sur la rue

Photo: Michael Wolf
Photographer Michael Wolf has taken? culled? street photography from Google Street View, Paris (and the work is quite captivating) »

Also worth mentioning: Wolf's Chicago Series, The Transparent City »

I've gotta get out more often (with my camera)

Made the Gapers Block spot with a shot I took at Second Pres on the near South Side not too long ago. Needed that little ray of sunshine -- my work life has mostly devoured my creative life of late (not that work isn't creative, it's just not purely selfish creative).

Good reminder to get out more.

historic second church of chicago

Spent the better part of Saturday on a speed dating spree, hosted by the Chicago Cultural Center’s Neighborhood Tours, visiting some of the heavy hitters of ecclesiastical architecture of Chicago, including St. Alphonsus, St. Benedict, and St. Clement [1].

But like a smitten pilgrim I was slain in the Spirit on the first stop -- the Second Presbyterian Church of Chicago -- and spent the rest of the morning regretting that I ever got back on the bus.

Second Pres grew from prominence out of a small group of Presbyterians who hooked up at Fort Dearborn once a long time ago. The Presbyterians split into two groups around 1842 over the cause of Abolition, the way churches split today with such frequency over the issue of gay rights. Second Pres was the more conservative collective of the two, composed of congregants who felt that enslaved peoples shouldn’t be freed until there was an economic strategy in place to support them in their freedmen status. It’s probably no surprise that this congregation would evolve to be the conservative well-heeled businessmen and industrialists who populated Prairie Avenue and built domestic fortresses like the Glessner House.

Politics aside, they did all right outfitting their church.



The neo-gothic exterior was designed by James Renwick, the fellow behind St. Patrick’s in New York. Renwick took a pass at Second Pres twice: the first structure was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire; the second one stands today at the intersection of Michigan and Cullerton. After another fire destroyed the roof over the sanctuary and inflicted severe water and smoke damage in the nave, the congregation hired member Howard Van Doren Shaw to rebuild and restore the interior.

Shaw dialed up his buddy and fellow church member Frederic Clay Bartlett and together they kicked off an Arts & Crafts Pre-Raphaelite mashup that has all the hallmarks of Protestants going to meeting. Divergence, vernacular and rambling symbolism reigns.

Unlike the soaring Catholic cathedrals that we saw later in the day where the stained glass panels flow cohesively in a concise story line about wretchedness and redemption, the Second Pres art glass panels are all over the narrative map.

Two Edward Burne-Jones stained glass panels adorn the narthex, pious copies of the Oxford panels of Saints Cecilia and Margaret.

(Wait: let me say that again. SIR EDWARD FRAKING BURNE-JONES.)



Over the choir loft a riotous Ascension by William Fair Kline plays out in full technicolor across one master panel and five smaller accompaniments.

Of the twelve stained glass panels that line the main sanctuary the majority are by Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany himself, and yes, no, of course not one of them coheres with another, but each of them is radiant (even for want of cleaning) and uncompromising in its magnificence.



Of the Tiffanys there’s a jewel glass panel, several pastorals, and a handful of painted figures (only the faces of the Tiffanys are painted -- the remainder of the color is infused in the glass) including an angel and a Jesus figure who is tricked out to look a little like Edgar Allen Poe (as our guide, the incomparable Al Walavich pointed out).



Don’t even get me started on the fine finishings, among them: the suspended flat panel stained glass light fixtures evoking the triune God and, quite possibly, the pomegranate. The six variably sized globes that swing among other chandeliers at the altar and may well represent the spinning planets.



I won't go on too long about the lovely mural work that is everywhere, except to say that I felt the most captivating piece in the church, and also the most illusive to capture on camera (I failed completely) is Frederic Clay Bartlett’s Tree of Life, which adorns the altar. Pure Arts & Crafts, the mural is all pattern and repetition. Dark and leafy, arching ever upward, it reminds me of the extraordinary wooden altarpiece of the cathedral of Santiago de Atitlan carved by the master Diego Chavéz and his brother Nicholas in the way it tethers spiritual aspirations with the grit and power and persistence of the earth.



So, in a word: Go. Visit a good long while. And while you’re at it leave the Friends of Historic Second Church a few farthings for the privilege so that they can continue the work of repairing the patched and torn carpet and cleaning the glass and protecting this treasure so that it will endure.



[1] Turns out St. Clement is host to Danny Thomas’ St. Jude, the effigy to which Mr. Thomas targeted his ardent appeal for career success, and the very same saint that he built a hospital to honor when things took off. Also of interest for those of us who love Elaine Stritch too much: Thomas formulated his plans for his hospital with Cardinal Stritch, Ms. Stritch’s uncle.

& an antidote

altgeld #2
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

I am not discouraged. Things will right themselves. The pendulum swings one way, and then another, but the steady pull of gravitation is toward the center of the earth. Any structure must be plumb to endure. So it is with Nations: Wrong may seem to triumph. Right may seem to be defeated, but the gravitation of eternal justice is toward the throne of God. Any political institution which is to endure must be plumb with that line of justice.

From a speech Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeldt gave once upon a time, now etched into his tombstone at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.

Wikipedia sums up Altgeldt as follows: "As governor he spearheaded the nation's most stringent child labor and workplace safety laws, appointed women to important positions in the state government, and vastly increased state funding for education. However, he is best remembered for pardoning the three surviving suspects of a bombing who were convicted after the Haymarket Riot. He also strongly disagreed with President Grover Cleveland's decision to send federal troops to Chicago during the Pullman Strike, a highly unusual stance for a state governor at that time."

So. Not all bad.

the windy city

Blalegovich from Andrew Sullivan

If indicted, Mr. Blagojevich would be the fifth of the last eight elected Illinois governors to be charged with a crime, and if he is sent to jail, the fourth to serve time.

Kate Zernike, In Illinois, a Virtual Acceptance and Expectation of Corruption Among Politicians.

Gotta admire that Midwestern consistency.

p.s. you know, of course, that Chicago didn't get its nickname from the wind -- "Windy City" was coined to describe the politicians around here.

even better than kittens

The First United Methodist Church at the Chicago Temple has installed a crucifix made from a cast of a cross burned at a 1963 KKK rally.

From Gapers Block, linking to the Chicago Tribune story »

Photo by Kuni Takahashi

Marseilles, IL

Sweet Grama:
I hope this finds you well.

Wanted to let you know about a road trip we took over the weekend to Great Gram’s home town of Marseilles, Illinois -- it’s just a short drive from where I'm living now. Strange that I’d transplant myself halfway across the country to arrive just two hours distant from the little town where your grandparents, just arrived from Norway, first got started in America.



Marseilles is seated in a wide squat along the I&M Ship Canal -- the waterway that snakes out this way from the city and was part of the engineering effort behind reversing the Chicago River. The box factory that you told me about, where your grandfather Soren worked, sits alongside it.



We drove through Marseilles a few years back when the factory was still in operation: At that time the sign out front read Phil Container. That changed in the last year: I spoke with a Marseilles lifer at the Coyote Cafe, where we stopped for breakfast (biscuits and gravy topped with scrambled eggs) and she told me that Nabisco (she called them the National Biscuit Company) ran it for years and years before they sold it to Phil.

It was only this last year that the jobs were sent overseas and the factory was boarded up. Whole town’s hurting, she told me. A couple other large industries recently sent their work to Asia and Mexico. The little town, that felt quiet and quaint the last time we passed through, felt a bit desolate and deserted. Johnny Cash spilled into the street from PJs biker bar at 9AM.



I took a few pictures of the factory -- soon as they’re developed I’ll send copies. I imagine it was a lovely little town once upon a time, framed as it is by sandstone bluffs and run through by the cool green banks of the Ship Canal. The Illinois River skims its outer boundary.

Came to understand over the couple days that we spent out that way why Great Gram loved Lake Michigan lake water so much that she asked you to bring back a mason jar full when you and Bompa traveled to Chicago for that Shriner’s convention. The water in the region is loaded with minerals: so much that it’s somewhat salty, and gave me a stomachache. She must have fallen in love with the city’s water when she moved, finally, to Humboldt Park.



Our plan was to follow the river to Starved Rock -- a sweet little State Park where we planned to do some hiking -- but first we detoured through Norway, Illinois, just north of Marseilles. It turns out this sleepy little spot is where a fellow named Cleng Peerson set up shop with a whole boatload of Norwegians back in 1825. The sign claims Norway is the first “permanent settlement of Norwegians in America” -- no doubt to ensure that no one confuses it with the Vinland, the first Norwegian settlement in North America in the early 1000s. As we all know. And must remind others. Persistently.

Unfortunately the Norsk Museum doesn’t open until 1PM on the weekends, so we didn’t have a chance to peek inside. Near the road marker to Cleng and his clan that named Highway 71 the Cleng Peerson Memorial Highway, and commemorated their settlement with a profusion of plaques, flags and a kiosk topped with an architectural flourish better suited to a stave kirke, there was a tongue-in-cheek memorial to the farmers and business folk who weathered the agricultural crash of the 1980s -- in the form of a crashed plane by the roadside.

Which left the impression that times have been tough in Norway, too.



I love you. I’ll send pictures soon.

Your granddaughter.

where they walked.

Nursing a broken heart this morning.

Sometime back my grandmother sent me a letter. It was stamped with an Audrey Hepburn stamp -- which made me smile because folks used to compare my grandmother to Audrey (when they weren't comparing her to Jackie Kennedy), and I’m sure she smiled as she licked it and affixed it to the envelope.

The letter contained another envelope -- one that her mother, my great grandmother, had given her many years ago when she visited Chicago for a Shriner’s convention in the 1960s (my Bompa was Grand Potentate of the Nile Temple in Seattle for a while -- and yes, my grandmother still has the rhinestone encrusted fez).

The envelope was scribbled with names and addresses: The home where my grandmother lived until she was three. The church where she was baptized. Notes on the neighborhood. Her old neighborhood: Humboldt Park in Chicago where her family settled after moving here from Norway. Where she lived until the family moved to Seattle, shattered by divorce, her mother a single mother now, with three children and her mother (my great-great-grandmother Ingeborg) in tow. My grandmother was the middle child who would soon become the oldest when her sister Corinne, who played violin and was thought to be a prodigy, contracted meningitis and died when she was eight.

I kept that letter in a basket for what seems like -- probably is -- years now. It was my intention to route out the addresses with my camera, visit them all and shoot them, bind them together in an album for my grandmother.

And for me, of course. Because I’m a transplant here, and feel a bit unmoored without family histories to stumble upon in the street, the way I do easily in Seattle. In Sonoma. That letter made me feel a little bit like I belong here in Chicagoland. Just a little bit.

Then I got busy with all kinds of things, and I put off shooting for another time.

Until yesterday. This being summer finally at last, the season of architecture, we headed out for an CAF architecture tour of the boulevard that runs through Logan Park in Chicago. It’s one of the last longest stretches of the boulevard system that once limned the city. Logan Square is right next door to Humboldt Park -- they’re basically the same neighborhood. It was bursting with Scandinavian immigrants the turn of the century before last.

One family of which was my family.

I went to where I stored the letter: and it was gone. Moved, I’m sure, well intentioned, to a safe place where I wouldn’t lose it.

And of course I can’t remember where that place is.

In my worst nightmare I tossed it out when I cleaned that basket last, thinking maybe it got mixed in the pile with the old receipts and expired boarding passes.

No. Please. No.

So I soaked up Logan Square without it, eyed the lavish greystones along the boulevard, enjoyed the Minnekirken -- the last remaining Norwegian language church in Chicago where the services are still conducted in the mother tongue even though all the kids have to wear earpieces to pipe in the English translation, and where the Pastor (an import himself from Norway) said, without a hint of irony in his voice: “Coffee hour is a very important part of what it means to be a member of this church."

(Was this her church? I don't know. I lost the envelope.)



Then had lunch at an amazing taqueria and loaded up at the panaderia across the street. All of this with the wondering lonesome grateful feeling that comes of knowing: They were here. Once.

Knowing that because they were -- my family, my ancestors -- because they managed to work it all out and live a good life and love some and give a little, knowing that because of all that: I am here now too.



A note on the map: It’s a fold-out map from the late 1800s delineating the entire boulevard system of Chicago. It shows Chicago before the L. Scored it last year at the Printers’ Row Book Fair for an unbelievably cheap $25. Now framed and hanging on my wall, like the treasure it is.

the elevated

Chicago, IL

tough love

I’m taking a trowel to work this morning, because yesterday I spotted a series of trees that live alongside our building that are dangerously mulched. With my trowel I will reorganize their high mounds of bark, presently packed tight against the tree trunks, into a donut shapes that expose the trunks to the air.

Why? Because the Treekeepers told me to.

I met three of the Treekeepers last weekend during a Chicago Places & Spaces tour of Peanut Park -- a sweet little appendix to Grant Park that’s tucked alongside Lakeshore Drive within sight of Oprah’s building.

Treekeepers are “volunteers who have become certified by Openlands to give trees the care and maintenance they need to thrive in the urban forest.” And they train others, in workshops around the city of Chicago, in how to care for trees right.



When it comes to trees they know what’s what, and although they’re not vigilant in their evangelism I came away converted; came away wanting to carry a pruner in a holster around my waist, the way they did, pulling it out in an instant when they spotted a tree that had been poorly pruned, setting injustice right like Zorro did with a quick zip zip zip -- trimming the stub down to the nub so the tree could better heal and grow.

Like a parent placing a band aid where it needed to be and sealing it with a kiss.

two water towers

Shot these awhile back, but geez louise already, I haven’t shot anything in ages and I’m needing a little color. Or what passes for color at the tail end of a Chicago winter.

So: Water Towers, Chicago-style.

The first was architected by William W. Boyington way back, and was the last thing standing on the far edge of the remnants of the Great Chicago Fire. The tower itself now houses an art gallery; across the street its companion building, the Pump Station, houses the Lookingglass Theater and a whole bunch of firemen. With trucks.

My mother, who’s deep into Ancestry.com research, tells me we’re related to Boyington, which would be freakin’ cool if it were true. (Jury’s still out.)



The other: Just a random cistern. These are slowly disappearing, so I like to snap ‘em when I can.

Okay. That was fun. Can we have Spring now?

and it was good.

and it was good.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Intelligentsia Coffee
Chicago, IL

Posting by cameraphone
the Loop

tiny creatures

Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain video towers at Millennium Park are such a gimme shot, I feel almost guilty shooting them.

Almost.

But then the guilt is quickly overriden by a simple, rumbling: gimmmm meee »

you have my word.

Just off Rush, right around Noontime.
Chicago, IL

inbound on the Ike

Have we talked about this? About how many of Chicago's expressways and tollways have names, most of them taken from politicians during the early glory days of superhighway construction (shall we assume that money changed hands?) -- like the Stevenson and the Kennedy -- and it's never entirely clear which name corresponds to which number because they're rarely coupled together on signs, and they're often abbreviated by locals -- so that the Eisenhower, which is I-290, becomes the Ike.

Which is what this is.

Update: I've edited this post *four* times with four different Interstate numbers, which goes to show that I have no idea which interstate the Eisenhower really is. I'm so not local.

feel the love

Made Gapers Block Rearview, baby.

Feel the love »

p.s. At this posting my pic is in curious proximity to an allusion re zombies. Coincidence? You tell me.

playing hooky

Played hooky on my virus last night, which is a strange insidious thing, wearing me down a little, making me spacey and peppering my calves with hives (?!) but otherwise leaving me be. So yeah, I pretended to be fine and crossed town to have dinner with a friend who's in town delivering a paper at Northwestern over the weekend at what appears to be a fascinating conference on Visual Democracy. If I'm able to ignore my virus a little more today I'll head over that way again and try to catch a plenary or two.

But to my point: I was looking up a book title that came up with A.M. over dinner, and found this waiting for me at Amazon, in that helpful way Amazon has of recommending books just for you based on your past purchases (see: the recommendation I received when I was getting reamed by life) and although I'm not yet convinced that I'll buy their recommendation I was glad to browse through to the first poem of the book which summed up so well so many of the things that came up over that good bowl of cassoulet and the late night stroll that followed through Chicago's public art -- starting with the Dubuffet (which rhymes with cassoulet -- don't pretend you didn't notice), past the Picasso and Miro, the scattering of street people, the shared the cigarettes, Chagall's Mosaic across from the Inland Steel building, on to Calder's Flamingo stabile at Mies' Federal Plaza and then to Millennium Park for a taste of Today -- but back to my point. Which belonged to the evening, which is resident in this fragment from Mary Oliver's Messenger:

let me keep my mind on what matters
which is my work
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished

Or something very much like that.

LSD

aka Lakeshore Drive.

Autumn. Circa 65 MPH.

ladies who lunch

Cheating on the event[1] lunch to grab my own down the road at Osaka, a tiny little pocket of a place on Michigan Avenue (a block South of the Art Institute) that makes magic out of an incongruous juxtaposition: Sushi & Fresh Fruit Smoothies.

Today's lunch: sake sushi with avocado and tamago maki, accompanied by a peach/mango smoothie.

The fish with sushi thing has a strange way of spilling across boundaries at Osaka: they have a crab and mango roll -- which I tried once and was sorry I had -- and they offer avocado in their smoothie assortment, which I've been assured pairs beautifully with mango.

Maybe next time.

The background music is the only juxtaposition that *doesn't* work at Osaka -- today it seems the Beatles have collided with one of those music boxes where the ballerina spins when you lift the lid.

But I'll put up with quite a bit for a lunch like this.

Posting by cameraphone from the Loop.


[1] A Forrester Forum on social networking -- more to come on that one.

koko & lonnie singing in the trees

kaminaljuyú cloud ridge
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Koko Taylor, if you’re wondering, is tired. Of the tunes she belted out for us last night in the perpetual solstice twilight of the Morton Arboretum, the only one that carried any heft and heart was her closing number -- her lullaby “Bye-Bye”. She sang it like she meant it – like she was ready to be done.

The Queen of the Blues has been at this a long time, after all, and her health isn’t what it was.

Fortunately she was wise enough to off-set her stiff footed stomping with that old diva’s trick of filling the stage with beautiful, talented men – the Koko Taylor Blues Machine carried her through with some gorgeous, supportive playing -- but even with all that support she still found room to berate them, like a babushka, when they cut off one of her tunes too quickly instead of tamping it down to something mellow she could speak over for awhile. Reviews from the Blues Festival a few weekends back were tepid, so it was expected, but a disappointment still.

Love you, Koko. Hope you’re feeling better soon.

Lonnie Brooks, on the other hand, who opened for Koko (and opened it wide), brought it home for the people. Great playing, great delivery – the kind that makes you dance in ways before unknown – like a body possessed. New moves with each new tune, as Lonnie sang his way through the great Blues trinity:

1. Gettin’ none.


2. Gettin’ some.


3. Gettin’ ready to get some more.

Brooks was ushered in by his son, Wayne Baker Brooks, and a fellow named Andre Howard on bass – all told these good men held this girl close and cradled her for close to two happy hours. Yes, please. I’ll take me some more of that.

The biggest disappointment of the night was the audience, of course. I say “of course” because we were in the Western suburbs. This was my first experience on the Morton Arboretum’s Concert Lawn, not a bad venue, but big and broad like these lawns generally are, without any retaining walls or landforms to capture the applause and excitement into the kind of loop that feeds the crowd into further frenzy. So what little expression could be eked out of our mostly-white, mostly-suburban, mostly-middle-aged brethren dissipated on the air.

But the blues wouldn’t be the blues if there wasn’t something to kvetch about. The cursed 17-year cicadas kept their distance after all, and when the sun finally set the fireflies came out, punctuating the cool air with their brief bursts of flame.

Not a bad night.