels was originally one of the numerous churches in Chicago with mostly Polish parishioners. “The structure bears a remarkable resemblance to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome,” asserts the church’s web site. The AIA Guide is a little more circumspect: “The tile and terra-cotta dome recalls the silhouette of St. Peter’s in Rome.”

In any case, the dome’s impressive. You can see it at some distance from the 606 trail.
Up close, “angels tread on the parapets,” says AIA. ‘Deed they do.
The view from a little further away. The original architects were church specialists Worthmann & Steinbach, with Holabird & Root rehabilitating the structure in the 1990s.

I figured I’d be able to see the interior. It was a Saturday, after all. In June. More than one wedding was probably planned for the church that day. I was right. When I entered, the place was set up for a wedding, and guests were trickling in, but the ceremony hadn’t started yet. No one paid any attention to me as I took in the lavish space that can accommodate 2,000 worshipers.

For example, behind the high altar is a depiction of St. Francis at “the little chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he saw Christ and the Virgin Mary enveloped in light and sitting on thrones and surrounded by numerous angels,” as the church puts it.

The church’s continued existence was a near thing. “With the construction of the Kennedy Expressway in 1960, a sizable number of families and students left the parish, and, by 1988, the church building was closed and slated for demolition due to deteriorating conditions,” the church explains. “At the request of Cardinal Bernardin, then Archbishop of Chicago, the priests of the Prelature of Opus Dei assumed responsibility for the parish in 1991.

“The church restoration started in 1991 with major repairs of the dome, the roofs and the stained-glass windows. Repairs continued in 1997 with the church interior. In 1999, the 100th anniversary of the parish, the church’s interior decoration was fully restored; the installation of new lighting, new doors and a new sound system was completed.”

Just another extraordinary place, nearly destroyed. And not even during the tear-down happy ’50s and ’60s, but in the 1980s. The church is unusual in that Opus Dei runs it. I’m no authority, but overseeing parish churches doesn’t seem to be in their usual line of work. Still, I’m glad they were able to save it.

Miyajima (Itsukushima) During Cherry Blossom Season

Posted on April 3, 2016 by admin

Here in northern Illinois, the grass is greening, small buds are budding and birds are making more noise. A few new-generation insects are in view. It’s even warm and sunny on some days, such as today, which followed a miserable, dank, cold Saturday. Such is the seasonal seesaw.

As this map and chart explain, early April is peak cherry blossom season in the Kansai and a few other parts of Japan. That’s when I saw the blossoms in Kyoto — the first year I was there — plus in parts of Osaka, including the crowded National Mint grounds but also the little-known but strikingly beautiful Osaka Gogoku Shrine in Suminoe Ward (which everyone simply called Suminoe Shrine).

In early April 1993, we went to Hiroshima for a weekend, and visited Miyajima (宮島), an island in the Inland Sea near the city. Formally called Itsukushima (厳島), it’s home to a Shinto shrine complex and best known for its monumental torii out in the water, which happened to be behind scaffolding when were were there.

Fortunately, the cherry blossoms were in full, unencumbered view. Temple deer were around, too.

I didn’t know until recently that Itsukushima is a World Heritage Site, put on the list after we were there, in 1996. UNESCO notes: “The present shrine dates from the 12th century and the harmoniously arranged buildings reveal great artistic and technical skill. The shrine plays on the contrasts in colour and form between mountains and sea and illustrates the Japanese concept of scenic beauty, which combines nature and human creativity.”

The University of Illinois During the 2016 Spring Break

Posted on March 28, 2016 by admin

On the afternoon of March 18, Lilly and I drove down to Champaign-Urbana, and on the next day, we took a look at the University of Illinois flagship campus, which happens to sprawl across both of those small towns. Since our visit, Lilly has decided to attend there in the fall. She’d been leaning toward it anyway. We’d only been there once before, briefly, during our return from the Downstate towns of Arthur and Arcola in the spring of 2007. So it was as if we’d never been there before, especially for her.

Spring break had just started at the university. That meant only a handful of students were around, including some who were clearly leaving. On one street on campus, buses were lined up and ready to take students to specifically marked destinations, mostly in the Chicago area. Spring break also meant, happily, that parking was free and easy.

Even so, we spent a lot of time on foot. Without much of a plan: sometimes new places call for the old random walkabout. Lilly will certainly learn all she needs to know about the place and more in the fullness of time. The campus has a lot of fine buildings, especially fronting the Main Quad, and I was especially taken with Foellinger Auditorium and its green dome at one end of that quad, though I didn’t quite get an image of its full domed glory.

The building dates from 1907 and was designed by Clarence H. Blackall, a Boston architect who did a lot of theaters, and if you read a list of them, very many didn’t survive the great age (that is, regrettable age) of knocking down old stuff, whose apogee came in the 1960s. The Foellinger has clearly endured, though I’ve read that it wasn’t up to stuff acoustically at first, and needed a lot more work. We didn’t pop inside for a look. Next time, maybe.

Not far away was the 185-foot McFarland Carillon, which dates only from 2009.
A Missouri firm called Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets, which seems to do a lot of higher ed work, designed the tower, which has 49 bells. We noticed bells ringing at half hours and quarter hours, sometimes, but I’m not sure it was the carillon.

Elsewhere we peeked inside the chapel at St. John’s Catholic Newman Center, which is part of a complex that includes Newman Hall and the Institute of Catholic Thought, and is the largest Newman Center in the country, according to Wiki. Dating from 1926, the chapel has a splendid interior. I explained to Lilly that it was named after Cardinal Newman, not Alfred E., but she didn’t know either of them.

Nearby is the Episcopal Chapel of Saint John the Devine, also a part of a campus ministry. I wanted to take a look in there too, but it was closed for the day.

Heading back to our parking space, we encountered one of the many pieces of public art on campus.There was no plaque nearby that I saw, but information is online. It’s full title is “Tree of Life Fantasy: Synopsis of the Book of Questions Concerning the World Order and/or the Order of Worlds,” by Alice Aycock. As we approached it, I figured it might be a massive sundial, as I’ve seen recently, but no.

This description lacquers on the art-ese pretty well, but it does rhetorically ask, “can we not comprehend the sculpture solely as an interesting, if baffling, assemblage of disparate elements?” Yes, we can. Interesting, but in my amateur opinion not baffling, because it’s mainly an interesting assemblage of disparate elements, though I’d say an interesting “combination of shapes,” since disparate is a ten-dollar word best saved for special occasions.

Fredericksburg Stroll & Der Stadt Friedhof

Posted on March 15, 2016 by admin

March 4 was sunny and pleasant in Fredericksburg, a settlement dating back to the efforts of German immigrants to Central Texas before the Civil War. A good day for a small town walkabout. As I walked, looking into the Main Street boutiques and wine shops and jewelers (James Avery has a shop there) and bistros and art galleries, it occurred to me that there needs to be a term for a town that partly or mostly lives off of upper middle-class day-tripers, retirees many of them, from near but not-too-near major metros.

Not tourist traps exactly, though there’s an element of that. I’ve been to a few of these towns, such as Galveston and Galena, Ill., and Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and Portsmouth, NH, and now Fredericksburg. Its locational advantage is proximity to Austin and San Antonio, and the town has a pleasant Main Street, a.k.a. Hauptstrasse, sporting a lot of repurposed 19th-century structures, many of historic or architectural interest.

The building on the left below was once the White Elephant Saloon, dating from 1888, featuring a whitish elephant above the entrance for reasons probably lost to time.
This was once a hospital.
I didn’t try for an exhaustive photo record of the many fine buildings in Fredericksburg. These visitors did a much better job of it, including many things I missed.

According to one source at least, St. Mary’s Catholic Church — which is off Fredericksburg’s Main Street by a block — counts as one of Texas’ Painted Churches, most of which are east of San Antonio. Some kind of adoration was ongoing at St. Mary’s, so I was able to drop in to see the lovely interior. Painted, yes, but also featuring stained glass and other objects of beauty.

“Still known as ‘new’ St. Mary’s, the church provides a classic example of Gothic architecture and was consecrated on November 24, 1908,” KLRU tells us. “Its principal architect was Leo Dielmann of San Antonio, with the contractor and builder, Jacob Wagner of Fredericksburg. Built of native stone quarried near the city, the total cost of building and furnishing the church was around $40,000.

“Still fully functional is the original pipe organ built by George Kilgen & Son of St. Louis, Missouri. It was installed in 1906 as a pump organ and has been completely electrified. The beautiful stained glass windows were added around 1914 and 1915.”

Further away from Main Street — and with absolutely no day-trippers or anyone else (alive) around — was the Der Stadt Friedhof, a cemetery established in 1846.
It’s more interesting than picturesque. For one thing, there are no trees or other large plants to speak of on the grounds, except out at the periphery. There’s a little funerary art, but its presence is fairly muted.

Still, I enjoyed looking around. The further you get from the boundary roads, the newer the stones become. Among the older stones at the edge of the cemetery are a number of graves surrounded by iron fences.
Many of which are neglected.
Almost all of the oldest stones are German, with ethnically appropriate names, such as Durst, Kallenberg, Keidel, Kramer, Lochte, Schmidt, Schuchard, Stein, Weiss, Zincke, usw. Adm. Nimitz’s parents are somewhere in the cemetery, though I didn’t look for them, and the admiral himself is buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Fransisco.

Church, Funicular, Incinerator

Posted on January 6, 2016 by admin

Yuriko’s been back from Japan since Saturday. Among other places she visited there was the Church of the Light, which has stood in Ibaraki in Osaka Prefecture since 1989.
That’s the interior, which receives light from a cross of a gap in its thick concrete walls. Architectural autodidact Tadao Ando designed the church. Most of his work until around 2000 was in Japan, but lately he’s been doing international commissions, such as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2002).

Yuriko reports that it’s a remarkable space, considering that it’s essentially a concrete cube. Or a set of cubes; it’s a little hard to tell, even after reading about the structure. More about it — including a lot of pictures — is at Mooponto, “the only web magazine devoted to japanese minimalist architecture.”

I had a brief selfish reaction to hearing about the church. Why didn’t I visit it when I lived (relatively) nearby? I thought about that a while, and maybe I remember hearing about it, but also that the parishioners discouraged casual visitors. They still do, but you can make a reservation to visit.

Here’s another thing I’ll do if I ever visit the Osaka area again: ride the Otokoyama Cable Line funicular. Because one thing we all should do in this life is ride funiculars.
Also called the Cable Line of the Keihan Electric Railway, it takes visitors up to Iwashimizu Shrine in Yawata, Kyoto. Yuriko went ahead of New Year’s. Somehow or other I’ve never heard of the line or the shrine. A shrine of some sort has been on the site since the Heian period (9th century) and the funicular’s been around since 1926, so I’ve got no excuse.

Another place in the Kansai that I want to see someday is the Maishima Incineration Plant in Osaka. I missed it when I lived there because it didn’t exist until the late 1990s. A few years ago I saw a photo of it and thought, what in the world? That’s in Osaka? Yep. Some photos and a bit about the place and the Austrian architect who designed it are here.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: architecture