The Strand, Galveston

Posted on July 21, 2015 by admin

I can’t pin down the last time I went to Galveston. It was sometime in the early 1970s, probably as an appendix to a visit to Houston from San Antonio. Little memory remains, and for whatever reason we didn’t return when I was older. My brothers remember visits in the 1950s, during the time when my parents lived in Houston, but that’s before my time.

I suspect we never went to the Strand on any family visits to the city, because the area, which is a part of the city near Galveston Bay, didn’t begin its revival until the 1970s. The always-informative Handbook of Texas Online tells me that the Strand — formally called Avenue B in Galveston — was included in the original plat of the city in the late 1830s, with the origins of Avenue B’s nickname unknown.

“While the avenue extends throughout Galveston, the Strand has usually referred to the five-block business district situated between Twentieth and Twenty-fifth streets,” it says. “Throughout the nineteenth century, the area was known as the ‘Wall Street of the Southwest,’ serving as a major commercial center for the region.”

Some of the 19th-century buildings still stand on Avenue B, the Strand. With a 20th-century tower to the south.
Naturally, the Hurricane of 1900 put the kibosh on the Strand’s career as the Wall Street of the Southwest. I’ll bet after the storm a common enough sentiment among businessmen was, To hell with this, we’re going to Houston. Galveston didn’t have the space to grow into a megalopolis anyway.

“In the rebuilding process, businesses moved off the Strand and away from the wharfs,” the Handbook continues. “The area became a warehouse district. In the 1960s amidst widespread deterioration of the Strand, the Junior League of Galveston County restored two buildings sparking interest in the area. In 1973 the Galveston Historical Foundation initiated the Strand Revolving Fund, a catalyst in subsequent years for dramatic restoration and adaptive use in the Strand Historic District.”

These days, the Strand is a Galveston tourist zone, populated by ordinary visitors, and when a cruise ship’s docked near the zone, probably even more people, though I didn’t see any ships nearby when we were there. As a tourist zone, it has two distinct advantages. One, the sidewalks are covered, so that strolling along in mid-summer doesn’t mean walking under a hot and copper sky. Also, the clothiers, geegaw shops and other venues are universally air conditioned.

Ann and I did our share of ducking in and out of shops, eventually buying a single key ring and a few postcards. I can report as a matter of historical interest — that is, for future historians of 21st-century minutiae — that Confederate battle flag-themed merchandise hasn’t died out in the souvenir shops of Galveston as of the summer of 2015, though I can’t say its presence was overpowering.

Sad to say, the eccentric Col. Bubbie’s Strand Surplus Senter has closed. The sign is still there.
“Col. Bubbie’s was the longest-running, single-owner business on the Strand,” the Houston Chronicle reported last December after the shop closed. “Since 1972, it sold military equipment — gas masks, camouflage pants, canteens, mess kits, medals and insignias, you name it — encompassing 60 countries and conflicts from the Civil War to Iraq.

“The shop helped outfit the TV show MASH and war films as diverse as Saving Private Ryan and 1941, among others. Until a few months ago it was the go-to spot for local theater productions to get period uniforms, but that stock has dwindled.”

We also stopped in at La King’s Confectionery on Avenue B. We were glad we did. The place makes excellent ice cream. Ann’s pistachio was particularly good. Ice cream jockeys and soda jerks in white were on hand to serve whatever you wanted.

A neon sign says Purity Ice Cream, and I thought that meant a product of Tennessee’s Purity Dairies, but no. According to the Austin Chronicle, “Ice cream on an industrial scale arrived in Texas in 1889 when the Purity Ice Cream Company opened in Galveston.” The ice cream that La King’s serves is a direct culinary descendant of that ice cream, and La King’s is the only place it’s served.

In the back, you can watch a fellow making taffy, which the store also sells.

One other thing I spied on the Strand: a public chess set.
It was a little too hot to play, but still. That’s what parks need more of, public chess sets.

The Bishop’s Palace, Galveston

Posted on July 20, 2015 by admin

Late last year, Congress passed a joint resolution along these lines: “Whereas the United States has conferred honorary citizenship on 7 other occasions during its history, and honorary citizenship is and should remain an extraordinary honor not lightly conferred nor frequently granted;

[In case you’re wondering, I’ll save you a trip to Wiki. The others are Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg, William and Hannah Penn, Mother Teresa, Casimir Pulaski and Lafayette.]

“Whereas Bernardo de Gaalvez y Madrid, Viscount of Galveston and Count of Gaalvez, was a hero of the Revolutionary War who risked his life for the freedom of the United States people and provided supplies, intelligence, and strong military support to the war effort…

“Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Bernardo de Gaalvez y Madrid, Viscount of Galveston and Count of Gaalvez, is proclaimed posthumously to be an honorary citizen of the United States.”

I didn’t know about that resolution until after Ann and I went to Galveston earlier this month, and I looked up Bernardo de Gaalvez y Madrid, Viceroy of New Spain, to add to my vague knowledge of the man for whom Galveston is named.

To my way of thinking, the first place to go in Galveston (after lunch, if you happen to arrive at lunchtime), is the Bishop’s Palace. That’s just what we did.

The name is a spot of Texas hyperbole. Palace, it isn’t. But it is a excellent example of a large (19,000 SF) Victorian mansion, built in the 1890s for a successful attorney and his wife, Walter and Josephine Gresham, who tapped local architect Nicholas J. Clayton to design it. (Clayton seems to have been very busy in the pre-1900 heyday of Galveston, but things were never the same after that.)
The Handbook of Texas Online describes Clayton’s work as “exuberant in shape, color, texture, and detail. He excelled at decorative brick and iron work… What made Clayton’s architecture so distinctive in late nineteenth-century Texas was the underlying compositional and proportional order with which he structured the display of picturesque shapes and rich ornament.”

That’s a fitting description for the Bishop’s Palace, which was a sturdy mansion too. It survived the Hurricane of 1900, one of the few structures in the area to do so, and sheltered a lot of survivors. The bishop in the name is Bishop Christopher E. Byrne, who lived there in 20th century, after the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston bought the mansion in 1923. Only in 2013 did the Church sell the structure to the Galveston Historical Foundation.

The interior has more stained glass than most Victorian mansions I’ve seen. Many of those were added by the bishop, who insisted that one of the rooms be converted into a chapel, which it remains. For instance, a stained-glass St. Peter’s there to greet you.

As usual, a house like this has some interesting period detail, such as the fact that the lights were built for gas as well as for that new light source, electricity, in case it worked out. Or the bathtub in the main second-floor bathroom.
Note the three faucets. Our guide, an informative woman whose main job is teaching Texas History — everyone in the state takes it in 7th grade, or at least used to — told us that one was for hot water, one for cold, and one for rainwater from a cistern. It was thought to be good for one’s hair.

The Greshams had the means to be international travelers in the days before Europe on $5 a Day, and that meant steamer trunks. I don’t think I’d ever seen trunks of the time plastered with luggage labels, but Bishop’s Palace had some on display.
Next door to the Bishop’s Palace is Sacred Heart Catholic Church. This building dates from the early 1900s, because the 1900 hurricane knocked down the original.

The church wasn’t open for a look inside. But the next-door location must have been convenient for the bishop. You know, in case he ever needed to tune up his crosier or something.

The 300 S. Wacker Map

Posted on June 23, 2015 by admin

Last week in downtown Chicago, I also got a look at the 300 S. Wacker map, which was unveiled late last year and is easily visible from the west side of the Chicago River near Union Station. That’s because it’s a map as tall as a skyscraper, and who couldn’t like that?
A close up.
The giant map depicts the Chicago River and nearby streets, from Cermak to Chicago and LaSalle to Jefferson. The 300 S. Wacker building itself appears on the map as a three-dimensional red block.

Previously, 300 S. Wacker had little to distinguish it as a building, and little to catch the eye. Beacon Capital bought it last year and commissioned Elmhurst, Ill.-based South Water Signs to do the work. I’ve read that there are more art maps in the building’s lobby, backlit by LED lights; I’ll have to take a look sometime.

Two Chicago River Bridgehouses

Posted on June 22, 2015 by admin

More rain over the weekend and again today. Are we turning into Seattle? Except that Seattle really isn’t the rainiest place in the nation, according to various sources. It turns out most cities in the Southeast U.S. get more rain every year.

But who would understand you if you said, it sure has been rainy lately. Are we turning into Mobile? Information age, my foot. Even easily available data has a hard time killing received notions.

That reminds me of something else I encountered in the Pacific Northwest all those years ago: Slug Death. Or, to be more exactly, Corry’s Slug & Snail Death in the bright yellow box. (It seems to be Corry’s Slug & Snail Killer these days, as if that matters to dying gastropods.) I think we were visiting people on Bainbridge Is., and that’s what they had in their garden. I’d never heard of such a thing. It was one of those ordinary details of a new place that stick with you.

En route to Union Station to catch my train to the suburbs last week, I spent a few minutes looking at some of the bridgehouses on the South Branch of the Chicago River. There’s a museum in one of the bridgehouses of the Michigan Ave. bridge that opened only last month — the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum — but I didn’t have time for that.

Here’s the Monroe St. bridgehouse on the east side of the structure. The bridge dates from 1919 and was built by the Ketler Elliott Co., a name I’ve encountered before.
Looks like it’s been cleaned lately, maybe even since the bridge’s 2000s rehabilitation. The site HistoricBridges.org tells me that “the bridge’s operating and control panels inside the bridgetender buildings were reportedly the first in the United States to have completely enclosed circuitry so that no exposed copper connections were available for bridgetenders to mistakenly electrocute themselves on.”

This is the bridgehouse on the west side of the Adams St. bridge, which was built a little later, 1927, but still during a time when aesthetics was a consideration in a public building project (it might be again, but for quite a spell in the last century, the idea seems to have been on hold).
The bridge was rehabbed in the mid-1990s. The bridgehouse is dingy, so I guess that’s 20 years of urban air at work. More about the Adams St. bridge is here.

Original Dairy Queen Sign 1955: So Says The Plaque

Posted on May 12, 2015 by admin

How many Dairy Queens have metal plaques on their side? I couldn’t say, but I did notice that the Dairy Queen across the street from the Maple Street Chapel, there at Maple St. and Main St. in Lombard, Ill., has one.

A fairly new plaque, by the looks of it. Someone on the Lombard Historical Commission, or maybe a committee of someones, decided that the Dairy Queen sign, vintage 1955, was worthy of note. I wasn’t in the mood to find just the right angle at which to get a full picture of the sign, especially since it meant crossing and recrossing a fairly busy street, or maybe standing in the street. But I did stand under the sign and snap the neon cone.

Besides, the Internet can be counted on to provide pictures of original Dairy Queen signs in various parts of the North America, and sure enough here they are. Including the Lombard sign.

There’s a pair of benches next to the shop. We sat there and ate some ice cream.

The Gustave Brand Murals at Carl Schurz HS

Posted on April 23, 2015 by admin

Saturday is Anzac Day, and not just any anniversary, but the centennial of the landing at Anzac Cove. Here’s a remarkable collection of images from last year’s commemorations (published by a British tabloid, no less).

Speaking of anniversaries, I’d never heard of this disaster until today, the 75th anniversary of the Rhythm Club Fire in Natchez, Miss.

Last Saturday our tour took us inside Carl Schurz High School, which is on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Its library has something few other school libraries can claim: a domed ceiling and murals by Gustave Brand. The murals were painted in the late 1930s by Brand, a German immigrant who was then pushing 80, so he had some help by former Schurz students. Brand had originally been sent to Chicago by the German government to paint murals in that country’s pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and he must have liked it here.

The works were restored in the late 1990s. At the back wall is a large alcove featuring “The Spirit of Chicago.” The text under the painting says: “The Spirit of the Pioneer lingers here. Where once the Redman roamed, a City vast Lifts its proud Skyline to the Morning Sun. A Monument to service nobly done.”

A closeup of the centerpiece.

Looks like a collection of allegorical figures under the protection of the Spirit of Chicago. I take that to be the City, not Columbia with her torch and flag, because of the Y on her chest, the Municipal Device of Chicago. To the left is the Fire, and to the right the ’93 world’s fair, among other things.

On the ceiling, around the dome, are four more murals by Brand, who clearly had a lot of energy for an elderly man. They depict the evolution of the written word, fancifully done, but fitting enough for a library.

Here are Stone Age men — presumably — carving in stone.

Egyptians devising their hieroglyphics. Seems like Brand had a thing for fancy headgear.

Medieval monks doing their part to preserve the written word. And Gutenberg.

What I did see at my high school library when I looked up at the ceiling? I don’t remember exactly, but it must have been acoustic ceiling tiles.

Carl Schurz High School

Posted on April 22, 2015 by admin

One of the other destinations on the Schools by Bus tour was Carl Schurz High School, a Chicago public school at 3601 N. Milwaukee Ave. As the name suggests, the neighborhood used to be heavily German. Work on the school began in 1908, with wings on either side added later that look a lot like the original structure.

Without a wide-angle lens, it’s hard to get an image of the whole structure, so expansive is it. This is the original building, plus part of one of the wings on the right. All together, the structure forms a squared C shape, with a large lawn filling in the C.

“Commissioned by a reform-minded school board headed by Jane Addams, the project was one highlight of a broad program for rescuing the immigrant poor from the ignorance and isolation engendered by the industrial city,” the AIA Guide to Chicago says about the building.

The school board’s architect from 1905-10 was Dwight Perkins, who did the original Schurz structure. “Chicago’s typical Dickensian public school before 1905 was a poorly lighted and ventilated box, set into the city grid with no significant playgrounds,” AIA continues. “Toilet facilities were archaic and located in the basement.

“The forty-odd schools that Perkins designed between 1905 and 1910 changed all that, creating a building type with grass and trees, sunlight and fresh air, safety from fire, and good sanitation.”
Good for him. From our fairly comfortable perch here in the 21st-century First World, I doubt that we really appreciate the squalid conditions that spurred action in the Progressive Era.

I didn’t know this until I read about Perkins, but he also did the Lincoln Park Zoo Lion House. We were there earlier this month.
A nice use of brickwork.

Inside El Centro

Posted on April 21, 2015 by admin

Inside El Centro, a campus of Northeastern Illinois University, you not only can find gender-neutral restrooms (see yesterday), but also a lot of cool pipes near the ceilings.

It’s something more buildings ought to do, at least if their pipes are exposed. El Centro has more surface colors than most buildings, certainly most educational facilities, and on the whole it works.

The hallways put natural lighting to good use. That, by contrast, is no rare thing in newer buildings. Turns out that cutting people off from natural lighting isn’t considered good for them any more. How is it that took decades to figure that out?

Anyway, in the afternoons, one side of the building catches light like so.

Some of the artificial light placements were interesting, too.
As our tour group wandered down one of El Centro’s halls, we encountered another tour group. They were architectural historians in town for the Society of Architectural Historians 68th Annual Conference. The conference seemed to have a lot of tour options, one of which was “Provocative New Architecture in Chicago: The Work of JGMA,” led by Juan Moreno, the designer of the building we were in.
He paused and spoke to us for a moment. He didn’t say anything earthshaking, but it was a nice thing for him to do.

El Centro, Northeastern Illinois University

Posted on April 20, 2015 by admin

I came across this sign on Saturday afternoon. That’s the first usage of “gender neutral” I’ve ever seen at a restroom. (There ought to be a hyphen, but never mind.) I wondered whether it’s an up-and-coming usage to replace “unisex” or merely is supplementing it.

The gender-neutral restrooms — one of three options, along with standard gendered rooms — were at El Centro, a satellite campus of Northeastern Illinois University that was completed only last year. It was one of the schools we visited as participants on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Schools by Bus tour. Unlike the Churches by Bus tour last fall, only one bus was enough for everyone. As the docents explained, this was the first tour of its kind by the CAF, compared with the churches tour, which has been going on for 20 years.

The schools were interesting, but the churches were more beautiful. There’s no escaping the utilitarian nature of a school, even if the overall design is good. Still, El Centro was well worth a look. The glass structure’s covered with fins: blue on one side, yellow on the other. Stand at one spot and it’s yellow.

Move, and it starts a transition to blue.

Then it’s blue. Or move the opposite way, and it goes from blue to yellow.

Just as remarkably, the building manages to work well despite standing hard by the always-busy Kennedy Expressway.

Last fall, Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote that, “Chicago architect Juan Moreno, a Colombian native who in 2011 won attention for a striking charter school built for the United Neighborhood Organization in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood, wisely saw the Kennedy as an opportunity, not a monster.

“Instead of setting his three-story, steel-framed building far back from the highway and sticking a parking lot in between, Moreno slid El Centro almost alongside the road. Rather than turning out an ordinary box, he bent his long, linear structure like a boomerang to turn its southern end toward drop-dead views of the downtown skyline. Then he sculpted its exterior for reasons both formal and functional…

“In the crucial move, 20-inch-wide fins — their faces blue to the south, yellow to the north — are layered atop El Centro’s glass skin, ostensibly to shield the building from the sun’s glare. But there’s no denying that the fins endow the building with visual rhythms that express the highway’s rushing motion and reveal the influence of the Pritzker Prize-winning London architect Zaha Hadid.”

A Gazebo and More

Posted on March 4, 2015 by admin

What this country needs is more public gazebos. There, I’ve said it, and I don’t care who knows it. I’m pro-gazebo.

World-Wide Words tells us that the word gazebo “is surrounded by more mystery than an earnest etymologist would like. It appears in 1752 without any warning or antecedent in part four of a book by William and John Halfpenny with the title New Designs for Chinese Temples, an influential work that was aimed at the then new English fashion for the oriental in design and architecture.

“Little is known about William Halfpenny, who called himself an architect and carpenter, not even if this was his real name… The word gazebo is equally mysterious. A lot of people have assumed that — like the temples described in the book — it must be of oriental origin. If it is, nobody has found its source.

“Failing that, etymologists make an educated guess that he named the structure tongue-in-cheek, taking the ending -ebo from the Latin future tense and adding it to gaze, so making a hybrid word that might mean “I will look.” If true, the model was probably videbo, “I shall see,” or perhaps lavabo, literally “I will wash,” taken from the Latin mass of the Roman Catholic Church to refer to the towel or basin used in the ritual washing of the celebrant’s hands.”

If you’re ever in Milam Park (see February 26) in San Antonio, you’re likely to find yourself looking at this fine gazebo.

An attached plaque says, in English and Spanish, “The people and government of the state of Jalisco, Mexico, offer this kiosk to the noble city of San Antonio de Bexar, in tribue to the relationship, tradition, and cultural inheritance of our people. May 1993.” Why Jalisco and San Antonio have a special relationship, I don’t know, but it was good of them to send a gazebo, even if they call it a kiosk.

To the north of the park is Santa Rosa Children’s Hospital. Or at least that’s what I’ve always heard it called — the formal name these days is the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio, which is part of the Christus Santa Rosa Health System, which has five hospitals. Last month workmen were busy adding color to the side of the building, which had previously been a drab structure.

On one side of the hospital’s an enormous mural — eight, nine stories tall?

One thing I need to do in the future is look at some of San Antonio’s many building-side murals. This is a start. It’s called “Spirit of Healing.”

According to the San Antonio Express-News, the hospital’s exterior “[is] taking its color cues — purples, oranges and blues — from the adjacent… mural by Jesse Treviño, the façade of Santa Rosa Hospital cheerfully is being transformed… Colorful channel glass panels are being hoisted into place on the hospital’s south side facing Milam Park and El Mercado. Roughly 11 feet by 3 feet, there will be 300 of them when all is said and done.

“Backed with LED lighting, at night they will glow like Christmas lights. During the day, the visually dynamic custom cast panels — lightweight to span large distances yet strong, durable and wind-resistant — mark the building as a special place.”

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Architecture