Irish Greens

Posted on May 26, 2023 by admin

Our hotel in Dublin was on a street of Georgian townhouses, and as far as I could tell it was created from an amalgam of at least two such structures. One of the city’s two tram lines runs down the street, with a stop a two-minute walk away from where we stayed.

St. Stephen’s Green was about five minutes away on foot in the other direction. Often enough we’d forgo part of the tram ride for a stroll through the greens of the park on cool and bright May mornings.

“This nine hectare/22-acre park, in Dublin City Centre, has been maintained in the original Victorian layout with 750 trees, extensive shrub planting with spring and summer Victorian flower bedding,” says Visit Dublin.

A Victorian-era creation. Of course. The site had been open land long before that, such as a marshy commons for centuries, then essentially a private green as its perimeter developed. In the 1870s, Baron Ardilaun acquired the land and donated it to the Dublin Corporation (the city). I had to look him up and the baron turned out to be – yet another Guinness, Arthur Edward, son of the renovator of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Another good use for beer money.

Part of the landscaping includes water features.

History wasn’t done with St. Stephen’s Green after it became a city park. In 1916, the green figured in the Easter Rising.

“The rebels dug trenches, probably at the four entranceways and other places – the written sources aren’t very specific about where they were,” University of Bristol reader in archaeology Joanna Brück told Irish Central.

“There has been debate over whether it was a strategically good location to take over or not,” she said, but in any case their presence at the green wasn’t any more successful than anywhere else that week for the rebels.

Decimus Burton

Toward the end of our visit, we made our way to another Dublin greenspace, one much larger (707 hectares/1,750 acres) in the western reaches of the city: Phoenix Park.

Though as a distinct tract of land, the park has a long history – site of an abbey that Henry VIII squelched, a royal hunting park – it took its modern form during the Victorian era (I’m sensing a pattern here). None other than Decimus Burton gave the park its current form.

I’d call him the Frederick Law Olmstead of the British Isles for his many parks, but actually Burton was a little earlier, and designed many structures as well. Still, as landscape designers, they’re clearly in the same league.

That afternoon also happened to be the warmest one during our visit, which added to the pleasure of the walk. We didn’t get that far, considering how large Phoenix Park is, but we made it to the gazebo near the zoo. An Irish gazebo, which are distinctive since independence for not having sides. Go ahead, look it up.

A picturesque water feature, with trees and bushes and birds to go with.

A scattering of memorials, such as that of Seán Heuston.

I didn’t know who he was, though I noticed that his name is attached to a nearby tram stop as well. I figured he died for independence. Yes, indeed. Led men in 1916 and met his end at Kilmainham Gaol not long after.

Not far away from Heuston is an example of de-memorialization.

The plinth remains, surrounded by trees that were obviously planted for the purpose of obscuring the site. There is still carving on the plinth, however, which is only partly readable, but I figured it out. Once upon a time (1870-1956), a statue of George William Frederick Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle, stood there. He was Palmerston’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for a couple of stints in the mid-19th century, and his statue wasn’t a relic of the Victorian era that at least some Irish cared to keep. It was bombed.

The obelisk honoring Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, on the other hand, still stands tall in Phoenix Park, despite him being born into the Protestant Ascendancy.

After all, Wellington was a Dubliner who gave Napoleon his final bum’s rush from the world stage, and supported Catholic Emancipation besides.

The bronze used for the plaques, on all four sides, is from cannons captured at Waterloo.

One reason I wanted to visit Phoenix Park was that I’ve known about it for so long, since ca. 1980. One day at the Vanderbilt Library, I discovered a microfilm collection of decades of The Times of London, which maybe went all the way back to the paper’s founding in the 1780s. Flipping through it more-or-less at random provided a fascinating pastime for me, because that’s the kind of interest in history I have (not a disciplined one of a scholar).

Completely by chance I came across a flood of column inches for days and days in the spring of 1882 about what would be called the Phoenix Park Murders. I had to look up the location of Phoenix Park, and more about the murders, and never forgot.

Our afternoon walk in the park was long, interspersed with rests on benches, of which there are too few, and sometimes by reclining on the ground. Such as on this daisy-covered slope.

Better, it occurred me on that sunny day in Ireland, to be pushing down the daisies than pushing them up.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin

Posted on May 25, 2023 by admin

In America, we have Gothic Revival churches, no more than 150 years old if that. In Europe, there are actual Gothic churches, and stepping inside takes you into sacred space many centuries older. You count as distant, unimaginable posterity for the builders or rebuilders of a place like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

The cathedral was the first place we went in that city. Actually, no. We ate at a spot called Wowburger first, partly because it was one of the few places open late morning on a Sunday. Though clearly inspired by American hamburgers and only around since 2015, I’d argue that Dublin-originated Wowburger is just as Irish as the cathedral. Go back far enough, after all, and cathedrals aren’t native to Ireland, either. Neither were the Anglo-Normans who built St. Patrick’s in the 13th century.

Wowburgers were really good. No wonder the chain is expanding beyond Ireland.

I used Google Maps, but we could also hear the ringing of its bells to guide us to the cathedral.

Adjoining the cathedral is a St. Patrick’s Park, created at the dawn of the 20th century. Nice place for a short stroll ahead of entering the cathedral.

Services had just ended, so St. Patrick’s opened to tourists. A good many besides us were there.

Much of the current interior appearance of the cathedral has a Victorian look, following a major 19th-century restoration and renovation funded – and directed – by Benjamin Guinness, a grandson of Arthur Guinness, and non-architect. Beer money to revive sacred space. Standards of documentation were a bit lax in the 1860s, so it isn’t entirely clear now what is renovation and what is older. So in a real sense, St. Patrick’s is both Gothic and Gothic Revival.

Because I am ignorant about much, I assumed going in that St. Patrick’s, a major religious edifice in the heart of Ireland, was Roman Catholic. But no: it is part of the Church of Ireland, a member of the Anglican Communion. That fact made me a little more amenable to paying the admission of €8 (the 60+ senior rate), not because of its Anglicanism specifically, but because there are so few members of that denomination to support such a grand church. The Guinness family can’t presumably be counted on to maintain the place in our time.

That discovery made me wonder: just how Catholic is Ireland these days? Not as much as I’d have thought, just like Mexico. According to the latest census (2016) by the Republic of Ireland, 78.3% of the population nationwide claims membership, down from about 95% the year I was born. The Church of Ireland counts 2.8% of the population as members these days. Those Irish claiming no religion came in at just short of 10%, way up from next to none during my lifetime.

Food for thought among these ancient stones and glass.

Another fascination for me of churches of this age are the burials and memorials, mostly of people mostly forgotten. St. Patrick’s has many. I looked for Jonathan Swift, among other things dean of the cathedral for many years, and who is not forgotten, but I didn’t take a good picture of his stone on the floor.

One Capt. John Boyd, on the other hand, commander of the HMS Ajax and lost in a storm off Dublin in 1861, has a life-sized statue right at the entrance. No one else was paying him any mind.

Poignant reminders of those lost in the Great War.

Is there anything to remind us of St. Patrick himself in his namesake cathedral? At least one thing I saw, which is found in the gift shop in the back of the cathedral.

St. Patrick socks. Wear them to keep snakes away? Could be.

An Hiberno-Iberian Trans-Atlantic Jaunt

Posted on May 24, 2023 by admin

If, on the day that I graduated from college in 1983, a djinn with certain knowledge of the future had appeared to me and said, Forty years to the day from today — May 13, 2023 — you will board a jet airliner and fly to Ireland, my response might well have been, Really? Cool. Where else do I go over the next 40 years?

But he would be gone in a flash, as that is how djinn seem to disappear, before he imparted any other information about the one score and ten other countries between those two days. Just as well that djinn are not known to appear to Americans of our time. Not me, anyway. I just had to let the four decades unfold.

This not-very-important coincidence of May 13ths exactly 40 years apart occurred to me a few days before Yuriko and I took an Aer Lingus flight up and over eastern Canada, just south of Greenland’s southern tip, and on to Dublin the next morning, May 14.

Ireland was our place to recover from jet lag, but that didn’t keep us from treading (and tram riding) the streets of the Irish capital until May 17, and looking at as much as possible.

The evening of the 17th we flew to Barcelona for the second and longer leg of the trip. Except for an excursion to Montserrat for a day, we stayed in that city of 21st-century renown, a place for sensation overload of all kinds and highly recommended by friends with passports and travel inclinations. We returned home yesterday via a flight back to Dublin for a layover, and then another to Chicago.

Wake up in Catalonia, go to bed in Illinois. Too ordinary to be regarded as the marvel it is.

New cities for us; new countries. We liked Dublin. We really liked Barcelona. I expected it would break that way.

This month’s jaunt was our first visit to Europe since before smartphones, the wide use of the Internet or email or texting or QR codes, Google maps, or the euro. I’m not sure whether all that has made overseas travels any easier.

Regardless, we kept up an active pace of quick-step tourism, something like our passage through Arizona and Utah last year, except that walking and driving through wide open spaces seeking natural splendor became walking and public transit through the urban corridors of central Dublin and Barcelona, seeking human-made marvels.

We found some. Centuries-old churches, ornate palaces, imaginative modern buildings, sites of historic violence, plazas thick with people at play or merely rest, depositories of famed art and books, vistas of the ocean and among mountains, and Euro-designed urban greenspaces a bit different from what we’re used to in North America.

We passed over brick, cobblestone and asphalt, down sidewalks narrow and wide, up and down stairs, in the footsteps of centuries of people, mostly unknown and unknowable except in the broadest strokes, who walked these exact spots in times hard or prosperous. The early 21st century, as it happens, is a prosperous era in both cities. Shops are many and various and full and busy.

Concentrated prosperity. For an American used to dispersed prosperity, this is a novelty.

Temps in Dublin tended to be lower than in Barcelona, though only a few degrees. By mid-day most days, the sun shined and it was 20 degrees C. or a few more, as they reckon things. The spring air had the happy effect of encouraging bare midriffs among young Irish and Catalan women both. We were rained on only twice, briefly, and only on one day in Spain did we feel anything like high heat.

The more a meal featured some regional product, say milk and cheese in Ireland or seafood in Spain, the better it tended to be. The restaurants we visited were usually linear rooms with expansive menus, or simple takeout joints, or we sought food at convenience stores or actual grocery stores. I confirmed that, if I were a drinking man, Guinness wouldn’t be for me, but sangria would be.

We passed through endless seas of faces along the sidewalks and jammed in the subway cars and trams, maybe not quite as various as in New York or Chicago, but of great variety all the same. We encountered signs in English that were readable but not always quite comprehensible. Others in Catalan were either easy, or matters of guesswork. We noticed the way ordinary bits of a city’s infrastructure look just a little different in another country, or sometimes a lot different. We saw graffiti on the walls and graffiti on skin.

What is graffiti in Spanish? I had to look that up. El graffiti, turns out. Despite the presence of surveillance cameras in countless street-facing nooks, graffiti artists are not deterred in Barcelona, or Dublin either, from casting their paint on walls, doors, railyard surfaces and occasionally (the wankers) useful signs. Still, you have to be amused sometimes.

Do they know Andy Capp in Barcelona? Someone does.

(Former) Dead Man’s Curve

Posted on May 11, 2023 by admin

Time for a genuine spring break, now that genuine spring has arrived. Back to posted content around May 24.

Returning from Normal on Sunday, I took another short detour fairly close by, in the wonderfully named town of Towanda, pop. 430 or so, originally a central Illinois project of the busy 19th-century businessman Jesse Fell. I’d seen signs for Towanda on the Interstate for years, but never stopped.

Towanda is the home of a massive grain elevator, owned by Evergreen FS of Bloomington.

For a more ordinary tourist, a stretch of the former U.S. 66 passes through town, and has a walking path next to the road. I took a stroll.

Also part of the former highway: Dead Man’s Curve.

The nickname isn’t too hard to figure out, but a sign offers details.

It doesn’t offer a death toll, which may not be known, but does say that from 1927 until a bypass was built in 1954, the curve was the site of “many disastrous accidents,” especially involving drivers from Chicago, “unfamiliar with the road and accustomed to higher speeds.” Oops. Once a hazard, now a minor tourist attraction.

Note the Burma Shave signs. They look fairly new, so I take them to be modern homages, in this case noting the dangers of Dead Man’s Curve.

There’s a rhyme for each direction of travel on the road.

Northbound: Car In Ditch/Driver In Tree/The Moon Was Full/And So Was He/Burma Shave.

Southbound: Around The Curve/Lickety-Split/Beautiful Car/Wasn’t It?/Burma Shave.

South Side Cemetery, Pontiac, Illinois

Posted on May 10, 2023 by admin

Across the Vermilion River from Chautauqua Park in Pontiac, Illinois, is South Side Cemetery, which predates the town’s Chautauqua activity by some decades, since its first burials were in 1856. At 24 acres, it’s still an active municipal burial ground. I saw at least two memorials with death dates in 2023.

Overall, a nice place for a stroll on a warm day in May, if you don’t mind being in a cemetery. I can’t say I ever have been.

Some older stones, including a scattering of Civil War veterans.

As usual with small towns, not many mausoleums or large monuments, but there are a few.

Lemuel G. Cairns fought for the Union, too, but has no ordinary soldier’s stone. According to Find a Grave, he achieved the rank of sergeant and after the war dealt in cattle in Texas, before moving to Illinois. I suspect he did well in that business in Texas, but maybe got tired of the heat.

The only sizable mausoleum I spotted.

A number of Gaylords reside there, including this fellow, it seems, a doctor and Union veteran.

This is a surname you don’t see much: Hercules. Also, an unusual design for a stone.

Rare, but not unknown.

“Early examples of the surname recording taken from surviving church registers include those of William Hercules (also recorded as Herculus) at the church of St Margaret’s Westminster, on January 16th 1603, and in the Shetlands, William Herculason who married Christian Harryson at Delting, on January 24th 1752,” says the Internet Surname Database.

A prominent Pontiac family, no doubt. With a name like that, they’d better be. One of them – J.W. Hercules – is mentioned as the designer of the Pontiac Chautauqua pavilion.

Chautauqua Park, Pontiac

Posted on May 9, 2023 by admin

A total of four hours behind the wheel there and back from the northwest suburbs of Chicago to Normal, Illinois, could be considered a chore, but not if you have time to stop a handful of places along the way. That isn’t always possible – weather or scheduling might prevent it – but when it is, you might happen across things to see. Maybe even things you won’t see anywhere else.

Such as in Pontiac, Illinois, pop. 11,150. It’s been a surprisingly good source of stopover sights since I started driving to Normal on a regular basis, and so it was on Sunday, when I headed down to Normal to load up the car with some of Ann’s possessions. She’ll be done with school for the semester later this week, so the goal was to not be overloaded when she finally returns.

Plunge into the small streets of Pontiac – that might not be the right verb, since its grid is pretty small – and soon you’ll be at Chautauqua Park.

Spring green and on Sunday at least, warm enough to inspire a little sweat.

A good place to walk around, but also to read, with a good many signs like this.

I read at least a half-dozen. Most of them told me about the history of the park as the setting for the Pontiac Chautauqua, as the park name suggests.

A few quotes from the various signs:

A.C. Folsom

“Under the leadership of A.C. Folsom, a group of civic-minded citizens organized to bring a Chautauqua to Pontiac. Between the years 1898 and 1929, the Pontiac Chautauqua Assembles developed into one of the Midwest’s most popular and successful summer festivals.”

“As the Pontiac Chautauqua grew, dramatic presentations became particular favorites of the crowd. Shakespeare, melodramas, domestic comedies, mysteries, and tragedies graced the stage of the pavilion. Troupes of actors from New York, Chicago and elsewhere traveled the Chautauqua circuit, playing a repertory of four or five plays.”

The Chautauqua pavilion as it appears now.

Theatrical presentations still occur there. According to a non-historic sign, the next one will be the Broadway musical version of Beauty and the Beast, June 14-18, 2023, by the Vermillion Players.

More Chautauqua Park history-sign verbiage:

“Specialty acts from all over the world brought exotic sounds which floated over the park on warm summer evenings. Here are just a few of the individuals and groups which graced the Pontiac Chautauqua: Mme. Schumann-Heink, opera star; The Weber Male Quartette; Colangelos Band; The Honolulu Students; Mr. & Mrs. Tony Godetz, Alpine Singers & Yodelers.”

“Each year of the Pontiac Chautauqua Assembly, noted lecturers, politicians and educators came to edify the event’s patrons… some of the most notable speakers include: Booker T. Washington; William Jennings Bryan; Samuel Gompers; Rev. Dr. Thomas DeWitt Talmage; Carrie Nation.”

Yep, there’s Carrie Nation at the Pontiac Chautauqua.

No visible hatchet. It’s clear she didn’t wear a corset. She considered them harmful.

As fascinating as the park’s Chautauqua history is – and there’s the basis of another limited costume series on prestige streaming, namely the story of a plucky, slightly anachronistic woman entertainer on the Chautauqua circuit, ca. 1900 – that isn’t all the park has to offer.

Namely, it sports two of the town’s three swinging bridges. Dating roughly from the time of the Chautauqua. Original iron work, with wooden planks that have been replaced many times.

Naturally, I had to cross them. One of them:

And the other.

They don’t swing, exactly, at least when you walk normally, but they do wobble, and it takes a moment to get used to the motion. Nice views of the Vermilion River along with way.

Bigger than I would have thought. At this point, the waters are on their way to the Illinois River, then of course Old Man River.

One more item in the park: a plaque-on-rock memorial.

Not just any memorial, but a fairly unusual one.

But not unknown. Naturally, I had to look up Fred Bennitt. I’m cursed that way.

Nichols Bridgeway ’23

Posted on May 8, 2023 by admin

Saw this headline in the WSJ late last week: ‘I’m Not Excited For Him to Become King’: American Royal Watchers Draw the Line at King Charles Coronation

Do we as Americans need to be excited about the coronation of Charles? No, we do not. Interested, if that kind of thing interests you, but I’ll bet even a good many Britons don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. As one of those things that doesn’t happen very often and which harkens back to a long history, the event interested me, but not to the point of distraction.

Reporting on the event makes it seem as if there are only two modes of thinking about Charles, and the British monarchy for that matter: slavish adoration and awe at the pomp, or bitter republican convictions that see the royals as posh parasites. I can’t muster enough emotion to feel either of those, though I could probably sit down and come up with reasons on each side of the monarchy, pro- and anti-, like any former high school debater.

Still, I did a little reading about the sceptre and orb, because who doesn’t like a little reading about orbs especially? Of even more interest, though, is the Stone of Scone, which for years I thought was pronounced the same way that the British refer to their biscuits (but no, it’s “skoon,” which does sound more Scottish). I understand that all it takes to see the stone these days is a visit to Edinburgh Castle. Its presence there since 1996 must count as a physical reminder of UK devolution.

All in all, the coronation didn’t interest me enough to get up at 4 or 5 am on a Saturday for live coverage. Plenty of video was available soon after.

While we were in Chicago on Saturday, we found ourselves on the Nichols Bridgeway, which runs from Millennium Park to the third floor of the Art Institute.

I couldn’t remember the last time we were there. Might have been back in 2011, when we attended my nephew Robert’s graduation from the School of the Art Institute. That’s when I took this picture of him with a faux nimbus.

The bridge still stands, of course. Looking north.

South.

We went for the views from the bridge. One thing Chicago has for sure is an alpha-city skyline.

Looking west on Monroe St.

Looking east.

Note how few cars there are (none) compared with the number of pedestrians. Turns out the Polish Constitution Day Parade had just finished. We missed it. Maybe next year; looks like a spectacle.

Another New Flag

Posted on May 7, 2023 by admin

The last weekend of April: cold, wet and miserable. The first weekend of May: warm, dry and pleasant. Such is spring.

We were in Chicago for a while on Saturday taking advantage of the fine weather, and when walked by Daley Plaza, we saw these flags.

What’s that one in the middle? One reason — the main reason — I took a picture was to look it up later. It didn’t take long. That’s the new Cook County flag.

Since last year, so not quite brand new, but not anything I’d heard about. The county sought a new design in a time-tested manor, by asking high school students to submit them (which is how Alaska got its excellent flag nearly 100 years ago).

An improvement on the old flag, I think, though I will give that one points for depicting a map of Cook County and its townships, which is distinctive. In any case, it looks like —

— vexillologic critics are beginning to have some impact on official flag design.

New Born

Posted on May 2, 2023 by admin

Still chilly, and a little windy, but that didn’t keep us from taking the dog for a walk around Volkening Lake, a pond really, just at dusk. As we have many times. Geese were taking their final approach to the pond, where many of the them apparently float the night away.

Congratulations to my nephew Dees and his wife Eden, whose second child, a second son, was just born. His first name, Leland. I can’t help feeling that a few more Striblings in the world is a good thing.

That makes 12 living descendants of my parents (so far, all of us, from newborn to near 71), four grandchildren for my brother Jay, and three grandnephews and one grandniece for me. Emissaries to a future we will not see, possibly a bit of the 22nd century. With any luck, one not as bad as current conventional wisdom would have it. Such wisdom tends to be a projection of present anxieties more than anything else.

Big Bend Camera Failure

Posted on April 30, 2023 by admin

Though I grew up in Texas, I never got around to visiting Big Bend NP until five years ago in April. Didn’t give it much thought while I schemed to go other places. The distance to the park is more psychological than geographic, I think. From San Antonio, for example, it’s a full-ish day’s drive to the park (six hours), but since when have Texans ever said, That’s too far to drive?

I had two cameras with me on the trip. One, my sturdy Olympus, model number I can’t remember, a standard and not especially expensive digital camera I acquired in 2012 so I could take pictures at events for a new freelance job. It took good pictures, better than I expected. The other digital image-maker at Big Bend was my camera phone. It was newer than the Olympus, since I got it to go to Mexico City a few months earlier. Even so, it only intermittently produced good pictures.

I started capturing the Big Bend scenery with the Olympus, as usual. It started taking vastly overexposed images, often the second or third of the same scene.

A thing that made me go hm.

Still, I got some decent images with the Olympus. It’s hard to go wrong in Big Bend.

By the time I got to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande, the Olympus had quit taking anything but overexposures. So I resorted to using the camera phone, producing lower-quality pictures that were sometimes OK.

The Olympus revived to create some good images later in the trip, but was increasingly unreliable. That was its last trip. Later I checked its settings, tried different settings, tried different data storage cards, and poked around online for some reason for it taking overexposures, to inconclusive results.

Once upon a time, you’d have taken your broken camera to a shop for examination and possible repair, but now? I figured I’d gotten my money’s worth out of the Olympus, and soon acquired just as good camera — better in some ways — in the form of a used iPhone that was no longer a communication device.

The failure of my camera on a trip was a kind of inconvenience, though barely even that. Back when Ann went to Washington, D.C., with a junior high group, some camera error or other meant she returned with few images. This upset her. I told her I was sorry she lost the images. But as worthwhile as capturing images can be, or sharing them, seeing a place yourself is the important thing.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There