The B. Harley Bradley House

Posted on October 4, 2016 by admin

I wondered recently, when did I first hear about the small Illinois city — or maybe the large Illinois town — of Kankakee? (Pop. 27,000 or so.) Not a very urgent question, since there’s usually no reason to remember when you first heard of most places — and no way you can remember. With a few exceptions in my case, such as Stevens Point, Wis., which I never heard of till Mu Alpha Theta held its national meeting there in 1978, which I attended.

Even so, I’ll bet I heard of Kankakee because it was in the lyrics of “The City of New Orleans” in the early ’70s, so artfully written by Steve Goodman, so memorably sung by Arlo Guthrie. “Kankakee” makes a clever rhyme with “odyssey.”

All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
And rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passing trains that have no names
And freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobile.

A lot of people could probably say that’s where they heard about Kankakee. Even some Germans. Years ago, my friend Rich played a German-language version of the song for me. Apparently it too was popular. In our time, those lyrics are easy to look up.

Auf seiner Odyssee nach Süden passiert der Zug Kankakee,
rollt an Häusern, Farmen und Feldern vorbei,
passiert andere namenlosen Züge,
Abstellplätze voller alter farbiger Männer
und verrostete Autofriedhöfe.

More recently, the Bradley House in Kankakee came to our attention. In full, the B. Harley Bradley House, vintage 1900.
It doesn’t take too much looking to see that Frank Lloyd Wright did the house. One of the first ones — the docent claimed the first one, others claim differently — done in his distinctive Prairie School. I can’t comment authoritatively which was first, and I don’t really care, but even so the house was interesting enough for a day trip.
The house, and the one next to it — the Warren Hickox House (behind it in the pic above), another Wright design that’s still a private residence — are in the the western edge of the town’s Riverview Historic District. The neighborhood features large old houses in various states of repair, but no others like these two.

The Bradley House is also close to the Kankakee River.
During the tour, I asked the docent whether flooding had ever been an issue — as it has with the Farnsworth House — but apparently the Kankakee isn’t as testy as the Fox River, at least at that place.

The house has had a long string of owners over the last century-plus. Within living memory, for instance, it was a well-known local restaurant, The Yesteryear. For a considerable time in the early to mid-20th century, a wealthy man named Joseph H. Dodson owned the place. He was a bird lover and used the house’s stable, which is now the gift shop, as a bird house factory. It seems that Dodson bird houses were quite an item at one time.

Then there’s the sad story of Stephen B. Small. Another wealthy Kankakee resident, he acquired the property in the mid-80s and set about to restore it. That came to a halt in 1987 when he was kidnapped and buried in a box whose air tube wasn’t large enough to supply him enough air, and so he died (both kidnappers are still in the jug).

More recently, through various twists and turns, the house came to be owned by a nonprofit that’s aiming to pay down its mortgage. Our little part in that was paying for the tour, along with buying a postcard an a refrigerator magnet.

I did not, however, want to pay $5 to take interior pictures, which wouldn’t have turned out all that well anyway. The interior restoration, completed only in 2010, restored the place to its 1901 appearance. A nice bit of work: long halls, spacious rooms (except for the servants’ quarters), wooden floors, art glass in the windows, and the kind of alcoves and recesses and the like you associate with Wright, though few low ceilings. Guess this was before, as The Genius, he could insist on ceilings fit only for short people.

Kankakee Walkabout

Posted on October 3, 2016 by admin

For no charge, the Kankakee County Convention & Visitors Bureau will send you a 24-page booklet (six forms of four pages each) called “Historic Churches of the Kankakee Area Self-Guided Walking and Driving Tour.” It’s a high-quality, full-color bit of work, with some text, a few maps and a lot of interior and exterior pictures of Kankakee-area churches, such as Asbury United Methodist, Wildwood Church of the Nazarene, First Presbyterian, St. Paul’s Episcopal, and others.

There’s also a few interesting historical tidbits about some of the buildings. This is my favorite, about St. Paul’s: “Divine intervention spared the stained glass windows during two great hail storms in 1932 and 1982.”

The churches weren’t the only reason we went to Kankakee on Saturday, braving intermittent rain, but as long as we were going to be in the area, I wanted a look. Ideally, a look inside a few of the churches, including divinely protected stained glass, but I suspected that would be impossible. We went to four of them, all in walking distance of the Kankakee County Courthouse, and none were open.

I understand the reasons. Things would go missing if they didn’t lock up most of the time. Still, it was irritating. We did get a look at the outsides, some of which are impressive enough, such as Ashbury United Methodist, which dates from 1868.

I liked the bell tower of First Presbyterian, vintage 1855. According to the booklet, its 2000-lb. bell is rung by hand on Sundays.
Churches weren’t the only buildings of note. This is the Kankakee County Courthouse, standing on this site since 1912.
The architect who designed it, Zachary Taylor Davis, ought to be better known in Chicago, considering that he also did the original Comiskey Park (gone) and the still-beloved and still-standing Wrigley Field. It should also be remembered that lunch-counter baron Charlie Weeghman commissioned that ball park for his team, the Chicago Whales of the Federal League.

The courthouse statute, dated 1887. As you’d expect, “In memory of the soldiers of Kankakee County who fought for the Union.”
Kankakee County Courthouse statue 2016 One more Kankakee County structure, just south of the courthouse: the brutalist county “detention center.”
The jail, that is. Detention is what you get in school. Otherwise it’s just official euphemism.

St. Petersburg 1994

Posted on October 2, 2016 by admin

After Moscow comes St. Petersburg. Of course it does. We spent the last days of our Russian visas in St. Petersburg after taking an overnight train between the cities, and after hearing stories about how thieves would pump knockout gas into our train cars and proceed to rob us naked. Somehow that didn’t happen.

If the Russians had been less prickly about extending tourist visas, we might have spent a few more days in the country, spending some of the hard currency we had that they wanted. But no.

It was a balmy October day when we boarded the Aurora. The vessel survived the Battle of Tsushima and later of course had her part to play in the October Revolution. Since the mid-Soviet period, Aurora has been a museum ship.

Also balmy outside the Hermitage. Much spectacle on the exterior, many fine works of art inside, but dank and crummy amenities, especially the bathrooms.

Thursday Natterings, But Not From Nabobs of Negativism

Posted on September 29, 2016 by admin

I woke the heater up yesterday from its summertime hibernation, mainly to see whether it would wake up and blow hot air, which is all I ask of it. Fortunately, the machine snapped to its single job without any complaint, such as some weird noise I don’t want to hear. The previous night had been quite cool, as they are starting to be, lowering the house temp to 69 F. My test took it up to 70 F. Normally I keep the house at 68 F. when it’s cold outside.

I saw the first Halloween decorations in the neighborhood the other day when walking the dog. It was a small faux cemetery in a front yard, featuring hand-painted sturdy cardboard (or cheap wood) tombstones. I don’t remember what any of them said.

Probably not Here Lies Les Moore. No Les, No Moore. I think I saw that in a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not collection years ago. That one I believe. Sounds like frontier humor to me.

Another remarkable collection of recent space photos from the Atlantic. As the intro notes, “We [as in, mankind] currently have spacecraft in orbit around the Sun, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, a comet, Jupiter, and Saturn; two operational rovers on Mars; and a recent close flyby of Pluto.”

Closer to home, here are two signs I saw recently in Chicago.

That’s a little alarming. I can think of a lot better places to pass the future. The only future I want from McDougall’s are occasional breakfast sandwiches.

Dirt cheap, eh? And what do your beneficiaries get? Enough to pay for the dirt that covers you, maybe.

The last Weaver is gone. Fred Hellerman died recently, I just learned. Time then to listen to the re-union Weavers sing “Get Up and Go.”

One more thing: I don’t think I’ve ever seen olives packed this way before. A Trader Jose offering, as the package tells us.

I opened them today at lunchtime. Not bad at all.

The Last Days of Kiddieland

Posted on September 25, 2016 by admin

Once upon a time, Kiddieland Amusement Park in west suburban Melrose Park featured rides and amusements for small fry, and somewhat older children, for a not-too-outrageous price. The park was around long enough for parents who had been taken as children to take their own children, and come to think of it, grandparents who had been to take their grandchildren.

Not being from around Chicago originally, I didn’t have that experience, but I did take my children three or maybe four times in the late 2000s. I don’t remember for sure, but I think one of Lilly’s friends originally suggested that she go. It was a little far to go very regularly, but not too far for an occasional visit.

Kiddieland was an unpretentious place, with rides such as a small but fast wooden roller coaster, a modest-sized Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a Tilt-A-Whirl, small car rides, small boat rides, other things that went up, down and around, and a 14-in. gauge miniature railway (always enjoyable to find a miniature railway; the Brackenridge Eagle rides on a 2-ft. gauge, just to compare). I won’t say Kiddleland was a one-of-a-kind place, because it used to be one of a class of locally owned, pre-Disneyland amusement parks. Yet it was a survivor, in the 21st century, from an earlier time.

I can only speculate why. The park wasn’t that expensive or unmanageably large. The staff seemed well trained and polite. Soda — all you wanted — was part of the price of admission (imagine, say, Six Flags doing that). The rides were entertaining even for small children, a real place in an age of electronic faux places.

Kiddieland might still be around but for a dispute among cousins who owned the place, the grandchildren of the founder. Seems like a strange division: One group owned the amusement park; the other owned the land. When push came to shove, the amusement park owners were shoved off the land, and the park closed for good in late September 2009.

When it was clear that Kiddieland was going to close, seven years ago this month, we went one more time. I think Lilly and her friends ambled around themselves, while I took Ann around. Here’s Ann and a couple of the small-fry rides.
There’s a Costco there now. The land owners were clearly looking for bigger bucks. Generally I’m for the highest and best use of real estate, and I like Costco well enough, but still. Something that could be anywhere replaced something distinctive about a particular place, so the world is slightly poorer for it.

Libertarian on the Thoroughfare

Posted on September 22, 2016 by admin

Political signage isn’t all that thick here in the northwest suburbs this year, only a scattering of statewide races, and I hadn’t seen a single presidential sign until the other day. Could be that, since Illinois isn’t remotely in play in that election, no one is bothering.

Then again, there’s a certain house on a small road I’ve been driving by regularly for more than a decade, and every election — every one — Republican signage is prominent in the yard, especially the presidential nominee during those contests. This year, nothing. Maybe they’ve moved. Or maybe their presidential nominee just embarrasses them.

But recently I did see a bit of presidential advertising, near the intersection of Schaumburg Road, a major thoroughfare, and Salem Road.

That’s the more visible part, made of yellow cups stuck in the fence. Less visible, and off to the side in blue cups, is # LET GARY DEBATE.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Posted on September 21, 2016 by admin

A docent at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, asked me how long it has been since I last visited the museum. I couldn’t remember. I’m pretty sure it was sometime after the current building opened 20 years ago, though I couldn’t say when, or what I saw. Reason enough to visit again on a pleasant September Saturday in 2016.

Encyclopedia Chicago says that “the new building clad in aluminum and Indiana limestone opened in June 1996 in a 24-hour summer solstice celebration. Referencing the modernism of Mies van der Rohe as well as the tradition of Chicago architecture, the $46 million structure is among the largest in the United States devoted to contemporary art. Its 45,000 square feet of galleries, with a permanent collection boasting more than 5,600 works and a 300-seat auditorium and outdoor sculpture garden, is suitable for large-scale artworks, new media, and ever larger audiences.”

Maybe so, but the structure, designed by German architect Josef Paul Kleihues, presents an unfriendly face to the public.

I don’t dislike it, exactly, but it doesn’t say art museum to me. Change the signage just a little and you’ve got a police headquarters, a telecom company, or a top-drawer server farm. Then again, art museums don’t have to look like the Art Institute either. MCA is what it is on the outside, and an interesting museum on the inside.

The inside is more welcoming. One example: MCA has some of the more comfy chairs — small sofas enclosed by spacious cubical-like structures — of any museum I’ve been to. Toward the end of our visit, if we’d stayed too long in one of these after so much time on foot, we might have fallen asleep.

Currently the big MCA exhibit is of Kerry James Marshall, an artist I was wholly unfamiliar with, in a show called “Mastry.” That just shows how little I pay attention to contemporary art. He’s a living artist, only a few years older than I am, and a resident of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. A remarkable body of his work is on display.

Of Marshall, Sam Worley wrote in the April edition of Chicago magazine this year, just before the MCA show opened, “At 25, he decided to return to the basics and paint a self-portrait—a classic portrait, almost. Its title alluded to a great literary work: ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.’ [1980]

“Marshall used egg tempera, a 13th-century favorite. He adopted compositional techniques associated with artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael. But, of course, his subject was black. So black that the shade of his skin is deeper than the portrait’s black background, which he fades into, as if invisible. Compared with conventional European portraiture, it’s like a photo negative….

“And so Marshall settled on creating a body of work inspired by and in dialogue with the classics—his early barbershop portrait ‘De Style,’ for example, its name a sly play on the Dutch abstract art movement de Stijl—while remaining resolutely its own thing. He found success with a simple insistence on placing black people, and black history, at the center of his raucous, colorful paintings, and that has opened a space for younger artists.”

A detail from “De Style” (1993).
Here’s one I particularly liked, a more recent painting, “Still Life with Wedding Portrait” (2015).

“In this painting, Marshall imagined a wedding portrait of a young Harriet Tubman… and her first husband, John… presenting her as someone’s beloved wife and not simply the stalwart resistance hero portrayed in standard histories,” the MCA notes.

As interesting as the Marshall show was, we also made time for other galleries. I always enjoy a spot of neon.
“Run From Fear, Fun From Rear” (1972) by Bruce Nauman.

Here are all the portraits of Patty Hearst you could want in one place. Twenty-six, to be exact.
“Patricia Hearst, A thru Z” (1979) by Dennis Adams.

I liked this especially: seven tons of sand on the floor in a dark room, along with radios, LED light box, and some ambient sound.
“A beach (for Carl Sagan)” (2016) by Andrew Yang.

MCA says of this: ” ‘The total of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of planet earth.’ So claimed Carl Sagan. In fact, astronomers estimated in 2003 that for every grain of sand on Earth’s beaches and deserts there exist ten times as many stars above. Yang takes Sagan’s pronouncement to heart in a scale model of the Milky Way in which one grain of sand represents one star; the estimated 100 billion stars are approximated by more than seven tons of sand.”

A scale model in numbers, but not size. How far would you have to scatter the sand to get that? That probably wouldn’t be too hard to figure out, but I don’t feel like it just now. I imagine it would be from here to one of the outer planets in the Solar System.

Behind the building, the museum has a sculpture garden. With only four — or was it five? — works. Quantity isn’t everything, but I think there should be more. Here’s “Graz Grosse Geister,” by German artist Thomas Schütte.
At some point during the visit I noticed that the museum guards weren’t just wearing black shirts with GUARD written on the back.
AVANT was on the front.

Just a little art joke, no extra charge.

The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Posted on September 20, 2016 by admin

Saturday was the annual Churches by Bus tour organized by the Chicago Architectural Foundation, which we were on last year and the year before. Not this year. We’ve been to two of the five churches listed on the tour. The tour isn’t precisely cheap, so I wanted a little more novelty. Four out of five, maybe.

So we planned to look at four churches around Michigan Ave. while in the neighborhood. Nothing new — almost nothing new — but no charge either. As it turned out, only two of the four were open, and a third had a service in progress; not the time to wander around looking at it. The open one that wasn’t busy was Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago on Michigan Ave., a fine Gothic structure in the heart of the shopping district.

Nice courtyard to the south of the main building, too.

When the church was finished in 1914, however, that part of Michigan Ave., still called Pine St., was no great shakes. Cheap land, in other words. All of the action on Michigan Ave. was still south of the Chicago River. That changed with the completion of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the river in 1920, and Fourth Pres has watched temples of mammon grow up around it since then.

A fine interior. Been inside a number of times over the years. The ceiling’s a little dark, but lights up there would be expensive not only in electricity usage, but maintenance, I figure.

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), an architect who did a lot of ecclesiastical work, designed the church. He’s also known for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Adjacent to the church is a much newer structure, the Gratz Center, which was completed only in 2013 to house a preschool program, the Buchanan Chapel, a new dining room and kitchen, offices, and rooms. We took a look at the second-story Buchanan Chapel, which is mostly spare, but well lit with natural light, and with a labyrinth on its floor. The chapel’s architect was Brian Vitale, in Gensler’s Chicago office.

Up in the corner of the chapel hangs “Quaternion,” a 2014 piece by Alyson Shotz, a Brooklyn artist.

Interesting. Often, that’s all I ask from bits of the world.

Michigan Avenue on a September Saturday Afternoon

Posted on September 19, 2016 by admin

We went downtown again on Saturday, more specifically to Michigan Avenue and within a few blocks to the east and west of that famed street. A famed street, and crowded on a Saturday during the time of year when it’s still warm.
The sidewalk wasn’t always that crowded. But sometimes it was, suddenly.

At the spot officially called Pioneer Court — I don’t know anyone who actually calls it that — in front of the Equitable Building and just south of the Tribune Tower, the new Michigan Avenue Apple Store is under construction, to take the place of the store further to the north on the avenue. They say it’ll be a humdinger when it’s done.
Wonder whether the bronze Jack Brickhouse will be in Pioneer Court near the Tribune Tower for much longer.
After all, the Tribune hasn’t owned the Cubs in a while, and the Tribune isn’t even going to own the Tribune Tower much longer (the company got $240 million for it). Then there’s the matter of Brickhouse being dead for nearly two decades. That’s a long time not to be on the radio. Time flies, people forget, your statue ends up in a less prominent location. Just speculation.

The plaza across the street from Pioneer Court, in the shadow of the Wrigley Building, was just the place on Saturday for some wedding photography. At least this party thought so, and they could do a lot worse.
The bust in the corner is of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DeSable, the fellow from Haiti — I suppose that would be from Saint-Domingue — who founded a trading post on the Chicago River near this site in the 1770s, making him the first non-Indian Chicagoan. I think that bust used to be where the Apple store is being built.

Not far away, just at that moment, was Jeremy the Magician from Britain. That’s what his hat said, anyway, and he had the accent for it, and a Union Jack vest, in case you didn’t get the point.
Further north, in fact not far from the Chicago Water Tower (can I call it iconic? Too bad that word’s been beaten to death), this fellow had a different sort of message.

Namely, you’re going to Hell.

(Capitalize “Hell.” English Language & Usage Stack Exchange says: “No less an authority than Fulton Sheen had the galleys for his latest book come back from the typesetters with ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ knocked down to lowercase. He carefully re-capitalized each occurrence. When his editor called to request an explanation, he gave what I think we can regard as the definitive answer to [the] question: Because they’re places. You know, like Scarsdale.)

Scenes of Post-People’s Republic Mongolia

Posted on September 11, 2016 by admin

The part of rural Mongolia that we saw in September 1994 — in and near Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, 20 or so miles from Ulaanbaatar — looked a lot like this. Ulaanbaatar wasn’t a sprawling kind of place in those days, unless you count the large neighborhoods composed of thousands of ger (yurts).
In places the trees were fairly dense, with streams flowing through the land. Most of all, though, it felt remote. Even more remote than the arguably further-from-absolutely-everything Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, because the infrastructure was so much more developed there, as far SW as you could go on the entire continent.

Ulaanbaatar didn’t feel so remote, though in ’94 sometimes livestock were seen wandering the streets. I wonder if that’s now a thing of the past for the Mongolian capital, as traffic inevitability increases. How do I know that traffic has increased in 20-plus years? That’s just one of those things that happens.

These prayer wheels were at the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in the city.
From the looks of more recent pictures, some restoration work has been done since then. At least, I’m fairly sure that the stock photo I linked to was taken at about the same place I stood; it certainly looks like it, taking into account various renovations and additions over the years.

In the city, we also visited the Mongolian Natural History Museum, known the world over for its dinosaur artifacts. “The museum is particularly well known for its dinosaur and other paleontological exhibits, among which the most notable are a nearly complete skeleton of a late Cretaceous Tarbosaurus tyrannosaurid and broadly contemporaneous nests of Protoceratops eggs,” Wiki says. I remember those eggs.

And, of course, the big skeletons. You could go up on a balcony for a look at them.

Photography involved paying an extra fee. Or so the museum staff told us at the entrance. None of us paid such a fee, and pretty much everyone in our group took pictures, though as you can see, the light was lousy. I don’t even think any staff were in the big dinosaur room with us, keeping an eye on us. Things were lax. Hope nobody over the years took advantage of that to take anything besides pictures.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There