Thorncrown Chapel

Posted on April 22, 2024 by admin

My bourgeois householder impulses kicked in today and I mowed the lawn, which, happily, is sporting a nice crop of dandelions. I’m actually fond of dandelions, so I suppose my lawncare impulses aren’t entirely conventional. I gave up raking leaves years ago, too, and don’t regret it. I look at my lawn in the spring and think, where did all those leaves go? To nourish the soil, of course.

On April 7, we left Harrison, Arkansas, where we’d spent the night, and headed for Dallas by not quite the most direct route. Soon we passed through Eureka Springs. We wanted to amble around town a bit, but parking was hard to find and – this rankles on a Sunday – costs money. So on we went, west on U.S. 62. Moments out of town, I spotted the sign for Thorncrown Chapel.

The chapel rises gracefully on its Arkansas hillside, whose trees at that moment were budding, but not obscuring the view. Good timing for a visit.

Wood and glass and light and – air. So light you’d think it’s going to float away, despite however many pounds of wood it represents.

“Thorncrown Chapel… is the most celebrated piece of architecture built in Arkansas,” says the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which is a tall statement. But that opinion seems to have some weight, considering the structure’s honors and spots on architecture lists, besides the acclaim accorded architect E. Fay Jones.

“Eighteen wood columns line each of the long sides,” the article notes. “The columns are connected overhead by a latticelike diagonal web of light wood pieces, creating the building’s most important visual feature. This interior bracing is Jones’s inspired inversion of Gothic architecture’s transfer of the loads of a building to “flying buttresses” that brace the walls from the outside.”

The Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel, also by Jones, has similar charms, but I’d say Thorncrown kicked things up a notch in design.

We happened to be in time for the Sunday nondenominational service, so we sat in for a while. No admission, but we were happy to make a donation.

Much better images are here. Seems that the muse was with E. Fay Jones when he designed the chapel for a couple who happened to own the land, Jim and Dell Reed, and who had this built instead of a retirement home, tapping Jones, a one-time student of Frank Lloyd Wright, for the job; and ultimately seeing it completed in 1980, after divine intervention was said to be a factor in the financing.

One of the speakers at the service – I can’t call it the sermon or homily, just a chat – who looked my age or a little more, was their son, Doug Reed, I think. Maybe he sees chapel every day, or often enough, but somehow a sense of awe came through as he described how the Thorncrown came to be. That didn’t make an impression on me in the moment, but the more I think about it, the more impressive it is, how familiarity hasn’t effaced awe for him.

Spring Break Bits

Posted on April 4, 2024 by admin

It might not feel like spring out there, but no matter. Time for spring break. Back to posting around April 18.

Not long ago, an entire movie on YouTube called First Spaceship on Venus came to my attention, and I decided to watch a few minutes to see how bad it might be. Soon I realized, this isn’t that bad. For what was clearly a pre-manned spaceflight depiction of spaceflight, not bad at all. I didn’t have time to finish it, but I will at some point.

I’d never heard of it. But I have heard of Stanisław Lem. I read His Master’s Voice years ago – nearly 40 years, so I don’t remember much – and saw the 1972 movie version of Solaris, ditto, though I’ve read it’s rather different from his novel. Turns out First Spaceship on Venus is the American title of Silent Star (Der Schweigende Stern), an East German-Polish production from 1960. Lem wrote the source book, The Astronauts, a few years earlier. The American version is dubbed into English and, I understand, cut in length.

Also, if you want, you can listen to the original soundtrack of Der Schweigende Stern. YouTube’s quite the place.

More idle curiosity for the day: checking ticket prices for Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks, who are appearing the same night at Soldier Field in June. The closest ticket for sale is pretty close indeed: front section, third row. For resale, actually. There are a scattering of resale tickets available in that section, with those on the third row listed for $3,791 + fees. Oddly enough, fourth row seats list for $2,794 + fees. At least for now. So one row ahead, where you can catch a slightly better glimpse of Mr. Joel’s shiny pate, is worth about a grand more?

I expect that represents dynamic pricing of some kind, facilitated by soulless algorithms in the service of maximized shareholder value, and varies from moment to moment. But I was never one for front row seats anyway, or even third or fourth. Checking further, I found that you can bring your opera glasses and sit way back for $179. As it happens, I’ve seen both of those entertainers; separately, in 1979 and 1980. I don’t remember what I paid. A handy inflation calculator tells me that $179 now is the equivalent of $47 back then. I’m positive I didn’t pay that much, total, for both tickets.

Visiting Queen of All Saints Basilica in Chicago last month, I took an image of carved text that puzzled me a bit, but then I forgot to look it up.

“Ecumenical Year?” I remembered to look into that more recently, and realized that it must refer to the first year of Vatican II, which was indeed 1962. Formally in English, the meeting was the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.

Naturally, when one hears of Vatican II, it’s time to listen to “The Vatican Rag.”

The council might have been 60 years ago, but that song never gets old.

Nephi on the Sidewalk

Posted on March 21, 2024 by admin

Today I’m reminded of the old joke whose punchline is, “He called me from Salt Lake City.” If you know it, you know it, but enough to say that Mormonism is the crux of that joke.

We took a walk around a northwest suburban pond late this afternoon, a familiar place, but there was unfamiliar writing on one of the many stretches of sidewalk.

Illustration to the left.

3 Nephi 11:14? That didn’t sound familiar. Maybe a book in the Douay version I don’t know about? I’ve never been able to remember all of its distinctions from the KJB. I forgot about my passing, and erroneous, thought until I downloaded the pictures later. That was the time to look it up. It’s from the Book of Mormon.

That’s a first in my experience, Mormon graffiti.

Queen of All Saints Basilica

Posted on March 4, 2024 by admin

The latest run of warm days is now ending, with rain moving through northern Illinois. In its wake, more seasonable temps for early March. Sunday wasn’t seasonable at all, with the air heated to a pleasant low 70s F.

On Sunday afternoon I headed for the the northwest side of Chicago. You’d think that would be straightforward, considering that I was coming from the northwest suburbs, but no: O’Hare takes up a sizable chunk of real estate between those two areas, and there’s no going under it like in Los Angeles. One goes around.

I was sure I didn’t need to consult a map, either. Go more-or-less east on a major road (Irving Park) that curls along the southern edge of the airport; go north on another major road that is just east of the airport (Mannheim); and then connect with the east-west road (Devon) that would take me to the part of the city I wanted to visit.

Easy, especially since I knew the first part of the route well. I often take those first two roads to the airport entrance. True, I had to go a little further north on Mannheim into less familiar territory to connect with Devon, but all I’d have to do is watch for Devon. So I did.

No, that wasn’t it, but it’ll be soon. No, that’s not it either, maybe the next major light. No, not that one. Maybe one more. No. We’ve all done this: expect something while driving, sure that it will come up soon, and it doesn’t. So I pulled over to check my map, finally, and I was some distance north of where I want to be. Mannheim doesn’t actually connect to Devon. The next major north-south street east of Mannheim, which is River Road, does. Oops.

Use the GPS, you say. I still say no. I wasn’t going to be late for anything that needed my punctuality, for one thing, but more important, I passed through a stretch of relatively unfamiliar and interesting territory as I navigated my way southeast to Devon. Metro Chicago is so large that that’s possible even after living here for decades.

Had I not been “lost” I would never have noticed this along the road.

I’d happened across Queen of All Saints Basilica in the Sauganash neighborhood of Chicago, one of the three minor basilicas in the city. I might have seen it on a list of local Catholic sights some time, but I didn’t remember it and didn’t set out to see it. But see it I did, though it was already closed. The exterior had to do.

Completed in 1960, so I’m surprised it isn’t more modernist. But I suppose the diocese wanted neo-Gothic, and that’s what architects Meyer & Cook provided. That firm seems to be better known for the art deco Laramie State Bank Building, also on the western edge of Chicago. While Queen of All Saints is certainly impressive, what if the diocese had asked for an art deco church?

Waukegan Ramble

Posted on February 19, 2024 by admin

I spent part of Sunday afternoon in Waukegan, a sizable far north Chicago suburb and in fact county seat of Lake County, Illinois. Not my first visit, but a bit out my usual orbit, halfway through that county on the way to Wisconsin and along the shore of Lake Michigan. The day was chilly, but not bad for February, so I set out on foot downtown for a few minutes.

The Lake County Courthouse & Administrative Building isn’t from the classic period of courthouse development, which would be more than 100 years ago now. It’s from the classic period of brutalism (1969), at least in this country.

The Civil War memorial in front (?) is an echo from an earlier time.

I took a drive too, looking for steeples. I knew most any church would be closed already, so I went looking for beautiful or interesting exteriors, and I found one tucked away in a neighborhood not far from downtown. While beauty isn’t quite the word for it, it certainly caught and held my attention.

Completed in 1964 as St. Anastasia Church, since 2020 the building has been home to St. Anastasia and St. Dismas Church, which combined are known as Little Flower Catholic Parish – part of the wave of ecclesiastical consolidation in our time.

The unusual design – at least, I’d never see the likes of it – was by mid-century modernist I.W. Colburn (d. 1992).

“This church… is a simple brick rectangle with arch motifs embracing in a succession of domed tiers on the corners and sides of the building,” reported the Chicago Tribune in 2016. “There are two larger versions of this form extended above the flat roof, which appear as towers. The rear domed tier rises over the main alter and carries an enormous cross on its crown.

“The walls of the building have a patterned surface due to the fact that some of the bricks protrude one half of their length from the flat wall. A portion of the wall is constructed of multicolored glass bricks and is most noticeable from the interior when the sun’s light shines through them filling the church with radiant color. The light thus becomes part of the service.”

Closed, as I thought, but maybe during a future Waukegan Tour of Homes, it will be open. Here’s a picture of the interior, decked out for Christmas.

“The interior repeats the motif of the exterior arches,” according to the Tribune. “The red brick, slate floor, glass and wood, mosaics representing the Stations of the Cross, illuminating skylight, and bronze crucifix over the altar give the worshipper the feeling of having entered a medieval monastery.”

My wanderings took me to a few other Waukegan churches, such as an older Catholic church on the edge of downtown. It says Church of the Immaculate Conception, carved over the entrance in stone, but these days it’s Most Blessed Trinity Catholic Church, the creation of a consolidation of six historic parishes.

Christ Episcopal Church, completed in 1888 and designed by Willoughby Edbrooke and Franklin Burnham of Chicago, who also did the Georgia State Capitol and the Milwaukee Federal Building.

Redeemer Lutheran Church.

The was enough churches for the day. The sun was going down, for one thing, but also once you’ve seen the Alpha and Omega, that’s enough for any day.

Wickland, Home of Three Governors

Posted on January 10, 2024 by admin

From My Old Kentucky Home State Park, it’s a hop and skip, not even a jump, to another old Kentucky home, Wickland. Or as it is called on Google maps, Wickland, Home of Three Governors.

For good reason, it turns out. That wording is on the sign at the entrance.

Whatever else you can say about Google as a rapacious entity, you have to admire its maps. My affection for paper maps hasn’t dwindled, and I still use them, but sometimes things pop up on Google Maps that I instantly know I should visit, such as Wickland.

Though with a Bardstown address, it is a bit out of town.

Done in Georgian style, rather than Federal, Wickland is roughly a contemporary of Federal Hill (My Old Kentucky Home). We weren’t entirely sure it was open, but in we went, to be greeted by a woman perhaps 10 years younger than me whose name I forget, but who said she managed the place.

That meant taking taking down some of the Christmas decorations at that moment, but she paused that activity to tell us about the mansion for a few minutes, intimating that it was just as interesting as Federal Hill, but received much less attention. I’ll go along with that. She was the only other person there, and said that we were the only visitors so far that day.

Its original owner, one Charles A. Wickliffe, built the house in the 1810s from a design by a Baltimore architect named John Rogers, and later Wickliffe became governor of Kentucky. His son Robert C. Wickliffe grew up at Wickland but moved to Louisiana, where he was governor of that state just before the war. John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham, Charles’ grandson and John’s nephew, was also born at Wickland and he too was a governor of Kentucky, taking office in 1900 after the death of four-day Gov. William Goebel, who was assassinated. That’s an entirely different story, and one I won’t get into, but more about it is here.

John Rogers, incidentally, designed the Basilica of Saint Joseph Proto-Cathedral in Bardstown, which was locked when we came by the same day.

After our brief chat, the manager of Wickland turned us loose for a self-guided tour. That is, we wandered around the mansion’s three floors, completely unsupervised. Also, unlike at Federal Hill, we could take pictures, so I did.

Nice. Not all of the Christmas decorations were down yet.

Wickland doesn’t charge anything to visit, but we made a donation equal to what we paid to see the more ballyhooed My Old Kentucky Home. Seemed only right.

Three Louisville Churches

Posted on January 3, 2024 by admin

A friend on Facebook – and actual friend, known him 35 years — signed off with HNY today. Dense fellow that I am, that didn’t register, so I Googled it and found Happy New Year and Hot Nude Yoga. I’ll assume he meant the first one.

Fairly early on our first day in Louisville, we found our way to St. Martin of Tours, a Catholic church that rises in the Phoenix Hill neighborhood, among clusters of shotgun houses, more than I’d seen anywhere else.

Must be St. Martin himself. He holds his basilica in Tours (I assume) as if on a serving plate.

I heard about him in a VU history class, but after so many decades, it was all a little fuzzy, so I looked him up. I remember now: Martin and his mentor Hilary of Poitiers kicked butt when it came to fighting the Arian heresy in the fourth century.

Patron of France, Martin is, but so much more: beggars, cavalry and equestrians, hotel and inn keepers, reformed alcoholics but also vintners and wine growers, quartermasters, and the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, among many others.

I suppose the saint was popular among the antebellum German immigrant population. They were on the receiving end of a Nativist mob attack not long before the war, a serious enough atrocity that it might have encouraged the waves of German Catholics to go to Chicago, St. Louis and other cities instead of Louisville.

The mighty-looking organ was silent during our visit.

A side chapel is a site of perpetual adoration, but I didn’t want to bother the man in there, who looked pretty intent. Closer to the altar are the bones of Saints Magnus and Bonosa, fourth-century figures and the subjects of the sort of vague saintly stories common in that period.

Later that same day, we parked across the street from Cathedral of the Assumption.

It too was new in the 1850s when the Know-Nothings nearly burned it down. In our time, it’s closed on Thursday afternoons. So I took a short stroll in that part of downtown. Yuriko had sense enough to wait in the warm car.

We returned to the cathedral on Sunday for another look. Near the entrance, a baptism in progress.

The Coronation Window.

How many windows have proper names?

“Original to the Cathedral, the Coronation window depicts the crowning of the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven,” the church web site says. “Designed by the Blum Art Co. in 1883, it is one of the oldest and largest hand-painted glass windows in the United States. The window was removed in 1912 and stored in the Bell Tower until 1994, when it was restored to its original position.”

A few blocks away is the Christ Church Cathedral, seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, and at just over 200 years, one of the oldest buildings in Louisville.

Homily in progress. We didn’t stay for it. The priest was probably not denouncing Arianism, but who knows.

OLLU & Elmendorf Lake Park

Posted on November 1, 2023 by admin

Despite the cold, we had about 40 kids show up yesterday to collect sweets, maybe half again as many as the busiest Halloweens of the past, though I don’t count every year. We ran through an entire box of full-sized candy bars plus some other smaller confections. Almost all of the kids came before dark, which has been the case for many years now. Another example of widespread nervous parenting that’s pretty much entrenched, I figure. When I was that age, we went out after dark in our Invisible Pedestrian costumes and we liked it.

Most of the costumes this year were buried under coats, but I have to say the best of ’23 was a tallish kid in no coat and a white-and-red full-body chicken outfit, complete with a comb as prominent as Foghorn Leghorn’s. The costume might well have been warm enough for him to go without a coat. The color scheme reminded me of Chick-fil-A right away.

I’m just old enough to remember sometimes receiving baked goods and fruit on Halloween; those vanished by about 1970, victim of the lurid nonsense stories about razor blades in apples, poisoned cakes and chocolate Ex-Lax being given to kids. We found the thought of that last one pretty funny, actually.

This morning we woke to about an inch of snow destined to melt later in the day. A small preview of winter.

The cold is an unpleasant contrast to South Texas last week, where it was hot for October. (Temps have fallen there since then, I heard.) Just after noon on Saturday, I headed over to the campus of Our Lady of the Lake University, OLLU. I’d heard of the school for a long time, but my knowledge of it never rose above the level of hazy.

Main Building, the sign says. A name refreshing in its simplicity. The building’s a little more intricate.

Mere steps away is Sacred Heart Chapel.

The school recently marked the chapel’s centennial. At your feet at the entrance, a date.

“The English Gothic chapel was the vision of Mother Florence Walter, Superior General of the Congregation of Divine Providence from 1886-1925,” says the university web site. “In 1895, she looked down from Prospect Hill at a swath of wilderness and declared, ‘One day we will have a chapel here. And its spires will be seen throughout the city of San Antonio.’ ”

That must have a good day for the superior general. Funding the chapel took 11 years, but eventually the Sisters, who had founded the school in 1895, were able to hire a renowned architect, Leo Dielman, to design the chapel. A prolific architect of sacred space – more than 100 churches to his credit – Dielmann had his funeral in 1969 at Sacred Heart Chapel.

When I went in, a funeral was going on. I gazed in for only a moment from the very back of the nave. Looked like this, except for the sacrament pictured.

OLLU borders Elmendorf Lake Park, with walking trails ringing a small manmade lake, created by the damming of Apache Creek. I took a walk. When the sun periodically came out from behind the clouds, it felt like it was about 90 F. It was a sweaty walk. Needed that hat I’d left in Illinois.

Thick foliage luxuriates on the lakeshore.

Almost no one else was around on what, compared with South Texas temps only a few weeks and months earlier, was merely a warm day. A Saturday at that. The place gave out no sense of being avoided out of fear for one’s person; just ignored. A few recreational fishermen stood on the shore, angling. One was in a small boat. That was all.

Another, more hard-surface part of the park includes benches. Parc Güell sorts of benches, but without the crowds.

No human crowds, that is. Birds were another matter. An astonishing number of birds occupied a handful of the trees in the park, ca-ca-ca-ca-ing with a resounding volume, especially on a small island I saw later is called Bird Island. Thinking on it, their Hitchcockian vibe might keep some people away. A lot of people.

Birds looking something like herons with completely black plumage. I couldn’t place them, but my bird knowledge is pretty meager. Crows? They look leaner of build than crows. But what do I really know about crows?

I do know enough not to walk under them. A few of the bird-occupied trees were along the path of my walk, so I took minor detours to avoid any direct bombardment. I passed through the park without being the target of any droppings.

I thought of a Red Skelton TV sketch featuring his characters, seagulls Gertrude and Heathcliff (I had to look the names up, but not that fact that he did those characters). One of the birds noted that the beach below was very crowded. The other responded, “There’s no sport in that.” Odd what sticks with you after more than 50 years.

Churches After Lunch

Posted on October 17, 2023 by admin

“Nothing matters but the weekend, from a Tuesday point of view.”

Lyrical wisdom from The Kings, a Canadian band who had only one hit in the United States that I know of (or two, depending on how you count the songs). I don’t think I’m going to look it up to confirm that notion. It’s been more than 40 years, after all, and that level of detail doesn’t matter much.

Lunch on Saturday was in Uptown, specifically near the Argyle El station, which is home to a sizable number of Vietnamese immigrants and their descendants. Once upon a time, at a small strip center in the neighborhood, there was a pho restaurant that had the distinction (for me) of being the first place I tried pho. It was the also first restaurant we ever took Lilly to, when she was exactly a month old in December 1997. I’m glad to say she slept through the entire experience in her detached car seat, next to our table. The other patrons were probably glad, too.

That restaurant is gone – or has moved, its space taken by the next-door Vietnamese grocery store – so we repaired to a North Broadway storefront pho spot. Actually much larger than a typical storefront, with room in back for a small stage for live music, colorfully decked out with a handful of small spotlights ready for action, as we saw at some of the larger restaurants in Saigon. Lunch was filling and as good as pho almost always is. Who can ask for more?

After lunch we walked the few blocks to Saint Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Church in Uptown. I lived not far away for a number of years, but had no idea it was there.

Another unusual church style, at least for Chicago. Colonial Meeting House, though looking a bit more Georgian than that, my sources tell me. An architect name Joseph W. McCarthy, not to be confused with the number-one proponent of McCarthyism from Wisconsin, did the design. He’s yet another noted designers of churches, back when that was a growth industry.

Many of the shrines in the church reflect the local population, as shrines tend to do.

In case you want to know who the 17 Martyrs of Laos are, a poster at the back of the nave tells you. Martyrs figure prominently at Saint Thomas, fitting right in for a church honoring a churchman murdered in a church.

Later in the day, in fact the last place we visited on Saturday, was St. Ita Catholic Church in Edgewater, at the edge of my old stomping grounds in Andersonville.

“St. Ita Parish was founded in Edgewater in 1900. On October 23, 1923, His Eminence George Cardinal Mundelein commissioned Architect Henry J. Schlacks to design and build a new church specifically in French Gothic design for St. Ita Parish,” the local parish web site says. I’ve seen a number of his churches.

“The current church, which opened in 1927, was the capstone of Henry Schlacks’ distinguished career as an ecclesiastical architect…. The open tower appears airy and delicate, yet it contains 1,800 tons of Bedford limestone and rises to 120 feet in height. Elaborate Gothic detailing marks the altar, but the medallion windows containing more than 200,000 pieces of stained glass, designed by Schlacks, are the real highlight of the interior.”

I have a vaguely remember visiting the church on a cool rainy Saturday – sometime in the late ’80s, maybe? — but not lingering for too long inside because a wedding was in progress. Last Saturday, cool and rainy, another wedding was in progress.Some other time I might see those many pieces of glass, artfully arrayed.

Churches Before Lunch

Posted on October 16, 2023 by admin

As we navigated the back streets of the North Side of Chicago late on Saturday morning, the rain kept on coming, leaving scatterings of yellow and brown leaves and sizable puddles.

Tucked away in the Lincoln Square neighborhood was our second site for the day, and first church: Luther Memorial Church.

As a congregation, Luther Memorial dates from the late 19th century, and was one of the first English-speaking Lutheran congregations in Chicago. Currently part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

The present Indiana limestone church building rose on the site in the 1920s, designed by E.E. Roberts and his son E.C. Roberts, who were Oak Park architects. Not as well known these days as The Genius, apparently, but they did a lot of work in their day.

Behind the altar is the Christus Window, original to the church in 1926. Blue Christ, I’d call it.

The side and back windows were installed about 40 years later, and they look like it.

That isn’t a criticism. The 1960s are derided as a time of poor design, and it might be in some things – children’s animation comes to mind – but not in the stained glass I’ve seen. More abstract than in previous decades, often, but with their own elegance, though my images don’t quite capture it.

By the time we left Luther Memorial, the rain had slacked off. Our second church of the day is one we used to know, over in the Ravenwood neighborhood, since we attended it sometimes in the late ’90s: All Saints Episcopal. Rev. Bonnie Perry was there at the time, and I understand she was instrumental in keeping the church open. These days she’s bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan.

An example of stick style, rare in Chicago, designed by John Cochrane, who also did the Illinois State Capitol and the Iowa State Capitol, among many other projects. The church was built in 1883, when Ravenswood was still a suburb of Chicago.

By the time we got there, the church was closed to Open House visitors. Getting ready for a wedding, we realized, when we say people dressed for a wedding going in. An elegant interior, as I recall.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: religious sites