The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Posted on September 20, 2016 by admin

Saturday was the annual Churches by Bus tour organized by the Chicago Architectural Foundation, which we were on last year and the year before. Not this year. We’ve been to two of the five churches listed on the tour. The tour isn’t precisely cheap, so I wanted a little more novelty. Four out of five, maybe.

So we planned to look at four churches around Michigan Ave. while in the neighborhood. Nothing new — almost nothing new — but no charge either. As it turned out, only two of the four were open, and a third had a service in progress; not the time to wander around looking at it. The open one that wasn’t busy was Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago on Michigan Ave., a fine Gothic structure in the heart of the shopping district.

Nice courtyard to the south of the main building, too.

When the church was finished in 1914, however, that part of Michigan Ave., still called Pine St., was no great shakes. Cheap land, in other words. All of the action on Michigan Ave. was still south of the Chicago River. That changed with the completion of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the river in 1920, and Fourth Pres has watched temples of mammon grow up around it since then.

A fine interior. Been inside a number of times over the years. The ceiling’s a little dark, but lights up there would be expensive not only in electricity usage, but maintenance, I figure.

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), an architect who did a lot of ecclesiastical work, designed the church. He’s also known for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Adjacent to the church is a much newer structure, the Gratz Center, which was completed only in 2013 to house a preschool program, the Buchanan Chapel, a new dining room and kitchen, offices, and rooms. We took a look at the second-story Buchanan Chapel, which is mostly spare, but well lit with natural light, and with a labyrinth on its floor. The chapel’s architect was Brian Vitale, in Gensler’s Chicago office.

Up in the corner of the chapel hangs “Quaternion,” a 2014 piece by Alyson Shotz, a Brooklyn artist.

Interesting. Often, that’s all I ask from bits of the world.

Scenes of Post-People’s Republic Mongolia

Posted on September 11, 2016 by admin

The part of rural Mongolia that we saw in September 1994 — in and near Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, 20 or so miles from Ulaanbaatar — looked a lot like this. Ulaanbaatar wasn’t a sprawling kind of place in those days, unless you count the large neighborhoods composed of thousands of ger (yurts).
In places the trees were fairly dense, with streams flowing through the land. Most of all, though, it felt remote. Even more remote than the arguably further-from-absolutely-everything Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, because the infrastructure was so much more developed there, as far SW as you could go on the entire continent.

Ulaanbaatar didn’t feel so remote, though in ’94 sometimes livestock were seen wandering the streets. I wonder if that’s now a thing of the past for the Mongolian capital, as traffic inevitability increases. How do I know that traffic has increased in 20-plus years? That’s just one of those things that happens.

These prayer wheels were at the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in the city.
From the looks of more recent pictures, some restoration work has been done since then. At least, I’m fairly sure that the stock photo I linked to was taken at about the same place I stood; it certainly looks like it, taking into account various renovations and additions over the years.

In the city, we also visited the Mongolian Natural History Museum, known the world over for its dinosaur artifacts. “The museum is particularly well known for its dinosaur and other paleontological exhibits, among which the most notable are a nearly complete skeleton of a late Cretaceous Tarbosaurus tyrannosaurid and broadly contemporaneous nests of Protoceratops eggs,” Wiki says. I remember those eggs.

And, of course, the big skeletons. You could go up on a balcony for a look at them.

Photography involved paying an extra fee. Or so the museum staff told us at the entrance. None of us paid such a fee, and pretty much everyone in our group took pictures, though as you can see, the light was lousy. I don’t even think any staff were in the big dinosaur room with us, keeping an eye on us. Things were lax. Hope nobody over the years took advantage of that to take anything besides pictures.

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.

The Oblates in San Antonio

Posted on March 23, 2016 by admin

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate run the Oblate School of Theology on a sizable campus on the North Side of San Antonio, not far from where I grew up, and near some former regular haunts of mine. Even though the campus is on Oblate Dr., and I drove by that street often for years, I had no notion of its existence until this year.

On March 12, another pleasantly warm day, I went with Jay, my nephew Dees and his girlfriend Eden to take a look around the campus. A gilded St. Eugene de Mazenod greets you at the entrance, in front of the handsome Gayle and Tom Benson Theological Center.
Eugene de Mazenod founded the Oblates in post-revolutionary France 200 years ago. Tom Benson is best known as the billionaire owner of the New Orleans Saints, but anyone living in San Antonio in the last 50 years or so knows him as the owner of Tom Benson Chevrolet. In any case, he gives a lot of money to Catholic causes.

According to the school’s web site, “the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate came to Texas in 1849, at the urgent request of Texas’ first Roman Catholic Bishop, to preach Christ’s message and to serve the People of God, especially the poor and marginalized.

“The Oblate School of Theology was founded in San Antonio in 1903 as the San Antonio Philosophical and Theological Seminary. The School’s initial goal and mission was to educate young men to serve as Oblate missionaries in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mexico and the Philippines… Today, Oblate School of Theology prepares men for priesthood from many dioceses across the United States and a number of religious communities.”

I have to add that in the early 20th century, the part of San Antonio that’s now home to the Oblates wasn’t part of San Antonio. Assuming they founded their school where it is now — and I haven’t found any information to suggest otherwise — the land the Oblates bought lay in the countryside, with the city to the south. There were no housing developments or highways nearby; all that would come in the 1950s, when the campus and the land around it were annexed by the city, as shown on this interesting growth-of-San Antonio map (which also shows the curious fact that the pre-1940 shape of the city was square).

As nice as it is, we didn’t come just to see the Benson building. Rather, we were intrigued by a grotto on campus patterned after the famed grotto in Lourdes. A full-sized replica, I read, made of concrete.
The San Antonio grotto’s been on the site since the early 1940s. In fact, according to its plaque, the Oblates dedicated it on Sunday, December 7, 1941. I’m sure that the date had been picked in advance, and events in the wider world weren’t going to call it off. Then again, maybe the Oblates were up early that morning Central Time, before any ill-tidings came from Hawaii.

Built on top of the grotto, accessible by stairs, is the Tepeyac de San Antonio, dedicated on July 25, 1999, depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing before St. Juan Diego in December 1531. This isn’t the first depiction of that scene that I’ve run across.

Here’s the Virgin.
And Juan Diego.
The Oblate campus also features a chapel, some business offices, places for visiting scholars, a gift shop (no post cards; I’d have bought some saint cards) and a fair amount of public art, such as a freestanding metal structure with a frieze of Oblates on horseback — “The Cavalry of Christ,” who were 19th-century missionaries in South Texas. ‘Ot and sweaty business, no doubt.
A garden behind the Benson building.
A place for Oblates who’ve passed on.
Stations of the Cross in a style I’ve never seen.
And “missions on a stick.”
There were five of them, depictions of the five Spanish missions in San Antonio. That includes the best known of them, the Alamo.

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.

Nara 1991

Posted on October 4, 2015 by admin

I can’t remember exactly which temple this was, but I’m sure it was in Nara. (Yuriko isn’t able to pinpoint it either.) This was October 1991, and it’s a favorite picture of myself.

My old college friend Steve probably took it, since he was visiting about then, and we went a fair number of places — Nara would have definitely been on that list. I went to Nara many times, since it was an easy subway and then train trip from where I lived.

I took every visitor I had to Tōdai-ji (東大寺), a sizable temple complex in Nara. The star attraction at Tōdai-ji is the Daibutsuden, the Great Buddha Hall, which features the Daibutsu (大仏) or Great Buddha inside.

If I’m interpreting those measurements correctly, the Daibutsu is nearly 49 feet high, with over 17 feet of that devoted to his head. I never did take a good picture of the Daibutsu, but I do have this.

The size is impressive, but so is its age. The Daibutsu dates from the 8th century of the Common Era, though parts have been recast over the centuries, such as the hands and head, and the building around it has been rebuilt twice, most recently in the 18th century. I never got tired of visiting.

St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, Park Ridge

Posted on September 24, 2015 by admin

You might call St. Luke’s Lutheran Church at 205 N. Prospect Ave. in Park Ridge an example of Suburban Gothic, but apparently that’s the name of a movie that came out last year. Anyway, it’s a handsome English Gothic-style church in the suburbs. We were back in Park Ridge Saturday afternoon for the last stop on the Churches by Bus tour.

The building has the distinction of being designed in the late 1920s by Elisabeth Martini (1886-1984), the first woman to be the proprietor of an architectural firm in Chicago. Mostly she did houses, but it seems that she was a member of this church, and did the design work for a payment of $60 a month for the rest of her life, which turned out to be another 50-odd years, though it might not have been adjusted for inflation.

Adjoining the sanctuary (next to the bus in my picture) is a 2010 addition by Douglas E. Lasch of Jaeger, Nickola, Kuhlman & Associates, which replaced a smaller addition from the 1970s and blends in remarkably well with the original structure. He has his own shop now, Faith Environ Studio, which focuses “primarily on providing architectural services to faith-based and other non-profit clients.”

St. Luke’s sanctuary has an elegant interior.

The stained glass windows tell of the Old and New Testaments. I’m sure the representation of Moses in one of the windows was meant seriously, but I can’t shake the idea that he’s grinning. Maybe it’s the eyes. “See what I have here! Commandments! Ten of them! Aren’t they terrific?”

Luther, on the other hand, looks fairly serious, but not grim.

I suppose those are the 95 theses on the door. A little hard to read at this scale. Wonder if they’re microprinted in the original Latin? I didn’t check. Never mind, the text is easily available on line in Latin and English (and other languages).

I haven’t looked at the theses since sometime in a college history class, so I was amused to find No. 86: “Again, ‘Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?’ ”

Ah, if only in our time and place we could mention Crassus without having to explain who he was. Then again, if those poor believers were able to understand that they were doing their little part to build the grandest church in Christendom, would they have been particularly upset?

One more thing about St. Luke’s in Park Ridge, which I read about later. It’s the home to the Bottle Band. Odd the things you find out. More about the band here.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: religious sites