Category Archives: History

The Viking

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Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary has started classes for the year. I know that because I saw a mass of students and parents waiting outside the school this morning just before classes begin, as has been the first-day practice for many years. I went there myself, with daughters, from 2003 to 2014.

In 1893, a curious ship arrived in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition.

That same ship, in 2026, can be found under a temporary, Quonset-like structure in a field in Geneva, Illinois, not far from the Fox River.

Once a month during the warm part of the year, the ship is open for tours, and we arrived on Saturday in the warm drizzle to take one. I knew about it because, examining Google Maps one day recently, I saw Friends of the Viking Ship.

Say what? It is a storied ship, and has good friends these days, since one of the first things the guide told us was that the nonprofit Friends of the Viking Ship recently acquired a site on which a permanent museum will be built to house the ship, whose formal name is the Viking.

“Christen Christens’s Frames Shipyard in Sandefjord, Norway built the Viking in 1892-1893 after the ancient Viking ship Gokstad,” notes the web site of the park that is currently home to the ship. “In 1893 the Viking sailed from Norway to Chicago, via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, to the World’s Columbian Exposition and now displayed at Good Templar Park.”

Good Templar Park in Geneva is a whole other kettle of fish: a park owned by a temperance society. But for now, more about the ship. How did it happen that a replica of a 9th-century Viking ship sailed across the wild North Atlantic in the days before wireless communication, ice patrols or weather reports? Apparently they did have 1890s navigation equipment – a compass, quadrant and barometer, for instance – so it wasn’t quite like the voyages of historic Vikings. Close enough, though, as it was undertaken in an open ship (with a tent) powered by sail and, sometimes, a dozen men pulling oars.

The tour involved a volunteer (let’s call him Bob) leading visitors all the way around the ship on a platform that allows you to look into, but not go onto, the vessel. Still, it’s a close look.

The why of it seems to be nascent nationalism on the part of Norwegians in the late 19th century, though that isn’t quite how Bob put it. Replicas of the famed (by 1893) Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria were due to visit Chicago – towed across the Atlantic from Spain – for the world’s fair. Who arrived in the New World long before Columbus? Plucky Vikings, of course, so a replica of a recently discovered Viking ship was built to sail to the fair under its own power. Norwegian pride, yes; and to upstage the johnny-come-lately Spaniards, too.

“The assertion had been frequently made that the Norsemen in their frail, lightly built galley could never have crossed the stormy Atlantic,” one Professor Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen of Columbia College wrote in The Chautauquan in 1894.

“It so happened that an old Viking ship was unearthed at Gokstad, near Sandefjord, twelve years ago, in the grave or tumulus of an ancient chieftain. The idea occurred to Captain Magnus Anderson, the editor of the Norwegian Seaman Gazette, that if an exact reproduction of this ship were made, he would undertake to sail her across the Atlantic and thus give an incontrovertible demonstration that the Norsemen, at least, could have discovered America…

“An invitation was issued for a national subscription and the required amount [to build the ship] was procured, mostly in the small sums of ten, twenty-five, and fifty cents. The undertaking, I am told, was not popular with the upper classes, while it appealed strongly to the imagination of the seafaring population which readily kindles at an enterprise with a touch of heroism. It was first proposed to christen the ship Leif Ericson; but for some reason the name The Viking was preferred. In every particular, even to the minutest detail, she was made to conform to her ancient model.

“She is clinker-built, of solid oak planks, is 78 feet long, 16 feet beam, draws 4 feet of water, and carries 200 yards of canvas. She has no real deck, but a loose bottom, which tends to give her that elasticity when striking the waves.”

The ship sailed for Chicago on April 30, 1893. “On May 10, when north of the Orkneys, she was caught in a heavy gale… That stanch little craft kept bravely ahead, though she shipped several seas, and the crew was kept busy bailing, until their horny hands were sore and the blood oozed forth under their finger nails. But not once did they think of turning tail; for they were all buoyed up by the thought that they had the honor of Norway in their keeping, and that, in a measure, they were to prove her claim to the glory of having first discovered the New World.”

When the Viking did reach the New World, its crew were feted on the Eastern Seaboard and elsewhere, and of course in Chicago. Ah, but fame is fleeting, etc. In the early 20th century, the ship was on display at the Field Museum but later suffered the indignity of being basically forgotten and in storage, owned by the Chicago Park District. The marvel is that she survived at all. Stabilization and restoration have been underway since the 1990s.

I was happy to do my little part – admission to the tour, and buying a few postcards – to put the ship in a proper museum, for its remarkable story, and the fact that it is probably the largest existing artifact of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The Illinois Railroad Museum: Details

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The Illinois RR Museum, as mentioned, has plenty of impressive rolling stock, some of which actually rolls. But like any good museum, the showpieces aren’t the only pieces. The small items have their own stories to tell, or at least to suggest. At one point I went into a repurposed car — I forget what kind of car it was — and found myself in the Builder Plate Hall.

Builder Plate? “In this hall are the builder plates from the builders of steam, electric, diesel, interurban, streetcars and passenger cars,” said a sign in the car. “A builders plate is like the VIN plate on a car. It gives the car a serial number that is unique to that car. A builder plate can service [sic] the same purpose. It is used to identify a locomotive.”

Evocative, these plates.

Evoking the rumble of finished locomotives on tracks, but also the din and heat of the factory floors where working men put together these machine-age power marvels to specs that began on drafting tables by gas light and then early electric bulbs.

Illinois RR Museum

I don’t want to romanticize such hard jobs too much, but it’s hard not to.

Illinois RR Museum

Are all locomotives made in China in our time? No. According to this Wiki list, there are many more defunct U.S. locomotive makers than not, but there are still active ones, including major repair facilities. Good to know.

And damn it, every time I look into a subject like that, I uncover a new destination. In this case, the Altoona Works.

At the Illinois RR Museum, the cars themselves offer detail. Sometimes builder plates.

Or branding.

Or warnings.

A curious thing to put on your train, but there’s a story.

The train, or at least the locomotive, looks to have a name: The City of Moorhead. Where the Southern Crosses the Yellow Dog.

“W. C. Handy, ‘The Father of the Blues,’ immortalized the crossing of the Southern Railway and the Yazoo Delta (‘Yellow Dog’) Railroad at Moorhead in his 1914 song ‘Yellow Dog Rag,’ better known under its later title, ‘Yellow Dog Blues,’ ” notes Mississippi Blues Trail. “Handy wrote that he first heard the line ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog’ sung by a guitarist at the Tutwiler train station (c. 1903). Moorhead became a hub not only of rail transportation but of blues activity in local juke joints.”

A more recent interpretation of the song is, of course, on YouTube.

Larger signs. Where there’s a north, there’s a south.

Signals.

The museum has a railroad-oriented book store in another repurposed car.

Illinois RR Museum

Lots of material for the enthusiast.

One more item: a bit of re-embedded signage from the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which traversed Illinois not far from here.

Good to see it. Because, as we all should know, the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride.

The Illinois Railroad Museum: The Rolling Stock

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Not long ago my friend Kevin and I were kicking around ideas for a day trip from our homes in Chicagoland, and we happened on a place he’d hadn’t been since he was a child nearly 60 years ago, and I hadn’t been in years, perhaps as long ago as 2005: the Illinois Railroad Museum, near the town of Union in McHenry County, in the northwestern exurbs. About an hour drive from my house. Definitely worth the trip.

Another example of a place people take their kids, but might not otherwise consider. Not how I think. Good for kids, good for everyone else whose admiration for and curiosity about trains hasn’t gone away. During our visit, on the last Saturday in July, the place was busy but not packed, with small children and their elders well represented, but they weren’t the entirety of visitor demographics. The Illinois RR Museum draws old men (old people) as well, sometimes without grandchildren in tow. In that, Kevin and I fit right in.

Not only that, the museum also seems to attract former railroad employees and railroad aficionados, enthusiasts and nerds of all ages and walks of life. Toward the end of our visit, near a display of dispatcher equipment, a visitor struck up a conversation with a museum volunteer that I was near enough to overhear. Old men both, older even than me, and both former dispatchers for lines long ago absorbed into the handful of U.S. railroads that still exist. They had a lot to talk about – with an intensity of jargon that was nearly opaque to us non-professionals.

But you don’t need to know every technical detail to appreciate the collection.

It’s massive, including locomotives and steam engines, freight cars, interurban cars, long-haul passenger and baggage cars, subway cars, streetcars, trolley buses, railroad work equipment, signals, signs and much more, either open to the elements or in several sizable train barns. Some of the rolling stock is still rolling, and visitors can take short rides out into the countryside along a few miles of right-of-way that the museum owns, with volunteers running the show.

And doing the maintenance: I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone in railroad garb oiling the machinery with a long-spout oil can, as you see (saw) in illustrations.

Mighty locomotives of various kinds.

The collection includes some rolling stock you don’t see that much, such as a 1949 steam-powered Leslie rotary snowplow designed to clear tracks of ice and snow, and one of the last ever made, as these too converted to diesel. To do its job, the blade at the front rotated at 150 rpm.

Illinois RR Museum

A wicked red maw, ready to grind its way forward. Just the thing for a fistfight, on the top of the car, between Bond and a nameless henchman; resulting in the henchman tumbling into the blade; think of your own Roger Moore bon mot for that situation (something about a grinding headache, maybe).

Interurban cars. Including this one, in which we rode out into the Illinois cornfields.

A few military cars.

The latter is a troop sleeping car, built by Pullman, doing its part for the war effort in the early 1940s.

Examples of the many streetcars and trolley cars in the collection.

The latter built in 1914, so it’s a little anachronistic, but I thought of it as a Meet Me in St. Louis streetcar.

And — of course it should be last — cabooses.

If you asked me, railroads should still be using cabooses. For aesthetic reasons. No railroad is going to do that, naturally, but that’s my opinion.

The interior of one of the cabooses. A good many of the cars at the museum are open, provided you’re willing to climb into them, and we certainly were in this case.

A somewhat newer caboose. We went in there, too.

This caboose was attached to another caboose and an engine, and you could take rides. We did. I couldn’t ever remember riding in a moving caboose before, but now I have.

The Kane County Courthouse

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In the near quarter-century I’ve lived on my street, this was the first orange warning sign ever posted directly in front of my house.

Indicating a flagman ahead, of course, but if you squint, the figure is holding a book to read, with a flagpole and flag attached to his back. It could be done; some kind of harness and a light-weight aluminum pole or the like.

***

How big does a building need to be hulking? No doubt context is important. I’d say that in the context of Third Street in Geneva, Illinois, the Kane County Courthouse is a hulking presence, though its hulk is softened by being set back from the street, and by grounds marked by large trees.

To get a full appreciation of the massed brickwork, head around the building for a more open view.

The area didn’t used to be open. The county jail — back when jails were jails and not correctional facilities – used to be there, built at the same time as the courthouse, in 1892. It didn’t last to the present.

“The Kane County Board commissioned Chicago architects W. J. Edbrooke and Franklin P. Burnham to create the impressive courthouse and accompanying jail — a testament to the county’s commitment to functionality and architectural excellence,” notes Kane County Connects.

“At the time, the jail was described as ‘the best building, most complete and convenient jail building and sheriff’s residence in the state of Illinois,’ according to an article in The Republican. The same article optimistically noted that any prisoners locked in the new jail would remain there as needed.

“However, just six weeks later, three prisoners escaped. That week’s Republican article began, ‘It is rather a bad start for Kane County’s new jail to have an escape in the first month of its occupancy.’

“By the 1970s, the 1892 facility was deemed ‘totally inadequate’ and in ‘deplorable condition’… The building was ultimately demolished in 1975.”

Be that as it may, there’s no doubt about where you are these days if you find yourself near the courthouse.

I went through the minor rigmarole (empty pockets, put everything in tray, walk through metal detector) for a look at the vaulting interior, designed in the days before air conditioning. Also, back when county budgets allowed for fine ironwork.

Straight up.

Worth the effort. As impressive as they are, Texas has no monopoly on fine courthouses, though it does have them in quantity.

Downtown Glen Ellyn: The Historic District

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Even modest buildings have a history. Or point to a history.

Just not much visible history in this case. Yet under this building in downtown Glen Ellyn, Illinois – in the Glen Ellyn Downtown North Historic District – is the main creek that used to pass through the village. Indian Creek, flowing for about 100 years now through an underground manmade channel. Civil engineers were busy in the 1920s.

An article published in 2023, “The Creeks of Old Glen Ellyn, Part 1” by Robert Elliot, offers a bit of detail: “Though we do not know exactly when, the creeks which flowed through old Glen Ellyn were slowly moved underground. Indian Creek appears to have remained above ground for a long time, although it too eventually fell victim to development. Although the exact year remains unknown, it appears that Indian Creek was mostly moved underground in 1922, when a dry goods store was constructed where it used to flow under Main Street. Today, Oak & Steel occupies the same location.”

Glen Ellyn was once marked by open creeks and small ravines and other irregularities, much like the rest of Du Page County. Like in much of the rest of the county, or the nation for that matter, that wasn’t consistent with modern suburbia, so the terrain was modified – in the same spirit as controlling the Mississippi or digging the Panama Canal, if not the gargantuan scale.

The 1920s also saw brisk commercial development near the Glen Ellyn interurban station, and it is these buildings that make up much of the historic district today. Such as a bank building, a sturdy-looking edifice built to re-assure in the days before the FDIC. Sturdy and elegant, I have to add.

The Glen Art Theatre. A spot to take in a motion picture, now as then.


“The Glen Theatre, formerly a single screen theatre, opened in February 1927,” says Cinema Treasures. “It was designed in the Tudor Revival style, along with the storefronts on either side of the three-story building. The architect was William B. Betts of Park Ridge, IL, who also designed a number of other movie theaters in the Chicago suburbs. Originally, the Glen Theatre not only featured motion pictures, but live stage acts, as well, and contained a Barton organ.”

Other historic district structures.

The site of the interurban line station. These days, it includes 2 Toots, a restaurant that delivers your burger and fries by model train.

I didn’t confine my peregrinations to the historic district, mainly because I didn’t know about it until later.

Just outside the district, a couple of churches.

More apartments up/retail down structures.

The Village Office, looking a little New Englandish.

The interurban line that once came through Glen Ellyn, the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Electric (CA&E), is long gone, as they all are. But it left a legacy, namely the Main Stem of the Illinois Prairie Path.

Worth a short walk or a long one. Traversing Du Page County is possible on its 61-mile network. During my recent visits, I walked maybe 1 percent of that distance, but I’m considering other segments.

Lake Forest Cemetery

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Just before noon yesterday, the clouds opened up and dumped rain and small bits of hail on my part of the world. One of those short, sudden downpours of summer. By this morning, the deck had dried out enough for me to do what I often do there, have breakfast and engage in some loafing.

Another summer note: in the evenings, crickets have received their chirping orders. For a few nights, only one or two bothered, on and off as the cicadas faded for the day. Now strong cricket choruses sound off by night. An excellent sound to fall asleep to.

Doesn’t this sound grand: a few weeks ago I attended a social event on the North Shore. But it wasn’t grand, not in the sense of a palatial setting. But it was at one of the many pleasant middle-class neighborhoods of the area whose real estate valuations lifted stratospherically in recent decades.

Driving all the way to the shore of Lake Michigan means passing through some thick traffic, so to my way of thinking, that also means you should go a few hours early for a look around parts of the North Shore, that narrow but long strip from Evanston to some point in Lake County to the north.

Drive up that way and you might find yourself at Lake Forest Cemetery. At the entrance gate.

Who’s waiting there, as part of the iron gate? St. Peter. Usually he has keys, but I suppose he’s holding the book he consults at the Pearly Gates.

Among the grand old rural cemeteries of metro Chicago, Lake Forest is one of the smaller ones, at 15 acres. Due to its lush landscaping, however, it seems bigger.

It too has a rural cemetery pedigree, selected as a cemetery site in 1857, coinciding with the founding of the town of Lake Forest.

“The site… selected contained the characteristics appropriate for a design in the naturalistic style,” according to a detailed history of the property at the National Registry of Historic Places. “It had topography with gently rolling changes in grade, ravines that added a rugged dimension, and a vista toward the lake.”

But some decades passed before its roads and landscaping were in place. William Le Baron Jenney (d. 1907), who designed the first fully metal-framed building – the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, the first skyscraper – did the roads and some other features in 1882 (not long before Home Insurance).

“In 1900, Ossian Cole Simonds [d. 1931] was selected to develop the site further and is responsible for its design in the Prairie Style. He perfected its beautiful graded surface, its broad open spaces, and its simple groups of trees, often with branches sweeping to the ground…

“Whereas the site had previously been open like a park, he enclosed the property with plantings, providing a feeling of privacy for the bereaved. The location of the cemetery on the bluff above the lake and surrounded by ravines provided a natural setting for quiet meditation that he emphasized through plantings. Unlike other cemetery sites that have been overtaken by urbanization, Lake Forest Cemetery still retains the character that Simonds emphasized through his plantings.”

I’ve happened across some of Simonds’ other work — Lincoln Park, but also Library Park in Kenosha.

Like any good cemetery, there’s a mix of memorials. Considering the decades of affluence on the North Shore, no shortage of sizable mausoleums.

More modest stones, but certainly weighty. Physically, but also emotionally for the bereaved.

More artful stones.

Not much Egyptian Revival that I saw, but there was a little.

Lake Forest Cemtery

The aforementioned sun dial memorial.

I liked this small section: unkempt on purpose, I think.

Lake Forest’s landscaping is meticulous otherwise, so that seems more reasonable that an omission by the groundskeepers.

Tinker Swiss Cottage

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As usual for a Northern summer – the best thing about it, really – the heat has been on and off even in July. Last week we had highs only in the 80s, and sometimes lows in the 60s at night. Those days gave way to hotter temps today, with the promise of more heat to come. For a few days.

Back on July 3, a fairly hot day itself, we buzzed out to Rockford, the furthest I’ve been for months now. After a hearty lunch at the Stockholm Inn, we visited the handsome and distinctive Tinker Swiss Cottage Museum & Gardens, which is just south of downtown Rockford. Known about the place for years, finally made time for it.

Another legacy of an American who traveled to Europe long ago. Apparently he was besotted with the Swiss design of the time. That American would be Robert Tinker (d. 1924), though his story is more convoluted than most. During the boom early days of mechanical reapers in the 1850s, one John Manny ran a reaper works in Rockford as one of the more nimble competitors of Cyrus McCormick (who sued Manny for patent infringement and lost). John Manny died suddenly in 1856, as even wealthy people sometimes did in those days, leaving his widow Mary in control of the company.

Young Robert Tinker (younger than Mary) worked in a management position at the company. He had not, himself, come from a wealthy family, but apparently was a man of sideways ambition. In 1862, Mary paid for Robert to spend an extended period in Europe, while still drawing a salary from the company. So not only was he able to take a sort of sabbatical from factory operations, and skip out on risking his life for the Union, he got to take a Grand Tour.

The docent was clear on all this as we toured the interior of the house – and I later discussed it with the museum’s director of education and collections, who affirmed the gist. Less clear is exactly how that happened. Mary and Robert were obviously close, very close, though their exact relationship is obscured from prying minds of the 21st century by a screen of Victorian propriety. Eventually (1870) the two married, and lived a long time as prominent Rockford citizens.

Robert was already at work on the Swiss Cottage before that, starting construction in 1865 on a limestone bluff overlooking Kent Creek, near when it meets the Rock River, finishing it around the time he got married. (Germanicus Kent being one of the founders of Rockford.)

I understand the gardens in the name used to be more extensive, but much remains.

Behind the house is a bridge across the creek, leading to an undeveloped patch of land, formerly part of the gardens, along a rail line.

Of course we had to cross the bridge, despite the heat. It’s a personal motto of mine: cross that bridge if possible. In this case, you’re rewarded by a view of the back of the Swiss Cottage, perched above the creek.

The property, now belonging to the Rockford Part District, also includes a three-story Swiss inspired barn. Formerly home to cows and horses and such, these days it’s a shop and visitors center and such. An unusual sort of barn, I’d say.

After Robert Tinker’s time, a factory was developed near the house. Nothing to do with reapers or the Tinkers. Just an opportune spot near the Rock River. Its hulk remains behind sturdy brick, lorded over by a rusty water tower.

The factory has been abandoned for some years. But I understand that socks, and indeed sock monkeys, used to be made there.

As they have been for a long time in Rockford.

The Fabyan Bear Cage

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Another relic of the Fabyan’s time along the banks of the Fox River in Geneva, Illinois, is a bear cage.

To be more exact, it’s a former bear cage, now used for picnics at the forest preserve. A nearby sign tells the story:

This picnic shelter actually began as a large cage built to house the Fabyan bears. It was built around 1920 to replace the first bear cage, which was a wire-and-wood structure. [Perhaps the bears had a habit of escaping that cage.] The first inhabitant, Mary, was a female American black bear. Later, two American brown bears, Tom and Jerry, lived here. During the Fabyan period, the cage did not have a roof. Spikes may still be seen along the top of the inside walls. These were meant to keep the bears from climbing out of their cage. The bears also had a large tree branch placed in the center of their cage so they could climb on top and look out over the estate. What a surprising sight this must have been to passers by.

At one time or another, the Fabyans also kept alligators and a monkey — and the latter lived in the house. The docent was happy to point out a room where he spent much of his time. Sure, things were different then. But I’m hard pressed to think that having a monkey in your house would have ever been a good idea.

Fabyan Japanese Garden

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For someone who has never written for television, and surely never will, I’ve got a few ideas. Just today: the wacky comedy adventures of three Florida Men who manage to kill themselves in a humiliating way – getting drunk and naked and trying to drive a cherry picker on the highway, say, with them in the basket.

They return as ghosts, condemned to haunt Florida retirement communities, though sometimes they find themselves in Miami Beach among the crabby ghosts of former retirees who came to live there in the ’60s. A twist: a fourth Florida Man, their friend who was driving the cherry picker, survived the accident and now he’s the only one who can see them. Hilarity does what it does, ensues.

In the 1890s, Japan was still newly open, and apparently exotic to the likes of wealthy Illinoisans George and Nelle Fabyan. The story is that they came away from the Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition deeply impressed by Japanese culture. It was a common reaction, I’ll bet, and most people might have bought a book or two, or a bit of art, and left it at that.

Not George Fabyan, the Great Collector of the Fox River Valley (gardens, windmills, mummies and more!). He had a Japanese garden built downslope from his home near the Fox. During the summer, visitors can go there even now, though ownership long ago passed to the Kane County Forest Preserve District.

He tasked Japanese garden designer Taro Otsuka to undertake the project, which was completed not long before the Great War. Otsuka, an early 20th-century immigrant, found his niche on these shores. Namely, in designing a wave of Japanese gardens in the Midwest.

Through cycles of decline and restoration, the Fabyan garden has abided. Free admission, donations accepted.

The garden designer’s raw material is the local flora, resulting in a garden on traditional lines that nevertheless has a look apart of the models of the old country, taking aspects of the new country. Don’t ask me the details, that’s just the sense one gets.

Lanterns.

Structures.

Teahouse of the Fox River, you could call that one.

What’s a Japanese garden without an impressive bridge over an elegant water feature?

The assortment of possible Japanese garden bridges is extensive, and of course they’re found other places besides gardens, such as the magnificent bridge at Sumiyoshi Shrine in Osaka.

Fabyan on the Fox

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Looks like we’ve hit the mid-July stride of chamber-of-commerce weather, with low 80s F for highs, high 60s for lows, for some days ahead. On the other hand, standard forecasts don’t include smoke, which could well make a comeback in the coming days.

It was a rainy May and June, bringing the flow of the Fox River fairly high by the time last month that we took a short walk nearby, largely under the flush of greenery.

As mentioned, we visited the Fabyan Forest Preserve in Geneva, Illinois one Saturday not long ago. The holdings — formerly part of the estate of George Fabyan (d. 1936) — include land on both sides of the river, and a large island accessible on both sides by footbridges. The view from the island.

The Fabyan Windmill is visible from the island.

We didn’t go there this time, but rather lingered on the west bank, around the Fabyan Villa, which we toured, taking in the bogus mummy. FLW did some renovation on the property, a fact well emphasized at the museum.

One view from the villa toward the Fox. If you’re going to build near a river — or any flowing body of water — give it some height.

Fabyan collected a lot more, including European artwork, back when that was doable.

Once upon a time (probably), the Fabyan kitchen served New Era Potato Chips. Glad to see it. The memory of the same such can at the Cuneo Museum is a minor delight for me.

Back when food processors crowed about have food science on their side. These days, that might get them MAHA’d into consumer skepticism.

Outside, more features, including a ruin from Fabyan days. I understand that the Roman-themed pool on the island has mostly been reclaimed by the river. This wasn’t part of the pool. A out-of-place gatepost, from the looks of it.

More evidence of the passing wave of Egyptomania.

Looking a little worse for roughly a century of wear.