Back to the Bronx

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Early in the afternoon of Easter Saturday, I boarded a 4 train at Atlantic Ave.-Barclays Ctr. in Brooklyn and rode it all the way to the Woodlawn station in the Bronx, which is the end of the line and nearly as far as you can go in New York City in that direction. It was a local train. As far as I could tell, there were no expresses to be had on that line that day, though I might have been wrong.

It was a long ride: the better part of two hours. But it was a ride I wanted to take, watching a shifting array of passengers get on and off, and when the train got to the Bronx, watching the borough go by, since the train is elevated up that way.

Some time ago, I wrote about my passage through the South Bronx in 1983: “Before long I was on the #5 IRT, which after leaving Manhattan becomes an elevated train and gave me a full look at the wasteland that is the south Bronx. Blocks of rundown buildings are one thing, but what’s astonishing is how few buildings stand on many blocks, and how much rubble there is. I’ve never seen the aftermath of a city shelled by an enemy, but I’d think it would look like this place.”

That impression of the South Bronx never quite left me. Of course things were different this time, because of the passage of 35 years, and the fact that the 4 takes a very different course than the 5 (which, note, I called the IRT 5 in those days). The 4 train took me past block after block of large apartment buildings, as you’d expect in much of New York, as well as by Yankee Stadium. A casual look at the route of the 5 on Google shows that much redevelopment has been done in that part of the borough, which I’ve also read about.

My goal for the day wasn’t riding the train, but walking through Woodlawn Cemetery. After I first visited Green-Wood Cemetery, I became intrigued with the prospect of seeing Woodlawn, which is an equivalent historic, park-like cemetery in the Bronx, founded in 1863 and so part of the rural cemetery movement. More than 300,000 people are interred there. When Saturday turned out to be clear and almost warm, that tipped my decision toward taking the trip up to Woodlawn.

The cemetery’s web site says: “Our 400-acre cemetery has become an outdoor museum to more than 100,000 visitors who tour our grounds each year. Our celebrated lot owners comprise artists and writers, business moguls, civic leaders, entertainers, jazz musicians, suffragists, and more, including Herman Melville, Joseph Pulitzer, Fiorello LaGuardia, Celia Cruz, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, just to name a few.

“The cemetery’s collection of monuments — including over 1300 mausoleums — were designed by American architects, landscape designers, and sculptors. The work of McKim, Mead & White, Carrere & Hastings, Beatrix Farrand, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and Daniel Chester French graces Woodlawn’s grounds.”

I entered at the Jerome Ave. entrance and walked across the cemetery, generally heading northeast along the main road toward the main entrance. The cemetery isn’t kidding about its many mausoleums. A lot of really large ones seem to be concentrated close to the Jerome Ave. entrance. The result of lots of wealthy people imagining they would be remembered when, of course, they are not.

Still, they’re wonderful to look at. Here’s the stately mausoleum of Julius Manger, early 20th century hotel mogul.

A Greek temple of a mausoleum for Francis Patrick Garvan, lawyer and long-time president of the Chemical Foundation.

The resting place of George Ehret, early 20th century beer baron. I was hoping it was the food faddist Arnold Ehret, but no.

Here’s more Egyptian revival. Always makes my day to run across an example of it.
Woolworth? That Woolworth? Yes, indeed. F.W. Woolworth, the king of the dime store, who died in 1919.

Among these major mausoleums, Woolworth was the only one I’d heard of before looking them up. I wasn’t out to look for famous graves, though I knew Woodlawn has plenty. I had no guide or map. I was just walking to see what I could see.

Mausoleums weren’t the entire scope of the cemetery. I saw many more modest markers, or not so modest, some very elegant.

This one was unusual: Jerome Byron Wheeler (1842-1918). Seems like he wanted to be remembered as a man of refined literary tastes. Or at least as a lover of books.

Wiki, at least, claims his mother was a second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. That didn’t pay for the stone and the relief, however: Wheeler owned mines in Colorado.

One more grave of a noted person: Joseph Pulitzer and other family members, which I found by chance.

Near the main entrance, I saw this wood carving.
Glad to see that the cemetery didn’t simply rip the stump out. Like all the best rural cemeteries, Woodlawn is an arboretum too. This is a kind of memorial to the tree.

Return to Green-Wood

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About three and a half years ago, I took a brisk walk through Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a hilly, wooded place featuring a vast array of headstones and funerary art. The very model of a Victorian rural cemetery, you might say, except that the city has grown around it. Also, it’s still an active cemetery in the 21st century.

I wanted to go back, especially since I spent the latter part of my recent trip to New York staying with my nephew Robert and his girlfriend Meredith at their apartment in Brooklyn, which happens to be two subway stops away from the main entrance of Green-Wood. Even better, I discovered that a tour — the Twilight Tour — ran from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday, March 30, after my work obligations were over.

So I bought a ticket online, and showed up at the main gate not long before 6. The gate itself is a striking bit of Victorian Gothic Revival. Outside the entrance:
None other than Richard Upjohn, the same architect who did Trinity Church Wall Street, designed the gate. Looks like it, too. Inside the entrance:
A resurrection-themed detail on the gate, one of four by John M. Moffitt.
Gray clouds hung over the cemetery and there was occasional drizzle. But I was dressed for it, so that didn’t interfere with the pleasure of walking through Green-Wood again, into parts I didn’t go to last time, so vast is the cemetery.

Even the bare trees and brown-green grass had their charms.

The tour wound up hills and down and around. I didn’t even bother trying to keep track of where we were. I just followed and listened to the guide, who knew a lot and pointed out things you might otherwise miss.

For instance, there aren’t that many Confederates in the cemetery, but there are a few. Such as Col. George Henry Sweet.
We soon came to the highest point in the cemetery, and in fact in Brooklyn, called Battle Hill for its part in a bloody episode in the Battle of Long Island (a.k.a. the Battle of Brooklyn) in the Revolution.

About 100 years ago, that event was memorialized on the hill by a sculpture called “Altar to Liberty: Minerva” by Frederick Ruckstull, which faces toward New York Harbor.

On a clear day, you can see the Statue of Liberty from Minerva’s perch, but we didn’t have a clear day. I understand that that particular the sightline is protected by law, like views of the capitol in Austin.

Also on Battle Hill is a sizable monument to New Yorkers who fought for the Union.

Not far away is the Van Ness-Parsons Egyptian Revival tomb. Pianist, teacher, organist and composer Albert Ross Parsons is interred there, among others.

Clearly they wanted everyone to know that the tomb doesn’t evoke pagan Egypt, but rather Christian Egypt.

Soon we came to the grave of Leonard Bernstein.
Then the more elaborate memorial to Elias Howe, improver of the sewing machine and archenemy of Issac Singer.
As promised, the tour started to become a twilight tour after sunset. The last large tomb I had light enough to shoot was a doozy, though: Charlotte Canda.
I didn’t know the story of Charlotte Canda. The guide informed us. Charlotte, daughter of a wealthy New Yorker, died on her 17th birthday in a carriage accident in 1845. Her tomb is based on unused sketches she made herself a few months earlier, for an aunt of hers who had predeceased Miss Canda.
Restoration efforts have been underway in recent years. According to the guide, back when Green-Wood was treated as a city park, Miss Canda’s tomb was an especially popular place to visit and picnic. The pathos of her story appealed to Victorians, I guess.

We carried on in the near-dark, often using smartphone flashlights, and saw the remarkable gravestone of Cortland Hempstead, chief engineer of the steamship Lexington, which burned and sank in Long Island Sound in January 1840. Of the 143 souls aboard, only four are known to have survived. Hempstead wasn’t one of them.

As seen here, the stone includes a relief based on a Nathaniel Currier lithograph originally published in the New York Sun: “Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat ‘Lexington’ in Long Island Sound on Monday Eveg Jany 13th 1840, by Which Melancholy Occurrence Over 100 Persons Perished.”

We also saw Green-Wood’s catacombs, which are usually closed to the public. They aren’t remotely as extensive as the catacombs of Rome or Paris, but they were interesting: a long concrete tunnel dug into a hill with some dozens of chambers off to the sides, and people interred in the walls of the chambers. The place was dank and smelled like a cave. According to the guide, the catacombs were a more economic alternative than burial in a plot for a while in the 19th century, but they never really caught on, probably because water always made its way in.

After leaving the catacombs, we passed by the single grave at Green-Wood that I wanted to see more than any other: Boss Tweed. Not for the aesthetics of the marker — it’s large but fairly ordinary — but for making the passing acquaintance of such an infamous scoundrel, when he’s no longer in a position to pick one’s pocket.

Stonewall National Monument

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Last Saturday, which was my last full day in New York City, I made a brief late afternoon foray into Greenwich Village. Been awhile since I’d been there, but I have a special fondness for the Village. Not because of the Beats or bohemians or the like, which are certainly interesting, but because I stayed in an apartment there for a couple of weeks in August 1983.

The place I stayed back then had a Sheridan Square address, so I wandered over that way, which isn’t far from the excellent Washington Square Park, though it was a little chilly on Saturday to fully appreciate it. Pretty soon I came across a place I’d heard and read about, but hadn’t fixed in my mind as being where it is: Stonewall National Monument, on Christopher St.

As national monuments go, Stonewall is small, about 7.7 acres. It’s also new, designated only in June 2016, near the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

NYC Parks has a short history of the place: “Located at 51-53 Christopher Street, Stonewall Inn was formerly two adjacent two-story stable houses erected in 1843 and 1846. After numerous alterations, the two buildings were joined into a restaurant by the 1930s. By the 1950s the place was known as Stonewall Inn Restaurant.

“In 1966, it closed for renovations, and reopened in the following year as a private club known as Stonewall Inn – a bar and dance hall which, like numerous local establishments, catered to the homosexual community of Greenwich Village.

“In the early hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn and a melee ensued in which 13 people were arrested. Word of the raid and the resistance to it soon spread, and the next day hundreds gathered to protest the crackdown and advocate the legalization of gay bars.

“Further protests erupted in early July, and on July 27, a group of activists organized the first gay and lesbian march, from Washington Square to Stonewall. The events of that summer and their aftermath are often credited as the flashpoint for the gay rights movement in the United States.”

In 1983, I had no notion the Stonewall Inn was there. I’d heard the story of the riots a few years before, but I don’t remember anything to mark the site when I was there, and by then the building was being used for something else anyway.

Christopher Park, which is across the street from Stonewall Inn, was being renovated at that time. “The restoration of Christopher Park was initiated in 1983 by the Friends of Christopher Park, a community volunteer group organized in the late 1970s to maintain and beautify the park,” NYC Parks says.

“Under the direction of landscape architect Philip Winslow, over $130,000 was spent in order to restore the site to its 19th-century splendor. The renovated park, including a new gate, benches, lampposts, walkways, and numerous trees and shrubs, was officially reopened in 1986.”

This time around, I spent a few minutes resting at Christopher Park, even though it was distinctly cool by that time in the afternoon. (In New York, one walks a lot, or should.) There are three memorials in the small park. One is “Gay Liberation” by George Segal, unveiled in 1992.

A more traditional statue, erected in the 1930s, also stands in the park: Phillip Sheridan, by Joseph P. Pollia.

Finally, according to NYC Parks, there’s a flagpole in the park honoring the 1861 Fire Zouaves. Damn, how did I miss that? What the ’61 Fire Zouaves need is a statue on the site, or somewhere in New York. A bright, colorful statue.

The Oculus

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Not everybody likes the Oculus, which is the unofficial name of World Trade Center Transportation Hub in Lower Manhattan, opened in 2016 to replace the facilities destroyed in the 2001 attack. The last time I was in town, it was still under construction, but now it’s done.

A good deal of the criticism is about how much it cost, and it certainly was expensive ($4.4 billion, I’ve read). As a non-New Yorker, I can easily be sanguine about that. Besides, with a GDP of $1.3 trillion or so annually, which is in the same league as Spain or South Korea, I suspect metro New York can afford a few grand public works. But it’s also short-term thinking. If the structure lasts even 100 years, who’s going to care about cost overruns?

Then there are the visceral reactions to Santiago Calatrava’s design. Some of these can be found at TripAdvisor, in the one- or two-star comments. A selection follows, all sic.

“White sterile, soulless, limited shopping, resembling a rotting beached whale. This place does not look as if it belongs in NY. More suited to a Middle Eastern theme park.”

“Cavernous: much better to look at from the outside; although, it really just looks like some animal’s ribcage.”

“Although many reviews praise the style of architecture as ‘impressive’, the underlining truth about this architecture is that it was designed in a style similar to that of Soviet Constructivism in order to purposefully induce feelings of tension, intimidation, a global or “one-world” identity rather than a traditional or local one.”

That last one’s an odd notion. Soviet was about the last thing I thought of when inside the Oculus.

That’s the view from one of the balconies on one side of the main hall. I got the sense of a large, vaulting open space — like a major train terminal of old, but looking nothing like one. I have a few quibbles, though. The space could use more places to sit, for instance.

Turning the camera to the vertical from the same perch.

I’d walked to the Oculus from the Downtown restaurant where Geof and his wife Karen and I had had dinner. They wanted to show me the Oculus.

This is Geof Huth. Known him for over 35 years now.

A look at the ceiling from down on the main floor.

I’m not going to spend time intellectualizing my experience at the Oculus. Enough to say that I liked it. I was impressed. It’s a wow. It isn’t like anything else I’ve seen. It may or may not be worth the money, but it is worth spending a few minutes standing in the space and looking up and all around.

Trinity Church Wall Street, Alexander & Eliza Hamilton, and Norges Bank Investment Management

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On Broadway in Lower Manhattan, near the intersection with the storied Wall Street, stands the church and graveyard of Trinity Church Wall Street. Looking at the property means you’re peering deep into the history of New York and the early days of the Republic — and into a modern-day real estate story involving Norwegians.

First, the church building.

The current church is the third one on the site, completed in 1846, so it isn’t the building that George Washington and especially Alexander Hamilton would have known. The second building was completed in 1790 to replace the original, which burned down in the Fire of 1776.

Richard Upjohn designed the current Gothic Revival structure as one of the first in a very long list of churches that he did. For a good many years, it was the tallest building in New York, or in the United States for that matter, which is a little hard to imagine in its current setting among taller buildings.

Being Holy Week, the church was fairly busy, though no service was going on when I visited.
Busy inside, but the real crowd was outside, in the graveyard.
A school group happened to be wandering through when I arrived. They might have come for the history of the entire place, but who had they really come to see?

Alexander Hamilton, of course.
I have to admit that I either didn’t know, or had forgotten, that he is buried at Trinity. In a way, that was a good thing, since it was a nice surprise.

Note the enormous number of pennies and other coins at the base of his stone. Seemed like even more than I saw at Benjamin Franklin’s grave, who had the benefit of being associated with “a penny saved is a penny earned.”

Eliza Hamilton, who outlived Alexander by more than 50 years and is buried next to him, collected her share of pennies, too.
That’s what you get for being the subject of a very popular musical in our time. Even I’ve heard some of the songs. Ann plays them in the car. They’re interesting. I’m all for musicals about major historical figures, but I’m not going to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket.

The Hamiltons weren’t the only famed permanent residents of the graveyard. There’s steamboat popularizer Robert Fulton, who has a memorial fittingly erected by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Here’s Capt. James “Don’t Give Up the Ship” Lawrence, hero of the War of 1812. His memorial’s looking a little green these days.
Nice detail on one side.

There are also plenty of memorials for regular 18th- and 19th-century folks. I’m glad to say they were getting some attention.

There are stones the likes of which aren’t made any more.

Or on which time has taken its toll.
About those Norwegians. Trinity Church Wall Street, which is part of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, is known for is being one of the wealthiest parishes in the nation. In 1705, Queen Anne granted the church 215 acres on the island of Manhattan. It still holds 14 of those acres, which these days are home to millions of square feet of commercial property. That kind of acreage would make anyone very rich indeed.

Recently —  in 2015 — the church monetized 11 of its office buildings by striking a deal with Norges Bank Investment Management, which oversees Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (a lot of North Sea oil money, I reckon). It’s no secret. I quote from the press release the church published:

“Norges Bank Investment Management will acquire its 44 percent share in a 75-year ownership interest for 1.56 billion dollars, valuing the properties at 3.55 billion dollars. The assets will be unencumbered by debt at closing.”

Unencumbered by debt. The sweetest words you can write about real estate.

“The properties are about 94 percent leased and total over 4.9 million square feet. They are all located in the Hudson Square neighborhood of Midtown South in Manhattan… The buildings were originally built in the early 1900s to house printing presses, but have been redeveloped by Trinity Church to attract a mix of creative office tenants.”

At the Tip of Manhattan

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“Charging Bull,” a 7,100-pound bronze at Broadway and Whitehall St. in Downtown Manhattan, seems even more popular than the statue of Rocky Balboa in Philadelphia, which certainly has its fans. My evidence is only anecdotal, judging by the number of people I saw around each, trying to take a picture. Rocky had a short line of people waiting to take their picture with him (in 2016, some 40 years after the movie came out).

But the Bull draws a crowd. In front of it:
Along with those eager to shoot its backside:
I was in New York City all of last week, where I met many of the editors of the company I now work for, plus writers and other staff, at an office in Downtown (Lower) Manhattan. Also during the trip, I spent time with a few old friends and their spouses, and my youngest nephew and his girlfriend. I even had a little time to walk around town, especially Downtown, which I enjoyed despite chilly air and some drizzle.

One of my walks took me to “Charging Bull,” which had its start as one of the heaviest works of guerilla art ever made, by Arturo Di Modica in the late 1980s. Now it’s a fixture on the tourist circuit, located almost as far south as you can go on the island, though not quite.

As is “Fearless Girl,” a much newer installation by Kristen Visbal, dating only from last year, and which was positioned to face the bull as an ad for an exchange-traded fund. I watched as one person after another posed with “Girl.”

Apparently Di Modica doesn’t like his work being upstaged by a little girl, but I can’t say that I much care. What’s interesting to me is their power as tourist magnets. Not many statues have that.

The statues are adjacent to a nice little park that has the distinction of being the first public park in New York, Bowling Green.
Note the fence. It rates a plaque, which says that the park was “leased in 1733 for use as a bowling green at a rental of one peppercorn a year. Patriots, who in 1776 destroyed an equestrian statue of George III which stood here, are said to have removed the crowns which capped the fence post, but the fence itself remains.”

The Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House rises over the park, roughly where Fort Amsterdam stood long ago.
The present structure dates from the early 1900s and was designed by Cass Gilbert, who’s best known for the Woolworth Building further uptown. These days, the building is home to a branch of the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian, as well as the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Off to each side of the building, allegorical figures stand above; tourists loll below. The work of Daniel Chester French, creator of the seated Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial and a lot else besides.
Across State Street from the building, in Battery Park, is a curious flagpole. Officially it’s the Netherland Monument. This is the base.

According to NYC Parks: “This monumental flagstaff commemorates the Dutch establishment of New Amsterdam and the seventeenth century European settlement which launched the modern metropolis of New York City. Designed by H.A.van den Eijnde (1869-1939), a sculptor from Haarlem in the Netherlands, the monument was dedicated in 1926 to mark the tercentenary of Dutch settlement, and the purchase of the island of Manhattan from Native Americans.”

How many people crowd around the bronze bull? Dozens at a time. Around the Dutch flagpole? None. Fitting, I guess. Bulls used to get their own cults. Flagpoles, not so much.

The Dutch flag wasn’t flying on the pole.

But at least I saw New York City flag, which is based on the tricolor of the Prince’s Flag of the Dutch Republic. Not as striking as the Chicago flag, but not bad at all.

Quasi-Spring Break

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The vernal equinox might have just passed, but every time I go outside, winter reminds me that it’s decided to linger. Have one for the road. Take another turn around the block.

Then again, we’ve seen a few robins. The croci are emerging. In the evening, Onion is way off to the southwest. All the usual signs of spring are here. So time for a kind of spring break. Back to posting Easter Monday, which is April 2 this year.

Till then, a few items.

Without looking for it — the only way to find many things — I came across this picture the other day.

That’s Mike and Steve Johnson, in a picture I took at a wedding of a mutual friend of ours on July 6, 1996. Mike died in 2016. I’m sorry to report that his twin brother Steve died earlier this year.

Recently I finished Apollo 8, subtitled “The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon,” by Jeffrey Kluger (2017). Thrilling indeed. Covers much of the same ground — rather, space — as the Apollo 8 chapter of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, though naturally in more detail.

The author characterizes the mission as the most “audacious” decision NASA ever made, and I’ll go along with that. Reading about any of the Apollo voyages, but especially this one, gives you (or should give you) a sense of just how dangerous it all was. Worth the risk, of course, but I’m surprised none of the Apollo astronauts bought it on the Moon, or in space, as opposed to the awful fate of the Apollo 1 crew.

A footnote: all of the Apollo 8 crew are still alive. Frank Borman just turned 90, James Lovell will turn 90 next Sunday, and Bill Anders is the youngest at 84. None of the other full Apollo crews are alive, though for now there’s at least one left from each mission except Apollo 14.

About 20 years ago, I saw Lovell speak at a real estate conference. I don’t remember much about what he said, other than to praise the movie Apollo 13, but it was a kick to see him anyway.

Recently we saw Vertigo at the theater. Been a long time since I last saw it, more than 30 years. These days, it gets high critical praise. Perhaps, I thought, I’d admire it more with a few more decades behind me, since I remember not being overly impressed by it as a young man.

It’s certainly a remarkable movie, interesting in a lot of ways. But it didn’t speak to me any more now than it did before. Maybe the story’s serious implausibilities got in the way. Not sure I can quite put my finger on it. A good movie, maybe a great one, but best? Naah.

Primary Day

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Today Illinois held its primary election for divers offices. At the entrance to my polling place at Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary were divers signs.

At about 2 p.m., when I went, the poll wasn’t particularly crowded. Voting took all of about 10 minutes. Many of the offices had only one candidate. Others, I knew little about. In that case, my strategy is usually to vote for the last person on the ballot, because I’ve read that the first person has an advantage just for being first.

In the last few days, the postcards and robo-calls have been pouring in. One robo-call I got yesterday — note that it was yesterday, the day before the election — said (details changed):

“Hi, this is Mortimer Snerd, candidate for state representative. I will bring honesty, integrity and transparency to Springfield. Today is election day, so please don’t forget to vote. Polls are open till 7. I hope I can count on your support. I’m Mortimer Snerd, and I approve of this message. Paid for by Citizens for Mortimer Snerd.”

Oops. The robot doing that robo-call jumped the gun just a little.

A couple of days ago, a voice purporting to be the wife of a candidate — let’s call him Charlie McCarthy — was left on my answering machine:

“Recently, you might have received calls on behalf of his opponent, making false accusations about my husband. The truth is, everything we’ve told you about Yancy Derringer’s questionable record is completely true and properly cited. Since it’s hard to counter facts, he’s resorted to name-calling. Please join me and punch number 666 on your ballot, Charlie McCarthy for judge.”

I’m afraid I can’t vote for Charlie McCarthy (campaign slogan, “He’s no dummy.”) That would put the nation at risk of another wave of McCarthyism.

No Nostalgia for DSL

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Lately it’s been just like the bad old days of DSL around here. I wrote about it more often than I remembered: here, here and finally here, among other times. Does anyone use DSL any more? I hope not.

Last week, after a fairly long period of solid performance, the house wifi because testy. Then temperamental. Then unstable and often unusable. Calls were made, robots were spoken to, and then a human being in the Philippines. Earlier today, a technician came to the house and did things to the system, which fixed it fine for about four hours.

Another call was made. This time I think I was speaking to a domestic call center. “Dan” he said, and it didn’t sound like a nom de call center (Raji calling himself Bob, or Nadia calling herself Mary). Another tech is coming tomorrow. We shall see.

I knew I was talking to the Philippines the first time because I asked. I couldn’t quite place her dialect, a mostly intelligible voice with an element of sing-song, and curiosity got the better of me. After all, the last thing she asked me was, “Is there anything else I can help you with or tell you?” There was.

San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, Before It Was a World Heritage Site

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In late March 2013, the girls and I went to San Antonio. I’m always glad to show a bit of the town to them, and the visit included some of the missions, which are collectively San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. A couple of years later, they became a World Heritage Site, the first in Texas.

At Mission Concepción.

In full, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña, founded by Franciscans, with work on the current structures started in 1731.
A little more than a century later, it was the site of the little-known Battle of Concepción in the Texas Revolution.
Mission San Jose.

In full, Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, with construction starting in the 1760s, and restored by the WPA in the 1930s.

I forget where Lilly got the small piñata. I think eventually the dog destroyed it.
It’s still an active church.
Mission San Juan Capistrano.
The church building had just been renovated the year before, which accounts for its newish, rather than long-weathered look.

Much of the grounds is open, with a few other ruins.
We didn’t make it to Mission Espada, and I haven’t been back that way since. Maybe one of these days.