The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Posted on September 20, 2016 by admin

Saturday was the annual Churches by Bus tour organized by the Chicago Architectural Foundation, which we were on last year and the year before. Not this year. We’ve been to two of the five churches listed on the tour. The tour isn’t precisely cheap, so I wanted a little more novelty. Four out of five, maybe.

So we planned to look at four churches around Michigan Ave. while in the neighborhood. Nothing new — almost nothing new — but no charge either. As it turned out, only two of the four were open, and a third had a service in progress; not the time to wander around looking at it. The open one that wasn’t busy was Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago on Michigan Ave., a fine Gothic structure in the heart of the shopping district.

Nice courtyard to the south of the main building, too.

When the church was finished in 1914, however, that part of Michigan Ave., still called Pine St., was no great shakes. Cheap land, in other words. All of the action on Michigan Ave. was still south of the Chicago River. That changed with the completion of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the river in 1920, and Fourth Pres has watched temples of mammon grow up around it since then.

A fine interior. Been inside a number of times over the years. The ceiling’s a little dark, but lights up there would be expensive not only in electricity usage, but maintenance, I figure.

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), an architect who did a lot of ecclesiastical work, designed the church. He’s also known for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Adjacent to the church is a much newer structure, the Gratz Center, which was completed only in 2013 to house a preschool program, the Buchanan Chapel, a new dining room and kitchen, offices, and rooms. We took a look at the second-story Buchanan Chapel, which is mostly spare, but well lit with natural light, and with a labyrinth on its floor. The chapel’s architect was Brian Vitale, in Gensler’s Chicago office.

Up in the corner of the chapel hangs “Quaternion,” a 2014 piece by Alyson Shotz, a Brooklyn artist.

Interesting. Often, that’s all I ask from bits of the world.

Michigan Avenue on a September Saturday Afternoon

Posted on September 19, 2016 by admin

We went downtown again on Saturday, more specifically to Michigan Avenue and within a few blocks to the east and west of that famed street. A famed street, and crowded on a Saturday during the time of year when it’s still warm.
The sidewalk wasn’t always that crowded. But sometimes it was, suddenly.

At the spot officially called Pioneer Court — I don’t know anyone who actually calls it that — in front of the Equitable Building and just south of the Tribune Tower, the new Michigan Avenue Apple Store is under construction, to take the place of the store further to the north on the avenue. They say it’ll be a humdinger when it’s done.
Wonder whether the bronze Jack Brickhouse will be in Pioneer Court near the Tribune Tower for much longer.
After all, the Tribune hasn’t owned the Cubs in a while, and the Tribune isn’t even going to own the Tribune Tower much longer (the company got $240 million for it). Then there’s the matter of Brickhouse being dead for nearly two decades. That’s a long time not to be on the radio. Time flies, people forget, your statue ends up in a less prominent location. Just speculation.

The plaza across the street from Pioneer Court, in the shadow of the Wrigley Building, was just the place on Saturday for some wedding photography. At least this party thought so, and they could do a lot worse.
The bust in the corner is of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DeSable, the fellow from Haiti — I suppose that would be from Saint-Domingue — who founded a trading post on the Chicago River near this site in the 1770s, making him the first non-Indian Chicagoan. I think that bust used to be where the Apple store is being built.

Not far away, just at that moment, was Jeremy the Magician from Britain. That’s what his hat said, anyway, and he had the accent for it, and a Union Jack vest, in case you didn’t get the point.
Further north, in fact not far from the Chicago Water Tower (can I call it iconic? Too bad that word’s been beaten to death), this fellow had a different sort of message.

Namely, you’re going to Hell.

(Capitalize “Hell.” English Language & Usage Stack Exchange says: “No less an authority than Fulton Sheen had the galleys for his latest book come back from the typesetters with ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ knocked down to lowercase. He carefully re-capitalized each occurrence. When his editor called to request an explanation, he gave what I think we can regard as the definitive answer to [the] question: Because they’re places. You know, like Scarsdale.)

Royal Oak Orchard, 2004 (and ’05)

Posted on September 18, 2016 by admin

About 12 years ago, I wrote, “I will, however, write about a place that needed less detailed notes: the Royal Oak Orchard, near Harvard, Illinois, where I took the whole family a week ago Saturday. It’s a U-Pick-Em orchard, the sort of place that one never thinks to go without small children…. Besides the rows of apple trees open to all pickers, there was a fruit shop, restaurant, souvenir shop, shack shop, playground, petting zoo, rings for campfires, a hayride, and a teepee inscribed with Bible verses.”

I took a favorite As-We-Were picture at the orchard that day, September 18, 2004.
Don’t know who the fellow in the green shirt was. Just standing around, probably. It makes me wonder how many images, scattered around in all sorts of places, I’ve accidentally gotten myself into.

To continue: “It was a fine day for picking, sunny and warm, and we had a pleasant drive into the exurbs. The orchard is about five miles east of Harvard, a town hard against the Illinois-Wisconsin line. I’d estimated that it would take an hour to get there; Yuriko thought it would be two hours; it worked out to be an hour and a half, true to the spirit of compromise in a marriage.”

Lilly was into the spirit of apple-picking.
“We got down to the business of picking apples, yellow ones and red ones and colors in between, with variety names that I don’t recall (guess I could use some notes). Regardless of their names, they were all tasty apples. Many of them were low enough for Lilly to reach, and even Ann sampled a number of different ones, though actual picking was a little beyond her.”

I had a fine time myself.

We’d picked apples the year before at a place I don’t remember so well, and the next year we went back to Royal Oak Orchard, but got rained on, and bought a bag instead of picking them.

No such problem in 2004: “Afterwards we repaired to the picnic area to eat lunch. A sign prohibited outside food, that is, picnic lunches such as the one we brought, but we ignored this. Pop Christian music played unobtrusively, but distinctly, from a speaker near the snack shop. Curious, but purveying apples and spreading the Gospel doesn’t seem mutually exclusive.”

We haven’t picked any U-Pick-Em apples since. Just one of those things you never quite get around to again, and then everyone’s lost interest.

A Reg Manning Travelcard — No. 15

Posted on September 15, 2016 by admin

Lately, thanks to the Special Collections & University Archives of Wichita State University, I’ve learned that “Reginald Manning was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on April 5, 1905. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1919 and studied art in high school. Shortly after graduation, Reginald began working for the Arizona Republic, starting work on May 1, 1926. He worked there for the next 50 years.

“Manning’s job at the newspaper originally was a photographer and spot artist. Before too long, he was drawing daily editorial cartoons and a weekly full-page review of the news called ‘The Big Parade.’ He quit drawing the ‘Parade” in 1948 in order to devote more time to his editorial cartoons. In 1951, Manning won a Pulitzer for ‘Hats.’

“In addition to his lectures, Manning has published many books. Some of the books that he produced are A Cartoon Guide to Arizona (1938), What Kinda Cactus Issat? (1941), From Tee to Cup (1954), and What Is Arizona Really Like? (1968).

“Reg Manning was one of the most prominent conservative voices in cartooning and has won numerous awards for his work. Besides winning a Pulitzer Prize, he has also won the Freedom Foundation’s Abraham Lincoln award two years in succession.”

He died in 1986. Somehow I missed knowing a thing about him until recently, when I was looking through some cards I’d bought at a resale shop. Seems that he did gag postcards, too. At least 15 of them.

His style seems familiar. Probably I’ve seen his work without attaching a name to it. The card I have, copyrighted 1942, was mailed from Flagstaff in March 1946, addressed to a Master Georgie, so I’ll assume it was from a relative or family friend to a child — no one signed the card.

He or she did check off some of the lines on the card, which is amusing. Guess that was the intention. Wonder whether Georgie — later George — kept the card his whole life from the age of around 10 (say) to much more recent times, when it wound up in a box of cards at a resale shop. Maybe George, lately around 80, passed on not long ago, and his heirs had no use for gag cards from the 1940s. All speculation, but sometimes that’s just the thing for a found object in your possession.

Queen Elizabeth Cake, NW Suburban Style

Posted on September 14, 2016 by admin

A recent birthday cake in our house.

One candle because no one could be bothered to come up with some other combination. “It’s for your first half-century,” I told Yuriko.

It’s called a Queen Elizabeth Cake, a creation of the always-talented Deerfield Bakery here in the northwest suburbs. The bakery’s web site tells me that it’s “yellow cake filled with strawberries, Bavarian cream and sliced bananas.” That jibes with my experience of eating some of it.

Also, “a single strawberry crowns this dessert, created by Henry Schmitt in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Chicago in 1959.” That would be part of the Queen’s tour along the spanking-new St. Lawrence Seaway that year. (A bit of major infrastructure that should be better known; I’d bet that only a small number of kids in Lilly’s dorm, just to pick one sample of people that age, know what it is.)

Henry Schmitt, coming from a line of bakers from Germany, founded Deerfield Bakery in metro Chicago in the 20th century. Apparently his QE Cake was an idiosyncratic take, since elsewhere (such as allreipes.com), I’ve read that the term refers to “a date nut cake… crowned with a broiled coconut topping.”

That sounds good too, but it isn’t anything like the Deerfield Bakery creation.

Which is very, very good.

Schaumburg Town Square, Augmented

Posted on September 13, 2016 by admin

Before she left for school, Lilly told me that people spend time at Schaumburg Town Square on warm evenings — all of them, this time of year — playing Pokemon Go. Not long ago I took a look myself, to see if she was pulling my leg.

She wasn’t.

Among other things, Schaumburg Town Square, which includes the township library and some retail space, features a small grass-surfaced amphitheater, and the game seemed especially popular there. I watched for a while to make sure that’s what they were doing, and confirmed it for certain when I heard a couple fellows talking about it. These guys.

As The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy said about Earth, “mostly harmless.”

I Went And I Believe

Posted on September 12, 2016 by admin

Still green, still summerish. I even saw people practicing baseball in the park over the weekend, though most evenings it’s now peewee footballers. Goldenrod has made its appearance in vast thick waves in some places, but only as a few sprigs in my back yard. Even so, that’s the first time I remember seeing goldenrod in the back yard.

Spotted in a big box retail store parking lot recently: a Jetta with a license plate frame that said on the bottom, “I WENT AND I BELIEVE.” From a normal standing position, the top part of the frame wasn’t visible, so I bent down to see just what the first part of that terse declaration might be. “Delphi” seemed unlikely.

Digression: According to Paths from Ancient Greece by Carol Thomas (1988), the last Delphic oracle was given to Julian the Apostate in 362. Wonder what that could have been. Maybe, “Dude, you’re hosed.”

The top of the plate frame said, CREATION MUSEUM. Must be the place in Petersburg, Ky., that also recently opened an interpretation of Noah’s Ark elsewhere in the state. I had to look into that a little further, and the owner of the car paid $30 to get in, or $60 for the “museum” and the Ark combo ticket, and who knows how much for the license plate frame.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Creation Museum also includes a planetarium. The CM web site says, “Sit back and be amazed as the planetarium projector displays vividly realistic images upon a 30-foot-diameter dome, allowing stargazers to travel anywhere in the universe. Enjoy learning from scientists and astronomers who affirm young-earth creation and explain how what we see in the night sky confirms God’s Word in Genesis.”

I can’t be civil about this any more. Morons. Does God in His wisdom want wide human variety? Including morons? I have to wonder.

Scenes of Post-People’s Republic Mongolia

Posted on September 11, 2016 by admin

The part of rural Mongolia that we saw in September 1994 — in and near Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, 20 or so miles from Ulaanbaatar — looked a lot like this. Ulaanbaatar wasn’t a sprawling kind of place in those days, unless you count the large neighborhoods composed of thousands of ger (yurts).
In places the trees were fairly dense, with streams flowing through the land. Most of all, though, it felt remote. Even more remote than the arguably further-from-absolutely-everything Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, because the infrastructure was so much more developed there, as far SW as you could go on the entire continent.

Ulaanbaatar didn’t feel so remote, though in ’94 sometimes livestock were seen wandering the streets. I wonder if that’s now a thing of the past for the Mongolian capital, as traffic inevitability increases. How do I know that traffic has increased in 20-plus years? That’s just one of those things that happens.

These prayer wheels were at the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in the city.
From the looks of more recent pictures, some restoration work has been done since then. At least, I’m fairly sure that the stock photo I linked to was taken at about the same place I stood; it certainly looks like it, taking into account various renovations and additions over the years.

In the city, we also visited the Mongolian Natural History Museum, known the world over for its dinosaur artifacts. “The museum is particularly well known for its dinosaur and other paleontological exhibits, among which the most notable are a nearly complete skeleton of a late Cretaceous Tarbosaurus tyrannosaurid and broadly contemporaneous nests of Protoceratops eggs,” Wiki says. I remember those eggs.

And, of course, the big skeletons. You could go up on a balcony for a look at them.

Photography involved paying an extra fee. Or so the museum staff told us at the entrance. None of us paid such a fee, and pretty much everyone in our group took pictures, though as you can see, the light was lousy. I don’t even think any staff were in the big dinosaur room with us, keeping an eye on us. Things were lax. Hope nobody over the years took advantage of that to take anything besides pictures.

The Wheeling Superdawg ’16

Posted on September 8, 2016 by admin

More than six years ago, I wrote, “What to do after touring a mansion exuding poshness, if you happen to be hungry? Go to a hot dog stand.

“Not just any hot dog stand, but the drive-in Superdawg. Not the original, which is on the Northwest side of Chicago, but the Wheeling, Ill., iteration that opened in January. It was on our way home.”

On Saturday, I noticed that the Wheeling Superdawg was on the way to the Chicago Botanic Garden, more or less. So we went again, the first time in more than six years. Before we got there, Yuriko said she didn’t remember any such place. But as soon as we arrived, she did. It’s hard to forget these characters.

Those are the rooftop boy and girl dogs — awfully heteronormative of them, some nags might say — but they’re also featured in a lot of other places, including on the packaging and the napkins. They’re also on the sign that faces the road (Milwaukee Ave. in Wheeling). These anthropomorphic hot dogs rotate slowly, unlike the static ones on the roof.
This time I had the original Superdawg. I forgot to order it without mustard, but other than that I liked it. Yuriko enjoyed her hamburger.

Back in ’10 I noted: “Each order station also has a sign that says: ‘We’re super sorry, but we’re unable to accept credit cards because of our unique drive in/carhop service…’ We went inside anyway, and they don’t accept cards there either. Retro indeed.”

I can report that in 2016, inside the restaurant at least, all manner of credit and debit cards are now accepted. Guess they figured the all-cash model was losing them some customers.

One more thing today: I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, though I have only the vaguest memories of it as a prime-time show in the late ’60s. One of the stations in San Antonio started showing it in the after-school slot in 1973, when I was in junior high. That I remember. The first episode the station aired was “Devil in the Dark.”

The series, and all its successor iterations, have been hit or miss over the years. Its starting concept — the pitch Roddenberry supposedly made — was “Wagon Train to the Stars.” Does anybody remember Wagon Train any more?

My own fondest memory of the show I’ve written about before: “More than 30 years ago, I spent a few days camped out in a dorm room at MIT. I noticed a few things while there, such as that everyone on the hall went to the common room to watch an afternoon showing of Star Trek, and everyone knew the lines. (The original series; because this was 1982, the only series. Patrick Stewart was still just a Shakespearean actor who’d played Sejanus for the BBC.).”

Non-Plants in the Chicago Botanic Garden

Posted on September 7, 2016 by admin

I thought of “Manmade Things in the Chicago Botanic Garden” as a title, but in a real sense everything in a highly cultivated garden is manmade, even if the raw materials of the displays are descended from naturally occurring plants. Artificial selection invented the tea rose, after all.

The Chicago Botanic Garden includes many things besides plants. Such as this sculpture in the Heritage Garden.

It’s instantly recognizable as a Robert Berks bubble-gum statue, in this case dating from 1982. Based on a casual search, his statues seem to be esteemed these days, especially now that he’s dead, but I’m with the art critics who were upset about the Einstein statue in DC when it was new. They’re ugly. That’s my two-word critique.

Anyway, the subject is fitting for a garden, since it’s Carolus Linnæus. In fact, I’ve seen his carved face before in such a place, but a long way from metro Chicago.
That’s Linnæus at the Adelaide Botanic Garden in 1991. A much more conventional bust, certainly, and maybe not that interesting. But at least it isn’t ugly. More about the Chicago-area Linnæus statue is at the always delightful Public Art in Chicago.

This is “Boy Gardener” in the Rose Garden.

By an Oak Park sculptor, Margot Mcmahon. Straightforward, unpretentious.

In the Japanese Garden, a yukimi lantern.

Supposedly it looks elegant covered with snow, and I’ll bet it does. I don’t think I’ll visit the gardens in winter to confirm that, though.

Also in the Japanese Garden, the Zigzag Bridge, with a selfie in progress, and a woman taking pictures of carp.

The explanation for its shape is that evil spirits can only travel in straight lines, and thus can’t follow you onto the island. What is it about evil spirits? They’re scared of noise, can’t follow a slight zigzag, and seem to have a lot of other handicaps to keep them from their malevolent work.

Here’s one of the bridges between the main part of the garden and Evening Island. Not so distinctive by itself, but it is shaded by enormous willows.
The other bridge to Evening Island has a name, the Serpentine, for obvious reasons. With more willows.
On Evening Island itself, there’s this structure rising from the flora.

The Theodore C. Butz Memorial Carillon, to give its formal name, installed in 1986. A sign at the base of the structure says, “Crafted in Holland, the Garden’s carillon is one of a few hand-played carillons in the United States. The cast bronze bells have a range of four octaves, and are played using a large keyboard. The smallest of the 48 bells weighs 24 pounds, and the largest weighs two and a half tons.”

No carillonneur seemed to be on duty, but we did hear it ring the hour, so I guess it can be set for automatic as well as manual.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling