St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, Park Ridge

Posted on September 24, 2015 by admin

You might call St. Luke’s Lutheran Church at 205 N. Prospect Ave. in Park Ridge an example of Suburban Gothic, but apparently that’s the name of a movie that came out last year. Anyway, it’s a handsome English Gothic-style church in the suburbs. We were back in Park Ridge Saturday afternoon for the last stop on the Churches by Bus tour.

The building has the distinction of being designed in the late 1920s by Elisabeth Martini (1886-1984), the first woman to be the proprietor of an architectural firm in Chicago. Mostly she did houses, but it seems that she was a member of this church, and did the design work for a payment of $60 a month for the rest of her life, which turned out to be another 50-odd years, though it might not have been adjusted for inflation.

Adjoining the sanctuary (next to the bus in my picture) is a 2010 addition by Douglas E. Lasch of Jaeger, Nickola, Kuhlman & Associates, which replaced a smaller addition from the 1970s and blends in remarkably well with the original structure. He has his own shop now, Faith Environ Studio, which focuses “primarily on providing architectural services to faith-based and other non-profit clients.”

St. Luke’s sanctuary has an elegant interior.

The stained glass windows tell of the Old and New Testaments. I’m sure the representation of Moses in one of the windows was meant seriously, but I can’t shake the idea that he’s grinning. Maybe it’s the eyes. “See what I have here! Commandments! Ten of them! Aren’t they terrific?”

Luther, on the other hand, looks fairly serious, but not grim.

I suppose those are the 95 theses on the door. A little hard to read at this scale. Wonder if they’re microprinted in the original Latin? I didn’t check. Never mind, the text is easily available on line in Latin and English (and other languages).

I haven’t looked at the theses since sometime in a college history class, so I was amused to find No. 86: “Again, ‘Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?’ ”

Ah, if only in our time and place we could mention Crassus without having to explain who he was. Then again, if those poor believers were able to understand that they were doing their little part to build the grandest church in Christendom, would they have been particularly upset?

One more thing about St. Luke’s in Park Ridge, which I read about later. It’s the home to the Bottle Band. Odd the things you find out. More about the band here.

Our Lady of Hope, Rosemont

Posted on September 23, 2015 by admin

The newest church on our bus tour last Saturday was Our Lady of Hope, a Catholic church at 9711 W. Devon Ave., just barely in the boundaries of the small suburb of Rosemont, which is better known for its proximity to O’Hare and various entertainment venues. In fact, while I might be wrong, it seems to be the only church with a location in Rosemont, based on a Google map search.

Built only in 1986 (which seems new to me), the church counts as a “Modern Prairie” style, according to the Chicago Architecture Foundation. “Modern Prairie designs are often devoid of frills and decoration, but build character through asymmetrical shape, and large open spaces,” the CAF says.

Frill-less indeed, especially on the outside.
Also true to its prairie-style forerunners, the entrance isn’t immediately apparent, but once you go in, you do find large open spaces. I liked the curve into the nave — maybe this space counts as the narthex, though probably that terminology went out with traditional church decor.
A semicircle of seats faces the altar. The lighting was such that I didn’t get a decent shot of the altar. The seats, on the other hand, were quite visible.
There was some representational art, but not much. Such as this group standing among plants.
A young architect named Leslie Ventsch, working at the time for developer Opus Corp., designed the structure. These days he’s a design director at Gensler, according to LinkedIn. He won a Burnham Award in the mid-80s, for a different structure.

St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church

Posted on September 22, 2015 by admin

Go to 5000 N. Cumberland on the Northwest Side of Chicago, and then to the back of the building at that address, and you’ll be looking at this.

In full, the English name of this church is St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. The church is part of the the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Saint Nicholas of Chicago, a diocese of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. St. Nicholas Cathedral, which we visited last fall, is the mother church of this group. For simplicity, I’ll call this church St. Joseph’s, which is an Eastern church in full communion with Rome.

As a building, St. Joseph’s is an impressive use of glass, concrete and steel, completed in 1977, which such materials weren’t always so impressively used (and they still aren’t). The docent asserted that some people are reminded of rockets when they look at the church, but I think of those pneumatic tubes you use at drive-through banks. Still, they work somehow as building elements.

There are 13 domes, as often the case in Eastern churches, the center for Christ and 12 others for the Apostles (I assume that includes Matthias, who took Judas’ place). A Ukrainian-born Philadelphia architect named Zenon Mazurkevycz (Mazurkevich) designed the church. He seems best known for St. Joseph’s, though he’s obviously done other structures.

The inside is ornate and also light-filled, on account of the tall windows on all sides. I assume the scaffolding over the sanctuary are temporary.

Mazurkevycz is quoted, in this blog at least, as saying, “We are dealing with a very functional architecture today no matter what we do, but church architecture is aesthetically functional more than anything else… It probably is the last architecture, as our buildings become more regimented, in which you can be exuberant.”

Exuberant is a good word for this church, inside and out.

Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Cathedral

Posted on September 21, 2015 by admin

Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, at 5701 N. Redwood Dr. in Chicago and our tour’s second stop, isn’t far from O’Hare. Even if we hadn’t known that before visiting it, we would have found out standing outside the cathedral listening to the docent describe some of its features. Every few minutes, a plane would noisily fly by and she’d have to pause. In the background, Kennedy Expressway noise was also noticeable.

As we approached the building, I recognized the domes on top. They’re visible from the Kennedy. I’d seen them many times, but never knew they were part of this particular religious edifice. Pictures of the exterior and its domes are here, though more colorful than I saw.

This is the entrance, on the west side of the church, of course.

Radoslav Kovacevic designed the building, which was completed in 1973. According to his 2002 obit in the Tribune, the Belgrade-born Chicago architect “designed about two dozen houses of worship for Russian, Greek, Serbian, Protestant and Roman Catholic congregations,” as well as schools and commercial buildings. His funeral mass was held at Holy Resurrection.

Here’s the interior center dome and its Christ the Almighty and chandelier. Not sure if that counts as a horus, since it isn’t one of those circular jobs with depictions of the saints and apostles.

As you’d expect, the walls sported many murals, such as this one depicting the Raising of Lazarus. Note the fellow unwrapping Lazarus. He seems to be covering his nose. Lazarus had been dead a while, after all. I didn’t know until recently that Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday, is celebrated in the Orthodox tradition.

The church sports plenty of excellent mosaics, too.

To the left (observer’s left, to the north) of the iconostasis is St. Sava.

That’s a detail from this mosaic, which is a reproduction of a painting called “Sava blessing Serb youth.”

The original painting dates from 1921, the creation of Serbian artist Uroš Predić. I’d never heard of the saint nor the artist before. Remarkable the things you can learn just looking around.

First United Methodist Church, Park Ridge

Posted on September 20, 2015 by admin

Late yesterday morning, Yuriko and I were in Park Ridge, Ill., an inner northwest suburb of Chicago. On the whole, it’s a handsome suburb, well marked by prosperity. A lot of rain had fallen on Friday as thunderstorms rolled through, but by Saturday morning the day was well on its way to being pleasant and clear.

So it was a good day to be on the Chicago Architecture Foundation Churches by Bus tour, as we did last year. This year, the tour visited six churches on the Northwest Side of Chicago and two of its adjoining suburbs: Park Ridge as well as the diminutive Rosemont, which is better known for its convention center and theaters and restaurants near O’Hare.

We were on Bus # 4 again. Our first stop was First United Methodist Church at 418 W. Touhy Ave. in Park Ridge.
As suburban congregations go, it’s an old church, founded in 1856, with the original sanctuary built in 1857. The church building we saw dates from the 1920s, a Tudor Revival design by two men once in Daniel Burnham’s employ, Thomas Tallmadge and Vernon Watson. Inside, it isn’t particularly ornate.

Except for the six large stained-glass windows, completed in 1940. They were fashioned by Conrad Schmitt Studios in Wisconsin, which is apparently still around, and designed by a young German immigrant named Conrad Pickel, whose children run a stained-glass studio in Florida.

The organ in back is much newer, installed only during this century. The organist (seen looking down at the sanctuary) played a bit for us. It has an excellent sound.
The church has a couple of other distinctions besides its design. Hillary Clinton attended church here growing up in Park Ridge, and it’s also home to one of the first Boy Scout Troops in the nation (the docent claimed it was the first), continuously active since 1912.

Thursday Ends & Odds

Posted on September 17, 2015 by admin

And why is the idiom “odds and ends” rather than the other way around? Just idle curiosity.

A huge thunderstorm started here at about 4:15 this afternoon. It was fast-moving. I sat out on the deck starting at around 3:45, when it was partly and cloudy windy and reasonably warm. I noticed a bank of black clouds to the west and northwest, and as the minutes passed, they crept closer. By about 4, the western half of the sky was covered, like a lid being closed.

In about 15 minutes, as soon as all of the sky was covered, enormous amounts of water cut loose, to the sound of some thunder. I was inside by that time. Whatever else you can say about me, I have sense enough to come in out of the rain.

The other day I saw a flying hubcap. Rolling, actually, most of the time. It was loose on the other side of a four-lane street, recently separating from a pickup truck, just as I drove by. I’ve seen enough hubcaps on the side of roads, but never one in motion. Fortunately, it stayed well clear of my position.

The following is strictly vanity. Everyone’s vain about something. About two years ago I found a web site that would generate a color-coded personal travel map. I found it again and updated it.

Green: either lived in these places or visited so many times I’ve lost count. Very familiar.

Blue: Numerous visits covering a fair amount of the state or province, or one or two visits of strong intensity and some variety. Fairly familiar. (I changed Iowa to blue.)

Orange: Spent the night at least once, saw a relatively limited number of places. (I added Oregon.)

Pink: Passed through (on the ground) but didn’t spend the night.

White (no color): Never visited.

It’s good to have some ambition in this regard, even though making a list and checking it off is a pointless exercise. What I want to do is get rid of all the white and pink areas, but if not, I won’t fret about it (Nunavut seems particularly unlikely).

What’s Left of Summer

Posted on September 16, 2015 by admin

Today was a lingering summer day. Leftover summer. Declining summer. The butt-end of summer. Nothing to do with the approach of the equinox, just that temps were summerlike warm. But as I drove, I kept the windows down, and the air conditioning off. Soon it won’t be so warm, and I wanted to feel the warm wind while it’s still out there.

I went to two grocery stores and a drug store on this summerlike September day. All of them had their autumn-Halloween displays up. One emphasized pumpkins. A lot of pumpkins. Another was all about candy. A lot of candy. Yet another was spook gear: costumes, lawn decor, and so on. How long will it be before I see the first Halloween inflatables on lawns? I hope leaves will be falling by then, at least.

How much research has been done about the retail effectiveness of stretching holidays so far forward? Christmas is the prime example, but there are others. Is it really true that a longer merchandising season means more sales, or just the same sales spread out over a longer period? Whatever the answer, it’s annoying.

A Calendar for ’16

Posted on September 15, 2015 by admin

Something to note for the day: Lost in Space premiered on CBS, the Tiffany Network, 50 years ago today (and it’s been nearly 18 years since Jupiter II started its ill-fated voyage). My thoughts on the matter are here. But I left out another thing to like: those hip themes (first and second season, and then the third) by Johnny Williams, who clearly had potential as a composer. Also, there’s this.

Calendars for next year have started appearing. The first one to land on my desk was the “2016 Journey Through America” calendar, a sample that informs me that my company logo and promotional message can go at the bottom. It’s not a bad calendar. The holidays and other days are basic North American ones — U.S. and Canadian civic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim — and the images are the usual high-resolution pretty pics of various places. The only real oddity of a date is National Tartan Day, April 6.

Maybe the calendar makers couldn’t decide on whether to focus on highly famed American sites or photogenic but obscure ones, since it includes both for the monthly pictures. Maybe they just decided to split the difference. Overexposed places represented in the calendar include the Statue of Liberty, Miami Beach, Monument Valley and Yosemite. But it also includes a snow scene in Geneva, Neb.; a covered bridge in Wakefield, Mich.; a sunflower field in Limon, Colo.; and a small dam in Whippany, NJ.

Dog & Butterfly & Maybe a Squirrel

Posted on September 14, 2015 by admin

When my dog chases a butterfly, I don’t think it’s in the spirit of playfulness, however it’s characterized in the enigmatic song “Dog & Butterfly.” Not long ago I saw, for the first time, our dog chasing a butterfly, though it might have been a moth, or maybe just a small and less-than-colorful butterfly. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the dog had eating the butterfly in mind.

The dog is keen on catching insects and occasionally does. Fortunately for her, she hasn’t yet caught a bee in her mouth, even though I’ve seen her trying.

Today was warm again and the dog spent longer than usual scanning the upper reaches of the tree in the back yard.

I couldn’t make out what she was looking at. A squirrel would be the best guess. Or maybe a tree gnome invisible to us, but not dogs.

At the Mansfield Cut, ca. 1958

Posted on September 13, 2015 by admin

The last time I visited Texas, I dug into more of my father’s slides for scanning. Sometime during 1958, probably, my father, mother and brothers visited my grandparents on Padre Island. My grandfather (left), a civil engineer, was working in some capacity in the creation of the Mansfield Cut, though we’re not sure what. On the right is my father. Jay and I call this the wearing funny hats shot.My grandfather (my mother’s father) and my mother. I suspect she borrowed the bonnet from my grandmother for the sunny day. Even in the late ’50s, it would have been considered old fashioned.My mother and brothers. It’s always a little odd looking at a picture of your family at a time when you don’t exist.The Mansfield Cut separates Padre Island from South Padre Island, and was made to provide access from the sea at that point to the Intercoastal Waterway. Jay says that mother marveled at the large numbers of shells on the beach there, since it was remote — it’s still remote — and not many people collected them. There’s a jar of shells at my mother’s home, and some of them might have been picked up during this visit.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling