A Post-Winter, Pre-Spring Stroll

Posted on April 7, 2014 by admin

No early greening this year, that’s for sure, though very small buds can be seen if you look closely. Still, Saturday was a fine day for a walk at Meacham Grove Forest Preserve.

It’s been a while since we were there. Despite the warmish temps, not many people were around. That could be because the only entrance to the preserve’s parking lot is off a side street that’s some distance from Lake St., the nearest large road. The forest is highly visible from another large road – Bloomingdale Rd. – but it’s just another roadside feature most of the time. It takes a little effort to figure out where to put your car so that you can walk. An oddly North American situation.

The Curious Statues of Fontana, Wisconsin

Posted on April 6, 2014 by admin

Around this time two years ago, during a strangely warm interlude that greened the grass and budded the trees and bushes in March, we spent part of a day at Williams Bay and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Lake Geneva is town’s name; Geneva Lake is the lake’s name, supposedly, but I’ve never heard anyone call it that. That was the day we saw this oddity in Lake Geneva.

One of my ambitions that day was to drive all the way around the lake, which we did before returning home (one of these days, I might walk around the lake, since there’s a trail all the way around; but maybe not all at the same time). On the western edge of the lake is the town of Fontana, whose full name is Fontana-on-Geneva Lake.

We stopped at a little lakeside park in Fontana and found this statue near the beach. The plaque says: Dedicated to the memory of ARTHUR B. JENSEN whose generosity and foresight made this beach possible. I assume that’s the same Arthur B. Jensen who wrote Shawneeawkee, friendly Fontana: A history, which can be yours for $100.

Not far away is this memorial.

FONTANA WEEPS September 11, 2001. An admirable sentiment, but I have a sneaking feeling that if that plaque happens to survive until 2101, say, people will wander by without the faintest idea what it’s about, even when they notice it, which they won’t. But that’s not a reason to not erect memorials. To paraphrase Mother Teresa, “Memorialize anyway.”

Finally, there was this.

Never Say Can’t seems to be the title. Shirley Brost, at least according to one source, seems to be alive and well in Fontana, but I’m not going to track anything else down about her. The oddity about this work isn’t even the frog — but why a frog? — but the not-so-admirable sentiment. I suppose it’s supposed to laud determination, which can be laudable sometimes. But it’s just as important — more important, I’d say — to have a clear idea of what you can, and can’t, do.

Here’s a better idea for a title: Never Say Cant. Except people would think it’s a typo.

Born in Babylonia, Moved to Chicago

Posted on April 3, 2014 by admin

The Oriental Institute Museum in Hyde Park, Chicago, houses an embarrassment of riches, a surfeit of treasures, and an abundance of artifacts from times lost to time. Not bad for an organization that isn’t even a century old. The institute’s web site puts it succinctly: “The Oriental Institute is a research organization and museum devoted to the study of the ancient Near East. Founded in 1919 by James Henry Breasted, the Institute, a part of the University of Chicago, is an internationally recognized pioneer in the archaeology, philology, and history of early Near Eastern civilizations.”

Besides the obviously high quality of the collection, which I’m only partly able to appreciate – it’s hard for me to sort out of who was who and when was when in the ancient Near East, except for places that were eventually part of the Roman Empire — I like the museum for two other reasons. First, it’s never been crowded in all the times I’ve been there since the 1980s. Second, it doesn’t pander to visitors with a lot of whiz-bang, touch-it-wow gimmicks. It’s got stuff, and signs describing that stuff. An old-fashioned, static approach to museum organization, for sure. If you go to the Oriental Institute Museum, you’ve got to be prepared to look at things and read about them.

But who’s so jaded that he wouldn’t be impressed by this?

Or this?

Or this?

The first item is a colossal bull head from the Hundred-Column Hall of Persepolis, dating from the reigns of Xerxes and Artaxerxes I in the fifth century BC (note: the signs in the museum use BC, not BCE). The horns are lost, which makes me suspect they were made of something really valuable, looted long ago.

Next is a human-headed winged bull — a lamassu — which once was at the entrance to the throne room of Assyrian King Sargon II . Weighs 40 tons. I wouldn’t want to get on his bad side.

Finally, a 17-foot-plus statue of Tutankhamun. Well, sort of. The institute says: “The statue is inscribed for Horemheb whose name was recut over that of King Aye. The statue is assigned to the reign of Tutankhamun on stylistic grounds, for it resembles other representations of that king.” Sure, but it’ll always be King Tut to me.

The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Posted on April 2, 2014 by admin

Nearly 11 years ago, I wrote, regarding the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago and clearly impressed by its size, “John Rockefeller thought big. The structure is huge. A big Gothic thing. I knew that, of course, having passed by it a number of times over the years, but it hit home when I wandered inside. I was the only one there. The glass is mostly clear, so the angled summer sun lighted the place. Several doors were open, so there was a breeze — unusual in such a large church. For large it was, as large as many cathedrals I’ve seen.”

None of that has changed in 11 years, except there was no summer sun or warm breeze last Friday.

Some vital stats, to save a Google search: The chapel is 265 feet long and 102 feet wide at its widest point. The tower, towards the northeast corner, is 207 feet high and can be ascended via a spiral stone staircase of 271 steps. The chapel weighs 32,000 tons, and 56 concrete piers carry the foundations down to bedrock 80 feet below the floor. Its design includes no structural steel.

This is the chapel from the front.

From the back, which shows the 72-bell carillon.

And inside.

The organ is sizable, too. According to the chapel’s web site, it’s an E.M. Skinner creation, vintage 1928, that originally “included four manuals, and had 6,610 organ pipes in 108 ranks; since its 2008 restoration, it now has 8,565 pipes in 132 ranks.” It was quiet when we saw it, but it can make a mighty sound.

Still fairly light inside for a cloudy day in late March. We spent time looking around and resting on the pews. I took note of the handful of plaques along the walls. Two of them told me that a fair number of U of C men died for their country in both WWI and WWII.

I also noticed a plaque dedicated to U of C academic Ernest DeWitt Burton (1856-1925), a professor of New Testament, director of the University Libraries, and ultimately president of the university. The plaque lauds him highly: His scholarship enlightened religion; his energy completed this chapel; his vision led the university forward.

Naturally I had to look him up. No doubt the professor would have disdained an open-source encyclopedia, but never mind. I can’t help feeling that the groves of academe don’t produce scholars like that anymore.

The Frederick C. Robie House

Posted on April 1, 2014 by admin

It was a little hard to get a full picture of the Frederick C. Robie House, which sits horizontally on a 60’ x 180’ lot on the South Side of Chicago. At least it’s hard if you don’t feel like backing up into the street, and I didn’t. The wind was brisk and everyone wanted to get inside.

As usual with a Frank Lloyd Wright work, it’s just as useful to think of it as a complex work of sculpture as much as a dwelling place, maybe more so. Something you might create with large, very expensive set of Legos, and which needs to be sustained with an IV money drip. The place was expensive from the get-go: the 1910 cost was about $60,000, or roughly $1.4 million in our dollars. For that price Robie got not only the lot and the house, with its long, lean lines, but also the furnishings, which were provided by the architect. And at least FLW didn’t run off with his wife.

You pick up your tickets at the gift shop (the entrance is pictured above), a space that was originally a garage, since Robie had a fascination for early auto-mobiles, as some wealthy men of the time did. The shop is stocked with architectural-themed books, videos, clothes, games and knickknacks, many associated with FLW, but not all. It included a Lego set – see, you can build architecturally significant Chicago-area houses from Legos – that looked awfully familiar.

The tour started in the lower level, adjacent to the gift shop-garage, which our guide called the Children’s Playroom, which is habitable but not yet restored. We saw a short video there about the house, including its bumpy history – Robie only lived there a bit more than a year before financial troubles obliged him to sell, to a guy who died shortly after moving in; later, when the Chicago Theological Seminary owned the house, it was nearly razed twice, including a 1950s threat that inspired a 90-year-old FLW to show up to protest.

But of course the building survived, and has even influenced its immediate surroundings . After the video we went outside and took a look at things from the entrance plaza of the Harper Center of the U of C’s Booth School of Business, which is across E. 58th St. The 215,000-square-foot Harper Center, completed only in 2004, references the Robie House with its horizontals and cantilevered elements (a Thornton Tomasetti design: more here).

The house’s entrance is tucked away under one of the large horizontal elements, making it hard to see from the street. The entryway is also only a few inches higher than my height, which makes me speculate that FLW wanted to make it even shorter – why should anything be taller than what he, a short man, needs? If so — and you certainly get that feeling at Taliesin sometimes — WTF, FLW?

But he wasn’t The Genius of later lore quite yet, so he didn’t win on that point. Or maybe it’s that he didn’t really see the design all the way through completion, since he skedaddled to Europe around then.

The second floor, barely visible from the outside through the seeming simple but elegant windows, is an impressive space. The great open room sports interesting glass and wood and lighting features, and I thought it would been a swell place for a swank party – during any decade from the 1920s to the 1950s, since swank was pretty much dead after that. Not sure it would be all that comfortable for daily living, not without more comfortable furniture and more clutter (comfortable for me, at least. What’s life without clutter? Drab.)

Most of the bedrooms aren’t visible on the ordinary tour because they’re on the third floor, which has only one way in or out. For a tour of a dozen or 15 people, apparently, the Chicago Fire Marshall insists on two ways out. So the third floor is accessible via small-group tours that cost more. I didn’t need to see the additional space that badly. We saw one second-floor bedroom, intended to be a guest bedroom, though at the moment it’s devoid of furnishing. I noticed in that room that the electric lights – even though brought up to code by the renovation – are operated by a two-button system, which I don’t see often.

In the not-yet-refurbished kitchen stands a conventional refrigerator, and it doesn’t go with the design at all. But mainly that’s because it stands in front of a dwarf-sized door that leads to a servants’ staircase. That door, the guide pointed out, was for the delivery of ice, and the spot where the refrigerator stands was for an icebox. I hope a little bit of our admission price goes to the purchase of a 1910-vintage ice box, because that spot cries out for one.

Hyde Park ’14

Posted on March 31, 2014 by admin

On the northeast corner of S. Woodlawn Ave. and E. 58th St. in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago, is the Frederick C. Robie House, on that site for more than 100 years and best known as an exemplar of the Prairie School of Design. Next door to its north, at 5751 S. Woodlawn, is the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, though new to the site. One block west of the intersection is the Oriental Institute Museum, repository of Near Eastern treasures, most of which they’ve dug up themselves. The Rockefeller Memorial Chapel rises to the southwest of the intersection, an ornate, soaring structure. That’s a lot within a short walk.

Last week was spring break for Lilly and Ann. Last year I took them to Texas for the occasion, but for various reasons this year, the idea of going anywhere never really took root. Still, I wanted to go somewhere – even if only a few miles away and for a few hours – and see something new if possible. In the summer of 2003, I wrote, “I walked by the Robie House, a creation of Frank Lloyd Wright. Him again. One of these days, I will take the tour, but not today.”

I didn’t know at the time that renovation of the Robie House had barely started, and hasn’t been completed even now, though mostly it has. The main goal last Friday was to tour the Robie House, which we did. Afterward we walked over to Rockefeller Chapel, and then spent an hour or so in the Oriental Institute Museum.

It was still fairly cold, but at least the sidewalks were clear of ice, and we didn’t have far to walk. Street parking always seems to be available next to the Midway Plaisance, just south of our destinations. In 1893, the Midway was briefly the focus of the world’s attention as part of the world’s fair, but now it’s a little-known urban green space, at least outside Chicago. That’s too bad, because it’s certainly interesting, if you know what was there.

We didn’t go into the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I was astonished to see its new location, which I hadn’t heard about. Until a year and a half ago, the store was snugly located in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, at 5757 S. University Ave. Turns out the seminary has moved, too, and now the building is home to the U of C’s Dept. of Economics, so famed in free market song and story.

Wiki, for what it’s worth, says: “The seminary move was controversial: it involved the disinterring of multiple graves.” I didn’t know anyone was buried there. Who was buried there? I’ll have to look into that sometime. Once upon a time, I did enjoy the Thorndike Hilton Memorial Chapel and the collection of rocks embedded in the seminary wall. I assume those are part of the Chicago School of Economics now.

Currently the streetscape between the Robie House and where the Seminary Co-op Bookstore used to be – which is across the street from the Oriental Institute Museum — is under construction.

I was surprised to see the bookstore’s new location, which even seems to include a café, like you might see in a Barnes & Noble. It didn’t seem right. At the basement location, there was no room for anything but books and more books. This video, at least, assures us that the new location still has a “maze aspect” and that Stanley Tigerman did the design (himself or Tigerman McCurry Architects staff?), which I guess counts for something.

But how could the new site have the book-cave charm of the old? Next time I’m in Hyde Park, I’ll take a look, to see if the new can hold a candle to the old.

Subtropical March ’13

Posted on March 30, 2014 by admin

Slowly warming over the weekend, but not enough to call spring. It’s this time of year especially when I miss the springs of South Texas and Middle Tennessee, or even the Kansai, which are already under way. This time last year, San Antonio was greening up nicely.

Such as at the Sunken Gardens, officially the Japanese Tea Gardens, when we visited last year. I expect it looks this way again about now, complete with greenery along with edge of expansive koi ponds.

We discovered that the garden also sports some plant graffiti. Floroffiti, maybe?

Other places were greening, too. But not that green. At Mission San Juan, the grass was still its usual winter brown.

Grass also gets brown under the heat of summer, which can last a long time. So it’s better to say that the predominant color of South Texas grass is brown, with interludes of green at certain times of the year.

This was the San Jose Burial Park, which isn’t far from Mission San Juan.

We didn’t spend much time there, but it looked like a peaceful burial ground, not much known expect by people who live nearby.

The Mean Streets

Posted on March 27, 2014 by admin

Besides being a transitional month between winter and spring – more winter than spring this year – March is also pothole season. Here’s one of the larger ones I’ve seen lately in metro Chicago, looking a couple of feet in diameter and holding plenty of snowmelt.

In some parts of greater Chicago, it’s pothole season all the time. Years ago I used to drive down Ashland Ave., a major north-south street in the city, on a regular basis. I nicknamed one of the persistent potholes “Henry VIII.” Because it was so large.

I never went any further with the idea. Unlike the Mypotholes artists.

Pics for the Day

Posted on March 26, 2014 by admin

Today I happened across something fitting for the centennial year of the beginning of the Great War: a collection of images from that war. But not just any old group of pictures. As the Telegraph puts it, “a former dustman has amassed one of the Britain’s best collections of First World War photographs after spending decades rescuing them from rubbish tips and bins.”

Saved by a garbageman, in more American words. Some of the collection is posted at the Telegraph web site. What I want to know is who – who – who would throw away pictures like these?

Here’s another collection of images, not quite as arresting, but interesting despite the annoying SEO headline, “These 22 Far Away Perspectives Of Famous Places Will Change The Way You See Them Forever.” No, they won’t.

The Stonehenge image well illustrates one of the stranger things about that site. Not that an ancient stone circle survives in Wiltshire, though it’s been reconstructed more than most people probably realize. What boggled my mind when visiting in 1983 was that a road goes right next to it. We drove there, and I expected to park beside the road and walk some distance. Nope – it’s right there. Convenient, but it doesn’t quite sit right.

The second picture of the Pantheon isn’t from far away, but never mind. I also visited that site in 1983, before the first McDonald’s opened in Italy, so this perspective didn’t exist for me to experience. I had to check: the first McDonald’s in that country opened near the Spanish Steps in 1986. More followed. The question that comes to mind, even now, is why do McDonald’s survive in Italy?

Then there’s the Mona Lisa. That’s not a new perspective for anyone who’s been to the Louvre. Even in November, the famed painting packed ’em in.

As for the Alamo, I’ve met people who expected it to be in the middle of nowhere. Or who felt that it should be “bigger.” Maybe because it looked that way when John Wayne died there.

A Loose Exonumic Item

Posted on March 25, 2014 by admin

I looked out this morning to – a yard of white. Sure enough, snow overnight. Just a dusting that didn’t last through the sunny daylight hours. Temps stayed a little below freezing all day and the wind was brisk. All in all, a raw day, even for March. Winter doesn’t want to give up.

It’s a modern illusion that the world is small. But it’s big enough to swallow entire jet airliners occasionally. My house is small in the grand scheme of things, but even so I don’t know everything within. Lately Lilly has taken to clearing debris out of her room – it’s going to take her a while – and I was doing some consulting about the best ways to arrange her closet.

On her cluttered desk I saw a small coin, a bronze color as some coins have, but no U.S. currency. Sometimes coins get loose from my accumulation of cheap foreign specie and wind up at random locations in the house, so I thought that had happened.

But no. It’s a shower token from the Platte River Campground at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. We visited in 2007, and even camped there, but I don’t remember buying, using or leaving with any tokens. But it seems that I did. Which somehow got up into Lilly’s room – which wasn’t Lilly’s room back in 2007. Go figure.

I’ll put it with my other tokens. I don’t have many. Fun word for the day: exonumia, which Merriam-Webster defines as “numismatic items (as tokens, medals, or scrip) other than coins and paper money.” First known use, 1962, so I’m older than the word. Barely.

Just using my memory, I believe I have a subway token from Moscow and one from St. Petersburg; one of the discontinued CTA tokens (maybe); a token of some kind from New York; a car wash token from somewhere; and a Chuck E. Cheese token, though I might be wrong about that. Unlike Russia or New York, I do my best to forget my two or three visits to that place.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling