A Few Manhattan Churches

Posted on October 31, 2025 by admin

After the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen we headed for Park Ave., location of a famed Byzantine revival Episcopal church. Before we got there, we noticed a much smaller church, not actually part of the Open House New York event, at 5 E 48th Street.

Church of Sweden in New York

We’d come to the Svenska kyrkan i New York, where services are still held in Swedish. Not only was the church open, there was a cafe on its first floor. The sanctuary is on the second floor. Elegant little place, suitable for the small congregation that Swedish services might attract.

Under the Historik section of the church’s web site, you’ll find this helpful information: När svenskarna började flytta till USA och hur Svenska kyrkan på olika sätt velat vara närvarande i New York. A fuller history in English is on the Wiki page.

St. Bartholomew’s Church

St. Bartholomew’s Church, an Episcopal congregation on Park Ave., was participating in the Open House. That meant it was sure to be not only open, but lighted. The first time I went there, many years ago, I compared it to a cavern. Later I visited when more lights were on. Twenty years ago I wrote: “This time, it was better lighted, the better to show off the church’s superb Byzantine-style mosaics.”

During my 2025 visit, now joined by my nephew Robert, we were able not just to gaze at the lit sacred space, but we had the benefit of a knowledgeable docent, a woman of a certain vintage with a hobbled gait and a raspy voice. She knew the history of the congregation, and its slice of Manhattan. She had the artistic detail down cold. She knew her ecclesiastical styles. From the depth of detail about the many artists who worked on the church, it sounded like she knew some of the artists personally, though that couldn’t be literally true for most of them, since the church was built more than 100 years ago, with certain later design additions.

At the direction of the docent, Geof unveiled the altar for a moment.

It might have been interesting to know Hildreth Meière. Hers was an astounding career: “Working with leading architects of her day, Meière designed approximately 100 commissions, both secular and liturgical,” the International Hildreth Meière Association says. “Her best-known commissions include Radio City Music Hall, One Wall Street, St. Bartholomew’s Church, Temple Emanu-El, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. She also decorated the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis.”

The mosaics didn’t photograph well – that is, I’m too lazy to carry around a better camera – but good images are at the association web site.

Emerging from St. Bart, we agreed that heading back to the cafe at the Swedish church would be a good idea. It was.

Sated with Swedish-style open-faced sandwiches, our walk soon continued, up Fifth Ave. to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was its usual crowded splendor. I think I spotted some new, or newish murals, just inside the nave. A wedding was in progress. One must come after another every Saturday not in Lent, with ropes closing off a large part of the nave, making for extra crowding in the side aisles.

We didn’t stay. Not far away was a church far less crowded but with its own splendor.

St. Thomas Church

Namely, St. Thomas Church, another major Manhattan Episcopalian congregation. Inside, lights were low. The reredos stood out in the dark, a glowing presence above the altar populated by more than 60 stone carved figures, I’ve read. A Christian crowd: saints, prophets and reformers in an ivory colored stone from Wisconsin. I’d have needed a telephoto lens to have any hope of identifying any of them, but that didn’t make them any less striking.

Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson designed the church, completing it in 1914. They were another of those prolific architects now out of living memory who seemed to design a long list of churches in a short time. The duo did St. Barts, too, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, just to name a few famed sacred spaces of near-palatial character.

Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church

Just steps away from St. Thomas, as real estate press releases like to say about two close buildings, is Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was our last Open House church for that day.

With its auditorium style and balconies, it reminded me of the Moody Church in Chicago, though Fifth Avenue Pres is much older: 150 years this year, as it happens.

A hallway and some rooms extend beyond the front of the nave, including a columbarium.

Waiting for occupants. All it will take is time.

No Kings, Many Watches

Posted on October 30, 2025 by admin

We arrived in Manhattan by the Long Island Rail Road late morning on Saturday, October 18. We walked the short distance from Penn Station to Times Square, where a crowd was in motion.

We hadn’t come to New York for No Kings, but Open House New York. Some days earlier, I’d read about the protest was scheduled for late morning on Saturday, October 18. Well now, that’s good timing.

About 100,000 came out in the city’s five marches, one for each borough, according to the NYPD, which is probably as good an estimate as any. Maybe 75,000 of those were in Manhattan?

A small number compared, say, with New Year’s Eve in Times Square – an event not to be found on any list of the things I dream of doing. They say that pulls in a million souls. Of course, it’s easier to draw a crowd for a drunken holiday revel than a sober civic rally. Also, that million people are far more regimented than any mere anti-administration march. Regimented by the police, that is. No Kings, though informal in most ways, was self-regimented. Seems that the NYPD made no arrests associated with the NYC marches.

March? More of a mass walk. Considering some of the egregious behavior being protested, the walking crowd was cheerful. Cheerfully angry, you might call it. As Spock might say in observing such peculiar human emotion, “fascinating.” Then again, it was a middle-class protest, largely attracting people (like me) who would have been nowhere near if they thought a riot was even a little likely.

Do these or any protests make any difference in short- or longer-term policy? Who knows. It is pretty to think so, but the notion wasn’t going to keep us at No Kings more than about a half hour, some of which was spent navigating upstream – which happened to be uptown – against the downstream human tide – who happened to be going downtown.

We numbered three by the time we got to Times Square. The train that Yuriko and I took from Syosset Station on Long Island went to Penn Station, and by the marvel that is texting, we were able to arrange a meeting there with Geof Huth, resident of Astoria these days, in the terminal’s new great hall.

I was astonished by the new hall, called the Moynihan Train Hall and completed only in 2021. Clearly I hadn’t kept up with major redevelopment projects in New York. SOM did the design, knocking it out of the park. I’d been fully prepared for the dowdy experience that Penn Station has been since the notorious destruction of the previous one in the 1960s.

Instead, we entered an open, elegant, fully modern space, crowned by the glass and steel of an expansive skylight and watched over by a four-faced clock on a pole. I was even more surprised when we headed outside and realized that the Moynihan Train Hall was created inside the city’s former main post office, the James A. Farley Building. The last time I thought about that massive, remarkable Beaux-Arts structure (McKim, Mead & White) was the last time I walked around this part of NYC, when it was still a post office.

The Farley exterior gleams the gleam of a newly restored facade, and happily kept the post office faux-motto: Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Good to see.

After leaving the No Kings crowd, we made our way to 20 West 44th Street, an 1899-vintage building and home of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York.

General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York

It was open for the Open House.

“The second-oldest library in the city includes a light-filled atrium that is used as a vibrant programming space by the General Society and other nonprofits,” notes the OHNY web site. “Overlooking the library on a striking wrought iron balcony is the John M. Mossman Lock Collection, which contains more than 370 locks, keys, and tools dating from 2000 BC to the early 20th century.”

Nothing like a handsome pre-war (Great War) building in which to spend some time. The enormous lock and key collection attests to the fundamental dishonesty of a fraction of mankind, and the ingenuity brought to the task of coping with that fact.

As for the General Society, it provides training and other assistance to skilled craftsmen, beginning in the late 18th century (at different locations) and down to the present. Its motto: By hammer and hand all arts do stand. That accounts for the hammer and hand emerging from the wall in its space.

As for the other nonprofits in the building, they include the Horological Society of New York, keeper of all things related to timekeeping since 1866.

It too was open, and we visited the impressive collection of watches and clocks and horological tools and books.

This is no fusty org relegated to the part-time care of antiquarians. HSNY has the organization heft (and scratch) to put on enormous annual galas, with the next one slated for the Plaza Hotel next year to celebrate its 160th anniversary. That will certainly be a picture to behold.

The Basilica of St. Fidelis, Cathedral of the Plains

Posted on October 12, 2025 by admin

Today I let Google finish “Cathedral of the…” and got the following responses, top to bottom (capitalization sic): Sea, deep, Holy Angels, holy angels photos, forsaken, immaculate conception, incarnation, Madeleine, deep ds3, pines.

Cathedral of the Sea is La catedral del mar, a “Spanish drama series” that I’d never heard of, though I have been to Santa Maria del Mar. The Cathedral of the Deep and of the Forsaken appear to be aspects of electronic games, and the others are churches in various places.

Not on the list is the Cathedral of the Plains. But it’s out there, in central Kansas.

That’s a nickname, since the church isn’t actually a cathedral, but the wording does appear on its point-of-interest spot on road maps – and naturally that got my attention. Formally, the church is the Basilica of St. Fidelis, said to be the largest church west of the Mississippi by seating capacity (1,100) upon completion in 1911 in Victoria, Kansas. Conveniently (for me), some decades later I-70 was built not far away.

John T. Comès (d. 1922), a Pittsburgh architect, designed the church for a congregation of Volga German immigrants. Who had come to greater Victoria starting in the 1870s. Why Victoria? Why not? No doubt they looking for flat farmland.

Comès, an incredibly prolific specialist in Catholic churches, did a fine job.

Nice.

The Volga Germans aren’t forgotten. No doubt their descendants are all around this part of Kansas. In 1976, the townspeople erected a memorial to their immigrant ancestors, across the street from St. Fidelis. A work by Pete Felton, a “Kansan limestone carver,” according to this posting, which also mentions limestone fenceposts as important in Kansas — something else to look into sometime.

After nearly 50 years, the statues are looking a little weatherworn, but they abide.

The woman and daughters caught the light at that time of day, the afternoon of September 23.

The man and sons did not. Would sunlight have made him less – Stalinesque?

Never mind. St. Fidelis Cemetery isn’t far to the north of the basilica, and I stopped by.

A good variety of memorials in a nice setting, even if the land lacks contour and there’s no flora beyond grass and cut flowers.

Then I started to notice iron crosses.

A lot of them. That called for further investigation, and it wasn’t long before I found out that Volga Germans were known for their wrought-iron crosses.

“German-Russian blacksmiths began making wrought-iron crosses in North Dakota as early as 1884,” says an article posted by North Dakota State University. “The hand-made crosses were most prevalent in central North Dakota from the late 1880s to about 1925, when marble and granite became more popular for grave marking. Most wrought-iron crosses appear in Catholic graveyards, although a few of these markers are also found in German-Russian Lutheran graveyards.”

The article talks of their crosses in North Dakota, but notes that they are also found in the “Northern Plains.” Such as Kansas, apparently.

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Salina, Kansas

Posted on October 11, 2025 by admin

The in-motel breakfast on September 24 in Salina, Kansas (pop. 46,800 or so) had been less than satisfactory, so Google Maps guided me to a doughnut shop on one of the wide, lightly traveled streets of downtown Salina. I ate in the car parked on just such a street, and soon started out for the highway (I-70) to head east.

Then I noticed Sacred Heart Cathedral.

I had to take a closer look.

If that structure doesn’t say midcentury, I don’t know what would. Indeed, the cathedral was built in the 1950s. But it isn’t quite like any other church building I’ve seen, even of that period. Also, it isn’t mid-century concrete, which it looked like from a distance, but limestone.

Note the Kansas elements.

The cathedral’s web site says: Sacred Heart Cathedral is a distinctive building that draws upon rural Kansas imagery and uses it in the service of Christian mythology. It is a noteworthy example of the work of Edward J. Schulte [d. 1975], a prolific designer of Catholic facilities across the Midwest through the greater part of the twentieth century.

Its most striking features are what appear to be a row of cylinders thirty feet in circumference extending the full height of the eastern and western facades, which resemble the grain elevators that dominate the skyline of most towns in western Kansas.

The allusion to grain elevators helps to link the church to its place in Kansas. It can also be seen as a symbol — the Cathedral is a place where the faithful come to receive the sustenance of the Eucharist.

It was open. That was unexpected, but I didn’t let the opportunity pass.

The baptismal font in the narthex.

The nave.

That part of downtown Salina was thick with churches. Another is First United Methodist, across the street from Sacred Heart.

About a half block away, Christ Cathedral Episcopal. The other churches weren’t open.

Later that day, at an exit just east of Abilene, I went looking for one more church — a kind of church I’d only ever driven by before.

Google Maps told me that this Cowboy Church was open for a few hours that day. I was skeptical, but went anyway, on the off chance that I’d get to see the inside of a Cowboy Church. As expected, it wasn’t open. Still, I got to look around in all directions.

Informality, I’ve read, is important to the nondenominational Cowboy Churches, whose number seems to be large, but without an exact count. (And some individual churches are pretty large.) I can only hope that at one or more of them, somewhere and at sometime, Yippee-Ki-Yay, Lord! is part of their prayer.

The Kansas State Capitol

Posted on October 10, 2025 by admin

One fine day in the Kansas State Capitol last month, I turned a corner and found myself looking up at Old Testament John Brown. Larger than life, as he has loomed these 160+ years.

The mural, actually called “Tragic Prelude,” is more than 11 feet tall and 31 feet long, taking up an entire wall in the capitol. The lighting isn’t particularly good for taking images of the whole work – a ceiling light in particular washes out much of John Brown’s (let’s say) emphatic expression. Luckily, the image seems to be in the public domain.

A plaque under the mural says:

Sponsored by Kansas Press Association, aided by Kansas school children, these murals were painted in 1940-41 by John Steuart Curry, who was born near Dunavent, Kansas. In John Brown’s outstretched left hand is the word of God. In his right, a “Beecher’s Bible.” Beside him, facing each other, are contending Free Soil and Pro-Slavery forces.

The plaque does not say that the many members of Kansas legislature hated the painting at first, and refused to hang it in Curry’s lifetime (he died in 1946). Curry had had the temerity to depict Bleeding Kansas, by far the most interesting period in the history of the territory and state; the interesting times no one wants to live through. Maybe they thought it glorified John Brown — which it half way does, but with more than a tinge of madness in him as well. Bottom line, the work apparently didn’t sit well with those who might have wanted a Kansas of doughty farmers and hardy pioneers and fertile landscapes.

Eventually, to its credit, the legislature did have the work installed. Whatever you think of John Brown, it’s a striking piece. I’d seen depictions of it, but either never knew or had forgotten that it hangs in the Kansas State Capitol, which made coming across it all the more memorable.

I almost missed it, having dawdled in Salina and Abilene for most of that day (September 24), but I made it to Topeka and the capitol about 30 minutes before it closed.

Like any number of monumental edifices, this one took time: construction finished in 1903 after 37 years in the works, not counting renovations or the comparatively recent addition of the 4,420-pound, 22-foot tall bronze “Ad Astra” on top of the dome, which was in 2002. The figure is an acknowledgment of the Kaw Nation (Kansa), who lent their name to the state.

Architect E. Townsend Mix (d. 1890) designed the capitol, though he didn’t live to see its completion. Most of his work is in Milwaukee, where he lived the longest, including St. Paul’s Episcopal in that city.

A fine dome.

Well-appointed chambers.

The capitol interior is fairly art-intensive. Not all capitols are. For instance, there are limestone statues in large niches — native limestone, a sign says — of famed Kansans, by Peter “Fritts” Felten Jr. of Hays, Kansas. Such as one of the aviatrix from Atchison.

Amelia Earhart is immediately recognizable, which is no mean feat for someone who is (very likely) been dead for nearly 90 years.

This figure is also more-or-less recognizable – though a depiction of him that’s a little strange, looking for all the world like Mr. Clean. Only a little like that Ike fellow on an Eisenhower dollar.

The fellow below’s fame has, I’m afraid, shriveled up like a balloon that lost its helium: William Allen White (d. 1944) Probably not even known in Kansas any more, since he was a noted journalist, a profession whose posthumous fame tends to be brief. Editor, Pulitzer Prizewinner, his plaque says. A Progressive Through-and-Through, it does not say. That might not play in Kansas at the moment.

Not one, but two time capsules reside with the capitol walls. At least two that I saw.

This is a digression, but one thing still leads to another on line, and I came across a list published in 1991 by the International Time Capsule Society: “10 Most Wanted Time Capsules.” That is, a list of time capsules whose location had been lost and thus were (up till then) unrecoverable. The page notes that two have been found over the last 30+ years, but eight are still beyond the ken of man. Such as:

MIT Cyclotron Time Capsule.

In 1939 a group of MIT engineers placed a brass capsule beneath an 18-ton-magnet used in a brand new, state-of-the-art cyclotron. The capsule was to be opened in 50 years but was not. No one remembered the time capsule was there (the cyclotron had long since been deactivated). But when reminded of its existence, MIT was faced with another problem: how do you get a time capsule out from under a 36,000-pound lid?

Bicentennial Wagon Train Time Capsule.

This capsule was supposed to hold the signatures of 22 million Americans. But on July 4, 1976, when President Gerald Ford arrived for the sealing ceremony in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, someone stole the capsule from an unattended van in the bicentennial wagon train. The capsule’s maker, the Reynolds Company, had broken the mold. The thief’s identity and the whereabouts of the capsule are unsolved mysteries.

Further investigation reveals that the whereabouts of the papers that Americans signed in 1976 – a good many pounds of it – mysteriously disappeared, and that theft from a van was one idea, though organizational misdirection sounds more plausible to me. To the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant, in other words. Anyway, there’s a 12-episode streaming service comedy in that incident.

Back to capitols. It’s now easier to keep track of the ones I haven’t seen than otherwise.

Green for an interior visit, orange for exterior only, gold representing uncertainty, and white no visit.

The Wyoming State Capitol

Posted on October 9, 2025 by admin

No skeletons were to be found at the Wyoming State Capitol last month, but you can hardly expect too many bone collections on display at state houses. The state of Wyoming does, however, want to remind visitors that they are in Wyoming.

The work is called “Spirit of Wyoming,” and it stands on the capitol grounds, created by artist Edward J. Fraughton (d. 2024). The more I look at it, the more there is to think about. Which I suppose is at least one indication of a good work of art. So the Spirit of Wyoming involves the immediate risk of catastrophic injury by being thrown from a horse? Probably not what the legislature had in mind.

Rather, it might be the determination to hang on, no matter how much or madly the horse bucks. Especially in territorial and early statehood days, that sort of determination applied to a lot of Wyomingites, whether they were cowboys or not.

I had the opportunity to walk all the way around the capitol after arriving on the cloudy but warm afternoon of September 8.

Golf leaf on a copper dome. Gold probably because it’s gold, not because Wyoming has ever produced that much. As of 2025, the state isn’t even among the top 10 all-time U.S. state producers.

I think this was the front.

It faces a long avenue. It was a Monday. Cheyenne isn’t, just yet, cursed with heavy traffic.

Also, the Wyoming state seal was to be found on that side of the building, in the sidewalk. Like in Virginia, except that you can walk on that one, like the slain tyrant it depicts. No treading on Wyoming.

Adopted in 1893, not long after statehood, and revised in 1921, the seal lists four sources of wealth and livelihoods, unusually (I think) for a state seal. They go with the cowboy and miner figures: livestock, grain, mines and oil. In our time, farming and mineral extraction, at least in terms of employment, are declining industries in Wyoming. Maybe the seal will be revised someday to include data centers, as they sprout in the Equality State.

On the other hand, Wyoming is still a major energy producer among the several states, especially when it comes to coal: 41.1 percent of the total nationwide (EIA stats), though national coal output is a much smaller pie – a dirty pie, to be sure – than it used to be. Also worth mentioning: a quarter of net electricity generation in the state is by renewables, roughly the same percentage as nationally. There is no nuclear power generation in Wyoming. When those data centers eventually get small modular reactors, that would change.

Another distinction of the Wyoming capitol is that work started on it before statehood, with ground broken in 1886. David Gibbs – later mayor of Oklahoma City, of all things – and the prolific William DuBois (a Chicago trained architect) did the design, one of restrained elegance.

This is one of the four statues at the capitol known as the Four Sisters: Truth. The others are Justice, Courage and Hope.

Though they look vintage, their niches remained empty for 131 years “for reasons that remain unclear,” according to a sign in the capitol. In more recent times, the state tapped the mononymous sculptor Delissalde to fill the niches, and the works were unveiled only in 2019.

They’re way up there.

One more thing to note: a display in the capitol lauds the state – actually the territory – for its enfranchisement of women in 1869, the first place anywhere to do so. Why Wyoming? You could chalk it up to the toughness of frontier women, but certainly women in all the other 19th-century territories were plenty tough. The broader movement to expand the franchise was already underway, though early in the game – and from the sound of things in this article at least, the territory’s move was something of a retroactively happy result “for a large, strange mix of reasons.”

The Iowa State Capitol

Posted on October 8, 2025 by admin

Think of the 50 state capitols as, collectively, a giant free museum of U.S. history, complete with grand buildings and a collection of artifacts with some consistent themes, such as images of elected officials, relics of war, and memorials to officially worthwhile individuals or causes. Some capitols explicitly have museum cases or whole museum floors, with a wide variety of stories and items from a state’s early years.

The collections can be a little staid. But sometimes, oddities are tucked away. Not too often, but there was that time I saw a two-headed calf at the Georgia State Capitol, or the miniature Western movie set at the Utah State Capitol. Or a bust of President Benjamin Harrison, carved from a tree stump. In Idaho. Then, at the Iowa State Capitol last month, this fellow.

Last time I visited the Iowa State Capitol, I arrived about 10 minutes after it closed. So I — we, Ann was with me – looked at an assortment bronzes on the grounds, including the memorable (and mammary) Mother Iowa, and admired the gold-leaf dome. This time around, Des Moines was the destination for my first day of driving, September 4, and I was determined to see the interior.

It’s a grand edifice, as capitols usually are.

A series of architects oversaw the design, including Chicagoan John C. Cochrane, who also designed the Illinois State Capitol and, less well known, the handsome stick-style All Saints Episcopal in Chicago.

I’d forgotten that four smaller domes flank the main dome, forming in quincunx of domes. I understand that Iowa is the only such five-domed state capitol in the nation. I’m not sure how important that distinction is, but it is a distinction.

On a clear day, there’s a good view of downtown Des Moines from the capitol steps (and sundial). It was a hazy day, the result of Canadian wildfires.

I arrived before closing, and experienced the grandness of the inside. Such as murals.

Allegories done in mosaic. Law, for instance. There was no backing up further to get a fuller image of Lex, since that would be over the edge of a balcony.

The House of Representatives.

The Iowa State Law Library. The most gorgeous of the spaces, I thought. Just like canyon pictures, an image does no justice to the brilliance of the place itself.

Note that the skeleton is behind glass in the Law Library.

What’s he doing in the Law Library? Showing how strict the library used to be about returning materials late? (Or the smartass answer: “Nothing, really.”)

The sign on the case says, This skeleton was originally purchased by the medical branch of the State Library of Iowa to checkout [sic] to Iowa medical educators and students as a learning tool. When the medical library dissolved, the skeleton remained on permanent display with the State Library’s collection. Archaeological experts determined the remains are male, 45+ years old, European ancestry.

Check out a skeleton from a library? Learning that such a thing ever happened was worth the effort, all by itself, to get to the capitol.

The dome is a little unusual, too, a little more representational that you usually see.

It features a memorial – in this case to the Grand Army of the Republic, with the name of the organization, a 13-star flag, and the dates 1861 and 1865. Considering that the development of the current capitol happened between 1871 and 1886, a GAR memorial of some kind isn’t a surprise, and I suppose the organization had the political heft at the time to get such a prominent spot.

Wiki tells me that more than 76,200 Iowa men fought for the Union out of a population of nearly 675,000 (in 1860), and about 13,000 died for it, two-thirds of whom by disease. Iowans supported the Union by about as lopsided a margin as imaginable. Seventy-six residents of Iowa are known to have served the Confederacy, and very likely most of those had recently moved to Iowa from the South.

Kenosha Walkabout, Featuring Franks’ Diner & Simmons Memorial Library

Posted on August 27, 2025 by admin

Always good to see their beaming faces.

The poster is on a window at Franks’ Diner, formerly an exterior window, but with an expansion of the diner many years ago, now facing the added section, where Ann and I had lunch on a late July Friday. Kenosha, home of Franks’, was another stop in our recent rambles around southeastern Wisconsin.

Finding Franks’ Diner was no serendipity. We’d been there, back in 2012. The Stooges, back in 1946. I’ll bet they were playing the nearby Kenosha Theater, which is still standing, but in need of restoration.

Not only is the 99-year-old Franks’ still there, it’s still dishing up dandy diner fare at popular prices. Back then, I wrote:

The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.

It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small room added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter.

That’s exactly the same as our July visit, except that people waited outside, since it was summer instead of winter and (of course) prices were higher. Once seated, I had the Garbage Plate. I’d skipped it last time, and I wasn’t about to miss it this time around.

2012: The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs.

The restaurant also supplies some reading material.

After lunch, we went a few blocks away and parked the car in the shade of large trees in Library Park. Ann waited in the car with the windows down – it was very warm, but not too warm for a few minutes of that – while I wandered around the immediate area, including a couple of streets of storefront retail in vintage structures.

Houses across the street from where we parked.

The nearby St. Matthews Episcopal Church.

The inevitable welcome mural. The 1970 Gremlin is an unusual touch. But they were made in Kenosha, so not that unusual.

At the edge of the park, a seated Lincoln. Sculptor Charles Niehaus (d. 1935) did the work. Just one of many that he did all over the place. The president has been sitting there since 1909, centennial of his birth, with restoration work done in more recent decades.

Nearby in the park, Kenosha’s Civil War memorial, called “Winged Victory” on electronic maps, a name that gets right to the point.

It’s Library Park because of the Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library, a branch of the Kenosha Public Library system, dominating its side of the park. It has a little more heft than most municipal branch libraries.

When it opened in 1900, the building formed Kenosha’s main library. Daniel Burnham designed it.

The Civil War veterans have their memorial outside. Great War vets are honored inside the library.

We’d happened on the Library Park Historic District, surrounding Library Park. The park itself goes back to the early years of Kenosha, when the land was a New England–style town commons. Forty-two properties, built from 1843 to 1930, form the district. A diner and an historic district: just the thing for a warm summer day stroll.

Downtown Waukesha

Posted on August 24, 2025 by admin

The other day I wondered how long it would take to count a million dollars’ worth of nickels and dimes a million times. That’s one of the dream images from “Minnie the Moocher.” Not just a dream, but an opium dream. After all, no sooner does Minnie learn to kick the gong around, does a vivid dream of wealth begin, all shiny and metallic, ending with:

She had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes

And sat around and counted them all a million times

Let’s say half the dollar value is nickels, half dimes. That would be 5 million dimes and 10 million nickels. So 15 million individual coins. Let’s also say it takes a second to count each, just to keep it simple. That would be 15 million seconds, or 0.475 years (roughly, I shaved off a few places). Counting them a million times would thus be (roughly) 475,000 years.

Of course, if it’s an opium dream, the niceties of time and such don’t apply. Still, it sounds like a hellish task of a Sisyphean kind. But maybe it would be a heavenly task, if you have no sense of the passage of time.

I didn’t sit down to figure all that out until I was at my desk, but the question came out of nowhere during a short interstate drive just before the end of July, up in the southeast corner of Wisconsin. One destination that day, a Sunday, was downtown Waukesha, an outer suburb of Milwaukee, but a place with a distinct history of its own, where people came to take the waters once upon a time.

We spent some time near the five-pointed intersection of Main, Broadway and Grand, focal point of a handsome streetscape.

Now this is a set of buildings.

The Almont Building, whose original name was the Robinson Block.

“The core of the downtown, prior to 1856, consisted of freestanding wooden frame buildings, but a new era began after a massive fire nearly destroyed this northern section of Main Street,” the Waukesha County Historical Society & Museum says. “The Robinson Block was built in 1857 with fireproofing in mind and is the first Five Points building to use Waukesha limestone.”

The Nickell Building, as it looked recently, and long ago.

“Built by Addison J. Nickell, local businessman and jeweler, the first floor housed the U.S. Post Office from 1902-1914,” notes the WCHS&M. “The work of Waukesha architect C.C. Anderson, this Queen Anne displays a projecting oriel and corner turret capped by a domed roof: both are covered by pressed metal.”

Being mid-day, one bit of business to take care of: lunch. We soon found the friendly joint called Joey’s Diner.

Joey likes Betty.

Joey’s is next to an Italian restaurant, similarly casual, that I think was owned by the same fellow. He was everywhere at once all the time — running a restaurant is nothing if not busy, and he seemed to be running two — but toward the end of our meal, asked how it was. I answered enthusiastically to the positive about my simple but also delicious hamburger. He responded by giving us a slice of chocolate cake, on the house. Thanks, Joey.

The street has other (many other) examples of places found here and nowhere else.

Been a while since I’d seen a joke shop. Closed.

The last one might have been Uncle Fun in Chicago, which closed some years ago. Too bad about that, but at least Jest For Fun Joke Shop, which has been at this Waukesha location more than 40 years, is keeping the retail tradition alive.

Rockville, Indiana

Posted on August 19, 2025 by admin

Now I’ve seen it: the grave of Batman.

George W. Batman, that is, who died in 1897, so he never lived to see his surname put to the other uses we all know so well. Variants of his name include Bateman, Battman and Baitman, meaning that Batman really isn’t that odd. Except it does look odd on that large stone, but only because of recent conditioning by a particularly successful fictional character. George W. happens to repose at Rockville Cemetery in Rockville, Indiana, and I happened to visit early one Sunday morning in late July.

A pleasant graveyard, founded in 1824 — same year as the town itself — and well marked by upright stones, but not overly landscaped.

A few memorials reach upward, but not that far.

A few mausoleums denote formerly big fish in the small pond that is Rockville, seat of Parke County.

Mostly modest stones populate the cemetery, presumably for regular folks of the past.

It isn’t too often that you see veterans of the War of 1812 (but not never).

Numerically speaking, there just weren’t that many compared to later, greater wars, and probably many of their graves aren’t marked as such. Nathan was near the other Adamsons, and indeed two of them (per Find-A-Grave) are his children.

Not too many blocks from the cemetery is the Parke County Courthouse. We encountered it on Saturday afternoon, soon after arriving in Rockville (pop. about 2,600), when temps were about as high as they would be that day. Sweaty 90s.

The courthouse is a grand Second Empire pile with some Beaux Arts added to the mix, completed in 1882, during the golden age of U.S. courthouses. Designed by T.J. and Brentwood Tolan, a father and son team. They did a lot of courthouses.

The giant dartboard isn’t something you see too often on courthouse grounds. Could it be the Dartboard of Justice? That’s how sentencing is done for crimes that call for one to 20 years in the jug; a toss by the judge, or the jury foreman.

No, a small street festival was being set up at that moment, though not up and running yet. It was too hot for that anyway. But not for a quick look at some of the buildings ringing the courthouse, most in good shape and mostly tenanted.

G&M Variety has the soul of a five-and-dime, but a more accurate classification these days would be a five-and-ten dollar store: a step above a dollar store, the love child of a convenience store and a standard grocery store, with a souvenir shop added to the mix. Roaming around its aisles was pleasant, for a look at the sometimes unusual merchandise, and the AC.

Drinks on sale that made me recollect sodas from my mid-60s childhood.

Frostie! Nehi! Triple XXX! Dang? We didn’t have Dang. Butterscotch root beer?

Pangs of nostalgia weren’t enough for me to spend $2.49 for an ordinary-sized soda, though I was a little thirsty.

More courthouse square.

The Old Jail Inn & Drunk Tank, now a B&B.

I returned to the square on Sunday morning, after the cemetery, for a further look when it wasn’t so hot.

Memorial Presbyterian Church and its freestanding bell tower.

It isn’t a Presbyterian church any more — its cross conspicuous in its absence — though a Presbyterian congregation meets there sometimes. These days it counts as an event space, with music performances, recitals, meetings, and other gatherings there, according to Billie Creek Village, more about which later.

Next to the former church.

Museum? I’m a little skeptical.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Architecture