Category Archives: Been There

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.”

Nicolas Cage, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans & the Young Cemetery Enthusiast

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Back again on Tuesday, after Memorial Day.

These days, you need to be part of an organized tour to legally visit Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, though considering that city’s reputation, I expect people still slip in. But I wanted to do things the official way, so on the morning of May 13, Lilly and I were part of a Free Tours on Foot tour of the historic cemetery. That’s a pay-what-you-will organization whose tours I first enjoyed in Charleston, SC.

Actually, not free in this case, even if you’re a wanker who doesn’t tip the guide at the end of the tour, since the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans, owner of the cemetery, demands a $2 fee per person paid upfront. Not that onerous, and I hope that it all goes to maintenance of the place. (Also, I tipped our guide, since I’m not going to be that wanker.)

New Orleans cemeteries famously sport above-ground tombs, a feature I long believed stemmed from the region’s high water table. That seems to be a common notion, repeated in guidebooks in an earlier time, and on many web sites more recently.

Our guide, an earnest young man and New Orleans history buff, told us otherwise.
What he said was pretty much in line with how an interesting web site called Interesting Thing of the Day explains it: “Tour guides seldom mention that above-ground burial was a common practice in both France and Spain, where many of the early settlers were from. Even without the resurfacing coffins — which, by the way, were the exception rather than the rule — this practice may well have been adopted simply to keep with tradition. In any case, this method is still widely used today, even though the water table has dropped considerably over the past two centuries as nearby marshes and swamps were drained.

“In New Orleans… bodies are usually placed inside the walls of the tombs. Because of the hot, subtropical climate, the tomb then effectively becomes an oven, and the high heat causes the body to decompose rapidly in a process that has been compared to a slow cremation. Within about a year, only bones are left.

“Just as an oven would not be constructed to bake a single loaf of bread, the tombs in New Orleans cemeteries are used again and again. The specifics vary depending on the exact design of the tomb, but a typical scenario is that after a year, the bones of the departed are swept into an opening in the floor of the tomb, which is then ready for its next occupant. It is a common practice to bury all the members of a family — or multiple families — in the same tomb, with names and dates added to a plaque or headstone as necessary.”

Overall, Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 has the look and feel of a dense necropolis, with avenues of the dead running between the tombs.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 Some of the tombs — a good many — are well maintained. Others, not so much.

We saw a number of examples of tombs used by many occupants over the years, including those of mutual aid societies established in New Orleans in the 19th century. The most ornate of these is the New Orleans Italian Mutual Benevolent Society’s tomb.

Architect Pietro Gualdi designed the tomb in the mid-1850s and went as far as inscribing his name on it. The tomb’s 24 vaults were for the temporary use of the society’s members, with its basement serving as an ossuary. The guide said that Gualdi died of one of the diseases that killed a lot of people in 19th-century New Orleans, maybe malaria, and was one of the first people interred in his creation (Wiki asserts malaria for sure).

Another collective tomb: the Orleans Battalion of Artillery.

Its plaque says:

Within this burial memorial rest some of the gallant defenders of New Orleans, members of the battalion which fought in honor on the plains of Chalmette on January 8, 1815 against the British invaders.

Date of construction is unknown.

Restored in 1974

Naturally the tour went by one of the cemetery’s odder tombs — that commissioned by actor Nicolas Cage, presumably to bake his mortal remains when the time comes.
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 Nicholas CageI’ve read he’s gotten a lot of flack for it. The tomb does look a little out of place, but then again, pyramids aren’t unknown in cemeteries — and why do all the tombs need to be rectangular? Also, the archdiocese clearly signed off on the thing, presumably persuaded by the actor’s payment of a generous fee.

In a century, tours will probably pass by the pyramid, by that time stained and a little crumbled, and explain that an eccentric movie actor had it built for himself in the early 21st century. Maybe the guide will have to explain what a movie was. And say that the actor supposedly believed in the power of voodoo to revive him, and in fact practiced voodoo himself.

I made that last part up as an example of a story someone might tell in the future. After all, such stories occasionally cling to someone long after their death. Take the example of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose tomb the tour visited last (she’s there with a number of other people, per cemetery custom).
Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 Marie LaveauMarie LaRoadside America: “Marie Laveau ran a New Orleans hairdressing salon during the day, but on her off-hours she was (supposedly) the Voodoo Queen, sought after for her potions and charms that would bring love or money to those willing to pay the price.

“Laveau died in 1881, but a tradition later developed that she could still grant favors from beyond the grave if believers either left offerings or scrawled three Xs on her tomb. This resulted in what was clearly the messiest grave in the U.S., and caused no end of headaches for local preservationists, who had to constantly clean and repair the tomb only to have it trashed again.

“They finally had enough and, on March 1, 2015, the cemetery was declared off-limits to all tourists except tour groups led by licensed tour guides.”

Marie Laveau’s grave is clean white these days, though if you look closely enough, you can see traces of those Xs drawn on the stone. As for Mme. Laveau’s skills in the voodoo arts, the guide suggested we take those stories with grains of salt. I will. New Orleans seems to have more than her share of such stories, yet we love her for it.

Usually members of a tour like this don’t have that many questions, but one young woman — college age, I think, on the tour with her mother — peppered the guide with an unusual number of questions that betrayed a strong interest in cemeteries and funerary practices.

The tour wound down at the Basin St. Station, a redevelopment between the cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park that has a New Orleans visitors center, exhibits and event space. A few of us stayed there to speak with the guide a little longer, and he and I and the young cemetery enthusiast started comparing notes about cemeteries worth visiting. I suggested Green-Wood in Brooklyn and Woodland in Dayton, though of course I can never remember its name. One suggestion of his — or hers — was Akaroa Cemetery in New Zealand, which I have to say does look pretty cool.

Formerly the Chateau Motor Hotel

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Recently I became re-acquainted with these fellows. Cement puti, I guess.

These figures as well.

They all can be found in the pleasant but hardly opulent courtyard of the Hotel Chateau in the French Quarter. The figures were there when I first visited New Orleans in 1981 and stayed at the hotel. They stood in the courtyard when I went back in 1989. They may only be ordinary stone, but they abide.

The hotel abides. Its history? The hotel web site page called History is remarkably free of any actual information on the subject. Enough to know that it’s an old place. This is the Vieux Carré, after all.

A little context. The first group of figures is one of a set that stand between a tall brick wall and a small swimming pool that’s the centerpiece of the courtyard.
The other figures decorate a small fountain near the courtyard entrance.

As far as I can tell, or remember, the hotel and its courtyard haven’t changed much in the nearly four decades since I first saw it. The walls looked old then, as they do now. The rooms seemed equally old, yet comfortable enough, then as now.

But memory across decades is always dodgy, and since my previous visits involved taking no pictures of the place, I can’t really say what it used to be like, except that the figures and pool were there.

It might astonish later generations, but none of the four of us took a camera on our three-day trip to New Orleans in 1981. For her part, Lilly did what people now do on such as trip: a running commentary to friends elsewhere, especially highlighting the food by transmitting images of it. Well, why not? If we’d had the same electronic gizmos, we would have done the same.

The view from the entrance of the courtyard.

The view from the second-story balcony. Our room was up there.

We could have stayed any number of places in New Orleans, or in the French Quarter, for that matter. I didn’t consider the Hotel Chateau overpriced, so that was a factor in deciding the stay there again. Its location at the corner of St. Phillip St. and Chartres St. is excellent, and that was a factor as well.
But the main reason we stayed there, beginning on May 12, was nostalgia. My own nostalgia for the place. Nostalgia might be derided as a kind of weepy foolishness, but I believe a dose of it now and then is a balm for the stress of the present, whatever that might be. A dose of personal nostalgia, that is, not the kind sold in stores.

Back in the 1980s, the property was called the Chateau Motor Hotel. I have a room service menu, dating from 1989, to prove it. I used it for note-taking on that trip. I might not have taken many pictures then (I had a camera the second time), but I filled four pages with notes about what we did.

This is only speculation, but at some point someone, maybe a new owner, decided that “motor” was déclassé, and the word was dumped. It’s entirely likely that in some earlier decade, say the 1950s, “motor” was added to the name because it sounded modern.

I don’t know why we stayed there the first time. One of my other companions had arranged the stay, maybe because another friend or relative had stayed there even earlier. It was a pre-Google, pre-Trip Advisor time. So our stay in 2019 originated in word-of-mouth very likely over 40 years old.

During that first visit, we spent at least one evening splashing around the pool — at its size, swimming wasn’t much of an option — and talking the banter and nonsense you find in a small group of friends. With one exception, I don’t remember any of it. I do remember a fairly involved discussion of the precise lyrics and larger meaning of “Across the Universe.”

When Lilly and I were sitting in the courtyard reading late one afternoon during this stay, two young men and a woman came to splash around in the pool. They were probably a little older than we were in the early ’80s, but not much. Their own banter and nonsense soon started.

Houston Water Features

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Near the Galleria in Houston, which is a mixed-use property that includes the 1.9 million-square-foot mall of that name as well as office towers and a couple of hotels, is a local feature unlike any other: the Gerald D. Hines Waterwall Park. Or more commonly, the Waterwall.

Waterwall is an apt name, with water cascading down the front.
Water cascades down the back as well.
According to a nearby plaque, 11,000 gallons of water spill over the walls per minute, from a height of 64 feet. John Burgee Architects, working with Philip Johnson, designed the massive water feature, apparently inspired by ancient Roman theaters.

This is a drone’s view. All we had were our own eyes to appreciate the place.

It’s a popular place to have your picture taken, front and back, but especially in the circle near the spray coming off the waterwall.
More than one person asked Lilly to take their picture at the site, including the young couple above, dressed to the nines.

Completed in 1985, Waterwall was privately owned until it looked like ownership might destroy it. In 2008, the Uptown Houston Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, a local nonprofit, acquired the Waterwall and the surrounding land. That might have been when I first read about the Waterwall, but then I forgot about it.

We stayed near the Galleria — in the nicest La Quinta I’ve ever stayed at — and when I was mapping out a route to visit the mall, I noticed the Waterwall nearby on Google Maps. I remembered it instantly and knew I wanted to go. We saw it late on the afternoon of May 11.

The next morning, we checked out and headed for New Orleans. But not before we spent a while near Buffalo Bayou, the main river through metro Houston. It’s another map feature that I wanted to see with my own eyes.

The park associated with Buffalo Bayou near downtown Houston has its charms, one of which is a view of downtown Houston.
That is the city’s original downtown, but at least in terms of office building density, the Galleria area now functions as another downtown for Houston. I knew that because I’ve read about the Galleria office market, but seeing it myself drove the point home.

Lilly and I walked along the Buffalo Bayou Park path for about an hour.

At one point, the landscape urged us onward.

At the tip end of Buffalo Bayou Park facing downtown is the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern. I can’t remember when I read about that. It wasn’t long ago.
Maybe in the likes of Atlas Obscura. That publication saves me the trouble of writing a description, along with the embarrassment of publishing the crummy pictures that I took inside the cistern.

“Built in 1926, this 87,500-square-foot… space was one of Houston’s first underground reservoirs,” the Atlas says. “The eight-inch-thick concrete roof is supported by 221 concrete pillars reaching 25 feet high that march in rows into the dim distance.

“A public works facility for decades, an irreparable leak was eventually found in the structures walls and thus it was subsequently decommissioned in 2007. The city was preparing to demolish it when it was found by the partnership developing Buffalo Bayou Park. After briefly considering using it for parking or mulch storage, the developers decided to keep it as an unusual and attractive space for park visitors.”

We took the 20-minute tour inside. “That was cool,” Lilly said afterward, meaning it metaphorically, not literally. I was expecting the inside of the cistern to be cool like a cave, but it was closer to room temperature. Anyway, I completely agree with Lilly.

The Painted Churches

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Just outside the hamlet of Serbin, Texas, if you follow your map but also keep your eyes peeled — because the map isn’t quite accurate — you’ll find yourself outside St. Paul Lutheran Church. The exterior is nice, but isn’t particularly distinctive.
Inside is a different story.
St. Paul is one of the Painted Churches found in Central Texas. In its case, the church was built in the late 19th century, but not decorated until 1906, when the congregation itself took up the task.

“Cross the threshold of these particular Texas churches and you’ll encounter not a simple wooden interior but an unexpected profusion of color,” says KLRU, which aired a documentary on the churches nearly 20 years ago.

“Nearly every surface is covered with bright painting: exuberant murals radiate from the apse, elaborate foliage trails the walls, wooden columns and baseboards shine like polished marble in shades of green and gray. These are the Painted Churches of Texas.

“Built by 19th-century immigrants to this rough but promising territory, these churches transport the visitor back to a different era, a different way of life. Inscriptions on the walls read not in English, but in the mother tongue of those who built them: German and Czech.”

I’ve wanted to visit the Painted Churches for some time now, but something or other has always make it inconvenient to do so. Still, potential destinations sometimes get under your skin, so I designed part of this particular driving trip to scratch that longstanding itch.

Heading south from Waco on U.S. 77 on May 11 in sometimes heavy rain — sheets of rain — we passed through such towns as Rosebud, Cameron, Rockdale and Giddings, and near the wonderfully named Old Dime Box. St. Paul Lutheran is near Giddings and the first of the four churches we visited.

Further south, in the town of Ammansville, is St. John the Baptist Church. We went there next.

A cemetery is adjacent to St. John the Baptist, which was built in 1918 and painted the next year by one Fred. Donecker of San Antonio, who seemed to specialize in church interiors.

St. Mary’s, also known as Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin, is in High Hill, and was built in 1906.
St. Mary’s billed itself as the Queen of the Painted Churches, and it was indeed gorgeous. Unfortunately, it was also dark inside. These pictures capture a bit of its ornate interior.

St. Mary’s stained glass captured a fair share of light, even on a cloudy day.
Finally, near Dubina, we visited Sts. Cyril and Methodius Church.
Artist unknown (1909), but he did a fine job.
By some counts, there are as many as 20 Painted Churches in Texas, so our visit wasn’t comprehensive. But after four or five such structures, you begin to get your fill of even the most beautiful ecclesiastical spaces anyway. Maybe I’ll see some of the others some other time.

Southern Loop ’19

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Just back from a driving trip whose mileage I didn’t bother to keep track of, but it was in the thousands. Actually, only part driving. Lilly and I flew separately from Chicago to Dallas earlier this month so she could take possession of her new car — an ’05 Mazda 3 that her uncle Jay gave her, provided we could drive it from north Texas to northern Illinois. The car rattled and occasionally made other odd noises, but soldiered on all the way.

The uninspired thing to do that would have been to drive straight through, which normally would take two days by breaking the trip in Missouri, such as at the Munger Moss.

Despite being a driving trip, that would be a pedestrian way to do it. Instead I took a week off so we could take a more interesting route. We left Dallas on May 11, heading south to the vicinity of Schulenburg, Texas, to visit some of the Painted Churches, which were built by late 19th-century German and Czech congregations who gave them richly artistic interiors — all the more interesting because much of it is vernacular art.

Rain came day most of that first day on the road, but we didn’t encounter any more until yesterday in Nashville. In between the days were sunny and often hot. Everyone we talked to about the weather reported a wet spring, however, and the Southern landscape looked lush, from Texas into the Deep South and up through Tennessee.

We spent the first night in Houston. I didn’t plan it this way, but our time in Houston focused on water features: the Waterwall near the Galleria Mall that first evening (the rain was over) and Buffalo Bayou and the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern during the next morning.

The next day we drove to New Orleans, a city I haven’t visited in 30 years, and one new to Lilly, and spent two days and three nights.

We ate very well. We saw excellent live music. We rode streetcars and walked the streets of the French Quarter, Treme and the Garden District. We toured one cemetery formally and one informally, and we visited the National WW II Museum.

On May 15, we drove to suburban Jackson, Mississippi, by way of the city of Natchez and the Natchez Trace to visit our cousin Jay and his wife Kelly, who hospitably put us up for the night.

The next day we passed through Philadelphia, Mississippi, my father’s home town, stopping for a short visit — Lilly had never been there — and then went to Montgomery, Alabama, where we spent the night.

On the morning of May 17, we saw the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both only open since last year, and the very different Alabama State Capitol, because I visit capitols when I can.

Leaving Montgomery in the early afternoon, we had enough time to visit the Ave Marie Grotto, not far north of Birmingham, and then spent the night of May 17 in Decatur, Alabama. The next morning I took a short walkabout near the Tennessee River and along Bank St., named for a handsome bank building there dating from the 1830s.

By that afternoon, we were in Nashville to visit some of my dear old friends, including one I hadn’t seen or enjoyed the fine company of since 1990. Today we did the long drive from Nashville to greater Chicago — I used to do it fairly often — arriving this evening.

Mostly, things went smoothly. Even traffic wasn’t that bad most of the time in the cities we passed through.

But while driving along Rodney Road in rural Mississippi outside Port Gibson and not far from the mighty river of that name, we suddenly came to this.
That’s stagnant algae-filled water, completely covering the road. For as far as we could see into the distance. Who knows how deep it is. So we backtracked on Rodney to the main road at that point, which happened to be the Natchez Trace.

Late Spring Break

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Time for a spring break. Later than the standard breaks taken by students, but it’s been a long time since I could call myself that. Back again around May 21.

Congratulations to my nephew Sam and his wife Emily, whose second child, Georgiana, was born healthy late last week. Nothing like having a daughter. I liked the experience so much I did it twice.

It’s a sobering thought to realize that she and her brother could well live to see the 22nd century.

Closer to home, spring can’t decide whether to be warm or cool, as usual. But there has been rain in quantity when there hasn’t been snow.

I tried to start my lawnmower last week during one of the cool days, while it was still in the garage. Nothing doing. So I anticipated draining its gas tank of old fuel, something I forgot to do in the fall.

On Saturday, when it was very much warmer, I parked the mower outside for a while and let it warm up in the sun. Then I tried to start it and voilà, it woke from its hibernation, ready to trim the grass in its noisy way.

During our recent visit to UIUC, we wandered past Davenport Hall.

From the looks of it, an ag building. But not any more. These days, it houses the university’s geography and anthropology departments. Dating from 1899, it’s one of the older buildings on campus. Nice facade. Reminds me of Texas A&M.

Not far from campus, an all together different kind of building. And yet a building. That’s a broad concept, after all. A bit of local color usually not acknowledged as such.

Some music for spring. Electroswing. Seems fitting somehow.

The first number, “Zoot Suit Riot,” released in the late ’90s, seems vaguely inspired by the incident in early ’40s Los Angeles. The quality of the video is poor, but with the crisp audio that doesn’t matter.

A more recent swing, dating from this decade, though in the case of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,” with a helping of “Diga-Diga-Doo,” the songs are original swing vintage. I’m fond of other versions as well, such as Max Raabe’s, which I saw him do.

Also recent, the lively “Gimme That Swing” and its kinetic, or maybe frenetic, video.

Speaking of music, I’ve picked one more biography to read, now that I’m done with Alexander Hamilton. A genius of a different sort: Cole Porter.

The Chicago Riverwalk

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Returning from my appointment on Friday, I took a walk along the Chicago Riverwalk — a section that wasn’t completed the last time I was paying attention — from N. LaSalle St. around to W. Lake St.

Parts of the waterfront walkway to the east were started back in 2005; the western section was only completed in 2017. The San Antonio Riverwalk, it isn’t, but Chicago has done well with what it has.

From the north end of the LaSalle St. bridge, you can see the “River Theater.”
To the west of that feature is a walkway that crosses under the LaSalle St. bridge.
I noticed that besides building the riverwalk, the city cleaned up the underside of all the bridges you can see from the riverwalk. Once upon a time, they wore their peeling paint and rust like badges of honor.

From the LaSalle St. bridge to the Wells St. bridge is a straightaway with a tubular fountain sort of feature.
On the west side of the Wells St. bridge is a fine view of that structure.
The afternoon sun in late April left a curious trace on the 300 N. LaSalle building, which rises above the Wells St. bridge.
Further to the west of Wells St.
This section, west of Wells, sports floating wetland gardens. Or maybe you can call them the Floating Gardens of Chicago. But what the city really needs are hanging gardens. Maybe they can go next to the Obama Library.
From there, the path crosses under the Franklin St. bridge, and goes to its end at Lake St., with the Merchandise Mart dominating the view. Workmen were busy installing turf on the small slope to the right (in this pic) of the sidewalk.
All the while, you can see boats plying the river.
Interesting that yellow means taxi, even on the water. I recognized the vessel in the second pic. The good tourist ship Lila passing Wolf Point.

Wolf Point & The Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame

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On Friday I went to downtown Chicago for business. Since it was a warm, clear spring day, I wanted to do a more extensive walkabout, especially in the River North area, where I attended to business. But I didn’t have much time.

Instead I was able to take a quick walk near the Chicago River, mostly on the way to my appointment and heading back to Union Station afterward. I was near the place where the river divides into its North and South Branches, which is known as Wolf Point and is the origin of the Chicago Municipal Device.

For quite a while, Wolf Point was oddly underdeveloped, at least compared with the rest of the riverfront. For instance, until recently the point was occupied mostly by a parking lot.

No more. The latest project there, Wolf Point East, is still under construction.

So Wolf Point looks a little different than at the beginning of this decade, and a lot different than it did in 1833.

Hines, Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, the AFL-CIO Building Investment Trust and PNC Realty Investors are the developers of Wolf Point East; Pelli Clarke Pelli did the design. The 60-story tower will have 698 residential units — upper-end rentals — that will be available late this year.

Just to the east, of course, is the 4 million-square-foot Merchandise Mart, seen here catching a shadow in the mid-afternoon.

A street runs between the Merchandise Mart and the river — the unimaginatively named W. Merchandise Mart Plaza — and from there, you can see the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame. That is, eight bronze busts honoring one-time U.S. merchant princes, each facing the building. Joseph P. Kennedy himself commissioned the busts in the early 1950s, which was possible because the Kennedy family owned the Merchandise Mart for many decades.

The busts are in two groups of four. These are the busts to the west. They don’t look so large from across the street, but the heads are four times the size of a regular human head.
From left to right: John Wanamaker, founder of the stores by that name; George Hartford, founder of A&P; Edward Filene, founder of those stores; and Montgomery Ward.

These are the busts to the east.
Construction and taxis whizzing by made it a little harder to make an image, but in any case they are Robert Wood, a chairman of Sears; F.W. Woolworth; Julius Rosenwald, another chairman of Sears and founder of the Museum of Science and Industry; and Marshall Field.

More about each of the busts is here. Twelve years ago, at least, they looked like they needed some restoration. I didn’t get quite close enough to them this time to know whether that has happened.

Indianapolis Artsgarden, 2014

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Easter fell fairly late five years ago, April 20, and we traveled that weekend as well. That time to Indianapolis, where we saw the Eiteljorg Museum and ate at Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles. A good little trip.

We also spent part of that Saturday afoot in downtown Indianapolis, including a short stop at an interesting public space: the Indianapolis Artsgarden, a large domed structure built over a major intersection.

Besides connecting the adjacent Circle Centre Mall to a nearby hotel and other buildings, the Arts Council of Indianapolis — which owns the space — holds public performances there, along with art exhibitions.

Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects (now part of Perkins Eastman), who designed Circle Centre, did the Artsgarden too in the 1990s. Actually not so much a single dome as a series of glass vaults. Makes for a light, open space.

Even when occupied by fully grown trees.

No event was going on when we were there, but it was a pleasant place to hang out. I did that while everyone else went shopping at the adjacent retail. If I remember right, they found some spring clothes.