Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church

Posted on September 16, 2014 by admin

The Logan Square Preservation House & Garden Walk on Saturday didn’t start at a house or a garden, but at Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church on Palmer Square. I’d never been in a Serbian Orthodox church before. Russian, yes, Greek, certainly (in Chicago), even a Japanese Orthodox church, Nikolai-do in Tokyo.

Looking at the outside, it’s a little hard to discern anything Serbian, except for the flag, or even anything in a traditional Orthodox style.

It’s a handsome Gothic building with Arts and Crafts overtones, I’ve read, though my eye isn’t keen enough to pick out the overtones. Like much of the neighborhood, the property dates from the 1910s – 1910, in fact – and it was designed by Lowe and Bollenbacher, a firm active in Chicago and Bloomington, Ind., a century ago. Apparently they did a lot of work in both places.

It wasn’t built for a Serbian congregation, but an Anglican one. So it remained until a fire destroyed almost all of the interior in 1968. By then, the number of Episcopalians in Chicago was falling, but the number of Orthodox Serbs was on the rise, so the old congregation sold the ruin to the Serbs. They’ve been remodeling the interior in Orthodox style ever since, complete with an ornate iconostasis, bright frescoes on a still partly-white wall, a brilliant chandelier (not sure if it counts as a polyeleos), and a lot of standing room. This isn’t a particularly sharp image, but it gives some idea of the interior. One Filip Subotic did a lot of the frescoes.

I have no Serbian Cyrillic, and my understanding of saint symbolism isn’t all it could be, so I didn’t recognize a lot of the saints floating up on the white wall, in their blues and reds and gold-leaf nimbi. But I did know St. George. Who else is going to slay that dragon from atop his steed?

Palmer Square, Chicago

Posted on September 15, 2014 by admin

Saturday started cool, but evolved into a pleasant, almost warm day. A good day for walking around in a light jacket, which is what we did. We participated in the 31st Logan Square Preservation House & Garden Walk, during which seven houses, one church, and two gardens were open for inspection with the assistance (and under the watchful eyes) of volunteer docents.

Though named for Logan Square, the walk actually focused on structures in Palmer Square, which is a smaller neighborhood within the larger Logan Square neighborhood, and some blocks south of Logan Square itself – the place with the Illinois Centennial Memorial, described last week – and north of Humboldt Park, described in late August.

The focus of the Palmer Square neighborhood is Palmer Square, a rectangular park a few blocks long with a circular running track, a charming little playground with figures from The Velveteen Rabbit, and a lot of shade trees. The city, with money from the state, redeveloped the park in the mid-2000s, and I understand tree planting has been going on vigorously since well before that. A previous generation of sheltering elms had been lost to Dutch Elm Disease.

This is at the eastern edge of Palmer Square, looking west. On either side to the north and south are streets, and across those streets mostly are handsome residential structures that date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More about those later.

On Saturday, walkers, joggers, and a lot of dog walkers were using the park. A fair number of parents and children were enjoying the playground. Pretty much everything Saturday in the park should be.

Palmer Square and Logan Square (the urban feature, not the neighborhood), are both part of the Chicago Boulevard System, a series of boulevards that connect parks and encircle the central part of the city – a 28-mile chain of parks, or an emerald necklace, to be more fanciful. The system dates to the late 1800s, and as usual with such things, suffered from neglect during much of the 20th century.

I haven’t confirmed it with my own eyes, but I’ve read that the section in Logan Square (the neighborhood, not the urban feature) is the best preserved of the original lot. I know that no one I knew in Chicago in the 1980s ever mentioned the boulevards, so it’s likely that they were largely forgotten by that time. (Or maybe I didn’t hang out with the right people.) These days, there’s some awareness.

This is a view of Humboldt Blvd. from Armitage Ave., looking north, and a good number of blocks north of Humboldt Park, and a bit south of Palmer Square. To the left of the narrow parkland is the main street, and to the left of that is another strip of narrow parkland.

Flanking both strips of narrow parkland are small streets, where it seems mostly residents park their cars. It’s a lot better than many major Chicago streets, which may have six lanes, but two of those are parked up on either side.

Lost Dome 2001

Posted on September 14, 2014 by admin

We came to be in eastern Iowa in early September 2001 — Labor Day weekend, in fact — because in February of that year, we’d taken a short trip to the same region, staying at a motel whose indoor pool turned out to be inoperable. I must have written a complaint letter about it, because the motel offered us another stay for no charge.

September’s definitely a more pleasant month to visit eastern Iowa than February, so we made our way back. We spent most of one day in the pleasant college town of Iowa City. The 2000s, it turned out, wasn’t a good decade for the town — a tornado hit one year, and the Iowa River flooded some of the town two years later. Before any of that, a historic structure burned.

That would be this historic structure: the Old State Capitol. Iowa City was a territorial and early state capital, and the building, with its gold leaf dome, was a relic of that time. (Iowa seems to have a thing for gold leaf on its capitol domes.) After the state government moved to Des Moines in 1857, the building became property of the University of Iowa, which it remains to this day.

We had a look at that early September 2001. Some renovation work was under way at the time.

A little more than two months later, workmen accidentally set the dome on fire and the fire consumed it, though not the rest of the building, which suffered water damage. I’m happy to report that a new gold leaf-covered dome was put on the building about two years later.

As we were leaving Iowa on that trip, we headed south a short distance from Iowa City and visited the Kalona Historical Village, an open-air museum heavy on farm structures and farm equipment, as you’d expect, plus a lot of Mennonite artifacts. Then we headed east and drove through Riverside, a small town. I only paused long enough, not even getting out of the car, to see the “USS Riverside” in a small park. At some point, the town fathers had decided that Riverside was the future birthplace of Capt. Kirk.

Thursday Debris

Posted on September 11, 2014 by admin

Distinctly cool today. We’re in for a run of cool days — enough to use the heater. A bit of fall too soon, but there will be some more warm days before there aren’t any more until next year.

The local skunk population seems to be way up. I smell them often when driving along. At night, I’ve seen a few live skunks scurrying down the street – the first time that’s ever happened since I moved to the northwest suburbs over a decade ago. By day, I see dead skunks on the road.

Not long ago, early one evening, I went out the front door and there on the driveway was the distinct black-and-white of a skunk. I stopped instantly. It stopped too. I figured it would do what most animals do in the face of a larger animal – get away. Advance on the animal, get sprayed. Otherwise, not. I was right, it hurried away.

A headline spotted today, via Google News: “Islamists Are Not Our Friends.” An Op-Ed in the NYT. Glad you cleared that up, headline writer. I would drag out Captain Obvious, but that seems a little adolescent, as many Internet memes are. Why is he a captain, anyway? Patterned after Captain America and the even greater Captain Canuck, I suppose, but isn’t –man the common suffix for a superhero, even a satirical one? Greater minds than mine will have to sort these questions out.

Another head: “DC teacher has sixth-graders compare George Bush to Adolf Hitler.” That from Fox, which is probably trying to highlight the shocking things that public school teachers do, especially if they have the temerity to belong to a union. But then again, you can compare the two (and I’m assuming they mean the younger Bush, but it doesn’t matter). Conclusion of such a comparison: Bush wasn’t much like Hitler. No major American politician has been, is, or can be. Well, maybe Huey Long had a bit of der Führer in him, but we’ll never know for sure.

From Newser, which seems to be a Weird News site: “Waitress Hits Lottery, Won’t Quit Job.” Why is that news? Is that supposed to be salt-of-the-earth admirable in some way? Or just the mark of a shriveled imagination? It just begs for an Onion satire. They’ve probably already done it: “Waitress Hits Lottery, Says Take This Job and Shove It.”

Product Thursday, example 1: Vigo Black Beans & Rice. In the convenient 8 oz. package, “completely seasoned & easy to prepare,” as the package says. Also: an Authentic Cuban Recipe. For a thing you cook in boiling water for a while – and that’s pretty much all there is to it – Vigo Black Beans & Rice is pretty tasty. Everyone liked it. Now if I could only remember where I bought it.

Example 2: Pirate’s Booty. Yuriko, impressed by a sample being given away, bought a bag of the white cheddar snacks. Shrug. Coincidentally, Lileks had a comment about the bag this week: “I have always hated this guy. Partly for the way he’s drawn. Partly for the fact that the food within is overpriced and insubstantial. But mostly for THAR BE GOOD, which he says on the larger packages. It just bothers me.”

The cartoon pirate on the bag does look like a Hanna-Barbera reject, but the stereotypical pirate verbiage doesn’t bother me particularly. After all, Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up soon (next Friday). Like National Gorilla Suit Day, it comes but once a year.

Speaking of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory, I saw the introduction to the original Space Ghost the other day, probably for the first time in well over 40 years. Why? One of those things that happens when you’ve got a lot of other, more important things to do. One thing struck me about it. Space Ghost sure seemed to fight a lot of man-sized insectoid creatures.

The Illinois Centennial Monument

Posted on September 10, 2014 by admin

Rain in the morning, sun in the afternoon, drizzle in the evening. At least that’s variety. And it isn’t cold yet.

Henry Bacon’s well known for the Lincoln Memorial, as well he should be. He isn’t very known for the Illinois Centennial Memorial Column, a.k.a., the Illinois Centennial Monument, in Logan Square in Chicago, which is on the Northwest Side. I’d never taken a look at it up close until recently.

It’s a little forlorn. One of those monuments with passed by thousands daily, noticed by few if any, and marked with a little graffiti just to drive home the point. Then again, it’s been quite a while since the 100th anniversary of Illinois’ statehood, which was in 1918.

It’s a Doric column, and according to one source at least, made up of 13 solid marble segments based on the same proportions and scale as the columns of the Parthenon colonnade in Athens (or Nashville, come to think of it). The eagle on top, done by sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman, evokes the one on the Illinois state flag.

She did the reliefs along the base of the column as well, depicting Indians, explorers, farmers and laborers.

Plus a few figures from Antiquity. I’m pretty sure that’s Hermes holding a train and a steamship, maybe offering them to the laborer holding the hammer, and it looks like Ceres is to the workingman’s left. On Hermes’ right – is that Eratosthenes? He looks Greek enough, and he’s got a globe, fitting for the father of geography and the first person to more-or-less figure out the circumference of the Earth.

It’s too much to expect an Illinois Bicentennial Memorial in a few years, but may this one can be cleaned and restored for the occasion.

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.

St. Stanislaus Kostka

Posted on September 8, 2014 by admin

One reason I wanted to peek inside St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church not long ago when I was in Chicago – it’s not far east of Humboldt Park – was that I knew it would be open. I knew that it would be open because the iconic monstrance inside is the focus of 24-hour Eucharistic adoration. Here it is.

I found a press release, of all things, that describes the monstrance on the occasion of its unveiling in 2008: “The gilded receptacle has taken sculptor Stefan Niedorezo two years to carve from linden wood using Renaissance methods. The iconic monstrance is nine feet tall and weighs 700 pounds. Malgorzata Sawczuk applied the gilding and serves as project conservator.

“The monstrance depicts the Blessed Mother as the link between the old and new covenants. She stands over the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred container that held the stone tablets inscribed with the 10 Commandments. Mary is ‘clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars,’ as depicted in the Book of Revelation (Rev 11:19 and 12:1-2).”

St. Stanislaus Kostka is largely a Polish parish (masses in Polish, English and Spanish these days), and the 1870s structure is near the Kennedy Expressway. So near, in fact, that it was slated for demolition to build the highway back in the 1950s, when the Robert Moses school of road building was still in style (whatever’s in the way, knock it down). Ultimately the road was shifted to avoid the church, in a feature known as the Rostenkowski Curve, though apparently that politico (U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, who died a few years ago) wasn’t instrumental in saving the church. A lesser-known local politician, Bernard Prusinski, was.

Whoever kept it from being bulldozed, I’m glad. Your don’t have to be Polish or Catholic to appreciate such a handsome brick church, which I understand recalls major Polish churches of earlier centuries, though in fact designed by an Irish architect, Patrick Charles Keely. He also did Holy Name Cathedral on the near North Side, as well as a lot of other Catholic churches in a lot of places. The man was riding the wave of Catholic immigration to the U.S. in the latter decades of the 19th century, which spurred the demand for more churches.

Note that it only has one belfry. Lightning took another one down 50 or so years ago, but I like the asymmetry.

The church also has some superb glass in its ornate interior.

Taman Negara 1994

Posted on September 7, 2014 by admin

Taman Negara is a large national park — more than 1,675 square miles — slap in the middle of the Malay Peninsula. I understand the name means “national park” in Bahasa Malaysia. As a park, it’s older than the independent nation of Malaysia, starting as a smaller game reserve in the 1920s and taking its present size in 1938 as King George V National Park. That gives you an idea of who persuaded the sultans of Kelantan, Pahang, and Terengganu to designate parts of their realm as parts of the park. Even now, the park is technically in all three of those Malaysian states.

Reaching Taman Negara from Kuala Lumpur involved a bus, and then a boat trip upriver to park lodging, about three hours each. We stayed at the cheapest part of the lodging — a small row of bunkhouses sleeping four each along the river — a few days in late August/early September 1994.

You might think it’s a jungly place. It is.

There wasn’t much else to do at Taman Negara besides walk through the rainforest, some of it on steep ground, since the park is in the Titiwangsa Mountains. We enjoyed the walks, and then idled back at the lodge’s common building, where we took out meals and read.

Various sources tell me that rare mammals live in the park, such as the Malayan tiger, crab-eating macaques, and Sumatran rhinos, but we didn’t see anything so remarkable. Rare mammals with any sense stay away from people tramping through the jungle. Bugs, on the other hand, seek you out in the rainforest.

Our bunkmates for a couple of days were a young Australian man and woman, a couple. For some reason, she was at pains to stress the independence and fortitude of Australian women, which I don’t doubt at all. Maybe she was trying to impress the point on Yuriko, who doesn’t doubt it either.

So I found it a little funny when she make a loud fuss about an insect that had gotten into the cabin: a gorgeous green-and-brown (I think) walking stick-like thing, maybe six or eight inches long, with large insect eyes. She insisted that we, the Australian fellow and I, kill it. We didn’t want to do that, so if I remember right, we shooed the creature onto a piece of newspaper and tossed it out the door.

One day we did the canopy walk. The park bills it as the longest one in the world. Maybe it is. It is way up in the trees, maybe 60 or 80 feet.

Of course it wobbled. Yuriko says she’s not sorry she did it, but doesn’t want to do another one.

Humboldt Park Bronzes

Posted on September 4, 2014 by admin

As you’d expect, there’s a statue of Baron von Humboldt in Humboldt Park in Chicago, and it’s a good one, a ten-foot bronze by Felix Gorling. He’s standing next to a globe and an iguana. I like those details. But by the time I got there, my camera’s battery was exhausted – the modern equivalent of running out of film. Public Art in Chicago always features better pictures anyway, so here’s Humboldt.

The baron and I go back a ways. I did a report on him in the fifth or sixth grade. His science is impressive, but what I think really impressed me at the time, and still does, was how he successfully explored parts of South America without much in the way of modern equipment (though I guess what he had was state-of-the-art).

Also in Humboldt Park – another legacy statue of the long-gone German population in the area – is a bronze of Fritz Reuter by one Franz Engelsman. My knowledge of Fritz Reuter is meager, and at first I confused him with the fellow who started the news agency (Paul Reuter, as it happens).

The park district tells us that “Reuter is best known for Otto Kanellen, a volume of prose stories. But he is also remembered for writing against political oppression, a subject he understood first-hand. The Prussian government sentenced Reuter to death for high treason because he had participated in a student-run club promoting political activism. This was commuted to imprisonment, and despite poor health, Reuter continued to write throughout his years in prison. Reuter’s work included several comic novels that were popular with many of Chicago’s German immigrants.

“On May 14, 1893, more than 50,000 Chicagoans of German descent attended the dedication ceremonies. While Reuter is less well-known to the wider community than Goethe or Schiller—for whom monuments were also dedicated in Chicago parks—the impressive attendance at this dedication shows the great enthusiasm for Fritz Reuter within the city’s German community. Four bronze relief plaques of scenes from Reuter’s best known works originally ornamented the granite base of the monument; however, they were all stolen in the sometime in the 1930s and have never been recovered.”

Germans weren’t the only ones living near Humboldt Park more than 100 years ago. More from the park district: “On October 12, 1901, tens of thousands of flag-waving Scandinavian-Americans participated in events to celebrate the monument’s unveiling. Despite heavy rain that day, the festivities included a parade and a two-hour ceremony in Humboldt Park.”

The monument this time: a bronze of Leif Ericson on a granite bolder, the work of a Norwegian come to Chicago around the time of the world’s fair, Sigvald Asbjørnsen.

A determined “We’re off to Vinland, men!” look on his face? Maybe. Sure, among Europeans, he got to America first, not counting nameless Vikings who may or may not have been shipwrecked there. If I’m ever out that way, I’ll definitely take a look at L’Anse Aux Meadows. But it’s a historical curiosity more than anything else, and this kind of memorial speaks more of modern ethnic pride than anything else. Even if the Vikings had told anyone else, which they didn’t, what could have 11th-century Europe done with that information?

Humboldt Park

Posted on September 3, 2014 by admin

The day before we went to Millennium Park, which was full of people, I went by myself to Humboldt Park, which is also in Chicago, for about an hour’s walkabout. Few people were there, even though it was the Friday before a holiday weekend, but maybe the population picks up on Saturdays and Sundays. Even so, the place seemed underused, considering how gorgeous parts of it are. Especially along the banks of the “prairie river” that runs through part of it – a landscape element by Jens Jensen, whom I’ve run across before.

“In 1869, shortly after the creation of the West Park System, neighborhood residents requested that the northernmost park be named in honor of Baron Freidrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1759-1859), the famous German scientist and explorer,” the Chicago Park District says. “Two years later, completed plans for the entire ensemble of Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas parks and connecting boulevards were completed by William Le Baron Jenney, who is best known today as the father of the skyscraper. Having studied engineering in Paris during the construction of that city’s grand park and boulevard system in the 1850s, Jenney was influenced by French design.

“The construction of Humboldt Park was slow, however, and the original plan was followed only for the park’s northeastern section. Jens Jensen, a Danish immigrant who had begun as a laborer, worked his way up to Superintendent of Humboldt Park in the mid-1890s… [Eventually], deteriorating and unfinished areas of Humboldt Park allowed Jensen to experiment with his evolving Prairie style. For instance, Jensen extended the park’s existing lagoon into a long meandering ‘prairie river.’

“He commissioned Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin to design an impressive boat house and refectory building which still stands at one end of the historic music court.”

The boat house is a fine structure.

The view of the lagoon from the boat house is nice as well.

A few people were fishing from the edge of the lagoon. I was looking at it. That was the entirety of the human presence there at that mid-afternoon moment. It was a little hard to believe that 9 million or so people live within 30 or 40 miles of this body of water except, of course, for the ambient traffic noise from nearby Humboldt Blvd. and Division St.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: September 2014