A Few Manhattan Churches

Posted on October 31, 2025 by admin

After the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen we headed for Park Ave., location of a famed Byzantine revival Episcopal church. Before we got there, we noticed a much smaller church, not actually part of the Open House New York event, at 5 E 48th Street.

Church of Sweden in New York

We’d come to the Svenska kyrkan i New York, where services are still held in Swedish. Not only was the church open, there was a cafe on its first floor. The sanctuary is on the second floor. Elegant little place, suitable for the small congregation that Swedish services might attract.

Under the Historik section of the church’s web site, you’ll find this helpful information: När svenskarna började flytta till USA och hur Svenska kyrkan på olika sätt velat vara närvarande i New York. A fuller history in English is on the Wiki page.

St. Bartholomew’s Church

St. Bartholomew’s Church, an Episcopal congregation on Park Ave., was participating in the Open House. That meant it was sure to be not only open, but lighted. The first time I went there, many years ago, I compared it to a cavern. Later I visited when more lights were on. Twenty years ago I wrote: “This time, it was better lighted, the better to show off the church’s superb Byzantine-style mosaics.”

During my 2025 visit, now joined by my nephew Robert, we were able not just to gaze at the lit sacred space, but we had the benefit of a knowledgeable docent, a woman of a certain vintage with a hobbled gait and a raspy voice. She knew the history of the congregation, and its slice of Manhattan. She had the artistic detail down cold. She knew her ecclesiastical styles. From the depth of detail about the many artists who worked on the church, it sounded like she knew some of the artists personally, though that couldn’t be literally true for most of them, since the church was built more than 100 years ago, with certain later design additions.

At the direction of the docent, Geof unveiled the altar for a moment.

It might have been interesting to know Hildreth Meière. Hers was an astounding career: “Working with leading architects of her day, Meière designed approximately 100 commissions, both secular and liturgical,” the International Hildreth Meière Association says. “Her best-known commissions include Radio City Music Hall, One Wall Street, St. Bartholomew’s Church, Temple Emanu-El, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. She also decorated the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis.”

The mosaics didn’t photograph well – that is, I’m too lazy to carry around a better camera – but good images are at the association web site.

Emerging from St. Bart, we agreed that heading back to the cafe at the Swedish church would be a good idea. It was.

Sated with Swedish-style open-faced sandwiches, our walk soon continued, up Fifth Ave. to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was its usual crowded splendor. I think I spotted some new, or newish murals, just inside the nave. A wedding was in progress. One must come after another every Saturday not in Lent, with ropes closing off a large part of the nave, making for extra crowding in the side aisles.

We didn’t stay. Not far away was a church far less crowded but with its own splendor.

St. Thomas Church

Namely, St. Thomas Church, another major Manhattan Episcopalian congregation. Inside, lights were low. The reredos stood out in the dark, a glowing presence above the altar populated by more than 60 stone carved figures, I’ve read. A Christian crowd: saints, prophets and reformers in an ivory colored stone from Wisconsin. I’d have needed a telephoto lens to have any hope of identifying any of them, but that didn’t make them any less striking.

Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson designed the church, completing it in 1914. They were another of those prolific architects now out of living memory who seemed to design a long list of churches in a short time. The duo did St. Barts, too, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, just to name a few famed sacred spaces of near-palatial character.

Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church

Just steps away from St. Thomas, as real estate press releases like to say about two close buildings, is Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was our last Open House church for that day.

With its auditorium style and balconies, it reminded me of the Moody Church in Chicago, though Fifth Avenue Pres is much older: 150 years this year, as it happens.

A hallway and some rooms extend beyond the front of the nave, including a columbarium.

Waiting for occupants. All it will take is time.

Erie, Pa.

Posted on October 27, 2025 by admin

This artwork needs a proper name, and I can suggest one: The Erie Christ, or Christ the Almighty of Erie, though that last one sounds like the Lord has taken up residence in northwestern Pennsylvania.

The striking Erie Christ can be found in Erie, Pennsylvania. More specifically at the Church of The Nativity, Russian Old Rite Orthodox in Erie. My brother Jay tipped me off about its presence, though I might have seen the church anyway, since it stands prominently on a rise facing the bayfront, its gilded onion domes easily catching the eye from a distance.

It is a handsome church, outside and inside. I arrived late on the morning of October 15.

Russian Old Believer immigrants came to the United States in numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, finding work in Eire on the ore and pulp docks. I’ll bet the climate suited them too. Just like home, with all the lake-effect snow a Russian might want. Their first church was completed in 1919. In the fullness of time (1983), the parish joined the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Bygones be bygones and all that.

In a twist that’s more late 19th century than late 20th, that structure burned down in 1986. Of course, buildings still burn, including churches. The parish rebuilt, with a local outfit called Building Systems Inc. doing the work.

The Church of the Nativity was my second stop that day. The city’s spot on the map has long intrigued me, so I’d come to Erie late in the morning on the second day of the recent trip.

Upon arrival in the city, after a brief stop at a Tim Horton’s, I first went to Erie’s bayfront, threading my way through the massive reconstruction project of the streets in the area. That was the first, but hardly the last major street construction briar patch that I’d encounter in the Northeast. My reward for the effort: a chance to stand under Erie’s Bicentennial Tower.

Built not for the U.S. bicentennial that we all remember so – fondly, but rather the 200th anniversary of the city of Erie, about 20 years later. Regardless, I was looking forward to the vista: the city, the bay and Presque Isle State Park. But no. Closed. Even so, I got a good look at the area, including the tower but also the U.S. Brig Niagara, which was instrumental in Oliver Hazard Perry winning immortal fame. Or would have been, if the Battle of Lake Erie were taught in schools any more.

The battle might have rated a mention in my high school history classes 50 years ago, but I don’t remember for sure. I expect it’s still taught in Pennsylvania high schools, just as the Battle of San Jacinto is in Texas. At least, that’s what I assume. That’s what I hope.

After my look-see down by Presque Isle Bay, I went to Holy Nativity, but that wasn’t quite enough. Always handy Google Maps directed me to St. Patrick’s Parish, not too many blocks away. Winter might be harsh in these parts, but that day was one of those brilliant warmish fall days we get in the North sometimes, and ideal for poking around a port city on the Great Lakes. (And eventually I left town by driving down State Street, a fairly active place of vintage buildings and newer shops.)

St. Patrick’s is on a not-so-busy neighborhood street.

While Russians were forming their immigrant community, Irish were doing the same not far away. One product of that immigrant ferment was St. Patrick’s, completed just after the turn of the 20th century. The history of the building is told with admirable clarity and detail in this recent video.

Among all the ornateness, a holy water spigot of Holy Grail simplicity, at least as depicted in certain tales.

Life-sized Stations of the Cross dwell in enormous niches in the nave.

I wasn’t eagle-eyed enough to notice the Roman soldier wearing a Bavarian cap. Or take a picture of it. No matter, I know about it now.

The Basilica of St. Fidelis, Cathedral of the Plains

Posted on October 12, 2025 by admin

Today I let Google finish “Cathedral of the…” and got the following responses, top to bottom (capitalization sic): Sea, deep, Holy Angels, holy angels photos, forsaken, immaculate conception, incarnation, Madeleine, deep ds3, pines.

Cathedral of the Sea is La catedral del mar, a “Spanish drama series” that I’d never heard of, though I have been to Santa Maria del Mar. The Cathedral of the Deep and of the Forsaken appear to be aspects of electronic games, and the others are churches in various places.

Not on the list is the Cathedral of the Plains. But it’s out there, in central Kansas.

That’s a nickname, since the church isn’t actually a cathedral, but the wording does appear on its point-of-interest spot on road maps – and naturally that got my attention. Formally, the church is the Basilica of St. Fidelis, said to be the largest church west of the Mississippi by seating capacity (1,100) upon completion in 1911 in Victoria, Kansas. Conveniently (for me), some decades later I-70 was built not far away.

John T. Comès (d. 1922), a Pittsburgh architect, designed the church for a congregation of Volga German immigrants. Who had come to greater Victoria starting in the 1870s. Why Victoria? Why not? No doubt they looking for flat farmland.

Comès, an incredibly prolific specialist in Catholic churches, did a fine job.

Nice.

The Volga Germans aren’t forgotten. No doubt their descendants are all around this part of Kansas. In 1976, the townspeople erected a memorial to their immigrant ancestors, across the street from St. Fidelis. A work by Pete Felton, a “Kansan limestone carver,” according to this posting, which also mentions limestone fenceposts as important in Kansas — something else to look into sometime.

After nearly 50 years, the statues are looking a little weatherworn, but they abide.

The woman and daughters caught the light at that time of day, the afternoon of September 23.

The man and sons did not. Would sunlight have made him less – Stalinesque?

Never mind. St. Fidelis Cemetery isn’t far to the north of the basilica, and I stopped by.

A good variety of memorials in a nice setting, even if the land lacks contour and there’s no flora beyond grass and cut flowers.

Then I started to notice iron crosses.

A lot of them. That called for further investigation, and it wasn’t long before I found out that Volga Germans were known for their wrought-iron crosses.

“German-Russian blacksmiths began making wrought-iron crosses in North Dakota as early as 1884,” says an article posted by North Dakota State University. “The hand-made crosses were most prevalent in central North Dakota from the late 1880s to about 1925, when marble and granite became more popular for grave marking. Most wrought-iron crosses appear in Catholic graveyards, although a few of these markers are also found in German-Russian Lutheran graveyards.”

The article talks of their crosses in North Dakota, but notes that they are also found in the “Northern Plains.” Such as Kansas, apparently.

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Salina, Kansas

Posted on October 11, 2025 by admin

The in-motel breakfast on September 24 in Salina, Kansas (pop. 46,800 or so) had been less than satisfactory, so Google Maps guided me to a doughnut shop on one of the wide, lightly traveled streets of downtown Salina. I ate in the car parked on just such a street, and soon started out for the highway (I-70) to head east.

Then I noticed Sacred Heart Cathedral.

I had to take a closer look.

If that structure doesn’t say midcentury, I don’t know what would. Indeed, the cathedral was built in the 1950s. But it isn’t quite like any other church building I’ve seen, even of that period. Also, it isn’t mid-century concrete, which it looked like from a distance, but limestone.

Note the Kansas elements.

The cathedral’s web site says: Sacred Heart Cathedral is a distinctive building that draws upon rural Kansas imagery and uses it in the service of Christian mythology. It is a noteworthy example of the work of Edward J. Schulte [d. 1975], a prolific designer of Catholic facilities across the Midwest through the greater part of the twentieth century.

Its most striking features are what appear to be a row of cylinders thirty feet in circumference extending the full height of the eastern and western facades, which resemble the grain elevators that dominate the skyline of most towns in western Kansas.

The allusion to grain elevators helps to link the church to its place in Kansas. It can also be seen as a symbol — the Cathedral is a place where the faithful come to receive the sustenance of the Eucharist.

It was open. That was unexpected, but I didn’t let the opportunity pass.

The baptismal font in the narthex.

The nave.

That part of downtown Salina was thick with churches. Another is First United Methodist, across the street from Sacred Heart.

About a half block away, Christ Cathedral Episcopal. The other churches weren’t open.

Later that day, at an exit just east of Abilene, I went looking for one more church — a kind of church I’d only ever driven by before.

Google Maps told me that this Cowboy Church was open for a few hours that day. I was skeptical, but went anyway, on the off chance that I’d get to see the inside of a Cowboy Church. As expected, it wasn’t open. Still, I got to look around in all directions.

Informality, I’ve read, is important to the nondenominational Cowboy Churches, whose number seems to be large, but without an exact count. (And some individual churches are pretty large.) I can only hope that at one or more of them, somewhere and at sometime, Yippee-Ki-Yay, Lord! is part of their prayer.

Mesa Verde National Park

Posted on October 1, 2025 by admin

In 800 years or so, will people come from significant distances to look at the ruins of my mid-century neighborhood? That doesn’t seem likely for any number of reasons. I’d be surprised if my own house survives until the next century, considering how good people are now at razing and rebuilding. But considering such a long span of time, there’s no way to know.

That’s the kind of thing I wonder about when facing structures of that age, especially those whose inhabitants are known mainly by the structures and other items they long ago cast off.

On September 17, we’d come to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park. To get close, you sign up and pay for a ranger-guided tour, which goes down stone stairs, along the edge of the cliff near the dwellings, and then back up some stone stairs (built by the CCC; does that even need to be said?). The elevation is 7,500 feet or so, but that didn’t cool things down that day. It was hot and sweaty.

A shot like that took some effort. We were hardly alone at Cliff Palace.

The ruins, which are most certainly near a cliff, are probably not a palace in the grand sense of a royal residence. More of a neighborhood, one of many in the vicinity, though the largest. Also, not quite as much of a ruin as it used to be. This is an image of the Cliff Palace from 1891, taken by Gustaf Nordenskiöld.

Not as long ago as all that, considering the age of the structures, but before TR inked the bill creating the national park, and back when you could help yourself to whatever was lying around, as the explorer (and photographer) Nordenskiöld apparently did, taking many items back home to Sweden. Eventually, the items made their way to Finland. A few were returned recently.

The ruins aren’t quite as ruined these days. The 20th century was a period of stabilization. Not as many artifacts got nicked either.

A kiva. The largest one at the Cliff Palace, I think. A religious site similar to others in the Southwest, such as at Bandelier National Monument (and now I know that was a kiva).

The canyon below the Cliff Palace. Imagine having to scramble up and down the walls regularly, to tend to fields or fetch water or escape from marauders.

Mesa Verde is of course much more than the Cliff Palace, since the park protects an estimated 5,000 archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. The main road through the park (built by the CCC, naturally) takes visitors to other overlooks. The dwellings of Spruce Tree House are sizable and also off limits these days, until the overhead rocks are stabilized.

More cliff dwellings. They are a little hard to see, but they are there.

On top of the main mesa, the road also goes through areas burned by wildfire at one time or another.

Flora always bounces back.

I had the vague idea that the inhabitants of the cliff dwellings disappeared mysteriously after about 1300, but visiting the park schooled me on more current thinking. They left, but there was nothing mysterious about it. Drought hit them, and hit them hard, so they migrated to find water and other sustenance. Persistent violence was probably a factor, too, as tends to happen in periods of strained resources. So it’s pretty clear that Ancestral Puebloans’ descendants even now live among the tribes along the Rio Grande, not too far away.

I also didn’t realize that the well-known cliff dwellings were only occupied for a relatively short time, in the grand scheme of native inhabitation: only about a century. Before that, most of the inhabitants lived atop the mesas. One such ruin is called Far View, which isn’t far from the road.

I heeded this signs and didn’t enter. But you can walk around the perimeter and imagine the passing centuries.

Elkhorn, Wisconsin

Posted on August 28, 2025 by admin

Labor Day weekend again? How does summer vanish so quickly? Back to posting on September 2.

Once upon a time, one of the many First National Banks of the world stood in downtown Elkhorn, Wisconsin, complete with a sturdy bank interior common at the time. As seen in a postcard from the early 20th century.

Go looking for the bank these days, and this is what you find.

Once a bank, now a pocket park. The view from the inside, looking back at the facade.

There were no signs to indicate how the park came to be. A less imaginative act would simply have been to raze the old building in its entirety and leave a weedy gap in the downtown streetscape, hoping for redevelopment that might never come.

Inside the park is a sundial, dedicated to the memory of one Eidola Renner (d. 1983) of the Elkhorn Garden Club. Ah, garden clubs. The term makes me think of Khigh Dhiegh.

This must be her. The sundial – whose gnomon is missing, so it can’t function for telling time – has been there since 1987, so I assume the park has been there at least that long, if not longer.

I arrived in Elkhorn on a warm day in early August, traveling by myself in southeastern Wisconsin. It wasn’t too hot for a stroll around the town’s municipal square, home to a “government center,” a mid-century box, but not the storied old courthouse that should be there.

There was a tank. How many tanks are loose in Wisconsin?

Well-tended buildings near the square.

Every town has one of these, it seems.

What is that?

Public notice of an antique alarm system, that’s what.

Not the first one I’ve seen. This one was made by the O.B. McClintock Co. of Minneapolis. “In 1901 O.B. McClintock came to Minneapolis and founded the American Bank Protection Company, which produced burglar alarm systems,” explains a site called Lavilo. “After his resignation in 1908, he opened the O.B. McClintock Company to ‘manufacture electrical chime and clock systems,’ which he sold to financial institutions all across the United States.”

Banks began telling the public the time quite a while ago (McClintock surely wasn’t the first). I’m of course old enough to remember dialing time and temperature, though I can’t remember which financial institution sponsored the service in ’70s San Antonio.

Elkhorn has a fine selection of downtown churches as well. Such as the First Congregational United Church of Christ.

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church.

St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Church.

Founded in 1841, back in Wisconsin Territory days, so “wilderness” was probably apt at the time.

Kenosha Walkabout, Featuring Franks’ Diner & Simmons Memorial Library

Posted on August 27, 2025 by admin

Always good to see their beaming faces.

The poster is on a window at Franks’ Diner, formerly an exterior window, but with an expansion of the diner many years ago, now facing the added section, where Ann and I had lunch on a late July Friday. Kenosha, home of Franks’, was another stop in our recent rambles around southeastern Wisconsin.

Finding Franks’ Diner was no serendipity. We’d been there, back in 2012. The Stooges, back in 1946. I’ll bet they were playing the nearby Kenosha Theater, which is still standing, but in need of restoration.

Not only is the 99-year-old Franks’ still there, it’s still dishing up dandy diner fare at popular prices. Back then, I wrote:

The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.

It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small room added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter.

That’s exactly the same as our July visit, except that people waited outside, since it was summer instead of winter and (of course) prices were higher. Once seated, I had the Garbage Plate. I’d skipped it last time, and I wasn’t about to miss it this time around.

2012: The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs.

The restaurant also supplies some reading material.

After lunch, we went a few blocks away and parked the car in the shade of large trees in Library Park. Ann waited in the car with the windows down – it was very warm, but not too warm for a few minutes of that – while I wandered around the immediate area, including a couple of streets of storefront retail in vintage structures.

Houses across the street from where we parked.

The nearby St. Matthews Episcopal Church.

The inevitable welcome mural. The 1970 Gremlin is an unusual touch. But they were made in Kenosha, so not that unusual.

At the edge of the park, a seated Lincoln. Sculptor Charles Niehaus (d. 1935) did the work. Just one of many that he did all over the place. The president has been sitting there since 1909, centennial of his birth, with restoration work done in more recent decades.

Nearby in the park, Kenosha’s Civil War memorial, called “Winged Victory” on electronic maps, a name that gets right to the point.

It’s Library Park because of the Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library, a branch of the Kenosha Public Library system, dominating its side of the park. It has a little more heft than most municipal branch libraries.

When it opened in 1900, the building formed Kenosha’s main library. Daniel Burnham designed it.

The Civil War veterans have their memorial outside. Great War vets are honored inside the library.

We’d happened on the Library Park Historic District, surrounding Library Park. The park itself goes back to the early years of Kenosha, when the land was a New England–style town commons. Forty-two properties, built from 1843 to 1930, form the district. A diner and an historic district: just the thing for a warm summer day stroll.

Billie Creek Village

Posted on August 20, 2025 by admin

I don’t know whether it was a relic or a replica, but there it was, something we’ve all heard about, seen in drawings and as the stuff of metaphors: a dunce cap. I’d never actually seen one before that I remember, not as a physical object.

That is why you (I) visit such places as the open air museum Billie Creek Village in Parke County, Indiana. To be mildly surprised. Such as the time I encountered a can of White Star brand tomatoes with a hammer and sickle on it, or a Papua New Guinea battle shield sporting the Phantom, just to name two among many such little surprises.

The dunce cap was on one of the desks at Billie Creek’s one-room school house, used until the early 20th century, as usual for that kind of school.

Good old dunce caps. Sure, they go against the grain of modern thinking, antiquated as a one-room school, but we all can remember a few goofballs from our school days who deserved one, can’t we? As seen in a pic from the Library of Congress, dated ca. 1905, but with no information about where it might have been. Just a small school in the years before self-esteem was discovered.

The old school house at Billie Creek is one of 38 historic structures relocated from various parts of Parke County, Indiana, to about 70 acres west of Rockville on US 36. Originally opened in 1969, the place has had a series of owners and been through periods of abandonment, but since 2022 has been under management that seems to know what its doing.

That’s my thinking, anyway, since its refreshing informality perfectly suits the place. You go, you park your car, you wander in. No irritating timed tickets, no gouging entrance fee, no expensive yet mindless luxury goods and experiences that could be pretty much anywhere. Yet there is an economic model: Billie Village hosts events – one was going on when we visited around mid-day on a Sunday – and some of the buildings are also shops, and do sell luxury goods, in the sense that such handcrafts aren’t found in modern grocery or drug stores.

We supported the place by buying a few things, including (yes!) postcards. A few dozen other people were doing so by attending the event. I watched part of some sort of award ceremony as it happened at the village gazebo, and even asked one of the bystanders about what was going on, but couldn’t quite get the gist of it. The meeting seemed to be one of those Society of Creative Anachronism sorts of things, though not that specifically. Attendees wore fantasy- and history-adjacent costumes, mostly with that homemade vibe. One of those outings for adults who didn’t get enough playing pretend when they were kids, I guess. All well and good.

I hope that economic model keeps the place open, because one recipe for a good couple of hours on a hot weekend in July is visiting curious old buildings. Such as a couple of relocated churches.

One Catholic.

The other Baptist.

An early Parke County cabin.

The home of an Indiana governor, one Joseph A. Wright (d. 1867), in office 1849-57. A Rockville native son.

Here he is, just outside his house, in dour Hoosier mode.

As the Covered Bridge Capital of the Galaxy (or some slogan like that for Parke County), it’s no surprise that covered bridges can also been seen at Billie Creek.

A barn, weathered yet handsome.

Craft goods were for sale inside. So were books by a local author who was there, hawking them. He told me about the books, some sort of fantasy series, and I was curious enough about them to listen to him, but not enough to buy one, which I think left him a bit miffed. Such is the writer’s lot.

Behind the barn, goats.

I wasn’t able to test the notion that goats eat tin cans. But I already knew the answer: it’s a ridiculous myth, as this item in Goat Owner tells us.

Southern Loop Leftovers: SC & GA

Posted on August 14, 2025 by admin

Early in the recent trip.

The Buc-ee’s imperium marches on. On my way to Tennessee that first day, I stopped at the location near Smiths Grove, Kentucky, to visit its gleaming facilities. Business was reasonably brisk that Monday, but nothing like the bedlam on the Sunday, nearly two weeks later (on the trip’s last day), when I stopped on the way back home at the same place, for the same reason.

South Carolina

Had a pleasant walk down a non-tourist street on a Sunday in Myrtle Beach. Not a lot going on. The late afternoon light had a nice glow.

Myrtle Beach International Airport used to be Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, which began as Myrtle Beach General Bombing and Gunnery Range in 1942 for use by the U.S. Army Air Corps. It closed in 1993.

One legacy of the base is a cluster of military memorials near the perimeter of the airport – at a place called Warbird Park, which is fully accessible to casual visitors – that includes something you don’t see all the time.

It is one memorial among many.

As well as some of the aircraft that used the air base.

Found at a MB beach shop among the clothes and beach equipment. Nothing says Myrtle Beach better than skulls, no?

There was more. Much more.

In Columbia, the Basilica of St. Peter.

Mass was in progress in its impressive interior, so only a glimpse.

Georgia

An automated, Fotomat-style ice store in north Georgia. They’re not as common up north, with the closest of this brand to me (I checked) in Aurora, Illinois.

Twice the Ice is the brand name. Quick facts: there are about 3,300 Twice the Ice locations so far in the United States and elsewhere – water and ice “vending machines,” according to one page on the company web site. Another page on the same site puts it at over 4,000 locations, which just means part of the site isn’t being updated. Whatever the exact number, there are a lot, and most if not all are franchised, representing about 1,000 franchisees.

It’s automation we call all get behind. I don’t think the machines are putting ice handlers and baggers at local gas stations and grocery stores out of work, since who holds that specific job?

So far as I know, “Ice is Civilization” is not the company motto. But it could be. It was said with such conviction by Allie Fox in The Mosquito Coast.

Of course, by the end of the book and movie both, he was howl-at-the-moon mad. So maybe some other slogan. Then again, that line is one of the few things – besides the fact that Allie Fox goes nuts chasing Utopia – that I remember from either the book or the movie after about 35 years. So it’s pretty memorable.

After gassing up at a station in north Georgia, I parked away from the pumps near the edge of the property to fiddle with my phone for a few minutes. Just outside the car window, kudzu lurked.

Which got closer.

And closer. Man, it grows fast.

Not really, but I did see all that kudzu at the edge of the gas station property. Kudzu. Who hasn’t seen the walls of it down South?

“In news media and scientific accounts and on some government websites, kudzu is typically said to cover seven million to nine million acres across the United States,” Smithsonian magazine reported in 2015. “But scientists reassessing kudzu’s spread have found that it’s nothing like that. In the latest careful sampling, the U.S. Forest Service reports that kudzu occupies, to some degree, about 227,000 acres of forestland, an area about the size of a small county and about one-sixth the size of Atlanta.

“That’s about one-tenth of 1 percent of the South’s 200 million acres of forest. By way of comparison, the same report estimates that Asian privet had invaded some 3.2 million acres — 14 times kudzu’s territory. Invasive roses had covered more than three times as much forestland as kudzu.”

Yet kudzu is regarded as a particularly intractable invasive species. How is that? It grows well in highly visible places. Such as next to a gas station parking lot. Smithsonian notes: “Those roadside plantings — isolated from grazing, impractical to manage, their shoots shimmying up the trunks of second-growth trees — looked like monsters.”

Along Georgia 60 in Chattahoochee NF, Smokey Bear is still at his job.

One thing leads to another online, and Smokey eventually lead me to “Smokey the Bear Sutra.” Only takes a few minutes to read, and it’s a trip. Just like the song “Elvis is Everywhere,” there’s a founding document of a religion in the distant future, one that asserts that humans should never have given up worshiping bears.

Augusta Flyby

Posted on August 6, 2025 by admin

In the heat of midday back in late June, en route to Athens, Ga., I arrived at the Georgia Welcome Center on I-20, a sizable structure just inside the state, and did what I needed to do. Returning to my car, I wondered whether I should drive into Augusta, only a few miles off the Interstate at that point. Specifically to downtown, to see what I could see, even at 90+° F. or so.

Would it be worth the short detour? At that moment, the lyrics of a song of my youth came to mind, as the only mention of Augusta I know in popular music.

I beg your pardon, mama, what did you say?

My mind was drifted off on Martinique Bay

It’s not that I’m not interested, you see

Augusta, Georgia is just no place to be.

The song was “An American Dream” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (a.k.a. the Dirt Band) – with backing vocals by Linda Ronstadt, no less – which reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its release in late 1979, and probably annoyed Augusta’s city fathers and other local boosters. But all that was nearly a half century ago, so I expect any annoyance is long gone as the tune has slipped into obscurity.

The song merely came to mind then, as songs often do, and didn’t affect my decision – which was to go. Do a flyby, in my idiosyncratic nomenclature for such a visit. That is, pass through a place, but a little more than merely driving through. If I see anything interesting during a flyby, I’ll stop for a short look. (So not only is my nomenclature eccentric, it isn’t really accurate. Who cares.)

Sure enough, I spotted something worth stopping for.

A mural at the intersection of James Brown Blvd. and Broad St., completed in 2020 by an artist named Cole Phail. Though born in South Carolina, Brown grew up in Augusta, a fact I previously didn’t know.

Later I learned that there’s a bronze of the Godfather of Soul not far away on Broad, but I didn’t look around enough to spot it, considering the heat dome, which seemed to be bearing down on me personally at that moment. So I looked at the mural, got back in my car, and blasted the AC. A few blocks away, as I was driving along, I saw an open church. I had to stop for that, too.

St. Paul’s Episcopal. Not only a church building, but a church graveyard as well.

Inside, some fine stained glass.

“Four buildings on this site have been destroyed,” the church web site says. (Sank into the swamp? Burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp? Speaking of 50-year-old references.)

“Our present church, built in 1919, was designed as a larger copy of the 1820 church lost in Augusta’s Great Fire of 1916. Among the furnishings saved from the fire is the original baptismal font brought from England in 1751, now located in the narthex.

“History buffs will find the church yard fascinating. Many undocumented graves lie beneath the ground, but others are marked, including that of Col. William Few, a signer of the United States Constitution, whose portrait hangs in the narthex…”

Missed the painting. But I did see Col. Few’s stone.

A busy fellow, both before and after the Revolution, including attendance at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and a stint as one of Georgia’s first Senators under the Constitution. His capsule bio at the Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress mentions all that, except leaving out the fact – detailed by the stone I saw – that he was reinterred at his current location in 1973.

Also, no word on whether he knew Button Gwinnett, everyone’s favorite early Georgia politico. He must have. Gwinnett might have had a similar career had he not ended up on the wrong end of a dueling pistol in ’77.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Religious Sites