Category Archives: Been There

Lake Mills and Its Pyramidal Oddity

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In late May, I benefited from a bit of service journalism offered by the Chicago Tribune, which told me that the state of Wisconsin wasn’t charging entry fees to state parks on the first weekend in June.

So on June 2, we sought to take advantage of the situation by driving up to Wisconsin for the day — and probably proving the marketing arm of the state right when it calculated that such an offering would attract some out-of-state visitors, especially from Illinois.

Before we went to any state park, however, we stopped in the pleasant town of Lake Mills, which is in Jefferson County in the southern part of the state, between Madison and Milwaukee. We had a satisfying lunch at a diner called Cafe on the Park, which is on Main St. across the street from Commons Park. Then we took a stroll over to the park.

Visible from the park are some interesting buildings, such as the former Odd Fellows Hall and local opera house. Now it’s occupied by an antique mall.

The charming Lake Mills Public Library. Closed on Sunday, or I would have gone in.

There’s a bandstand in the park. Wouldn’t be a proper small-town park without one. With patriotic bunting. Nice touch. Formally it’s the Franklin Else Memorial Bandstand, though you (I) could argue it’s a large gazebo.

The Veterans Monument in the park is a little odd. It’s respectful and all, but has some unusual design elements.
It has a triangular shape, for one thing, with three triangular columns rising from a triangular base to support a triangular top. Triangles are also etched into the design in various places.
Besides all that, a black stone pyramid is the centerpiece of the memorial. Why? Or, if you’re feeling more surprised, WTF?

No marker on or near the monument explains. I didn’t know what to make of that local oddity until I got home and looked around some.

Twenty years ago, the Tribune published an article about Lake Mills and its adjacent body of water, Rock Lake.

“There’s something in Rock Lake.

“What, exactly, lies at the bottom of this placid fishing hole east of Madison is the stuff of local legend, the obsession of scores of divers and the spark of an unlikely controversy that has raged among locals for decades.

“Believers, including many old-timers and diving enthusiasts, say that ancient pyramids, ruins and even a serpent-like, 200-foot-long rock figure lay beneath these algae-filled waters. They say pre-Columbian dwellers built the structures on dry land before the area was flooded by geological upheavals and a dam built in the 1800s.

“Skeptics… say there’s nothing but natural piles of rocks below the 40-foot depths…. the otherwise unremarkable town of Lake Mills, which abuts Rock Lake, [calls] itself ‘City of the Pyramids.’ “

City of Pyramids, eh? Sounds like something a ’30s newspaperman made up and a ’50s chamber of commerce ran with. A little whimsical to incorporate into a veterans memorial, no? Then again, do such memorials need to be somber to the point of sameness, ignoring local lore?

That’s hardly the end of online descriptions of the supposed structures at the bottom of Rock Lake. Grazing through some of them, you come up with lines like:

“You can’t mistake certain things. There’s a city down there. There’s no question about it.”

“There are remarkable, artificial underwater structures beneath the waters of Rock Lake, Wisconsin but unfortunately for many years these prehistoric ruins have been ignored by researchers.”

“Much like Judge Hyer before him, Taylor believed that the three to four pyramids (the number changed with each reporting) was [sic] Aztec in origin and were built during a drought when the lake was completely drained and they were sacrificial altars to the rain god to bring the rains back.”

“Aerial photos, side boat sonar scans, and underwater divers eventually charted a complex of at least nine different stone structures, including: two rectangular pyramids, several stacked-rock walls, two ‘Stone Cone’ areas, a conical pyramid, and a large ‘Delta Triangle’ structure.”

“Former state archaeologist Bob Birmingham told the Wisconsin State Journal in 2015 that the tales were ‘a bunch of baloney.’ ”

Bob Birmingham chalks up the shapes to piles of rock left by receding glaciers, and notes that such piles are found in other Wisconsin lakes. My, that’s boring. Tales of ancient peoples building mysterious structures are awfully romantic.

Somehow, I’m inclined to agree with Bob.

Southern Loop Debris

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When were driving through LaGrange, Texas, on the first day of the trip, I began to wonder. What’s this town known for? I know it’s something. Then I saw a sign calling LaGrange “the best little town in Texas.” Oh, yeah. Famed in song and story.

On the way to Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston, we took a quick detour — because I’d seen it on a map — to see the Beer Can House at 222 Malone St., a quick view from the car. Looks like this. Had we wanted to spend a little more time in Houston, I definitely would have visited the Orange Show. Ah, well.

We enjoyed our walk along Esplanade St. in New Orleans, where you can see some fine houses.
Plus efforts to thwart porch pirates. We saw more than one sign along these lines during our walk down the street.
We spent part of an evening in New Orleans on Frenchman St., which is described as not as rowdy or vomit-prone as Bourbon St., and I suppose that’s true, though it is a lively place. We went for the music.

At Three Muses, we saw Washboard Rodeo. They were fun. Western swing in New Orleans. Played some Bob Wills, they did.

At d.b.a, we saw Brother Tyrone and the Mindbenders. Counts as rock and soul, I’d say. Also good fun, though they were playing for a pretty thin Monday night crowd.

Adjacent to Frenchman St. is an evening outdoor market, the Frenchman Art Market, which we visited between the two performances. The market featured an impressive array of local art for sale, though nothing we couldn’t live without.

Something you see on U.S. 61 just outside of Natchez, Mississippi: Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant. More about it here.

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, Stribling St. is still around. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, but after nearly 30 years, I wanted another look.

So is the local pharmacy run by distant cousins. Glad the chains haven’t spelled its demise.

During our drive from metro Jackson, Mississippi, to Montgomery, Alabama — connected by U.S. 80 and not an Interstate, as you might think — we passed through Selma, Alabama. I made a point of driving across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, though we decided not to get out and look around. Remarkably, the bridge looks exactly as it does in pictures more than 50 years old.

In downtown Montgomery, you can see this statue. I understand the bronze has been around since 1991, but was only recently moved to its current site not far from Riverfront Park, the river of course being the Alabama.
I’d forgotten native son Hank Williams died so young. Some singers die rock ‘n’ roll deaths, some die country deaths like Hank.

Speaking of death, early in the trip, I was activating my phone — whose dim algorithm always suggests news I seldom want to see during the process — and I noticed the name “Doris Day” in the feed. I figured that could mean only one thing. Sure enough, she became the first celebrity death of the trip.

I hadn’t known she was still alive. In fairly rapid order during the trip after Ms. Day, the reaper came for Tim Conway, I.M. Pei and Grumpy Cat. I didn’t know that last one, but Lilly did.

I remember a time that Tim Conway described himself as “the funniest man in the universe” on the Carol Burnett Show. We all took that as a comedian’s hyperbole. But what if he was right? What if some higher intelligence has made a four-dimensional assessment of human humor and come to that exact conclusion?

As for Doris Day, I will try to park as close to my destinations as possible in her honor for the foreseeable future (a term I remember hearing as long ago as the ’80s in Austin).

Also in Montgomery: the Alabama State Capitol. The Alabama legislature had been in the news a lot before we came to town, as the latest state body to try to topple Roe v. Wade. That isn’t why I visited. I see capitols when I can.

From a distance.
Closer.
The capitol was completed in 1851, though additions have been made since then. The interior of the dome is splendid.

Actually, the Alabama House and Senate don’t meet in the capitol any more, but at the nearby Alabama State House, something I found out later. When we visited, the capitol’s House and Senate chambers seemed like museum pieces rather than space for state business, and that’s why.

Seems like hipsters haven’t discovered Decatur, Alabama, yet. But as real estate prices balloon in other places, it isn’t out of the question. The town has a pleasant riverfront on the Tennessee and at least one street, Bank St., that could be home to overpriced boutiques and authentic-experience taprooms.
Of more interest to me was the Old State Bank, dating back to 1833 and restored toward the end of the 20th century. It is where Bank St. ends, or begins, near the banks of the Tennessee River.

Even more interesting is the Lafayette Street Cemetery, active from ca. 1818.

Lafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaIt’s more of a ruin than a cemetery, but I’m glad it has survived.
Lafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaLafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaLafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaDuring the entirety of the trip, there were plenty of random bits of the South to be seen along the way.
We also listened to a lot of Southern radio on the trip — something Lilly plans to avoid on future trips, Southern or not, with her Bluetooth and so on — and we had a little game whenever we tuned into someone discussing some social problem in earnest on a non-music, non-NPR station. The game: guess how long will it be before the discussion turns to God. It was never very long.

Road Vittles, Spring ’19

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Once upon a time, you either knew about a place like Davis Cafe or you didn’t. If you didn’t know it already, it wasn’t a place you were likely to stop if you were driving by — even if it weren’t on an obscure Montgomery, Alabama, side street, which it most definitely is.

The view from the outside.
But that was once upon a time. Now the challenge is sifting through too much information to capture a useful recommendation from the fire-hose gush that is the Internet.

I tasked Lilly to find a place for lunch before we left Montgomery. She came up with Davis Cafe. It’s a soul food meat-and-three. Or rather meat-and-two, but that hardly mattered, since the helpings were so ample and so wonderful.

I had the ribs, with black-eyed peas and yams, while Lilly had catfish with collard greens and macaroni, with corn bread for the both of us. Exceptionally good eating and good value as well. My kind of place. Like the gone but not hardly forgotten Mack’s Country Cooking in Nashville.
We didn’t have a bad meal in New Orleans, or even anything mediocre, which wasn’t much of a surprise. We visited a number of spots on Decatur St. in the Quarter, including the wonderful Coop’s Place, where I had rabbit and sausage jambalaya and an Abita beer; another spot where we had shrimp and crayfish and corn al fresco — better yet, on the second-floor balcony, and Lilly said it was her favorite meal of the trip; and a yet another place for beans and rice.

But my own favorite of the New Orleans visit was Li’l Dizzy’s Cafe on Esplanade Ave. in Treme for lunch the first day. It too was located using tech that didn’t exist the last time I was in town.

Li’l Dizzy’s lunch buffet might have been the thing, but we wanted to eat dinner that evening with some appetite, so we ordered off the menu. Had me a shrimp po’ boy to make up for the fact that when passing through Lafayette, Louisiana, the day before, Olde Tyme Grocery was closed for Sunday. Ten years later, my memory of the Old Tyme po’ boy hadn’t faded, and I wanted another. Li’l Dizzy’s po’ boy didn’t disappoint.

(We were hungry all the same in Lafayette, so we stopped at the absolutely nondescript, immigrant-run Charlie’s Seafood. It wasn’t Old Tyme, but it sure was a good place for fried seafood at a low cost.)

Two days out of three, breakfast in New Orleans meant the Cafe du Monde, because of course it did. One of the virtues of the Hotel Chateau was the five-minute walk to the cafe.

The cafe and its beignets are precisely the way I remember them from 30 and more years ago, or at least as I wanted to remember them. Light and sweet and as satisfying as waking up on a day off with more days off ahead.

We did learn, however, that the time to go was around 9, if breakfast is the goal. Earlier than that probably means a crowd of workers there for morning coffee. Later, by 10 or so, and there’s definitely a much larger tourist crowd. I don’t have anything against tourists, except when they all want the same thing as I do at the same time — a potential problem with any crowd.

So one morning we went to the Market Cafe instead, a simple restaurant in the French Market. Had a Southern, rather than specifically New Orleans, breakfast that day: biscuits and gravy, enjoyed while a three musicians played in the background.

The sort of breakfast you have if you’re going to go out and work on the farm all day, I told Lilly. Not too many people work on a farm anymore, but the breakfast hasn’t changed, which helps make us fat in the 21st century. On the other hand, we had a long day of walking ahead of us, so the breakfast geared us up for it.

Sorry to report that Miss Ruby’s is no more. It was a shoebox of a French Quarter restaurant on St. Philip St. that I remember fondly from 1989. Especially the pie. When I get my Tardis-like device to travel to my favorite restaurants, past or present, open or closed, I’m returning to Miss Ruby’s for pie.

Oddly enough, a good description of that long-lost restaurant is in the comments section of a book hawked by Amazon: Miss Ruby’s Southern Creole and Cajun Cuisine: The Cooking That Captured New Orleans (1991).

Reviewer Susan said: “I had the pleasure of many years ago (1980s), stumbling upon Miss Ruby’s restaurant while on a trip to New Orleans with an old boyfriend… Miss Ruby came to the door as we stood outside contemplating a place that looked more like her kitchen then a restaurant. She introduced herself with a big smile and welcomed us in. To this day I can recall what we ate, fried chicken, the sweetest green peas ever, lemonade to die for and I believe a German Forest Cake.”

Except for a few details (girlfriend instead of boyfriend, pie instead of cake), that was pretty much the Miss Ruby’s I encountered late in the ’80s.

In Nashville, we ate at somewhere old and somewhere new, though actually our best meals in town were homemade by my friends Stephanie and Wendall, with whom we stayed. But for restaurant food, we first went to the Elliston Place Soda Shop, which has been open since 1939 and looks the same as it did when I first went ca. 1980. The next day we ate lunch at the fairly new and highly aesthetic Butchertown Hall, open only since 2015.

Nashville Guru says: “Butchertown Hall gets its name from one of Germantown’s old nicknames ‘Butchertown,’ inspired by the numerous German immigrants who worked as butchers in the neighborhood. The first thing you notice when you walk through the Butchertown Hall doors is the appetizing smokey scent coming from the Grillworks Infierno 96 Grill (one of only three in the country). The high ceilings and natural light make the space feel large and open. A mossy rock wall separates the sleek bar and main dining area. There are community tables, two-top tables, four-top tables, and benches throughout the restaurant with seating for up to 130 people.”

It was Sunday, so the brunch menu was on the offing. I had the brisket and gravy — more gravy! — and it was tasty indeed. The place was a little loud, though, making conversation, which is what you want as much as the food during brunch, a little hard.

That there are newish restaurants in Nashville is no surprise. It’s a growing city. What surprised me walking around before and after eating at Butchertown Hall was that the entire Germantown neighborhood seemed new. New apartments, retail and restaurants, created ex nihilo in recent years (but naturally, according to demand). Now Germantown is a happening Nashville neighborhood. What was it 35 years ago? Nothing to speak of. As in, I don’t ever remember hearing anything about it when I lived in Nashville.

This and other Nashville growth nodes — that means you, Gulch — were the subjects of much old-person conversation during the time we were in Nashville. Old, as in me and my friends. Young Lilly put up with it.

Ave Maria Grotto

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From what I’ve read about Brother Joseph Zoettl, O.S.B. (1878-1961), he wouldn’t have cared whether he was depicted in bronze or not. Be that as it may, many years after his death, Br. Joseph stands facing his creation, the Ave Maria Grotto, on the grounds of St. Bernard Abbey near Cullman, Alabama.

Driving north from Montgomery toward Decatur on the afternoon of May 17, we weren’t about to miss the grotto. It features 150 or so miniature replicas of famous buildings, almost all created by Br. Joseph over three decades, out of found materials.

“Originally from Landschutt, Bavaria-Germany, a young Br. Joseph found himself headed to America to pursue monastic life at Alabama’s only Benedictine Abbey,” the abbey web site says.

“Little did anyone know that this young Bavarian would end up leaving the abbey its greatest legacy and in an incredibly humble way. Since 1934, people from around the world visit the Ave Maria Grotto to see famous parts of the world in miniature. The former abbey quarry is now the four-acre park that the Grotto and surrounding miniatures rest upon.”

Many of the structures are perched on the side of a slope, with a path winding down below for a look at them.

As you’d expect, most of the structures replicate Christian churches or shrines or scenes, such as the First Christmas.
A wayside shrine, modeled after those popular in Latin America.
Lourdes Basilica and Grotto.
St. Martin’s in Landshut, Bavaria. This was one of the few structures that Br. Joseph had actually seen. The rest he did working off photos — postcards especially.
Sometimes, Br. Joseph decided to build something a little less religious. Such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Or “Hansel and Gretel Visit the Castle of the Fairies.” I don’t remember that part of the story. Maybe it was part of the sequel: Hansel and Gretel vs. the Fairies of Doom.
Roadside America: “The Grotto is not some holy shrine that got out of control. From the start, it was conceived as an over-the-top public attraction.

“Using only basic hand tools, Brother Joseph would shape cement into a replica building, then give it some zing with marbles, seashells, cracked dinner plates, or bicycle reflectors. Tiny-but-majestic domes were fashioned from old birdcages and toilet tank floats.”

The abbey includes a good deal more than the grotto.
There’s a church and school, and a few minute’s walk from the grotto, a cemetery for the monks. Br. Joe’s cross is in there somewhere.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice & The Legacy Museum

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As you enter the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on a hill in downtown Montgomery, Alabama — as we did on May 17 — it’s hard to see what’s ahead.
The path passes “Nkyinkyim Installation” by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, erected with the memorial when it opened only last year. The work speaks for itself.

The memorial structure includes over 800 corten steel (weathering steel) monuments, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. Engraved on the columns are the names of the lynching victims documented for that county.

Here are the victims in Wilcox County, Alabama, to pick one of the first steel monuments you encounter: Riley Gulley, William Lewis, Arthur Stewart and Ephreim Pope.
Visitors enter the memorial at one corner of the square shape. On the first side of the memorial, the steel monuments are flush with the floor, with the names at eye level or lower.

On the second side of the memorial, the floor begins to slope downward in the direction of travel, but the steel monuments continue to be at the same level.
In the third side of the memorial, the floor slopes even more and the effect becomes very noticeable. The steel monuments are hanging.
You need to look up to see the county names.

The fourth side. The effect is practically tunnel-like by now.
The writing on one wall says:

For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned, and burned, for the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law.

We will remember.

With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.

Water flows down the other wall.

The text:

Thousands of African American are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never been known. They are all honored here.

Outside the memorial structure are smaller versions of the steel monuments arrayed in long lines, lying with their text face up. I understand that if a county named on one of them wants to use it as part of a local memorial to lynching victims, it will be given for that purpose. So far no county has taken any of them.

The Legacy Museum, developed by the same organization as the memorial — the Equal Justice Initiative — is also in downtown Montgomery, pointedly in a building where enslaved black people were imprisoned, near the site of the city’s 19th-century slave market. By the mid-1800s, Montgomery was the focus of the slave trade in Alabama.
In full, it is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. It’s a small museum, 11,000 square feet, but a powerful one.

The EJI web site for the museum says: “Visitors encounter a powerful sense of place when they enter the museum and confront slave pen replicas, where you can see, hear, and get close to what it was like to be imprisoned awaiting sale at the nearby auction block. First-person accounts from enslaved people narrate the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade. Extensive research and videography helps visitors understand the racial terrorism of lynching, and the humiliation of the Jim Crow South.”

The museum also illustrates that the more recent (and ongoing) war on drugs, a toxic interplay of political calculation and moral panic, has made black Americans “vulnerable to a new era of racial bias and abuse of power wielded by our contemporary criminal justice system.”

A quote from the all together remarkable EJI Director Bryan Stevenson, who lead the effort to build the memorial and create the museum:

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape. This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

Natchez &c.

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When we left New Orleans to drive to Natchez, Mississippi, on May 15, the uninspired route would be have been I-10 to Baton Rouge and then north on US 61. Instead I wanted to drive across Lake Pontchartrain, because I’ve seen that crossing on maps for years. Better yet, it’s no extra charge, since the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway collects no toll northbound.

The morning was bright and traffic light on the causeway. It’s actually two bridges, one each way, so you don’t face miles and miles of unavoidable oncoming traffic mere feet away. An enjoyable stretch of road under those conditions. Uneventful enough driving to ponder the engineering marvel that’s the causeway while still on it.

Before going, I wondered if there would be a few minutes on the causeway when we would be out of sight of land. I’d read claims to that effect. But the answer is no, not that I saw. I spotted the north shore of the lake in the distance before the south shore had completely vanished from my rear-view mirror. Once you get to the other side of the lake, you’re in Mandeville, Louisiana. I-12 from there connects with US 61 in Baton Rouge.

By early afternoon, we were in Natchez, Mississippi. The town has some good views of the Mississippi River from a park on the bluff.
The local gazebo.
It was too hot to wander around in the noonday sun for long. We decided not to tour one of the local antebellum homes, but rather spend the afternoon heading further north on the Natchez Trace Parkway to seek out antebellum ruins instead.

Lilly drove part of the way on the Trace and I played with my camera.

Others might find the driving dull, but I like driving the Trace for its lush greenery, and also its sparse traffic. No trucks at all.

We took a diversion off the Trace before going to Port Gibson and on to Jackson, along a winding country lane called Rodney Road. Go far enough on that road, and you’ll come to the Windsor Ruins.
I can’t remember where I read about the ruins, but the place has been filed under my Possible Minor Destinations for a good while. That’s such a sprawling, unorganized mental catalog of places that it’s a wonder that I ever remember to take the right detours at the right time.

We were the only ones there once another car left a minute or two after we arrived. Considering that the ruins used to be the heart of an enormous plantation, it’s remarkable how lonely the spot now feels. History has passed it by.

The view from the ruins.
“Windsor, built between 1859 and 1861, was the home of Smith Coffee Daniell II, a wealthy planter who had extensive properties in the Delta and in Arkansas,” the NPS says. “Completed in 1861, the home was the largest house built at that time [in Mississippi], the plantation once covering over 2,600 acres.

Curiously, Daniell died on April 12, 1861. The mansion survived the war, probably because the Union army used it as soon as the area had been captured, but it burned down by accident in 1890.

The fence is fairly new, added by the state, which now owns the site. Guess the state of Mississippi doesn’t want any of the 23 massive Corinthian columns coming down on any hapless visitors. They’re looking a little dodgy.

Garden District Walkabout, Including Lafayette Cemetery No. 1

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Someone once warned me about the condition of the sidewalks in the French Quarter, but on the whole, they weren’t that bad. For crumbling, occasionally hazardous sidewalks, the Quarter or even Treme couldn’t compare with the Garden District. Some stretches reminded me of Mexico City in that regard.

The houses in the Garden District clearly represent a concentration of wealth, so you’d think the sidewalks would be repaired. Maybe it’s that New Orleans is a trifle lax when it comes to infrastructure, but I don’t actually know that — the idea merely fits with the city’s reputation.

Or it could be a weird municipal dynamic: the city can’t appear to put too much money into the roads and sidewalks of an affluent area like the Garden District. Bad optics. So the area’s infrastructure is a little rough. Maybe the residents don’t care much. The only people on foot in the district seemed to be tourists, singly or in tour groups.

Never mind, it’s a good place for a walk, if you pay attention, and even when the Southern sun begins to beat down, as it did late on the morning of May 14. Sometimes shade is there for the taking.

The trees part to reveal some fine houses.

My favorite among those I saw, though of course that was a small fraction of the area’s visual richness.
Our walk took us past some houses marked as historic, such as the Goldsmith-Godchaux House.
Alas, it seems to be noted more for its invisible (to us) interior than the exterior, though that’s nice enough. The plaque outside says: “Designed by noted nineteenth century architect Henry Howard in 1859. Significant for its painted interiors. Has more fresco wall decoration and stenciling than probably any other mid-nineteenth century residence in the South.”

It occurred to me, walking along and sweating, that the Garden District represents 19th-century urban sprawl. New development is often spoken of as if it’s kudzu, which grows willy-nilly and takes over the place. This is nonsense, since residential development follows demand, though infrastructure spending helps facilitate it (in the 20th century, that means you, Robert Moses).

In any case, the demand was there after New Orleans became part of the United States, since the new English-speaking population didn’t particularly want to live with the Creoles in the Vieux Carré. They probably considered the old city an old dump.

Who started subdividing the plantations that used to be the Garden District? I had to find out. A singularly interesting character named Barthélémy Lafon, a Frenchman who seems to have skipped out on the Revolution, coming to New Orleans in 1789.

According to 64 Parishes, “Barthélémy Lafon enjoyed a long and diverse career in Louisiana as an architect, builder, engineer, surveyor, cartographer, town planner, land speculator, publisher, and pirate.”

My italics. Though it seems like he was more of a rich-man sponsor of pirates than someone who went to sea in search of booty. Even pirates need seed capital.

Down on Magazine St., we walked by some interesting commercial structures, such this one at the corner of Magazine and Jackson.

As it says, the building is home to Koch & Wilson Architects, who (I found out) are restoration specialists. Good for them. A fine thing to be in New Orleans. Among other things, the firm restored the nearby St. Mary’s Assumption. Sadly, we couldn’t get in to see that.

On the first floor of the Koch and Wilson Architects building is a flag shop, a deli and a doughnut shop (and H&R Block, but never mind). How cool a tenant roster is that?
We stopped by for doughnuts, and coldbrew coffee for Lilly. The shop served large and pricey hipster doughnuts, something not especially distinctive to New Orleans, but who cares. They were good.

Walking down Magazine, you come across this curiosity.
I’d look that up, but I’d rather not know exactly what you’d see there. We all need a little mystery, even in the age of Google.

Down the other direction on Magazine is a joint after my own heart, but we didn’t stop in.
I couldn’t visit the Garden District without dropping in on Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. It was a more popular place than most cemeteries I’ve been to.

The collection of tombs is similar to that of Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1, a mix of maintained and crumbling examples.
The cemetery had better shade than Saint Louis, mostly in the form of sheltering magnolias, and wider avenues of the dead in some places.
Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 also has some collective tombs. This one says Jefferson Fire Company, 1852.
Here’s one for orphans.
Society for the Relief of Destitute Orphan Boys, 1894. If that isn’t Victorian nomenclature, I don’t know what is.

The National WW II Museum

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World War II was a big war, and it has an impressively big museum in New Orleans, the National WW II Museum, which we visited on May 14. The focus isn’t the whole — that’s too big — but rather the American part in the global conflict. A big enough subject.

All together, the museum includes five buildings of more than one story each, artifacts large and small, a vast number of words to read with the exhibits, and dozens of continuous video presentations.

The building reminded me a bit of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, but a different architect did the work, Bart Voorsanger.

The structure isn’t finished yet. Looks like the wing-like-thing (wing of victory?) is being added right now.

A museum of this scope is exhaustive and exhausting, but I’m getting old. It has a lot of ground to cover, of course, but more than that the museum needs heft to amplify the war’s increasingly dim echo as time passes. It’s mostly vanished from living memory.

The Second World War was my parents’ war, so when I was growing up, the echo was pretty loud, largely in the torrent of books and movies and TV shows dealing with the war. Some of my earliest memories of watching TV include Combat! and The Rat Patrol, to use examples of televised WWII fiction more and less serious. The details of the war might have faded some by the time I came along — it was years before I got Bugs Bunny’s joke about A cards at the end of “Falling Hare” — but the big picture was still clear.

Time passes, even the big picture fades. Just look at what has happened to the Great War. It’s all we can do that they shall not grow old.

So the National WWII Museum starts off big, with a Douglas C-47 Skytrain hanging from the ceiling over the entrance and ticketing counter, which is in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion.
On the floor is a replica LCVP, built from original plans. This kind of boat is pretty much the reason the museum is in New Orleans.
As an acronym, LCVP is about as standard Army as you can get: “landing craft, vehicle, personnel.” Less formally, they’re Higgins boats, designed by Andrew Higgins and built en masse during the war by Higgins Industries of New Orleans.

Wiki describes the usefulness of the boats well: “The Higgins boat was used for many amphibious landings, including Operation Overlord on D-Day in Nazi German-occupied Normandy, and previously Operation Torch in North Africa, the Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Shingle and Operation Avalanche in Italy, Operation Dragoon, as well as in the Pacific Theatre at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Battle of Tarawa, the Battle of the Philippines, the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa.”

Pretty much a greatest hits of U.S. amphibious landings during the war. In its early days, beginning in 2000, the museum focused on D-Day exclusively, so what better place than the city where the Higgins boats were built?

Upstairs in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is a floor devoted to the U.S. industrial production so critical to victory. As the museum notes, “By the time the Japanese surrendered in 1945… American manufacturers had turned out more than 96,000 bombers, 86,000 tanks, 2.4 million trucks, 6.5 million rifles, and billions of dollars’ worth of supplies to equip a truly global fighting force.”

A number of artifacts illustrate the Arsenal of Democracy, such as a jeep chassis.
Along with smaller items, such as the cigarettes, chocolate and gum that made a soldier’s lot slightly more bearable.
A machine to make dog tags.
They actually were an innovation just before WWI, at least as far as Americans were concerned. For millennia, many men went off to war and simply vanished. I remember, for instance, seeing at Gettysburg National Cemetery row upon row of stones marked UNKNOWN.

Also in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is the D-Day exhibit. As the original crux of the museum, it’s very detailed, with artifacts, images, reading material and more. The rooms reminded me of the Musée du Débarquement Arromanches in Normandy, though that facility had the advantage of looking out on the remains of one of the artificial harbors used during the landing.

A copy of the Order of the Day, June 6, 1944, along with French currency presumably carried by soldiers. Notes, not coins.

Another building, Campaigns of Courage, highlights the course of the war in the European and Pacific theaters with artifacts, photos, movies, text and some elaborate diorama-like sections that visitors walk through.

In Europe, for example, the Seige of Bastogne, done to look like snowy woods, though without the freezing temps. In the Pacific, the Guadalcanal Campaign, done to look like a tropical rain forest, though without the venomous bugs. There’s only so much verisimilitude a museum can do.

It took quite a while to work our way through these exhibits and, as usual, I knew we were absorbing only a small fraction of what they had to offer. So it is with large museums.

About 20 minutes before the museum closed, we arrived at the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center. On display are airplanes, as you’d expect. Hanging from the high ceiling.
The centerpiece of the display is My Gal Sal, a B-17E Flying Fortress, one of only three or four such warplanes still in existence.

You can ride up to the fourth floor and look down on the plane.
Heights don’t usually bother me from behind a secure railing, but looking down from above the plane, with it filling the void below me, made me a little unsettled.

My Gal Sal probably survived because bad weather forced it to land in the wilds of Greenland in 1942, and it couldn’t fly again. The crew survived, but the plane stayed on the ice, not to be salvaged until the 1990s and restored in the early 21st century.

The Cathedral-Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France

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We couldn’t very well wander by St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter without stopping for a closer look. In full, the Cathedral-Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France. The structure took its current form in 1850.
Facing toward the altar.

Looking back.
A most handsome interior, with stained glass depicting the life Louis IX, and paintings and statuary, including Joan of Arc. I was especially intrigued by the flags. More than you usually see in a church.

Hanging on the right, as you face the altar, are flags that have flown over New Orleans, and it looks like a completist assemblage: Castile and León, Bourbon France, Bourbon Spain, the Union Jack, the Republic of France, the flag of the United States in 1803, the Republic of West Florida, the state of Louisiana, the state flag of Confederate Louisiana, and the Stars and Bars.

On the left side are a modern U.S. flag, the Vatican flag, and flags of the dioceses of the metropolitan province of New Orleans. That includes the suffragan dioceses of Alexandria, Baton Rouge, Houma-Thibodaux, Lafayette, Lake Charles, and Shreveport, but I couldn’t say which are which.

The altar and above.
I visit a lot of churches these days. If a church building is unlocked, I’ll go in for a look. But that wasn’t a habit I had when I was young. Certainly not much before 1981, when I visited the cathedral for the first time. Wish I could remember the tinge of awe that I must have felt then.

No matter. St. Louis Cathedral impresses even in my church-visiting middle age.

A Few New Orleans Statues, With Some Opinions

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As of May 2019, Gen. Andrew Jackson still rides his steed at Jackson Square in New Orleans, the dramatic centerpiece of a handsome public space.
The equestrian bronze, by notable 19th-century sculptor Clark Mills, has been there since 1856, when the Battle of New Orleans was still in living memory, at least among the old timers. I understand the monument is a target of removalists, so there might come a day when Jackson Square loses its man on horseback and becomes Something Else Square.

That’s New Orleans’ decision. Yet I’m not persuaded Jackson should go, for all his retroactively understood flaws. It’s one thing to remove monuments to those who actively sought disunion because they feared to lose their human property. Jackson and his men defeated an invading army on American soil near New Orleans. As president, he had no use for disunion, either. Just ask John C. Calhoun.

During our last day in New Orleans, Lilly and I visited the National WW II Museum, and to do so we got off the St. Charles streetcar at Lee Circle (as Google Maps calls it). Looking back at the circle, we saw an empty pedestal.

That’s odd, I said to Lilly. But I must have known at some time — I’d ridden on the St. Charles line decades earlier — that a statue of Robert E. Lee used to stand atop the pedestal. I’d forgotten. I don’t ever remember taking a close look at the Lee statue, since I haven’t always watched for monuments as much as I do now.

Just yesterday, it occurred to me to look up Lee Circle, and was reminded that removal activists were able to persuade New Orleans to take down Lee and three other monuments in 2017. Sic transit gloria mundi, Gen. Lee.

Of course, there are many ideas about a new statue to put on Lee’s former spot. Among this selection, the one I like best on prima facie examination is the relatively unknown J. Lawton Collins, a New Orleans native and important commander during WWII. He’s also appropriate because the museum devoted to that war is mere blocks away. Or if a strictly military option is out, Andrew Higgins, of Higgins boat fame, seems reasonable.

Here’s another statue that has gained the ire of removalists: Chief Justice of the United States Edward Douglass White Jr., who had a long and varied career but sided with the majority on the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision. (Most sources double that s in his middle name, but the statue does not.)

The chief justice stands on Royal St. in front of the major edifice housing the Louisiana Supreme Court, a building whose reputation has varied across the decades. We just happened to walk by.

Later I wondered, what’s the state supreme court doing in New Orleans and not Baton Rouge? Guess as far as the court is concerned, Baton Rouge is a johnny-come-lately capital, having that title only since 1846.

Chief Justice White would be a harder nut to crack for the removalists than Lee, simply because among the generally ahistoric American people, whipping up righteous outrage about someone as obscure as White would be a tall order. But it might happen.

In Louis Armstrong Park, where we had a pleasant stroll despite the increasing heat, there are plenty of statues that will probably last a good long time. Satchmo himself certainly deserves to.
Elizabeth Catlett did the bronze, which was dedicated in 1980.

Other metal jazzmen grace the park, such as a marching brass band by sculptor and New Orleans native Sheleen Jones-Adenle, erected in 2010.
Here’s a tripartite statue of foundational jazzman Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden created by sculptor Kimberly Dummons, also from 2010. Such triple figures aren’t common, but not unknown.

In Congo Square, there’s a vivid sculptural relief by Nigerian-born artist Adéwálé Adénlé fittingly called “Congo Square,” another of the 2010 class of works in the park.

That hardly covers everything in Louis Armstrong Park. Whoever Mike is, he made good images of these and other sculptures there.

Next to the French Market, at St. Philip and Decatur Sts., is Maid of Orleans, a gift from France to New Orleans and erected in 1972.
A replica of the 1880 Emmanuel Frémiet equestrian statue of Joan of Arc in Place des Pyramids in Paris, the Maid used to be at the foot of Canal St., but when a casino was developed there, she moved to her present location in the Quarter.

One more: A seated statue of Francis Xavier Seelos.
Francis Xavier Seelos statueHow we came see that statue, during our walkabout in the Garden District, is slightly convoluted. But that’s never stopped me from pursuing a destination.

While relaxing at the Chateau Hotel during the second evening, I queued up “Pearl of the Quarter,” a dulcet song about a New Orleans long gone and which never quite was. One of its lines: “I met my baby by the shrine of the martyr.”

A flight of Steely Dan fancy, I’m sure, but if you Google around using that term and “New Orleans,” pretty soon you come across the National Shrine of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos at St. Mary’s Assumption Church in New Orleans. Which just happened to be not too far from where we were going to go the next day.

So we visited the shrine and its reliquary, which are separated from the nave of the church by a wall and a door — locked. We didn’t get to see the interior of the church as a result, which I understand is well worth seeing.

The seated statue is in the hallway outside the shrine itself, which includes a number of exhibits about Fr. Seelos, a Redemptorist from Bavaria, along with many relics and a more conventional standing statue of him at the end of the hall.

Fr. Seelos, for his part, was beatified by the church in 2000. He came to New Orleans as a missionary in the 1866.

“As pastor of the Church of St. Mary of the Assumption, he was… joyously available to his faithful and singularly concerned for the poorest and the most abandoned,” Seelos.org says.

“In God’s plan, however, his ministry in New Orleans was destined to be brief. In the month of September, exhausted from visiting and caring for the victims of yellow fever, he contracted the dreaded disease. After several weeks of patiently enduring his illness, he passed on to eternal life on October 4, 1867.”