St. James at Sag Bridge Catholic Church and Cemetery

Posted on March 15, 2021 by admin

Saturday was warm and pleasant, Sunday raw and unpleasant, and today — Ides of March Snow. If Rome had had a few inches that day, Caesar might have stayed home, since the rarity of snow would surely have been a warning not to do any official business. Oh, well.

Except for scattered dirty piles in parking lots, all of the massive February snows had melted by March 14. The March 15 snow will last a few days at most, due to a warming trend predicted for later in the week.

Illinois has a few hills, typically relics of ancient glacial movements. Built on top of one of them, in the village of Lemont, is St. James at Sag Bridge Catholic Church, which got its start in historic times — but still quite a while ago, in the 1830s.

On the slope of the hill is the church cemetery. One side of the hill — maybe better to call it a ridge — is quite steep, yet still sports stones.

The rest of the family had other things to do during the day on Saturday, which as mentioned turned out to be clear and warm, so I headed south for a look around the suburban stretch of Archer Avenue (Illinois 171) between Lemont and the village of Justice.

The urban section of Archer Avenue, “Archey Road,” was the haunt of Mr. Dooley once upon a time, but that’s a matter best left for others to describe (if you feel like paying for access).

In our time, suburban Archer Avenue is a thoroughfare featuring independent and chain restaurants, small office buildings, auto repair shops, liquor stores, churches, schools, municipal facilities, and vast cemeteries. The surrounding forest preserve lands are even larger, the further out you go.

St. James at Sag Bridge is near the junction of Archer Avenue and the north-south Illinois 83, which (to the north) is one of the main transit spines of DuPage County. St. James’ hill also rises near the triple waterways of the Des Plaines River, the manmade Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and an older manmade leftover of the 19th-century canal-building boom, the tiny-by-comparison Illinois & Michigan Canal.

To the south of the church and cemetery is yet another artificial waterway, the early 20th century Calumet Sag Channel, which gives the area its name, Sag Bridge, for a predecessor bridge of the one that now carries 171/83 across the channel. The Calumet Sag connects the Calumet River system with the Sanitary and Ship Canal, which it joins just to the west of the church. It’s a complicated bit of geography that I was only vaguely aware of before I decided to examine this part of Archer Avenue.

Sag? I wondered about that as well. The full name of the canal is the Calumet-Saganashkee Channel. I didn’t know that either, but learning it generated another question, as is often the case. Saganashkee?

Named after a local feature with a modified Indian name, it seems: Saganashkee Slough, which is a lake on forest preserve land in the area.

“A case in point is Saganashkee Slough,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1994. “It was formerly a huge swamp that extended from west of 104th Avenue to the limits of Blue Island, and its original name, Ausaganashkee, is a Potawatomi Indian word that means ‘slush of the earth,’ wrote former Forest Preserve District general superintendent Cap Sauer in a historical account written in the late 1940s.

“During the construction of the I&M Canal in the 1830s, a feeder ditch was dug in the swamp that helped supply additional water to the canal. The slough was almost destroyed in the 1920s by blasting during the construction of the Cal-Sag Channel. Saganashkee was reconstructed by the forest preserve district, although in much smaller form, Berg said. At 325 acres, it is still, however, one of the largest bodies of water in the district.”

As for St. James, the church was founded to serve workers, mostly Irishmen, who were building the Illinois and Michigan Canal, with the current structure completed in the 1850s. A place to go Sunday morning after Saturday night revels, and sometimes donnybrooks, at least according to Irish stereotypes. I suspect the congregation is a good deal more diverse these days.

It’s a handsome limestone building, built from material from nearby Lemont-Sag quarries, which provided stone for Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and the Chicago Water Tower besides. I understand the St. James interior is quite beautiful, but it was locked when I visited.

The Our Lady of the Forest grotto on the grounds was, of course, open for a look.

Compared with the church building, the grotto is new, built in 1998 for the for the 165th anniversary of the parish. See grottos when you can.

Chicago Mass Vax ’21

Posted on March 14, 2021 by admin

The United Center mass vaccination site isn’t actually in the arena itself, but under a set of interconnected tents set up in one of the arena’s parking lots, there on the Near West Side of Chicago. We weren’t there on Friday afternoon to get vaccinated ourselves, since that continues to be elusive, though I expect that to change before too long.

Rather, we’d come to escort a family friend, a little old Japanese lady Yuriko knows well, who is somewhat infirm and has limited English. I’d managed via the appropriate web site to make a first shot appointment for her for early Friday afternoon, so off we went to the city.

With some trepidation that the on-site organization might be slapdash. Parking might be an issue. Lines might be long. Maybe no one would know what’s going on. Maybe her appointment would have been mysteriously cancelled, or there would be no record of it.

Maybe there would be indications that the federal effort to vaccinate the nation was a hopeless fiasco.

Reports of shifting eligibility for the shots at the United Center didn’t bode well for things. A couple of post-registration emails didn’t foster a sense of confidence in the effort, either. A day or so after the initial registration, which was for 1:30 on Friday, I got an email saying the the appointment had been changed to 3 on Friday. OK, fine.

A few hours later, I got another email telling me to ignore the first email, and that the appointment was still at 1:30. Hm. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d received another email saying that the people who’d sent the first erroneous email had been sacked — and then another message saying that the people who’d sacked the first set of people had been sacked. And maybe a report that a møøse was løøse, biting people.

Anyway, we drove in from the northwest suburbs, arriving just after 1. Parking, at least, wasn’t an issue, with plenty of people guiding cars into another of the United Center lots. We walked from that lot, across a street, toward the vaccination tents.

No long lines, either, though the site was set up for them.

The entrance to the vax tents was in was practically in the shadow of the 960,000-square-foot United Center and other buildings.

I’m glad to report that the process was simple and without delay. This particular site, at least, had no whiff of fiasco about it. Everything was well organized. Plenty of people — mostly members of the 101st Airborne Division — were on hand to point you to each step: checking in, health questions, and then the vaccination.

It took less than five minutes from the entrance to the waiting area after the shots, where you’re supposed to wait for 30 minutes to make sure you don’t have a funny reaction. So we waited. That was the longest part of the process by far.

The only slightly irritating moment involved signing up for the booster. Point your phone at this QR code, said signs with large QR codes on them, and it will start the process of signing up for you. I’ve been down this road before. I point my phone at a QR code and it does precisely nothing. There must be a step missing that I don’t know about, and no one ever mentions, because everyone who knows about it assumes everyone else knows about it. That’s a common problem with tech, I find, but ultimately not a big deal in this case.

Staff with iPads were on prowl looking for people who couldn’t use the QR code for one reason or another, and soon one of them had signed our friend in for her second shot, which will be in early April back at this same temporary vax complex.

Thursday Chaff

Posted on March 11, 2021 by admin

It’s been a warm week for March so far, even warm enough last night before bed to crack the window a bit and listen to the strong winds and occasional rain showers. Did that account for the occurrence of one of my semiannual phantasmagoria dreams early this morning? Maybe.

Great Fortune, subtitled “The Epic of Rockefeller Center,” by Daniel Okrent (2003) is a delightful book so far, and I’m only a chapter in. Certainly the most delightful thing I’ve ever read about a major urban mixed-use redevelopment project.

The first chapter sets up the story nicely, telling a short history of the Manhattan land that would be Rockefeller Center up until the time that John D. Rockefeller Jr. got involved in the project in the late 1920s. I didn’t know that the parcel had belonged to Columbia University for many years, and the scheme to redevelop the land (known as the Upper Estate) was ultimately driven by the university’s need to pay for its stately campus in Morningside Heights.

“… this meant that expansion on the grand scale of McKim, Mead & White’s Olympian campus on Morningside Heights had somehow to be financed, and the Upper Estate was the only cash cow in sight,” Okrent writes. “The milking commenced in 1904…”

An important person at the beginning of the story is Otto Kahn, multimillionaire financier and patron of the arts (an American Maecenas, back when educated people would have known that reference), who was president and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera. I didn’t know that he was well enough known that the Marx Brothers parodied him as Roscoe W. Chandler in Animal Crackers.

A digression. Apparently, for $200, one can own an original Otto Kahn letter. Then again, they aren’t rare. Okrent called his correspondence “oceanic.”

Okrent also writes some good standalone lines: “His [architect Ben Morris] neo-Georgian Union League Club on 37th and Park is probably as close as one can get to the architectural equivalent of a stuffed shirt.”

The other day, I was driving along with Ann and playing with the radio dial as we went. On came “Copacabana.” Hadn’t heard that song a good while, but as I mentioned to Ann, it seemed to be on the radio all the time in 1978.

I thought a bit about it, and it seems remarkable that such a downer of a song was so popular. As a ballad, the entire story is, a woman’s boyfriend is killed in front of her, and psychologically she never recovers.

“Yeah,” Ann said. “But the music is so peppy.”

True enough. There’s also a derivative short story in there somewhere. Maybe the incident and the aftermath from the point of view of Rico. Maybe he was the playboy son of a Fulgencio Batista crony. In his highly publicized murder trial in New York in 1949, his lawyers argued self-defense and he was acquitted.

While walking the dog at Fabbrini Park this week, I noticed a memorial plaque on a bench honoring a man named William “Mr. Bill” X (I forget the last name). Nicknamed Mr. Bill, eh? And what were his last words? Oh Noooooooooooooo!

Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, Mr. Bill couldn’t actually die, just suffer endlessly, which seems a lot more hellish. Still, we celebrate the likes of Mr. Bill. I used to have a Mr. Bill t-shirt, and have photographic evidence to prove it, in as much as photographs prove anything anymore. It’s among the t-shirts I’ve lost over the years, which also includes the Kill ‘Em All, Let God Sort It Out shirt that sported a black beret-wearing skull.

St. Joseph, Joliet

Posted on March 10, 2021 by admin

The iron works in Joliet might be ruins these days, but St. Joseph Catholic Church, one of the city’s major church buildings, still stands on Chicago St. downtown. It’s the second church on the site, built in 1905 to serve Slovenian immigrants, many of whom worked in the local iron and steel mills.

By the time we got there on Sunday, masses were over, and it might have been closed in the afternoon even under normal circumstances. Still, we got a good look at the exterior.

“The St. Joseph community includes Slovenian attire and music in its Masses, offers one Mass in Slovenian each month, refers to the Virgin Mary by her Slovenian name of Marija Pomagaj and holds a celebration for St. Nicholas Day, which is a tradition in Slovenia,” Shaw Media reported on the occasion of the parish’s 125th anniversary, including some interior shots.

Charles Wallace, an Irish-born Chicago architect (1871-1949), designed St. Joseph. He apparently did a fair number of churches in the Chicago area during the golden age of church building for large immigrant communities.

Across the street from the church is this building, headquarters of the Slovenian Union of America as well as the Slovenian Women’s Union of America Heritage Museum. The building dates from 1910.

Closed, of course. My kind of little museum, though, so we might visit some other time. Might visit Slovenia some other time, too, with any luck. I hear it’s a pleasant place to visit.

Hadley Valley Preserve

Posted on March 9, 2021 by admin

On Sunday after leaving the Joliet Iron Works Historic Site, we planned to get takeout at a place in Joliet found via Google Maps, but after driving a few blocks, an old-fashioned technique for finding something to eat kicked in. That is, we saw it ourselves, and stopped on impulse.

Chicken-N-Spice. The place looked good, and it was: crispy fried chicken, warm mashed potatoes and gravy and tender biscuits. It was still a little cool to eat outside, so we found a spot to park and ate in the car.

After lunch we drove to the Kansas-shaped Hadley Valley Preserve, a unit of the Forest Preserve District of Will County.

Not really much of a valley, but the 685-acre preserve is a savanna, according to the FPD: a grassland with scattered tree growth and a mix of shrubs and wildflowers (in season).

Looks that way.

The trail makes an oval all the way around. We walked the whole thing counterclockwise, about 2.5 miles, with temps in the mid-50s and sunshine that wasn’t oppressive. Most of the mud had dried up by the time we walked it, unlike last week’s trail.

There were other walkers but also horses and their riders, about a dozen all together at one point or another on the trail.

Rolls of hay. Not as picturesque as possible, but the scattered rolls have some charm.Spring Creek runs from east to west through the length of the preserve.

The creek eventually connects with Hickory Creek in Joliet, and from there flows to the Des Plaines River and, of course, the far-off Gulf of Mexico eventually.

Joliet Iron Works Historic Site

Posted on March 8, 2021 by admin

For early March, and especially considering the snows and bitter days of February, Sunday felt gloriously warm. Temps were in the mid-50s by the early afternoon, and we needed no further encouragement to go find a place to walk, though it took some driving to get there.

We went south. There are lots of places to see in southern metro Chicago, including the Joliet Iron Works Historic Site.

Industrial ruins, that is. Unfortunately not the towering metal husks you might see in Pittsburgh or Birmingham, Alabama, but worth a look all the same.

A path runs through the ruins about a half mile, roughly parallel to RR tracks to the east, and the Illinois & Michigan Canal to the west, though those aren’t always visible.

Toward the southern end of the site, it’s mostly rubble, and not always much at that. Further north, there are the stubs of the sizable structures that used to be there.

Including some dark holes.

This pit is the foundation of a once mighty, and mighty dangerous, blast furnace.

Once I was reminded of some of the images of Knossos that I’ve seen. Like this one.
“The factory opened in 1869 and was a massive facility for the time….” notes Atlas Obscura. “Employing four huge blast furnaces and a few thousand employees, the metal works produced around 2,000 tons of raw pig iron each day.”

Not sure where that figure came from. On site, one of the signs said that soon after the plant opened, the total was 50 tons of pig iron a day. By 1910, production was 400 tons a day.

“The plant kept putting out metals until 1936 when it closed for a short time before being reopened [for the war effort]. However, its new life was not to last that long either, as the works became unprofitable and were abandoned in the 1980s.”

Surprisingly little graffiti marks the ruins, though there are places where it’s clear it has been painted over. Such as here.

But new graffiti is probably added regularly.

The Forest Preserve District of Will County acquired the site in the 1990s, and stabilization efforts have been enough to allow it to be open to the public. Parts of the site, anyway.

You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

Tottori Sand Dunes, 1992

Posted on March 7, 2021 by admin

Pleasant spring-ish weekend. Sour old man winter will return again sometime soon, of course, but probably not in full force as spring slowly gains the upper hand.

Referring to the Tottori Sand Dunes, Wikipedia has this to say, among other things: “Each year, around two million visitors — mostly from within Japan and East Asia — visit the dunes.[citation needed]”

Maybe so. When we went there in March 1992, the place was pretty popular.

The dunes aren’t that far from the heavily populated Kansai region — Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe — and they count as a novelty draw since Japan doesn’t a lot in the way of epic sand dunes. If that’s what you want to see, Tottori is the place to go. The dunes stretch nine miles from east to west, and are a little more than a mile wide. At their highest, they rise about 165 feet over the Sea of Japan.

“The Sendai River carries sediment from the nearby Chugoku Mountains that eventually washes out into the Sea of Japan,” JNTO says, along with images of the area wider than anything I have. “Strong sea currents and winds work together to push these sediments back onto the shore to form the sand dunes. These same intense winds continuously move and re-shape the dunes.”

The dunes supposedly inspired Kobo Abe’s novel, The Woman in the Dunes (砂の女 Suna no Onna, “Sand Woman”), which I haven’t read. Years ago I did see the 1964 movie based on the novel, which is a well known avant-garde film and, I thought, relentlessly grim. Fitting for a retelling of the Sisyphus myth.

Thursday Dribs

Posted on March 4, 2021 by admin

Shouldn’t there be drabs as well? Maybe, but I did that not too many Thursdays ago.

“Drib is known in some English, Irish and Scottish dialects from at least the eighteenth century, meaning an inconsiderable quantity or a drop and most probably is a variant form of drip or drop,” says the always interesting World Wide Words.

“The experts are undecided whether the second half is a mere echo of the first, as in reduplicated compounds like helter-skelter, see-saw and hurly-burly, or if drab is a real word in its own right.”

It is a word, but in the sense of dull. The Thursday Drabs would suggest that I passed the day listlessly, but that wasn’t the case at all. For one thing, going out for a walk is now pretty easy and, except when the wind kicks up, not too bad. All the ice has vanished from almost all of the sidewalks. Walking the dog is mostly a pleasure again.

These February scenes are gone as well. Some snow still endures, forming snow archipelagos on lawns, especially in shady northern exposures, but there’s a little less of it every day.

Also good to see: croci emerging from the earth. Some in our back yard, and some especially vigorous patches on the grounds of Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary, where we sometimes walk the dog.

Not long ago, I found a 12 oz. jar of preserves tucked away deep in our canned (and jarred) goods pantry: cherry raspberry preserves, product of Brownwood Farms of Williamsburg, Michigan. That sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it for a moment.

The lid, though tight, sported a light coating of dust. That doesn’t bode well for the edibility of the edibles inside.

Then it occurred to me. We’d bought these preserves way up in Grand Traverse County in the summer of 2007 during a visit. Naturally, this made me a little leery of even opening the thing, much less eating it. But I got it open and didn’t see (or more importantly) smell anything amiss.

Been eating my 2000s-vintage preserves on various kinds of bread since then, here in the 2020s, and it’s delicious. After all, Grand Traverse is justly known for its cherries and raspberries and other berries. I’m glad the preserve was literally true in the case of these preserves.

Arlington Cemetery & Elm Lawn Memorial Park

Posted on March 3, 2021 by admin

Due south of Mount Emblem Cemetery are twin burial grounds, Arlington Cemetery and Elm Lawn Memorial Park, also in Elmhurst, Illinois. On Saturday I headed south from Mount Emblem along County Line Road, fully intending to find an entrance to I-290 and proceed home, but I noticed the two cemeteries before I got that far.

I’ve been driving by those cemeteries for years, seeing them from the highway, not realizing they were distinct and never getting around to seeing them any closer. Though the afternoon was getting chillier and patches of snow still covered the ground, I figured I’d take a look.

These images are of Arlington Cemetery, which is to the east.

These are of Elm Lawn, to the west.

A better aesthetic than Mount Emblem, which is say more standing stones, and the cemeteries ought to be nice in the spring and summer. It’s hard to tell in the winter whether these concerns, of some years ago, have been addressed.

As a casual visitor, there was no difference between the two. No fence or other demarcation. I noticed that the Arlington office building was permanently closed, with a sign referring visitors to go to the Elm Lawn office a few hundred feet away. Indeed, according to the cemetery’s web site, the two have been combined under single ownership for more than 25 years.

The permanent residents probably don’t care about any of that. If they do, they’re keeping quiet.

A small section of Elm Lawn (I think) that I drove by is designated the Valley of Peace Shia Cemetery, which must be fairly new. Considering the demographics of the northwest suburbs, that’s thinking ahead on the part of cemetery ownership.

Mount Emblem Cemetery

Posted on March 2, 2021 by admin

A cemetery with most of its memorials flush to the ground — a mid-century notion that hopefully has faded — looks like a snow-covered field in winter. That can be nice, but it doesn’t say cemetery, and the added beauty of stones in the snow, rather than under it, is missing.

There were stones in the snow at the Elk Grove Cemetery in January 2010.

Mount Emblem Cemetery in Elmhurst, Illinois, has all the ingredients to be a striking cemetery except standing stones. So on Saturday, I saw mainly this kind of scene.

With a few reminders that loved ones are memorized somewhere under there.

There are a few structures that won’t be denied their place in the pale winter sun.

Mount Emblem has, however, one thing unique in any cemetery I’ve been to, or know about: a Dutch-style windmill.

It’s the Fischer Windmill, built in the mid-19th century, long before the cemetery was established.

“The windmill was built sometime between 1849 and 1865 by Henry Fischer, after he inherited part of the family farm from his father, Frederick L. Fischer, one of the original settlers in the county,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1995. “It took two hired millwrights about three years to build it, including six months to fashion the main cogwheel.

“The main framework of the windmill is cypress, and it rests on a stone foundation. It features hand-hewn shafts and gearing of white oak and hickory… The mill ground wheat and corn for local farmers until the demand declined after the turn of the century.”

The cemetery association bought it in 1925 and, according to the Trib, installed chimes. I didn’t hear any chimes, but I did notice two loudspeakers mounted on the structure.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

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