Ukrainian Village Exteriors

Posted on September 9, 2014 by admin

Cool in the evenings, warm during the day. Cicadas by day, crickets by night. We’re on the September slide. But the weather won’t be bad for two months or so, unless the Yellowstone Caldera blows or something like that.

As I mentioned yesterday, St. Stanislaus Kostka on West Side of Chicago is open all the time. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for a lot of other churches in the city. I understand the reason, of course: thieves and vandals and other miscreants. So sometimes all that’s visible to the casual visitor is an exterior, and that by itself can be a fine thing. Still, you want to go inside.

Earlier this summer we went to Ukrainian Village, a neighborhood in Chicago still populated by many Ukrainians, but arrived too late in the day to take a look inside St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Now 100 years old, I’ve read that it was modeled after St. Sophia in Kiev, with magnificent icons, mosaics and stained glass windows inside.

It has 13 domes surmounted by crosses – one for Jesus, 12 more for the Apostles, most not visible at this angle. Only a short walk from St. Nicholas is SS Volodymyr & Olha Church, a Byzantine-looking sort of place, which only dates from the early 1970s, but which harkens back a good many centuries.

It too was closed that afternoon.

But the sun was shining bright on the mosaic above the entrance, which depicts the Christianization of Ukraine. I hope it was in the summertime when that happened.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Posted on August 5, 2014 by admin

I forget which rest stop it was now, but somewhere in Iowa we stopped for the usual reasons, and Ann asked for a cold drink from one of the machines. I fed it my dollar and then some coins, which it returned. But not the dollar. And no drink. There were blank slips to fill out in case of machine failures and a slot to drop them in. My experience with such things is hit or miss – Lighthouse Place Premium Outlets, or at least its vending concession, still owes me a dollar from the mid-00s – but I duly filled it out.

DESCRIBE PROBLEM: Took dollar. Won’t take coins. No refund of dollar.

While looking through my pile of mail when I got home, I noticed a little envelope from Pop Top Vending of Grinnell, Iowa. My slip was inside. So was one Yankee dollar. Good for you, Pop Top. Good customer service isn’t the baseline in this country (as Yuriko often points out), so it needs to be recognized.

The shortest route from metro Dallas to metro Chicago is north on US 75 into Oklahoma, which turns into US 69 – both are divided most of the way – and eventually that runs into I-44. Take that road east to St. Louis, where you catch I-55 northbound for the run up to Chicago. I’ve done it many times over the last 25 years. I used to overnight at Zeno’s Motel in Rolla, Mo., but in more recent years I’ve spent the night at the Munger Moss Motel in Lebanon, Mo. I knew Zeno’s had closed, and the lot seems to be vacant now.

Munger Moss is a solid independent motel. A tourist court. The kind of place where Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert might show up for the night. I was going to take a picture of the neon motel sign, but the co-proprietor – Ramona Lehman, who greeted me at the desk when we arrived at about 9 – turned it off for the night before I got around to it. So I settled for an interior pic of Room 70.

Lilly saw the picture and said, “That’s retro.” The pictures on the wall depicted bygone US 66 sites, so yes. Retro. But not completely. Note the TV and the AC. We didn’t turn on TV. Didn’t seem like the thing to do. We did use the air conditioner and access the property’s wifi, though. I had a column to file, and Ann wanted her entertainment. Nostalgia’s fine, but we have to live in our own time.

We arrived latish in Lebanon because I detoured slightly off the most direct route. In northeastern Oklahoma, I turned on US 412 and took it east to I-49 in Arkansas, and then north to Bentonville (I-49 was still called I-540 on my maps, but apparently the name changed recently). Bentonville is known as the hometown of Always Low Prices. Always. It’s the site of the Ur-Walmart and still the location of the behemoth’s HQ.

That isn’t why I came. I wanted to see the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. One of the things to do if you happen to be a billionaire is found a museum and stock it with the fine art you’ve been collecting for years. Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, did exactly that. Not another institution on either coast or any of the major cities of the interior, but in the northwest corner of Arkansas. It’s been open only since late 2011.

You’d think most of the museum’s paintings — and it is heavy on paintings, though there’s a sculpture garden we didn’t have time to see — would already have been locked away in major museum collections, so high is the quality. Shows you what I know about the fine art trade.

From a NYT article published shortly after the museum opened: “It was only in May 2005 that Ms. Walton announced the selection of the Israeli-born Boston architect Moshe Safdie to design the museum and ruffled feathers along the Eastern Seaboard by buying a landmark of Hudson River School landscape painting, ‘Kindred Spirits,’ by Asher B. Durand, from the New York Public Library for around $35 million. The purchase came early in an extended shopping spree that rattled nerves, aroused skepticism and stimulated the art market.”

Ruffled feathers and rattled nerves, eh? But I bet when it comes to bidding for art, “riche” always trumps “nouveau.” The museum’s rooms are mostly chronological, from Colonial America to very recent items. A handful of works are astonishingly familiar, such as one of the Gilbert Stuart portraits of President Washington. Many more fall under the category of, You know, I’ve seen that somewhere — it’s here? Such as “Cupid and Psyche” by Benjamin West, or “Winter Scene in Brooklyn” by Francis Guy, or the delightful “War News from Mexico” by Richard Caton Woodville and the completely charming “The Lantern Bearers” by Maxfield Parrish. (All of those paintings are reproduced under “Selected Works.”)

A few of my pics came out decent, such as “Boy Eating Berries” by Joseph Decker, no date (but the artist lived from 1853 to 1924).

Did a few detail shots, too. This is RLS from “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife” by John Singer Sargent (1885).

From “The Lantern Bearers,” which was a Collier’s cover in 1910.

A few of my sculpture pics turned out passable as well. Here’s an antebellum example, “Atala and Chactas,” by Randolph Rogers (1854). You don’t hear much about that story any more.

Next, a video-killed-the-radio-star example, “John Cage Robot II,” by Nam June Paik (1995). Eleven wood TV cabinets, 10 Panasonic color TVs, one Samsung, two DVD players and mixed media elements that include piano keys and piano hammers, books, chessmen, and wood mushrooms. You can’t tell from this still, but all the of TVs were playing video loops.

The museum also happened to be showing an exhibit about architect Moshe Safdie, including a lot of models of his building designs in such places as Ottawa (how did I miss that?), Jerusalem, Salt Lake City and others. I don’t think I’ve seen anything of his besides Crystal Bridges, which is an interesting work.

“Nestled between two hills in the Ozark… [the museum] traverses a stream within the wild landscape,” notes designboom.com, which annoyingly doesn’t believe in capital letters, so I’ve added them. “Covering 120 acres, the grounds are crossed with an extensive trail network which leads through mature forests of dogwoods, oaks and white pines and eventually leading into the nearby downtown area. The environment fuses art with nature, allowing visitors to descend from the site’s entrance and immerse themselves into the center’s recessed setting, encountering a cluster of pavilions wrapped around a focal pond.”

We arrived at about 4:30, ahead of closing at 6, so we didn’t have the time to walk around some of the wooded areas. Or to visit downtown Bentonville or the not-far-away Walmart Museum which, no doubt without a hint of irony, celebrates the five-and-dime that Sam Walton founded in Bentonville more than 60 years ago. Also no time for Pea Ridge National Military Park, which is in this part of Arkansas. I’m told I visited when I was small, but I don’t remember it. Ah, well. I might pass this way again sometime.

Tri-State Summer Solstice Weekend ’14

Posted on June 22, 2014 by admin

Late on Friday morning we drove west for a few hours – and enjoyed a remarkably long in-car conversation among ourselves, no radio or other electronics playing – and by mid-afternoon arrived at Mississippi Palisades State Park, which overlooks the Mississippi River just north of Savanna, Ill. The plan included bits of three states in three days. My plan, really, since my family humors me in such matters, and lets me think up the details of little trips like these.

Friday was Illinois. We camped at Mississippi Palisades, which is an Illinois State park and incredibly lush this year, and we spent time in Savanna, a little river town on the Great River Road, mostly to find a late lunch. Toward the end of the day, we made our way to Mount Carroll, Ill., which is the county seat of Carroll County and home to a good many handsome historic structures.

On Saturday, we ventured into Iowa – it really isn’t far – and first saw Crystal Lake Cave, just south of Dubuque. In Dubuque, lunch was our next priority, followed by a visit to the Fenelon Place Elevator. Which is a funicular. When you have a chance to ride a funicular, do it. The last time we were in Dubuque, I remember the Fenelon Place Elevator being closed for the season (uncharacteristically, I don’t remember when that was — the late ’90s?). Anyway, this time I was determined to ride it.

Afterward, we headed west a short distance to the town of Dyersville, Iowa, home to the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, but better known for The Field of Dreams movie set, which still draws visitors. We saw both.

Today was mostly about getting home at a reasonable hour, but I had to add a slice of Wisconsin by navigating a number of small roads until we came to Dickeyville. It would be just another rural Wisconsin burg but for one thing: the Dickeyville Grotto, which actually includes a main grotto, smaller grottos, shrines, a church and a cemetery (and a gift shop, for that matter). Like funiculars, grottos demand our attention, especially such as striking bit of folk architecture as the Dickeyville Grotto.

A Small Sample of Aggieland

Posted on May 13, 2014 by admin

Texas A&M University is a big place. I looked it up: the main campus currently occupies 5,500 or so acres, and accommodates 56,000+ students. Systemwide – because there are other campuses – the school boasts an endowment of $7.6 billion. It also seems like a lot of construction is going on, so those figures will probably be outdated in a few years. A&M’s pretty much the main industry in the twin towns of Byran and College Station, Texas, which also have the distinction of not being on an Interstate, though I-45 runs fairly close.

Jay and I took a stroll around campus for an hour or so, which is time enough to see a small fraction of the buildings, as well as a lot of Aggies. They look pretty much like college students anywhere in North America, except for Corps of Cadets members mixed in, who are easily distinguished by their uniforms, which have a remarkable resemblance to WWII vintage U.S. uniforms, in as much as I’m familiar with them. Membership hasn’t been mandatory in 50 years, but the Corps is still a defining tradition at the school. But of course there are many Aggie traditions, some of which are common knowledge among Texans.

If we’d done much planning, we might have been able to see a building or two dating from the time our grandfather attended A&M (again, he was Class of 1916). Mostly, though, we came across buildings dating from the 1920s and ’30s – there seems to have been a large building boom then – as well as some remarkably brutalist structures from more recent decades. Of the structures we saw, I most liked the Civil Engineering Building, built in 1932.

The plaque on the building describes it this way: “A classical revival two-storied stone structure is faced in brick, with cast stone and ceramic tile ornamentation.”

Note the ornamentation here: two Hermes figures, a cow, a couple of horses, and a couple of dogs. Elsewhere, pigs.

The reason for all of those animals on the Civil Engineering building? The plaque again: “Originally used as a veterinary hospital with two additional buildings in the rear, used as [a] stable and anatomy laboratory.”

Not far away we happened on the Cushing Memorial Library, where there’s an exhibit for the centennial of the opening of WWI: “The Great War: Memories of Service and Sacrifice, A World War I Exhibit Featuring the Aggie Experience.” Just the thing to see – free, not too large, and connected to our family’s experience. Class of 1916 meant that it wasn’t long before Grandpa was in the Great War. We told a woman behind the desk at the entrance about him, and she seemed pleased to hear it.

The displays featured some material from Aggies who’d been in the war, but the exhibit had more than that, including wartime posters, photos, letters, everyday items, and more, and not just from American soldiers, but also British, French, German and Italian. (What, nothing from little Montenegro?). The material is from the Ragan Military History Collection at the library.

“A enlarged image of the tattered Gold Star service flag that most prominently captures the World War I Aggie experience will also be exhibited,” notes the A&M release about the exhibit. “Part of a national tradition that began with World War I, the service flag contains approximately 2,000 maroon stars honoring those Aggies who served, and 50 gold stars memorializing those Aggies who gave their lives in the war.”

Fortunately for him and his 13 descendants (so far), Grandpa came back from France, though as an engineer, unexploded ordnance — and the Spanish Flu — were likely the main dangers he faced.

The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Posted on April 2, 2014 by admin

Nearly 11 years ago, I wrote, regarding the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago and clearly impressed by its size, “John Rockefeller thought big. The structure is huge. A big Gothic thing. I knew that, of course, having passed by it a number of times over the years, but it hit home when I wandered inside. I was the only one there. The glass is mostly clear, so the angled summer sun lighted the place. Several doors were open, so there was a breeze — unusual in such a large church. For large it was, as large as many cathedrals I’ve seen.”

None of that has changed in 11 years, except there was no summer sun or warm breeze last Friday.

Some vital stats, to save a Google search: The chapel is 265 feet long and 102 feet wide at its widest point. The tower, towards the northeast corner, is 207 feet high and can be ascended via a spiral stone staircase of 271 steps. The chapel weighs 32,000 tons, and 56 concrete piers carry the foundations down to bedrock 80 feet below the floor. Its design includes no structural steel.

This is the chapel from the front.

From the back, which shows the 72-bell carillon.

And inside.

The organ is sizable, too. According to the chapel’s web site, it’s an E.M. Skinner creation, vintage 1928, that originally “included four manuals, and had 6,610 organ pipes in 108 ranks; since its 2008 restoration, it now has 8,565 pipes in 132 ranks.” It was quiet when we saw it, but it can make a mighty sound.

Still fairly light inside for a cloudy day in late March. We spent time looking around and resting on the pews. I took note of the handful of plaques along the walls. Two of them told me that a fair number of U of C men died for their country in both WWI and WWII.

I also noticed a plaque dedicated to U of C academic Ernest DeWitt Burton (1856-1925), a professor of New Testament, director of the University Libraries, and ultimately president of the university. The plaque lauds him highly: His scholarship enlightened religion; his energy completed this chapel; his vision led the university forward.

Naturally I had to look him up. No doubt the professor would have disdained an open-source encyclopedia, but never mind. I can’t help feeling that the groves of academe don’t produce scholars like that anymore.

The Frederick C. Robie House

Posted on April 1, 2014 by admin

It was a little hard to get a full picture of the Frederick C. Robie House, which sits horizontally on a 60’ x 180’ lot on the South Side of Chicago. At least it’s hard if you don’t feel like backing up into the street, and I didn’t. The wind was brisk and everyone wanted to get inside.

As usual with a Frank Lloyd Wright work, it’s just as useful to think of it as a complex work of sculpture as much as a dwelling place, maybe more so. Something you might create with large, very expensive set of Legos, and which needs to be sustained with an IV money drip. The place was expensive from the get-go: the 1910 cost was about $60,000, or roughly $1.4 million in our dollars. For that price Robie got not only the lot and the house, with its long, lean lines, but also the furnishings, which were provided by the architect. And at least FLW didn’t run off with his wife.

You pick up your tickets at the gift shop (the entrance is pictured above), a space that was originally a garage, since Robie had a fascination for early auto-mobiles, as some wealthy men of the time did. The shop is stocked with architectural-themed books, videos, clothes, games and knickknacks, many associated with FLW, but not all. It included a Lego set – see, you can build architecturally significant Chicago-area houses from Legos – that looked awfully familiar.

The tour started in the lower level, adjacent to the gift shop-garage, which our guide called the Children’s Playroom, which is habitable but not yet restored. We saw a short video there about the house, including its bumpy history – Robie only lived there a bit more than a year before financial troubles obliged him to sell, to a guy who died shortly after moving in; later, when the Chicago Theological Seminary owned the house, it was nearly razed twice, including a 1950s threat that inspired a 90-year-old FLW to show up to protest.

But of course the building survived, and has even influenced its immediate surroundings . After the video we went outside and took a look at things from the entrance plaza of the Harper Center of the U of C’s Booth School of Business, which is across E. 58th St. The 215,000-square-foot Harper Center, completed only in 2004, references the Robie House with its horizontals and cantilevered elements (a Thornton Tomasetti design: more here).

The house’s entrance is tucked away under one of the large horizontal elements, making it hard to see from the street. The entryway is also only a few inches higher than my height, which makes me speculate that FLW wanted to make it even shorter – why should anything be taller than what he, a short man, needs? If so — and you certainly get that feeling at Taliesin sometimes — WTF, FLW?

But he wasn’t The Genius of later lore quite yet, so he didn’t win on that point. Or maybe it’s that he didn’t really see the design all the way through completion, since he skedaddled to Europe around then.

The second floor, barely visible from the outside through the seeming simple but elegant windows, is an impressive space. The great open room sports interesting glass and wood and lighting features, and I thought it would been a swell place for a swank party – during any decade from the 1920s to the 1950s, since swank was pretty much dead after that. Not sure it would be all that comfortable for daily living, not without more comfortable furniture and more clutter (comfortable for me, at least. What’s life without clutter? Drab.)

Most of the bedrooms aren’t visible on the ordinary tour because they’re on the third floor, which has only one way in or out. For a tour of a dozen or 15 people, apparently, the Chicago Fire Marshall insists on two ways out. So the third floor is accessible via small-group tours that cost more. I didn’t need to see the additional space that badly. We saw one second-floor bedroom, intended to be a guest bedroom, though at the moment it’s devoid of furnishing. I noticed in that room that the electric lights – even though brought up to code by the renovation – are operated by a two-button system, which I don’t see often.

In the not-yet-refurbished kitchen stands a conventional refrigerator, and it doesn’t go with the design at all. But mainly that’s because it stands in front of a dwarf-sized door that leads to a servants’ staircase. That door, the guide pointed out, was for the delivery of ice, and the spot where the refrigerator stands was for an icebox. I hope a little bit of our admission price goes to the purchase of a 1910-vintage ice box, because that spot cries out for one.

Hyde Park ’14

Posted on March 31, 2014 by admin

On the northeast corner of S. Woodlawn Ave. and E. 58th St. in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago, is the Frederick C. Robie House, on that site for more than 100 years and best known as an exemplar of the Prairie School of Design. Next door to its north, at 5751 S. Woodlawn, is the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, though new to the site. One block west of the intersection is the Oriental Institute Museum, repository of Near Eastern treasures, most of which they’ve dug up themselves. The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel rises to the southwest of the intersection, an ornate, soaring structure. That’s a lot within a short walk.

Last week was spring break for Lilly and Ann. Last year I took them to Texas for the occasion, but for various reasons this year, the idea of going anywhere never really took root. Still, I wanted to go somewhere – even if only a few miles away and for a few hours – and see something new if possible. In the summer of 2003, I wrote, “I walked by the Robie House, a creation of Frank Lloyd Wright. Him again. One of these days, I will take the tour, but not today.”

I didn’t know at the time that renovation of the Robie House had barely started, and hasn’t been completed even now, though mostly it has. The main goal last Friday was to tour the Robie House, which we did. Afterward we walked over to Rockefeller Chapel, and then spent an hour or so in the Oriental Institute Museum.

It was still fairly cold, but at least the sidewalks were clear of ice, and we didn’t have far to walk. Street parking always seems to be available next to the Midway Plaisance, just south of our destinations. In 1893, the Midway was briefly the focus of the world’s attention as part of the world’s fair, but now it’s a little-known urban green space, at least outside Chicago. That’s too bad, because it’s certainly interesting, if you know what was there.

We didn’t go into the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I was astonished to see its new location, which I hadn’t heard about. Until a year and a half ago, the store was snugly located in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, at 5757 S. University Ave. Turns out the seminary has moved, too, and now the building is home to the U of C’s Dept. of Economics, so famed in free market song and story.

Wiki, for what it’s worth, says: “The seminary move was controversial: it involved the disinterring of multiple graves.” I didn’t know anyone was buried there. Who was buried there? I’ll have to look into that sometime. Once upon a time, I did enjoy the Thorndike Hilton Memorial Chapel and the collection of rocks embedded in the seminary wall. I assume those are part of the Chicago School of Economics now.

Currently the streetscape between the Robie House and where the Seminary Co-op Bookstore used to be – which is across the street from the Oriental Institute Museum — is under construction.

I was surprised to see the bookstore’s new location, which even seems to include a café, like you might see in a Barnes & Noble. It didn’t seem right. At the basement location, there was no room for anything but books and more books. This video, at least, assures us that the new location still has a “maze aspect” and that Stanley Tigerman did the design (himself or Tigerman McCurry Architects staff?), which I guess counts for something.

But how could the new site have the book-cave charm of the old? Next time I’m in Hyde Park, I’ll take a look, to see if the new can hold a candle to the old.

A Ride on the Paternoster

Posted on March 13, 2014 by admin

Here’s a term I’d never heard before: paternoster elevator. Or, as Wiki defines it, in part: “a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping.” The site has a helpful illustration.

The term was new to me, not the thing itself, because Yuriko and I rode one in Prague almost 20 years ago. We were astonished to find such a contraption. I never knew it had a special name, but I didn’t forget it.

This YouTube posting gives something of the sense of riding one, and since it was filmed in Prague, that might have been the very one we rode on. Here’s one in Copenhagen that I would have ridden if I’d known about it. I’m astonished that they’re still around even now.

As usual, I came to the term in a roundabout way. After proposing a coffee table book about dirty ice mounds, I remembered another one I came up with years ago, Great Elevators of Europe. For fun, I Googled that term, and the video about the paternoster came up.

The Elks National Veterans Memorial

Posted on October 29, 2013 by admin

“The elks live up in the hills and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come down to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find that it’s only a water hole. What they’re looking for is elk-ohole.”

– Capt. Jeffery T. Spaulding

I was winding down by around 4 p.m. on October 19, but I wanted to see one more place. It wasn’t far north of Mother Cabrini’s shrine, and also at one of the edges of Lincoln Park: the Elks National Veterans Memorial. I could see its Roman-style dome from quite a distance in the park.

After the Great War, the Elks wanted to build a memorial to their members who had died in the conflict, which numbered more than 1,000, as well as space for the org’s national headquarters. The main rotunda of the Elks National Veterans Memorial was the most ornate space I saw during Openhousechicago, though Mother Cabrini’s shrine was a close second.

This was no accident. The Elks War Relief Commission, which was tasked with supervising the building’s construction, wrote in its recommendation to the Grand Lodge in 1921 that: “The suggested building be made definitely monumental and memorial in character; that the architectural design be so stately and beautiful, the material of its construction so enduring, its site and setting so appropriate… that the attention of all beholders will be arrested, and the heart of every Elk who contemplates it will be thrilled with pride, and that it will for generations to come prove an inspiration to that loyalty and patriotism which the Order so earnestly teaches and has so worthily exemplified.”

The order picked New York architect Egerton Swarthout to design the memorial. He had a predilection for Beaux-Arts, which shows in the Elks memorial. More than shows, it overflows. I wouldn’t want everything to be done in that style, but it has its place – such as in massive, ornate memorials completed in the 1920s.

My camera, and my skills, aren’t remotely up to capturing the marbles or the soaring murals or even the gilded allegorical statues of the rotunda, which depicted Elk-approved virtues (Brotherly Love, Charity, Fidelity, and Justice). Better to see them with the eye, or failing that, at the memorial’s web site.

By contrast, I gave picture-taking a go at the Grand Reception Room at the Elks National Veterans Memorial. It too is ornate to beat the band.

I was especially taken with the allegorical painting called “The Armistice,” which of course references November 11, 1918. Eugene Savage did that work and others in the room, and I thought that style looked familiar. Like a WPA work, but before that agency existed. Sure enough, Savage was an important player in the WPA Federal Arts program, so I guess that was no accident either.

The National Shrine of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini

Posted on October 28, 2013 by admin

I expected to see interesting architecture on last week’s Openhousechicago. I didn’t expect to run across the humerus of a saint. But the relic arm bone’s behind glass and under the altar of the National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, which is just west of Lincoln Park.

The shrine itself is magnificently ornate, done in a “modern Romanesque” style. Mosaics and frescoes on the dome overhead illustrate the life of the saint; the stained glass all around tell of the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, the Apostles, and more, even including the seal of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was founded by Mother Cabrini; there are four side chapels and four side altars; and the shrine has a Tamburini Pipe Organ, an Italian variety that I’ve read is rare in North America.

This is the view of the dome from the front pews, and a part of the baldachino (canopy) over the altar.

I’ve been in a fair number of ornate churches, but what struck me about this place was how new it feels. Not just new by the standards of European sacred spaces – which might be 100 years or less – but new by American standards. This iteration of the shrine was only opened last year.

A predecessor shrine was part of Columbus Hospital, an institution founded by Mother Cabrini (d. 1917) at this location in 1905. All together she founded 67 hospitals, schools, and orphanages in the Americas and Europe. I’m pretty sure I knew about the Columbus Hospital before it closed in 2002, but never ventured into it or the original shrine.

A condo tower was eventually developed on the site of the hospital – an extremely valuable piece of land, with its immediate access to Lincoln Park and views of Lake Michigan – but part of the deal was that the shrine had to be redeveloped on the site as well. So the floors over the shrine, which is a separate entity within the structure, are residential condos. An unusual arrangement.

The shrine also includes offices and a small museum about the saint. Among other things, the room in the hospital in which Mother Cabrini lived until her death is re-created, and on display are a habit she wore, her bed, an address book, and a to-do list (“continue work on that fourth miracle this week”).

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: architecture