The House on the Rock, Section 1: Alex Jordan’s Odd Man Cave

Posted on June 2, 2015 by admin

The Alex Jordan Center is the first building of The House on the Rock you encounter after the ticketing building. Reached by a walkway through an “Asian garden” (an odd mix of Chinese and Japanese elements), the center is essentially a museum devoted to The House creator, Alex Jordan Jr. (1914-1989), with information about him and his lifelong obsession with building the complex, and filling it with stuff.

There’s more information on the walls of the Alex Jordan Center than is easily available elsewhere, especially online (as Wiki puts it, “published information on Jordan’s life is scarce”). Much of what’s written about the place follows the Roadside America school of reportage: Wow, what a wacky place! Look how wacky it is! Can you believe how wacky this place is?

The House on the Rock is wacky. Ah, but so much more. My impression is that Alex Jordan was something of a ne’er-do-well whose parents supported him until he lucked into a way to support his obsessions: charging people admission to see his stuff (that, and maybe farm subsidies). Once it got up and going, the place grow’d like Topsy. Except not quite: Jordan spurred the growth. Whatever the character of his obsessions, he also clearly wasn’t stupid. I was astonished to learn that he oversaw the design and construction of some of the automatic music machines, which look as fantastically complex as any of the Disney animatronics.

Here’s a smaller example of a kind of animatronics I’d never heard of before, one of which, with information, is in the Alex Jordan Center: “In the early 1980s, Alex traded with California collector John Daniel for a collection of Baranger motions…

“Baranger motions are mechanical animations manufactured by the Baranger Company of South Pasadena, California between 1925 and 1959. The animations were rented to jewelry stores as window displays; they were shipped to the stores periodically on a rotating basis so that there was always something of interest in the store window… The House on the Rock has the world’s largest collection of Barangers on display and in storage.” (The Pollack Advertising Museum in Mesa, Ariz., reportedly has more.) The pictured eggman, a Humpty Dumpty Baranger, is only one of 14 in existence, according to one source.

Jordan must have also had a dash of P.T. Barnum in him. Why else would you have a three-story sea monster built for the world to see? On the other hand, I was happy to learn that The House on the Rock doesn’t particularly gouge its visitors. Admission for three adults and one child, bought at a discount on line, was less than $90, and certainly worth it. The gift shop was tourist-priced, but not excessive. One small example: postcards were a quarter each. I seem to remember that cards of Taliesin were more, maybe a dollar. The place doesn’t charge Buc-ee’s prices, in other words.

The House on the Rock is formally divided into three parts. The first part begins after leaving the Alex Jordan Center, and includes the original structure: a dimly lit collection of rooms snaking around the side of the hill. At least, that’s what it felt like. Without a map, or an aerial view of the complex, it’s hard for a casual visitor to tell how it’s all put together. Not that that matters. Once you’re into the groove of the place, passing through twisting corridors and crossing pedestrian bridges and climbing staircases and wandering along footpaths through mildly claustrophobic tunnels, and even taking in an occasional view of the outside, it’s just one thing after another. Quite literally.

The first section was also the only part of the complex that remotely resembles living quarters, featuring (among other things) a simple kitchen looking about 40 years old. Other rooms included pieces of furniture, such as couches and tables, and one has a large fireplace: elements of an elaborate man cave, to use a term more recent than The House. With some stress on cave. Rock formed the basis of most of the walls, the ceilings were low, and much of the color scheme involved brown.

Most of the rooms weren’t so ordinary. Jordan’s fascination with collecting dolls, especially Japanese dolls, and Tiffany lamps, or Tiffany-like lamps, is apparent in many places.

The first section also included a handful of the automatic music machines that would show up in such quantity later in the complex. This looks like a painting of such a device — in fact, an homage to a famous painting I can’t quite place — but actually the device is behind a hole in the wall made to look like a frame. Insert a token and it makes music.

At one point the tour trail takes you outside to enjoy the view. Even though last Saturday was overcast and rainy, I saw the appeal of the vista, off into the rolling green hills of southern Wisconsin.

The signature room of the first section is the Infinity Room. In its terse way, The House on the Rock web site says, “The 14th room of the House, completed in 1985, this engineering marvel extends 218 feet out over the scenic valley and 156 feet above the forests [sic] floor. The Infinity Room has 3,264 windows for walls that treat guests to a truly spectacular view.”

I wasn’t able to take a picture of the Infinity Room exterior that wasn’t obscured by trees, but there are some images on line.

Looking toward to end of the room, you see this.

As far as you can go into the room, you see this.

Dead ahead from there is a window in the floor that allows you to look down toward the tops of the trees. I can only hope that Jordan hired competent engineers to cantilever the thing safely, and that inspectors from Iowa County periodically take a look at it. The room’s been up for 30 years, so presumably it’s fairly sound. Still, Yuriko was unnerved by entering the room, and didn’t stay long, and she wasn’t the only one. Another woman visitor voiced her disquiet and turned around mid-way to the end point. Her young daughter went on (as did mine). The lure of infinity wasn’t to be missed.

The House on the Rock

Posted on June 1, 2015 by admin

Here’s a list of some of the things we saw at The House on the Rock on Saturday. It’s only a partial list, and most of the categories represent a large number of individual items: books, Tiffany-style lamps, dolls, Japanese dolls, Japanese lanterns, musical instruments, self-playing musical instruments, stained-glass windows, stained-glass panels, paperweights, stuffed birds, antique guns, dueling pistol sets, rifles, coin banks, model trains, suits of armor, swords, faux crowns, Fabergé-like eggs, 19th-century doctor, barber, and pharmacy equipment, scrimshaw, model ships, nautical equipment and ephemera, cash registers, model airplanes, bottles, mounted newspapers, brewery equipment, cheese vats, bells, doll houses, cannons, and circus miniatures.

The House on the Rock is also home to an enormous calliope; what’s asserted to be the largest carousel in the world (and it could well be); and a 200-foot-long model of a sea monster, about three stories high, poised in mid-fight with an enormous squid.

The self-playing musical instruments were many, some small and maybe from the golden age of such devices, the late 19th century (it’s always a maybe at The House when it comes to authenticity), and others were room-sized and created for The House. Most were operated by nicely designed gold-colored tokens that were available for four for a dollar. I kept one as a souvenir, and used a handful of others to play the automatic tunes.

All of these items are housed in a complex of buildings built on hill in rural Wisconsin. It’s a successful tourist trap, quasi-museum, psuedo-antique gallery with some possibly valuable items mixed in, a remarkable piece of outsider architecture, a monument to a highly energized eccentric collector named Alex Jordan Jr. who might have his own cable show were he living in our time, and most of all a mass agglomeration of stuff acquired according to the idiosyncratic lights of Mr. Jordan, dead now more than 25 years, but maintained as all of these things (and a viable business) by a successor he picked. I’ve never been any place like it before.

Actually, I have. Once or twice a year, I have a phantasmagoria dream, usually involving my passage through a street or a cityscape or a tunnel among a constantly shifting complex succession of images and things. Usually these are good dreams, but sometimes there’s an edge of anxiety, such as the time I passed through the phantasmagoria trying to remember where I’d parked my car (I woke relieved to realize my car was in my driveway). The House was no dream, but as you walk through, it’s for sure a complex succession of images and things.

Back on August 4, 2007, when we visited Taliesin, which is a few miles away, we talked about a return trip to The House on the Rock someday. That day turned out to be May 30, 2015. Yuriko, Yuika, Ann and I set out by car for Madison on the afternoon of the day before. We spent the night in a motel there, and the next morning drove the 50 or so miles to Spring Green, Wis., and then the few more miles to The House.

On the 29th, we arrived in Madison in time for dinner. I picked La Taguara on Washington Ave., a Venezuelan restaurant I discovered via online search. I’ve been to many kinds of restaurants, but this was a first for me, and everyone else. I can report that it satisfied our need for a good dinner, as well as my periodic urge for food novelty. I had the Pabellon a caballo, which the menu called the Venezuelan “national dish”: black beans, white cheese, shredded beef, rice, deep-fried sweet plantain pieces, and an arepa — flatbread made of ground maize dough — along with a fried egg. We had fried yucca for an appetizer, and I had passion fruit juice to drink.

Since it was still light after dinner, we made our way to downtown Madison by car, and eventually on foot to Monona Terrace, a meeting and convention facility that happens to have a rooftop terrace with a fine view of Lake Monona. The last time I was there, ice covered part of the lake. A late May view is a lot more pleasant. The opposite direction from the lake included an equally fine view of the capitol catching the day’s dying light.

After leaving The House on the Rock in mid-afternoon on the 30th, I drove a slightly out-of-the-way route back home, by way of Mount Horeb, New Glarus, Monroe, and Beloit (everyone else was napping). I did a driveby look at New Glarus, a town founded by Swiss settlers, and which includes the Swiss Historical Village, an open-air museum and something else in Wisconsin to see someday.

But on this trip, everything besides The House on the Rock was just a bonus. That was the focus of the 27-hour, 400-mile trip. It didn’t disappoint.

People of the Bean

Posted on May 28, 2015 by admin

As tourists pro tem in Chicago on Sunday, it seemed inevitable that we’d end up at the Bean, and so we did, just ahead of rain. “Cloud Gate” hasn’t lost its appeal since our last look-see in ’11. A lot of other people were there too.

This was the first time I’d ever seen anyone actually using a selfie stick.
Just a guess, but it looked like members of a quinceañera showed up, probably by limo, to be in the presence of the Bean.

About this fellow: 1981 called, and wants that hairstyle back.

I wonder about the longevity of the style. I don’t ever remember having the urge to style my hair in a way that was popular a decade or two before I was born. Guess he wanted to express his non-conformity in the same way that so many others have over the years.

The Last Days of Ed Debevic’s

Posted on May 27, 2015 by admin

Word is that Ed Debevic’s, at least at its current location, is going to disappear later this year. I can see why: the land at the corner of Wells and Ontario in River North is much too valuable in 2015 to be home to a single-story eatery, regardless of how popular it is. In 1984, when the restaurant was founded by famed Chicago restaurant idea-man Rich Melman, that wasn’t the case. An apartment tower will soon rise on the site, like the one near it.

Ten years ago, I described Ed Debevic’s as “a faux diner that serves decent food, intense milkshakes, and entertainment in the form of the wait staff dancing on one of the counters.” That was the last time I went there. The description still holds. This time, four of the wait staff danced on the counter to “Car Wash,” a song older than any of them.

Clearly the place is hated by food snobs, such as this vitriolic fellow. That by itself doesn’t add to the quality of a place, but it does make me more favorably disposed to like it. (Ah, so much wisdom in de gustibus non est disputandum. The Japanese have a maxim along the same lines: 十人十色, juu-nin to-iro. Literally, ten people, ten colors. More figuratively, to each his own.)

I’d put Ed’s squarely in the middle of restaurant experiences. It wasn’t even my first choice on Sunday, or second, but a lot of places downtown are closed on Sundays. Yuika, who had never been to such a place, seemed to enjoy it, and the burger I had — one with blue cheese — was tasty indeed. So I’ll put in a kind word for the Ed’s, even if it doesn’t serve burgers made from fair-traded, sustainably raised cattle who were allowed to roam and graze in Alpine pastureland, prepared sous-vide for 72 hours and served with boletus mushrooms and heirloom chioggias.

Chicago Amble

Posted on May 26, 2015 by admin

On Sunday — which on a holiday weekend, feels like a Saturday — we went to the city and spent some peripatetic hours showing around our niece Yuika (and first cousin of our children). She’d never been to Chicago before. We took a water taxi from near Union Station to the dock under the Wrigley Building, headed north on Michigan Ave., east through River North, eating there, then south again along State St. and eventually to Millennium Park.

It was absolutely nowhere new for me, except for a shop on Michigan Ave. that wasn’t there until recently, and a newly remodeled interior of a hotel we ducked into, to use the lobby bathrooms. Yet I enjoyed the walk. Part of it was walking with someone who’d never seen any of these streets or any of the changes over the years; someone for whom Chicago was previously just the name of a large city. Besides, the city was very much alive with residents, tourists and service workers, despite it being a Sunday.

I’m glad to report that the statue of Nathan Hale, which stands in front of one of the Tribune Tower entrances, decided to participate in whatever consciousness-raising a red rubber nose is supposed to promote.

I had only the vaguest notion of it. Anti-poverty, I think. It would be so very easy to look it up, but I’m going to pursue willful ignorance in this case, since it smells of something invented to show off celebrities as much as to further a worthy cause.

In the northern section of the Tribune Tower is the brightly colored Dylan’s Candy Bar, which apparently opened earlier this year.

It’s the latest of 10 locations nationwide, with others in New York, Los Angeles, a couple of airports and some other places where the retail formula Make Something Simple Elaborate works well. There’s a certain genius to that approach, after all, as the foundation (for example) of the Starbuck’s empire.

Further north on Michigan Ave. was Gold Gurl.

Gold Gurl is not, I suspect, one of several exactly like her, but the only one, though across the street another character standing on a platform moved to the beat periodically, as Gold Gurl did after standing perfectly still for a while. I had Ann drop a 50-cent piece in Gold Gurl’s collection bucket. Busking needs to be supported in this city.

A Forgotten Thread About Florida, Remembered

Posted on May 21, 2015 by admin

Posting again on Tuesday. Memorial Day’s a little far ahead of Decoration Day this year, but because of the flux of the calendar, Memorial Day will drift back to May 30 next year (and in ’22 and ’33, just to look ahead). I didn’t realize it until recently, but Sen. Daniel Inouye was eager to return Memorial Day to May 30, introducing resolutions on the matter repeatedly until his death.

Warm again after a couple of ridiculously cold days. It wasn’t freezing — that would be beyond ridiculous, into the insane — but I could see my breath yesterday. Today I sat on my deck in the pleasantly warm air.

I don’t look at Facebook constantly, but when I do, odd things pop up sometimes. Today the system reminded me that “Six years ago, you posted this.”

My first thought: I’ve been using Facebook for more than six years? Tempus fugit.

The comment I posted then, along with a small scan of a postcard I’ve reposted here, was: “The best fried oysters I’ve ever had, at the Apalachicola Seafood Grill, Apalachicola, Florida, May 2009.”

My old friend Dan, a resident of Birmingham, Ala., these days, replied: “The Grill has been there for as long as I can remember. I can remember going there 40 years ago. And, as I recall, if you like flounder, they do an incredible job with it as well.”

It’s still there, if reviews on Yelp, Google+, Urban Spoon and the like are to be believed. Good to know.

I answered: “I need to explore Miami more, but I’ve pretty much decided the panhandle’s my favorite part of the state.”

Geof Huth then chimed in: “Hey, that picture reminds me of a postcard I received recently.”

Dan: “By comparison, Miami is soulless.”

I’d say Miami has a really different kind of soul. Pending further investigation.

One more comment from me: “Postcard? What a coincidence. Rich F. got a card just like it, too, since he used to serve discount oysters to me at an oyster bar in Nashville.

“Miami Beach sure was interesting, but you have to like art deco.”

Dan: “and shell pink…”

I might still have that postcard. I have a box of Places I’ve Been Cards, started more than 10 years ago. Back when I worked downtown, I had my own office — an increasingly retro concept; I’m glad I don’t work in an open floor-plate office — and I thumb-tacked a few cards on one of the walls, a couple of places I’d recently been. Then I put up a few more. And then even more. The only commonality was that I’d been to the place. It got to be a few dozen eventually.

When I had to leave that office, I took all the cards down and boxed them. Since then, I’ve added to the collection with cards upon return from a place, mindful always to have a few extra, and with cards I find at a resale or antique shop representing places I went before I stared collecting cards.

Spring Flowers ’15

Posted on May 13, 2015 by admin

Lilacia Park, May 9, 2015

The Lombard park sports a wealth of lilacs, of course, such as this Hyacinthiflora lilac.But also tulips, such as “Antoinnette.”And “Mona Lisa.”And “Burgundy Lace,” a fringed tulip.Also, good old crabapple trees.This character showed up to entertain. I think. Or maybe he just likes to dress up. Thing 1 and Thing 2 weren’t around.I took some of the pictures and Ann took others.

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 Mapel Street Chapel, Lombard

Posted on May 11, 2015 by admin

We spent a little time in west suburban Lombard on Saturday, since it was a dry day among the many rainy ones lately, mainly to take in the pleasures of Lilacia Park in May, but also for a short walk nearby. I wanted to take another look at the Maple Street Chapel.

At the corner of Maple St. and Main St., which is about as Middle America nomenclature as you can get. Nearby streets are Willow, Ash, Elm and Hickory, and not far away are streets named for presidents.
It’s been 145 years since the chapel replaced an earlier structure, lost to fire. At one time a Congregationalist congregation met in the building, but later it became part of The First Church of Lombard, which is UCC. In its early days, the structure also had various community functions as well, such as a school and library.

These days, the church members meet for regular services nearby, with the chapel hosting various events, such as a folk concert on Saturday we were too early to see. In fact, the building was closed, so we didn’t see the inside. Apparently it’s nice.

I like the steeple.
Lightning hit it in 1994, knocking off the original cross. The replacement, I’ve read, also serves as a lightning rod.

“Batcolumn”

Posted on May 7, 2015 by admin

Lest we forget, today is the centennial of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. It’s getting some attention online. The latest book about the subject, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, came out recently, and I plan to read it in the near future. It’s by Erik Larson, who wrote The Devil in the White City, which is a strong recommendation, so I’m looking forward to it.

One more item from my May Day foray to downtown Chicago: “Batcolumn,” a very tall (101 feet) statue standing in front of the Harold Washington Social Security Administration building at 600 W. Madison St.

The sculpture was erected (and it must have been some job) in 1977, commissioned by the GSA. That reportedly annoyed people who objected to spending public money on making interesting things, but here it is, nearly 40 years later. I don’t know that it’s a favorite bit of public art among Chicagoans — not like the Picasso or the Bean — but everyone’s seen it, and no one seems to object to it any more. I think the government got its money’s worth.

The Swedish-born U.S. sculptor Claes Oldenburg did the work. His specialty: large versions of ordinary objects. While looking at some of his other items on line, one looked familiar right away.

It’s “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X,” which we saw at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington DC in 2011. Back in 1998, I think, I also saw “Spoonbridge and Cherry” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There