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Dust, Quicksand, & Late-Season Dragonflies

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We enjoyed a warm weekend, following cooler days and almost cold nights. But no hard freeze just yet.

Today was windy, and it’s been dry a while, so dust kicked up from the baseball diamond was visible from my back yard.
Columbus Day Dust 2015By contrast, when it’s been raining a lot, patches of quicksand form, trapping unwary little leaguers. Well, maybe not. Apparently grade-schoolers aren’t even afraid of quicksand anymore, which means that people aren’t watching enough Tarzan movies.

Saturday we took walk at the Crabtree Preserve, which is a 1,000-acre unit of the Forest Preserves of Cook County that we’d somehow overlooked before, even though it’s only about 15 minutes away. It’s a pleasant place to walk on a warm October day, with trails that wind through woodland and restored, or mostly restored, prairie, and a small nature center with some exhibits.

I read that it’s been a boom year for dragonflies, but haven’t seen so many myself. Maybe that’s because I don’t live that close to lake-sized bodies of water. But as we followed the trail around Bulrush Pond and Bulrush Marsh, we spotted a few clouds — swarms — squadrons of dragonflies, especially ones with long red abdomens.

… And a Hell of an Engineer

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I can’t say that I remember much about the Georgia Tech-W. Carolina game, but I was there 30 years ago. I was visiting a friend that I knew from Vanderbilt who lived in Atlanta at the time. Before VU, she’d attended Georgia Tech for a semester or a year or some time. It was a pleasant Saturday afternoon, so off we went.

Ramblin' WreckSomething I do remember: after parking, and as we walked to the stadium along with a stream of other game-goers, we passed by street vendors. One of them, who was selling peanuts — guess that might be goober peas — had a sign telling everyone that they were now entering the Peanut Zone. It was lettered in imitation of the Twilight Zone font — which I just learned seems to be an actual font.

Tech took the game, 24-17. I had to look that up. In our time, that was amazingly easy.

Either before or after, we went to the Varsity to eat, since I’m pretty sure the Peanut Zone, while it made us chuckle a little, didn’t inspire us to buy peanuts. The flagship Varsity near Georgia Tech, that is. I probably had a chili dog. That’s the thing to do there.

John F. Tracy’s Plaque

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I’ve seen some plaques in my time, such as ones commemorating the high-water mark of Hurricane Ike, a vintage Dairy Queen sign, the 25,000th 7-11 franchise, the site of Huey Long’s assassination, an outstanding civil engineering achievement of the 1980s, a Civil War veteran who died in 1947, Bill Murray’s footprint, even Addison Mizner’s pet spider monkeys. Guess I’m a sucker for words carved in metal trying to beat forgetfulness, though I think forgetfulness will eventually overcome such efforts.

Saw another plaque on Sunday, behind the Ridge Historical Society in the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago. A curious thing, this plaque, placed right next to the back entrance and mounted on a short block. Though made of metal, it was well worn by years of weather — close to a century, it seems.

There was no one was around to tell me about it, but my guess would be that it had been moved there from somewhere else nearby. It said (in all caps, actually, but I’m capitalizing the lines that are particularly large on the plaque):

1852      1922
ROCK ISLAND LINES
Seventieth Anniversary
October Tenth
The memorial tree planted nearby
is dedicated
by the Rock Island in affectionate memory
of
JOHN F. TRACY
Who by industry courage and loyalty
through every vicissitude signally
aided in the development of the
CHICAGO ROCK ISLAND & PACIFIC RAILWAY
into a great transportation system
DEVOTED TO THE PUBLIC SERVICE

The Rock Island is remembered in later decades thanks to Alan Lomax and Leadbelly and others, though that’s fading too, and it was an important railroad in its day (and a client of Lincoln’s in its earliest years). It was also a link in the Grand Excursion of 1854, which is known to us Millard Fillmore fans.

John Tracy’s not so well remembered. My guess would be that he lived somewhere in Beverly, and was long dead by 1922. A small amount of checking reveals he was an executive of the railroad, including its president from 1866 to ’77. A Gilded Age railroad tycoon! His story is probably in an out-of-print volume somewhere, maybe at the Ridge Historical Society. A book that’s no one’s read in years, and a story that probably doesn’t involve diamond-tipped walking sticks and lighting cigars with $100 banknotes, alas.

An American System-Built Home

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There are only a handful of American System-Built Homes in existence, about 15 by one count, though others might be spending their days in anonymity. Because I’ve been slapdash in my approach to learning about Frank Lloyd Wright, it was a thing I’d never heard of until Sunday, on the architecture walking tour.

Tourdeforce360VR has this description: “Between 1915 and 1917, Wright designed a series of standardized ‘system-built’ homes, known today as the American System-Built Homes, an early example of prefabricated housing. The ‘system’ involved cutting the lumber and other materials in a mill or factory, and then brought to the site for assembly; thus saving material waste and a substantial fraction of the wages paid to skilled tradesmen.”

World War I interrupted production, and it never started again. Turns out there two in Chicago, and one of these is on S. Hoyne Ave., and known as the Guy C. Smith House.
The owners of the house, David and Debbie — or was it John and Jill or Mark and Margo? I forget, but the names began with the same letters — came out to tell us about the house.
FLW homeownersThen we went inside. It was very nice of the owners to let us shuffle through their home. They’ve done right by Wright, too. This is the dinning room, for instance.
Nice dining room, eh?It’s a fine house, but I could never live in such a place and have it look like this. Soon, papers and books and other items would start to appear on the tables and other flat surfaces. Then they would take over, like kudzu.

A Few Beverly Houses

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This was one of my favorites on the Beverly walking tour on the Southwest Side of Chicago, 10340 S. Longwood Dr., also known as the Hilland A. Parker House.
Beverly, ChicagoNote the enormous yard, sloping upward, which we were told continued quite a ways toward the back. The area was wide open when the house was built in 1894, so there was no reason to build on small lots. An architect named Harry Hale Waterman did the design. He did a fair number of houses in the neighborhood, but this one was for himself.

The AIA Guide to Chicago says: “Site and style combine here for high drama. The base of the huge rusticate brownstone blocks rises on the hill to form huge arches on the big semicircular porch. The tall roof, pierced with steeply pitched gabled dormers, exaggerates the height.”

Not far away is this charmer by Walter Burley Griffith, the Harry N. Tolles House, 10561 S. Longwood, which was built in 1911, with some later additions, such as the glass bricks.
Beverly HousesGood old Walter Burley. I learned about him when I visited his signal creation, the city of Canberra, during the warm Christmas season in ’91.

Before the Australians tapped him to build their capital, he “designed more than 130 designs in his Chicago office for buildings, urban plans and landscapes, half of which were built in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin,” PBS says, in the years before WWI.

At 10616 S. Longwood: the house that’s now home to the Ridge Historical Society, dating from 1922 and designed by John Hetherington. Not this fellow, though.
Beverly, ChicagoThe organization calls it the Driscoll House on a sign in the front; the Graver-Discoll on a plaque around back; AIA calls it the Herbert S. Graver House. Hope no one has come to fisticuffs over the nomenclature. Graver, it seems, commissioned it, while Driscoll was the last owner before the historical society. More about it here.

The oldest house on the tour was the Chambers House, 10330 S. Seeley, dating from 1874 and designed by that prolific architect of previous eras, Unknown (who also did the Irish castle mentioned yesterday).

Beverly, ChicagoAIA says: “The remarkably well-preserved house [indeed] is a classic suburban villa, complete with ‘French’ tower.” Maybe a French tower is a vantage from which to taunt passing Britons clapping coconut shells.

Beverly on a Sunday Afternoon

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The leaves are turning. Here’s the scene at the 103rd St Metra Station, on the Southwest Side of Chicago, early Sunday afternoon, under a gray but not rainy sky.
Beverly, ChicagoWe were at the station not because we rode the train that day — we drove, and parked nearby — but because Yuriko and I took a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour of the Beverly neighborhood, which started at the station. Beverly is on the Southwest Side of the city, and distinctive for a number of reasons, but one that stood out while walking around is its hilly contour. A glacial ridge just west of S. Longwood Dr. is easily visible near the station, which is on 103rd just east of Longwood, among a knot of small retail shops, including a local bank that tells one and all:
Beverly, Chicago“Known for its spacious homes, tree-lined streets, and racially integrated population, Beverly has retained its reputation as one of Chicago’s most stable middle-class residential districts,” notes the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Originally part of the village of Washington Heights (1874), the area was annexed to Chicago by 1890 but remained sparsely settled for decades.

“In 1886, real estate developer Robert Givins constructed a limestone castle at 103rd and Longwood Drive in the Tracy subdivision of Washington Heights, but the surrounding neighborhood did not achieve residential maturity for decades. The situation was the same north of 95th Street, where Civil War general Edward Young and W. M. R. French, the first director of the Art Institute, had built homes along Pleasant Avenue in the 1890s. Vast sections of Beverly, especially the area south of 99th Street and west of Western, remained prairie until the 1940s and 1950s.”

This is the Gilded Age “Irish castle” of  Robert Givins, with its distinctive turret mostly obscured by leaves at the moment. These days, it’s a Unitarian church. Note the slope of the hill.
Beverly, ChicagoThe tour involved walking south on South Longwood Dr., which follows the bottom of the slope, then up (west) on W. 105th Pl., then north on S. Seeley Ave. and S. Hoyne Ave. Along the way, we stopped and looked at houses, while the docent described them. We got to go inside only one property, the Guy C. Smith House on Hoyne. More about that later.

The last place we saw was at the corner of Seeley and 103rd.

Beverly, ChicagoNice design, but the shoes got more attention. There was a sign in the yard saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB! and another that said, 80 YEARS AND KICKING.

Nara 1991

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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.

Nara 1991My 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.

TodaijiIf 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.

DaibustuThe 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.

Thursday Tidbits

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Cool air to begin October. Fitting.

I saw part of The Iron Giant on TV a few years after its 1999 release, coming away with the impression that I ought to see all of it someday. That day was Saturday: Yuriko, Ann and I watched it on DVD. Upon its theatrical release, apparently the studio dropped the ball in marketing it, so the movie didn’t do well, but it caught the attention of critics. I can see why. Not flawless, but high-quality animation and a fun story.

Occasionally we still discover another food that the dog will eat. This week it was refried beans. She was pretty enthusiastic about them, in fact.

NASA has just published remarkable images of Charon, moon of Pluto. Or are they considered twins these days? I haven’t kept up with those definitions. Anyway, how often do we see something that’s absolutely, for sure never been seen by humans before? Not often.

Around 30 years ago, when I bought my first car, I remember pricing some Volkswagens. As usual for a young man, I was looking for an inexpensive car. Volkswagens of the time weren’t as inexpensive as I thought they would be.

A decade earlier, when you wanted an inexpensive car, they would have been the thing. They were People’s Cars, after all. But somehow the brand had strayed away from the entry level by the early 1980s, and before long I owned an entry-level Toyota, a company that remembered to make models at a variety of price points. I’ve bought a number of other Toyotas since then, too, above entry level.

Now that Volkswagen’s been caught committing mass fraud, I imagine the talk a few years ago between two upper-level company managers (in cartoon German accents). After all, imagined conspiracy scenes can be fun.

Hans: Can we really get away with this?

Fritz: Ja, the Americans are too stupid to catch on.

Obviously they learned nothing from the history of the 20th century.

Map in the Mail

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Medecins Sans Frontiers wants money from me, and toward that end sent me a map of the world specially printed for them by Rand McNally. That’s a pretty good way to get my attention. It’s not quite as aesthetic as one by National Geographic or Nelles, but not bad. But you’d think that for an organization that has “without borders” in its name, national borders would be left off the map to make a point. Instead, the nations of the Earth are variously hued, as on any political map.

Fine print on the side of the map is at pains to say that the lines and colors on the map don’t mean that the organization takes a position one way or the other on any of them. It also specifically mentions Sudan and South Sudan — a “final boundary… has not been determined” — and that “a dispute exists between the Government of Argentina and the United Kingdom concerning sovereignty over  the Falklands Islands (Malvinas).”

Mentioning Sudan and South Sudan, I understand, since I’m pretty sure the organization is active there. But the Falklands? Why a note about that and not, say, the West Bank or the Western Sahara or the Spratlys or just about anywhere else that’s disputed? Such spots are just about everywhere, though this map doesn’t show that some disputes are more intense than others.

Also: the map is a Gall stereographic projection. Looks like Rand McNally doesn’t mention Peters, and from what I can tell, this one doesn’t look as weirdly distorted as either Mercator or the maps I’ve seen called Peters projections. Speaking of which — here’s xkcd on maps.

A Spider in September

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The single window in our garage looks at to the west, meaning that at this time of the year, the later afternoon sun comes in more-or-less directly. Last weekend I noticed a large web near the window, something new for the summer.

Spider!The image distorts its size to make it seem large, but tip-to-tip I’d say it’s no more than about an inch. The web’s large, though — a couple of feet in diameter, so I guess our spider friend’s been working on it a while.

I doubt that anyone else will disturb it, or even notice it. I plan to check in every now and then to see what it does as things get colder.