Autumn, milwaukee, Nature, Uncategorized, wisconsin

Walks Around Wisconsin. Milwaukee, October

 

It’s that time of year again.

The days are mellow but at night, there’s a bit of a nip in the air.  OK, really more of a wholehearted bite.

Autumn in Wisconsin — hard cold winds straight off the Canadian prairies sweep summery days away.

 

Experienced walkers in these parts know how to stay the course during the cold winds.  Put on your heaviest boots & take on some ballast – – drop a half-dozen rolls of quarters in your coat pockets, maybe a couple pints of Captain Morgan, the favored antifreeze in these parts.

Wax the ear flaps on your Stormy Kromer hat to cut wind resistance and head into the headwinds.

 

People are using to weaving, here in the city that leads the country in excessive drinking, so tacking & jibing with the wind comes pretty naturally.

Signs in the park remind dog owners that during High Wind days, any breeds smaller than a St Bernard should be double-leashed and aviation wheel chocks are recommended when they stop by a fire hydrant.

 

Who knows where the summer’s heat is carried off to – – I seem to recall an old Chippewa legend — when the North Wind blows into town, all the sunshine’s warmth is swallowed & carried to Capistrano.

Or perhaps I’ve got that muddled somehow. But modern science offers an equally crazy story to explain the change in seasons.

 

This old planet wobbles along on a bent axle or tilted axis, something like that?

“Wobble & Tilt” should be a carnival ride, or cop lingo for an inebriated pedestrian, but it’s scarcely appropriate behavior for a mature planet.

And recently I’ve become hopeful that scientists will buckle down and stabilize this situation.

 

The Big Red Ball. Photo by Jeff Miller / UW-Madison

 

 

Last month, apparently lacking adult supervision, those crazy kids at NASA deliberately crashed a spaceship into an asteroid.  (Some articles called it a “moonlet” which makes me feel bad, like we’re picking on the little guy.) The idea was to see if they could change the asteroid’s course as a kind of test run for a planetary defense system.

So I’m thinking, once NASA has practiced up a bit, crashing spaceships & changing orbits, etc. perhaps they can correct Earth’s wobble & tilt problem?

Redirect some pointless wandering rock to smack into Earth.  Nothing over the top like last time, when they wiped out the dinosaurs, just a smack on the wrist with a ruler, so Earth straightens up and flies right.   Haley’s Comet is due for a visit in 2061, they should have it all worked out by then.

 

These same science types are working on jaunts to Mars, where temperatures during the tourist season average -81 degrees F.

 

We laypeople may not know much about space travel.  But we do know, that those sorts of scientists, interested in the Red Planet, and eighty one degrees below zero, are not from around here.

No one from Wisconsin is much interested in traveling somewhere colder.  The Wisconsin science types are mostly in Madison, huddled around a plasma magnetosphere called The Big Red Ball.

 

 

Our planet has a magnetosphere of course, so at least we’re protected from solar winds, even if it doesn’t help with the Alberta Clippers or the Arctic Cold Fronts.

 

The Big Red Ball, at the U of Wisconsin, kinda looks like a Hollywood mad scientist thing – – covered with magnets, wires, gauges, and pretty sure a 48-cup stainless coffee maker. And it cranks out 500,000 degrees F.  or 5 million K, something like that, basically “real hot,” a miniature sun.  And the scientists really don’t care if they discover a darn thing — as long as the funding holds out, the lab is nice and toasty.

And that reminds me, time for cinnamon raisin bread toast and hot coffee, gotta go.

 

 

 

 

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Great Lakes, milwaukee, Spring, Winter, wisconsin

Walks Around Wisconsin. First Spring Blossom above the 42° Parallel North

 

 

 

Well, I don’t really expect I’ve fooled anyone!

Yes, I took a bit of latitude with the title, and need to backpetal – – it’s not a real blossom of course.

I sliced the stem off the top of the last acorn squash from last fall’s harvest, and it just struck me, how much it looked like a daisy.

Around here, it’s still dropping below freezing every night, and probably down into the teens by next weekend.

But we had some warm weather over the past weekend, and we’re getting ready for some flowers and green leaves.

Hope springs eternal, even if it has to jump over the snowdrifts.

 

 

 

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milwaukee, Uncategorized, wisconsin

Walking around Walker’s Point

 

Well, I haven’t been posting much.  So other than working and studying, what have I been doing?

I’ve been making a determined and deliberate effort to make Milwaukee feel like home and have pretty much succeeded.

Part of this process, I think, was going to live in Walker’s Point, a neighborhood on the south side of town.

 

Nice brickwork on an old school building

A mostly industrial area, on low-lying ground between two rivers, and in recent years just a footnote in the city’s story, this neighborhood has also long been a hub for people who were “othered.”

For many years, this was a German town, but in the early 1900’s, immigrants from Mexico were brought in to work in the numerous tanneries, which for a time, produced more leather than anywhere else in the world.  Polish and Slovenian immigrants had arrived before them, to work in the steel mills, machine shops and factories.

 

I like walking by the local print shop, showing off some of their posters.  My neighborhood has the largest concentration of Spanish-speakers in the state.

 

Walker’s Point is now gentrifying and growing, old businesses and warehouses being converted to brewpubs, restaurants and loft apartments, but the residential population is still pretty small, there’s still a great sense of neighborliness and its low-lying houses nicely frame the skyline of the downtown.  The skyscrapers for Northwestern Mutual and U.S. Bank are easily visible and not too far, but a world away from this neighborhood.

Also visible is the clock tower at Rockwell Automation, with its 40-foot clock faces (twice as big as Big Ben’s clock), big enough that ships on Lake Michigan use it like a lighthouse.

 

Rockwell Automation “For Over a Century, Doing Our Darndest to Get Rid of Humans”

 

 

 

The area is also home to artists and the gay nightlife scene, and there’s a diverse and tolerant crowd roaming these streets.  After being a backwater, now I think now the currents here are a lot of the lifeblood of the city, with true big city hustle & bustle but small town feelings of neighborhood.

 

neighborhood shops

 

Walking around, there are oldtime residential pockets, and you’re struck by the many Victorian homes.  Many are stately and charming, with quaint flowerbeds and yards full of statues and art.  While a lot of this area is still industrial and not far from the harbor (and the Milorganite factory is sometimes within smelling distance), it’s quiet and safe.

Here’s some cellphone snapshots of random things from from recent walks.  There’s no theme today, it’s just an interesting town to walk around.

 

I liked this old Victorian, but took the picture on a day the sky was absolutely gray. So this is a fake blue sky. Photoshop’s bag of tricks sometimes strikes me as clever and useful, sometimes as funny, and some days, as downright creepy. But for a random postcard like this, I guess the fake sky doesn’t seem to present any huge artistic or ethical issues.

Here’s some stuff from other parts of the city.  Closer to downtown, they’re building a 25-story apartment building.  What makes that interesting – – it’s wooden!  I don’t mean it will have wood facing or paneling, but the actual structure.  It will be the tallest timber frame building in the world.

 

 

Near the high school where I worked a few years ago, are some Frank Lloyd Wright houses, currently being restored.

 

 

 

 

The Basilica of St Josephat, built by Polish immigrants. Maybe it was the spiritual locus, but the sky above it really was that blue the day I walked here.

Hard to believe you’re looking at a former post office (keep reading for the explanation).

 

 

By 1900, when this was built, there were 60,000 Poles living here, and they already had seven churches, but wanted something grander, with room for over a thousand worshippers. So this is basically a scaled-down version of St. Peter’s in Rome.

In a clever bit of economy, they bought the old Chicago Post Office, a big 4- or 5-story Second Empire-style building, which was being replaced, and re-used the stone blocks.  (The giant 9-story Old Chicago Main Post Office you see today, which goes over the Eisenhower Expressway, was built in the ’20’s and ’30’s)

 

 

And that’s the news from Milwaukee.  I hope everyone is well and staying dry.

 

2 November 2021 update on the timber frame apartment building. It will be 284 feet tall, the tallest wood-framed building in the world.

 

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Cellphone shot of a 1915 station in Sparta, on the Chicago Northwestern.

Originally, this line was called the Baraboo Air-Line Railroad.  (Isn’t that kind of great!?)

The trains don’t go there anymore.

Although there’s active stations not too far away (eighteen miles east in Tomah, and 28 miles west in La Crosse), because Amtrak runs more-or-less northwest across the state, on its way to St. Paul.

This little brick building is now the office for the 32-mile Elroy-Sparta biking trail, which the official guide tells us, is “considered the first rail-to-trail in the United States.”

It’s about 120 miles northwest of Madison, and if you continue NW from Sparta, on the La Crosse River Trail, you’ll hit the Mississippi.

The sections I walked were pleasant, if unexciting, but the big attraction is the tunnels.

 

The trail was mostly crushed limestone and well-maintained. I think one section of trail may still be closed after some storm damage, so if you’re planning on biking this, check with the folks in the Sparta office.

 

In the 1870’s, RR workers dug & blasted their way through the hills.  We walked through the longest tunnel, nearly 3/4 of a mile long.

 

The closest access point is reached by driving down a semi-washed-out gravel lane next to the church I posted yesterday.

At the foot of the hill, there’s what looks like an ancient stone-lined canal.

 

 

It was actually just an attempt to divert storm water away from the tunnel and railbed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tunnel is almost entirely unlined, and water drips down steadily from the ceiling, and runs alongside the path in little ditches.

At some point, the burrow is reinforced with massive stone blocks, and water cascades down the wall – – I think the spot where the workers hit an underground spring.  This picture was taken with a flash, there’s no lighting in the tunnel.

 

 

 

This is to give an idea of walking through the tunnel with your flashlight turned off, looking toward the entrance.

 

If you don’t mind getting a bit wet, and perhaps hearing a bat or two overhead, it’s a wonderfully cool place for a walk on a hot summer day.

And a great place to sing, if there’s no one around.

I recommend selections from Bohemian Rhapsody, or Phantom of the Opera.

 

 

 

 

1870's, Railroads, Uncategorized, wisconsin

Walks Around Wisconsin. Chicago Northwestern, Sparta station, 1915. And a Dampish Sort of Tunnel, 1873.

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A cellphone snap of an 1878 church near Norwalk, Wisconsin (pop. 638)

Built by German immigrant farmers, miles from any village, surrounded by hills and cornfields.

Looking well-looked-after, in a nice setting, surrounded by thriving crops.

Apart but without any feeling of isolation, just peacefulness.

The church is called St. John the Baptist, and the corn certainly looked well-watered.

 

 

1870's, wisconsin

Walks Around Wisconsin. The church on Summit Ridge.

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Kind of a nice home office, when you work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s former home.

 

 

Lots of attention on working-from-home, so I thought I’d do a post about Taliesin, where Frank Lloyd Wright worked, lived, and taught.

I work at a busy university, but in a seldom-visited ell off an old building.  Some days my only visitor, is someone checking if I’ve watered the office plants in the window of the common space.  (I haven’t.)  Other than a couple of meetings a week, I’m used to working solo — I spend my day on computers, email and phone — so the adjustment to working and attending college from home really wasn’t too traumatic.

Apparently though, based on the continuing flood of online advice, it’s been a real sea change for a lot of folks.

Lots & lots of articles floating around, or rather, we’re floating in a sea of articles, about remote learning and working.

 

 

 

Taliesin is very close to the Wisconsin River, but this pond is a reservoir, created by damming a little stream. The overflow was used to generate electricity for the house.

All this advice is eddying round and round my head, kind of confusing.

Here’s some of my notes:

~   ~   ~

Turn on drone music.

Analyze your neural pathways & practice brain-hacking

Need to hack a pathway through shrubs for drone pizza deliveries. 

Do we have oregano in spice cabinet

~   ~   ~

Learn to better communicate with your animal companions.  

Resolve relationship crises between cat & dog.  

Evaluate pets as an emergency food source. 

Order a larger crock-pot. 

One with a lockable lid. 

Buy more oregano.  Catnip?  Horehound?

~   ~   ~

Maintain Focus! 

Research-Backed Secrets to Concentration!  

💐 Let your mind Wander🎈🌻  It will create Wonder💐

Remember, a wandering mind, like a Labrador, almost always comes home by dinnertime, carrying with it, something interesting. 

 

An online motivational voice tells me to live in the moment.

But his accent makes it sound like mo-mint, and I realize how long it’s been since I had a York Peppermint Pattie.  Doesn’t mint kill germs?  Was it peppermint or spearmint as a plague preventative?  Mandrake?

Then I wonder if it’s true, that if you breathe through a hookah filled with mint mouthwash, the air will be cleansed of germs.

Would people stare at me, if I did that on the bus.  Not in my neighborhood.  But if they see the hookah, will they think it’s a bong, and approach too closely, to ask if I’m holding?  I’m not a pothead, but I’m often mistaken for a homeless guy, when I wear  my favorite old jacket, and don’t shave or comb my hair.

What if I just wear that horrible old jacket, which has been encouraging social distancing for years, before that was a thing, and is infused with organic scents (citronella, lemon eucalyptus oil, raisins, and wet Labrador) and just keep popping York Peppermint Patties?  What about tabbouleh with fresh mint, would that kill a virus?  Are there any Lebanese delis in this town?  Do they sell hookahs?  Is that an offensive stereotype?

When I was a kid, my grandmother walked me through her herb garden, and handed me little snips of every plant as she named them.  I put them in my jacket pocket, and forgot about them.  Then when I was riding on the school bus, I kept thinking about pizza all the time.  After a couple of weeks, I realized, my jacket was full of pizza spices — oregano, marjoram, basil, thyme, etc.  I left them in the pockets, I loved having a pizza jacket, but they didn’t prevent me from getting frequent colds and ear infections.

Buy fresh mint when you get the oregano.  See if they have mandrake in the Goya aisle. 

 

And so it goes.  I don’t think my mind is coming back anytime soon.

But let’s get back to architecture, we’ll be minty fresh & on point.

 

 

Walking toward it from the visitor center, Taliesin resembles a little hilltop village.  The hill was one of Wright’s favorite spots as a boy, and overlooks land that was farmed by his relatives.  The visitor center itself is fun to visit, designed as a restaurant, but not finished until after his death.  It does have a small restaurant operating in the building also, which had terrific food.

 

Like a lot of people, housebound, I’ve been thinking about how our surroundings and architecture influence our mood, and our thoughts.

Lots of studies and articles – – by architects, artists, home decorators, psychologists, color psychologists, etc.

 

 

Wright designed a schoolhouse for his aunts, within walking distance of his house. The whimsical-looking “Romeo and Juliet” tower in the distance, was a functioning windmill, to pump water for the school, as well as a pretty cool observation spot.

 

In this monograph, we will explore how manifestations of this current crisis complicate our societal work-centered dynamic & we will deconstruct the underlying cultural sources of pandemic-induced burnout.

 

Just kidding, were you scared?

Interesting stuff, but this column isn’t structured to construct or deconstruct much of anything.

I find too much structure, grammar, stuff like that, disrupts the feng shui of my site.

It’s Spring, and barbeque season, and that brought to mind a trip during April of last year, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home/school/workshop in Wisconsin.  A place of beauty and really bad fires.

 

 

“I knew well that no house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and home should live together each the happier for the other.” FLW

 

If you’re gonna work from home, this is the way to do it!  A fascinating, sprawling place, in a bucolic setting.  The house, studio, and outbuildings total 37,000 square feet, and if you add all the other buildings on property he designed (Hillside School, theater, sister’s house, barn, visitor center, etc. ) it collectively covers almost two acres.

Arriving there from my 700 square foot apartment, it felt…spacious.

 

 

 

 

The almost-invisible corner, formed by two panes of glass, was one of Wright’s distinctive design elements.

 

 

 

The hilltop is a whole complex of buildings – – the main house, guest house, drafting room, carriage house, farm structures, garage, etc.  It was a place of constant modification – a chicken barn, for example, was converted into a dormitory at some point.  The courtyards have lawns, stone paving, pieces of Asian and Wright’s own art, and a patio under an arbor covered with vines.

 

 

 

 

Inside & out, are examples of Asian art, that Wright brought back from his trips.  For a time, he had a successful side business, selling Japanese woodblock prints.

 

 

 

 

The house is not as dark as it looks in my terrible photo, there are hundreds of windows, and it’s filled with light.  In my defense, I wouldn’t describe the tour as rushed, but neither did it allow time for photography.

 

 

 

 

Some of the Asian antiquities, rescued from earlier house fires, were incorporated into the stonework.

 

I was a docent at a house museum, and at the Jamestowne site in Virginia.  So I understand that you cannot talk about every aspect of a place, in one tour.

So it wasn’t a complete surprise, when the guide at Taliesin, didn’t mention the ax murders.

So I asked.

Mostly out of curiosity over how the docents would handle the topic.

I don’t want to do a hatchet job on the tour, or the house, so I shouldn’t exaggerate.  No one was actually killed with an ax.

It was a hatchet.

Wright was already married, with six kids, when he ran off to Europe for a year, with a married client, Martha Cheney.

He built a house at Taliesin, and Martha and her two children lived there with him.

A husband & wife from Barbados worked there as a handyman/cook team, but had just been fired.  The mentally-unstable handyman attacked and killed Martha and her children, and four others, poured gasoline on the bodies, and set the house on fire.

 

Instead of fleeing the site of the massacre, Wright rebuilt it.

It burned down again, from an electrical short. (It seems ironic, that one of the first homes he designed in the area, for his sister, was featured in a magazine article “A Fireproof House for $5000.”  Wright later set the theater wing of his architecture school on fire, trying to clear some brush.)

Wright rebuilt for a third time, on what some people might have felt was an unlucky sort of spot, or at least, too far from the nearest fire department.  The current house is sometimes called Taliesin III.

And here’s one thing – – no one on the tour, including myself, felt the slightest sense of creepiness.  The house is light-filled, calm and lovely.

I’ve read that traditional Navajo will burn or abandon a home, when someone dies inside it.  Some cultures practice purification rituals, burning sweetgrass or sage, etc.  Perhaps they’d feel that the two fires served as a cleansing process, or that ghosts need a physical fabric to attach to a site.

Well, it struck me as a lovely spot.

Across the little valley, a Shingle Style chapel is visible, with the interior designed by Wright, and where some of his relatives are buried.  He was originally buried there as well, for about 26 years, but his tradition of controversy, family strife, and fire continued even after death.  In 1985, according to the wishes of his third wife, but apparently without the knowledge or consent of other family members, he was disinterred, cremated, and the ashes taken to Taliesin West, his studio in Arizona.

 

Fireplaces were scattered throughout the house, some so narrow that the logs would’ve been placed vertically.

 

 

Home ownership isn’t a guarantee of serenity, is it. The guide explained that this cracking was due to the ground settling, over many decades. But some of the stonework was not quite professional-looking, and was probably done by his students. I was surprised to find some of the recessed lighting was pretty cheap-looking.  But our guide pointed out, that this was a home, and workshop, and not a glamorous project with a wealthy client footing the bills.

 

I’ve now toured a number of Wright structures – the Darwin Martin complex in Buffalo, Graycliff (a lakeside estate for the same client), Fallingwater, Pope-Leighey (a small “Usonian” house in Virginia), the Guggenheim, as well as individual rooms, that were rescued from buildings being demolished.   I’ve viewed others in Rochester, Milwaukee, Chicago, etc.  They are all wonderful.

But quite often, you see or hear about problems and staggeringly expensive restorations – – cantilevered floors that had to have I-beams retrofitted, at huge expense, ceilings coming down, etc.  Some of that is simply a function of age and weather.  One of his principles, that a house should be an organic part of the landscape, integrated with its surroundings, is famous, and now seems kind of inarguable.  But sometimes his houses seem to want to disintegrate into the landscape – most tours of Wright structures include recitations of repairs and restorations, and pleas for contributions.

But even during his lifetime, there were problems.  The shellac that he specified for exterior woodwork, peeled off, repeatedly.  Ask a few carpenters sometime, if they’ve ever used shellac on exterior wood.  They’re just going to look at you funny, while they shake their heads, no, never.  A famous story was about a client, calling about a skylight, leaking water all over his desk.  Wright’s reply:  “I guess you’re going to have to move your desk.”  Leaks in flat tar roofs, cantilevers that weren’t up to the task, rooms heating up because the windows were without drapes or shades at his insistence, etc.

 

Much of the woodwork, inside and out, is bald cypress, which he started using during the ’20’s, although it isn’t native to NY or WI.  Projects in the west sometimes used redwood, and later houses, mahogany.

 

Kentuck Knob Museum website

I’ve never taken an architecture class, and know very little about Wright.  But I’m going to stick my neck out, and express my uninformed personal opinion.  Wright’s houses are wonderful, they’re timeless designs, and I guess you don’t need me to explain that to you – – but sometimes…they seem to have been constructed like stage scenery, not intended to last.  Wright was an artist, a theatrical person, leading a life filled with drama.  Very Hollywood.  An abandoned wife & family, notorious affairs, financial insolvency, dozens of automobiles, a lurid mass murder, and what some would see as a flamboyant arrogance.  The guy wore a cape, for heaven’s sake.  And a cardsharp broad-brimmed hat.  The house was modern, organic, “natural style,” but the narration inside it was gothic.

 

 

These houses are like fantastic home theaters, for the residents to strut their hours on the stage.  Phone calls from clients, full of sound and fury, complaining of leaking roofs, do not signify — there’s not a note that’s worth the noting.  He created these scenes, and left it to the home owners — the actors and stage managers, mere players — to fret about impracticalities & drips.  “Reason and love keep little company together…”  Bob Vila mentions a number of leaky houses created by famous architects — Philip Johnson, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, etc. — and a story about someone visiting a Wright house in Tulsa, during a rainstorm.  There were containers all over the house, to catch the drips.  The owner just said, “This is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”

So, what are the takeaway lessons for working from home?  Think creatively, stretch, take time for recreational pursuits, like other people’s spouses, put new batteries in your smoke alarms, and don’t leave sharp objects laying around when you’ve fired your staff.

Oh yeah, and try to create something revolutionary, beautiful and serene, that people will admire forever.

 

Looking toward the back of the house, a clear line of sight. I don’t think it’s visible in the photo, but you can see a glimpse of the sky, through the front windows.

 

The complex included a carriage house and garage.  Wright loved cars, and owned fifty of them during his lifetime.  Jaguar, Bentley, Lincoln Continental, Packard, Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, etc.   This was one of them – – a 1930 Cord L-29 cabriolet, in Taliesin Orange. It’s in the Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, IN. The photo is from the Library of Congress.  Obviously an economical, modest little runabout.

 

 

 

Guest house, forming one side of the complex.  The masonry was made of thin cuts of local stone, designed to suggest the way natural rock layers are visible in outcrops.

 

 

1920's, 1930's, architecture, wisconsin

Taliesen. Working from home.

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Looking into infinity. The new walkway connecting the Milwaukee and Chicago airports.  73 miles to the baggage claim.

 

Well I’ve been living in Milwaukee for the better part of a year, but I’ve just begun to explore the zone outside the city limits, which the nice folks at the farmers’ market tell me, is that fabled land called “Wisconsin.”

I was afraid it might be a bit dull, to a New York sophisticate like myself.

What a relief to encounter true and large-scale weirdness.

 

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This spring, on a cold, rainy day, I rented a car and  ventured out-of-town.  At first, it looked a lot like where I grew up, especially the cows, but driving along the Wisconsin River, toward the upper Mississippi,  we entered the “Driftless Area,” winding through sharp little ridges and valleys, sometimes wooded.

And then we visited a very strange place indeed.

 

 

 

Even weeks later, thinking it over calmly, my reaction is still the same – it seems less like a real memory, than a drunken, moldering dreamscape.   Fun, even charming, but also a bit spooky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from a collection of antique coin banks. These were labelled “Clowns Are Trump, You Pays Your Pence and You Takes Your Chances”

 

About forty miles west of Madison, beginning in the late 1940’s, and working through the ’50’s, a man built a house in the woods, on top of a rocky outcrop.  He called it “The House on the Rock.”

 

 

In a pretty commonplace region of cow pastures, woodlots, small towns, this experiment sticks out, literally and figuratively, as a strange, strange place.

A stray fragment of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy realm, Tim Burton as the architect, soundtrack by Tom Waits.

 

 

An immense cabinet of curiosities, sideshow extraordinaire, and hoarder’s storehouse of earthly “treasures,” the place where Antiques Roadshow goes off the road.

A crackerjack palace, decorated by Liberace, with every shelf & nook & cranny stocked by the Ringling Brothers & John Lennon, tripping on LSD, raiding every flea market, boardwalk, and carnival, Rube Goldberg tinkering in the back room.

P. T. Barnum’s ghost wanders through, and is humbled.

 

 

 

We didn’t plan on being there.

Family was visiting – – all of them Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts – – and we were headed to Taliesin, Wright’s home and workshop.

The two houses turned out to be a yin & yang thing.

The day we visited Taliesin, the weather was perfect, and the guides were well-informed and well-rehearsed, if a bit dry.

 

Taliesin

 

Wright’s artistic creation was well worth the drive – – an organic-seeming creation, the model of the perfect prairie house, in harmony with its surroundings, and almost spartan in its clean lines.

Yeah, so, we can talk about all that art & balance & perfectness & good taste some other time.

 

And now for something completely different.

 

 

Because the day after visiting Taliesin, we went somewhere else entirely – – a place all about the unhinged and the off-kilter and questionable, about trickery and cheesy excess – – you know, more like the America we actually live in, and that’s what this post is about.

 

Spaceship landing on what appears to be a chocolate cake.

 

It is truly impressive.  I remembered a quote from Dolly Parton:

“It takes a lot of time and money to look this cheap, honey.”

 

 

It was a weekday, off-season, and the weather was crummy – – cold, gray, windy – – and that is absolutely when you should visit, when the place is nearly empty.  We almost had the place to ourselves.

Just a few miles from Taliesin, but it was another world.

Just like Frank Lloyd Wright, another local guy also built a home and workshop up on a hill.

It was described to me as “interesting…different…maybe the biggest tourist attraction in the state,” by someone who’d never been there, but we decided to stop by.

I hadn’t read anything about it, and you cannot see the place from the road.  The lane winding through the trees gives you the first inkling – – lined with giant bronze vessels, with metal lizards attached to the sides.

 

 

A word about my photos for this post: SORRY.  This is a big overstuffed post, but these are snapshots on the fly, in really dim lighting.  I had family visiting, and gotta keep the old folks amused & moving, or they get cranky and rust up.  But if the pictures are sometimes fuzzy and a bit hard to decipher, that’s actually the way it seemed when I visited – – a huge murky space lit by low-wattage colored bulbs. Some stuff  is in cases with fluorescent lighting and dusty glass.  Think of the photos as a slightly out-of-focus slide show, after having a few cocktails, that’s the feeling I’m going for. 

 

To call it a house is inadequate.  Yes, there is a house – most of it, a dim, low-ceiled, cave-like conglomeration of amateur rough stone, old stained glass, church bells, firepits, and… shag carpeting.  Lots of musty-smelling shag carpeting.

Lots & lots of tchotchkes, statuettes, knick-knacks, bottles, iron pots, etc.

Ebony figures from Africa coexist with imitation Tiffany lights.

 

 

 

 

Lots of graying, yellowing, browning books – the man read anything and everything, apparently.  A wood staircase is lined with bookshelves, for three or four floors.

 

 

 

You come to a big room with slanted windows, looking out over the countryside, and carpeted tiers, what I believe was called, back in the day,  “conversation pits.”

 

And then, the first bit of weirdness – you realize the music you’ve been hearing, appears to come from a mechanized little orchestra, sawing away at “Bolero.”  Complicated contraptions, looking like drunken mashups of hydraulic valve lifters and bits of pinball machines, with a dash of Edward Scissorhands, seem to be playing actual instruments.  You’ll encounter a number of these robotic ensembles, sometimes, I think, just going through the motions while recorded music played, but drums and other instruments were definitely playing – – amazing, impressive, and often sounding kinda awful.

 

 

 

 

If Fred Flintstone moved to the Jetson’s neighborhood, and Wilma started hitting eBay and garage sales, this would be their house.

So I guess I’d call it Groovy, or Cool, Daddy-O, or possibly Yabba-Dabba Doo!

 

A wall made of slabs of glass, with colored lights behind it.

 

And…I’m underwhelmed.

It’s fun, kind of cozy, and the colored glass windows are great, but mostly it’s a higgledy-piggledy maze of eccentricity and clutter, with a dash of tackiness.

 

A number of decorating themes slug it out in the house – – some vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright elements, Asian, African, Flintstones, etc. but the dominant motif was “Rec Room”

 

But the experience hadn’t really even begun.

The entire complex is a “house” in the same way the USS Intrepid is a “boat.”

You’ll notice I haven’t said anything about “the man” who built this place.  His name was Alex Jordan, Jr., and he apparently was what my grandmother used to call “a real character.”  And I’m not going to tell you about him.  You may have already googled him, you definitely should.

There’s also a fun video filmed there, by the band “10,000 Maniacs,” (from Jamestown, NY, yea!).  It’s a re-make of Roxy Music’s “More Than This.”  (The video was done after Natalie Merchant left the band, and their cover isn’t as good as the original, but it gives a good idea of the place.) https://vimeo.com/108524874

You go up to the roof to admire the view, then down past a minimal, vintage kitchen, and a couple more Buddhas.  Did I mention there are a whole lot of Buddhas sitting around?  Indoors and out, big and small, in gravel courtyards and tucked into niches.  They seemed a little dubious, like garden store knockoffs, looking less contemplative than baffled, just like the rest of us.)

 

 

And as the sound of the endless “Bolero” begins, mercifully, to fade, you hear, around the corner and down a corridor, the theme from “The Godfather.”

And then you enter something that’s that’s not weird, cluttered, and uneasy, but just plain great.

The Infinity Room.

 

 

An enclosed, glassed-in room – – a covered bridge shaped like a Viking longship, juts out, cantilevered to what seems an impossible distance!   You quickly realize the optical illusion, and (spoiler alert) it really isn’t infinite, but it is over two hundred feet long, with a glass window to look down at the far end, at the pine trees and boulders you’re suspended over.

There’s a rocky outcrop underneath, somewhere, to balance the weight of the thing, but you can’t see it, and it just seems like the coolest treehouse-and-walk-the-gangplank-observation-room any daydreaming kid ever sketched in his notebook during geometry class.

The wind was kicking up, the day we were there, and the room creaked and swayed a bit, which was cool, but you could tell it was OK.

And anyway if it did collapse, how cool it would be to toboggan down the hill, through the pine trees, yeah, with the theme from the Godfather echoing in our ears, and the tinkling sound of countless imitation Tiffany lights smashing!

A wonderful external picture on the “Highest Bridges” website http://www.highestbridges.com/wiki/index.php?title=Infinity_Room_at_the_House_on_the_Rock

 

Outside, in the fresh air, smelling the pines, is a garden with a little waterfall, in the Japanese style, as done by a Holiday Inn.

 

And connected to the house, by a series of roofed, somewhat decrepit walkways, are labyrinthine warehouses.  You walk past a waterwheel, into a sort of millhouse, with suits of armor and random artifacts everywhere, including the men’s room.

 

You are entering a delirious steampunk world.

 

You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone!”

 

Acres of massive hangers, filled to the brim with outrageous jumbles of collectibles mixed with giant industrial machinery (an iron drive wheel, bigger than a car, a massive steam tractor, a ship’s propeller, huge electric generators) arranged into cityscapes, draped and intersected with dim colored lights.

 

I don’t mean a few Christmas lights.  They walked into J. C. Penny, and bought every made-in-Taiwan, ruby-glass kitchen light fixture, and grouped them into interwoven, homemade chandeliers of impossible sizes and scales, dangling eerily.

 

It is a glorious shambles – – creepy in places, charming in others, and sometimes a bit sad.  I don’t want to call it “surreal,” because I think “hyper-real” is closer to the truth.

If you’ve ever played “Myst,” a mystery video game from the ‘90’s, you’ll have a similar sense of a semi-abandoned fantasy realm.

 

 

The dimly-lit corridors and sloping catwalks are sometimes a bit disorienting.

 

 

 

 

 

You can feed tokens into antique arcade games – some work, some don’t – decrepit musical machines from a hundred years ago, some still squawking out tunes from Edison rolls, others plinking plaintively from music boxes, or huffing asthmatically from dusty pneumatic  systems.

 

Life-size mannikins jerk into action, pistons and gears and cranks beat out tunes.

 

 

 

 

Player piano rolls unroll, mallets & hammers tap on bells, drums, glass cylinders, chimes.

 

We dance to a Charleston-era tune wheezing from a massive ancestor of the jukebox.

 

 

 

Describing this place seems kind of impossible.  Nothing really does it justice.

 

A huge old diorama, perhaps once impressive, but now creepy as all heck, looking like a decrepit anteroom to the netherworld. I finally remembered what it reminded me of – – an episode on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery called “Camera Obscura,” based on a Basil Copper short story.

 

It is almost overwhelming.

You may think I exaggerate.

No, my regular readers protest, not Robbie!  Not that straight arrow, scrupulously-reliable-fact-checking-chronicler-of the American Way!

And this may all seem like pretty tame stuff, really.  It’s just the volume of it all that kind of swamps you.  Like that scene in “Moscow on the Hudson,” where the recent immigrant from Russia, overwhelmed by choices, faints in the breakfast cereal aisle.  And the dusty stillness of some sections – – they really ought to put bells on the darn maintenance guys, so when they’re tinkering with something behind the scenes, and then step out suddenly, they don’t give you a heart attack.

I got a drink of water, straightened up, and told myself “We’re Americans, darn it, we like stuff!  The more the merrier!”  And pressed on.

 

 

 

 

Another robotic band setting. The museum’s creator, Alex Jordan, designed animatronic figures and mechanical gadgets to play musical instruments.

 

The Smithsonian is far, far more extensive, with over 100 million artifacts, and is often called “America’s Attic.”

Sometimes in idle moments, I wonder what those people want with, for example, 140,000 taxidermied bats, but it’s Washington, D.C. another focal point of weirdness.

 

An assemblage of drums reaches up several stories. I do not know why there are birch trees.

 

You want clocks? We gotta lotta clocks.

 

 

 

The House on the Rock is on a more modest scale, but its chaotic and mostly unlabeled collection seems worthy of being “America’s Basement,” at the very least.  Parts of it might be the props storeroom for Cecille B. DeMille.

 

 

Life-size scenes of medieval mêlées, with armored elephants, depicting…ok, I do not have the slightest idea.

 

 

Sometimes it’s a labyrinthine museum, with glass cases along claustrophobic aisles, and sometimes, like an antediluvian amusement park

 

 

A three-story wooden clock, just past the remnants of a massive old electric generator

And another difference from any other collection of Americana I’ve visited. – -some of this stuff is junk.  By which I mean, it’s unabashedly phony.  Homemade neo-Victorian nonsense is jumbled together with genuine antiques.

 

Rusting outside, is a real cannon or howitzer, probably WWI French or Belgian.

 

A room of firearms contained clearly fantastical creations, like 36-shot pepperbox pistols, that looked to be cobbled together from bits of old piping.  The flintlocks appear to be brass-bedecked tourist items from the Casbah, or perhaps a theatrical prop room.  Naval 32-pounders might have come from a movie set.  Larger items, like a two-story cannon, must have come from defunct circuses or sideshows.  They’re all together, and you’re left to distinguish the real from the imaginary.  Or not.

 

 

 

Heading toward one of the larger mechanical bands, you walk up a dim brick-paved Street of Shops – – storefronts stuffed with antiques.  I paused to take the picture below, of the pale, glass-eyed dolls, staring back from their baby carriages, and was left behind by my group.

And honestly, when the place is empty, it felt a bit creepy, a place one feels watched, and doesn’t want to be alone in.  When a maintenance man appeared out of the shadows, I froze for a couple of heartbeats.

 

 

Overall, it’s not creepy.  But still.

Life-size and doll-size shops

 

After admiring the first dozen dollhouses, I walked and walked past innumerable more examples, barely looking at the tiny tea sets and miniature domestic tableaus, and then, out of the corner of my eye, noticed one tiny figure had apparently given up on escaping, and had tucked a shotgun barrel under his chin.

 

 

Hitchcock dolly zoom

 

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I think there is about an acre of miniature circuses

 

 

The H.O.T.R boasts a number of carousels, but you cannot ride on them. The biggest, claimed to be the biggest indoor carousel in the country, has many creatures, but not a single horse.

 

Instead, the walls of the huge building are covered with the wooden horses.

Hovering overhead are a host of dissolute-looking department store mannequins, like vengeful ghosts from shuttered Macy’s and Gimbels, ready to snatch people like me, who fail to color coordinate – –

tarnished angels in the architecture, women in loose gowns, with huge wings attached.

I imagine they’re intended as angels, but, especially since some are missing hands, or suffering wardrobe malfunctions, they looked like inebriated and menacing Valkyries.

 

 

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Huge glass bells, part of the carousel music machinery

 

Another, smaller carousel, is reserved for hundreds of dolls.  And at least one skeleton.

 

The carousels are spectacular.

 

 

 

At some point, just after looking at more spittoons than I’ve ever seen before (which spilled over, so to speak, into the adjoining exhibit areas), continuing to march along ramps, walkways, and corridors, feeling pretty stunned by the sheer mass of it all,  we  found ourselves in a nautical area.

 

 

 

And as you enter the four-story warehouse, with walkways and cases winding up the walls, looming over you is a giant model of a whale fighting a giant squid.

 

 

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I could not estimate the number of ship models.  Clippers, carracks, caravels, aircraft carriers.  Some were museum quality, some were toy-like, and some would have looked at home hanging over the bar in Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville.  The Titanic hitting an iceberg.  Big tin Spanish-American dreadnoughts.  Scrimshaw, some real, some fake, scattered amongst the models.

 

 

 

 

Towards the end, shambling along in mostly stupefied silence, we entered the newest wing, for model airplanes.  (Too tired to even attempt a pun.)

 

 

 

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I actually feel that you can learn something from this place.  I’m just not sure what that is.  They call a lot of this stuff “memorabilia,” but what exactly are we remembering?  Mostly, I’d say, those dreams we get after eating a pepperoni pizza, while watching Vincent Price in “House of Wax.”

 

 

One thing that popped in my head.  The scale and variety of this vast repository, and the jumbling of steam engines, generators, and other industrial detritus, with the toys and old arcade amusements, strikes me as perfectly right & proper.

When American fired up the Industrial Age, it also started cranking out industrial entertainment, and decorative knickknacks. “The Theory of the Leisure Class” came out in 1899, and introduced the idea of “conspicuous consumption,” that is, buying stuff you don’t need, to show off.

Permanent “amusement parks,” like Coney Island, boardwalks & piers full of rides, penny arcades, and coin-fed fortune-telling machines, etc. and huge “expositions” or “World’s Fairs” started popping up, peddling technology and manufactured fantasy.

 

 

You can learn a lot about a place, and a time, by visiting serious museums, symphony halls, art galleries, etc.

– – but life isn’t all dioramas & statues, Beethoven & Rembrandts, is it?

It’s also beer & skittles, the Dead Kennedys, hotdog stands, snow globes, and graffiti.

In Wisconsin, a state that prides itself on its blue collar solidarity and working stiffs’ pleasures, the House on the Rock takes our pride in unrefined fare to a memorable extreme – – amassing thousands of the cheap thrills of yore, kitschy games, and diabolical-looking toys from the five & dimes, carnivals, fairs, and toy shops.

A house built not on sand, but on bric-a-brac.

 

A turn-of-the-last century mechanical novelty, one of dozens, mostly still functioning – – pop in a token, and the barber begins to shave – – and a policeman pops up in the window. Any idea what this was about?

 

It’s a blast. 

Wear comfortable shoes, and brace yourself.

 

 

Call me Ismael ~ ~ Confronting the giant plaster whale ~ ~   Ish & The Fish

 

Me & me old mum, in front of robots playing kettledrums. She hates clutter, and yet loved this place.

 

1870's, 1890, 1920's, 1930's, 1950's, 1960's, Arrant Nonsense, craft projects for lifers, History, Uncategorized, United States, wisconsin

House on the Rock. A walk through mass production and madness.

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History, Uncategorized

Old Milwaukee. Troubled bridges over water.

Milwaukee drawbridge LOC

Milwaukee drawbridge. LOC

Milwaukee is often overlooked and overshadowed by Chicago and Detroit (even if usually for bad news), and seem destined to never be quite as cool as the Twin Cities (“The Hipster Capital of the Tundra”).

So it’s natural that the city’s interesting and unusual history isn’t any more publicized that the city itself.

Like NYC, Milwaukee wasn’t always one city – it was formed by a merger of rival settlements.  Three towns became one, and bridging the three-way split required…what do you think?  Rationality?  Efficiency?  Common sense?  Come on, get real, there were politicians and capitalists involved.  And these are Badgers we’re talking about!  These people chose an incredibly combative giant weasel for their mascot.  Of course there was some strife and lunacy before they could come together.

“The Bridge War” was part of the city’s tumultuous creation process — an odd story of destruction and “burning bridges” rather than building them.

 

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1901 Milwaukee River. NY Public Library

 

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1885 Milwaukee River from Walker’s Point Bridge. NY Public Library

The Milwaukee River is now mostly a place for pleasure boats.  But people focused on rivers in the old days, in ways that we’ve forgotten.  Rivers were the highways and trade routes, and sources of energy, and were still important, long after the railroads and steam engines came along.  They were lines of communication.

But they also have always served as borders and frontiers.

Natives of New York City are very aware that its boroughs were once proud, independent towns and cities, some for over two centuries.  In the 1800’s, the Roeblings built what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world, to link Manhattan to… those people on the other side of the East River.  The Brooklyn Bridge was an instant hit, and over 150,000 crossed on the first day, between the two biggest cities in the area, but a few years later, when the cities voted on merger, it was a real squeaker, and Brooklyn passed it by just a few hundred votes.

And Milwaukee had its Bridge War, which resulted from a fierce rivalry between three communities.

 

Juneautown was on the East bank of the Milwaukee River,

Kilbourntown was on the West bank,

and Walker’s Point was on the South bank.

Wait, can a river have three banks?  OK, Walker’s Point turned out to be on the south bank of the Menomonee River, and not pointy at all as far as I can make out.

All three towns were named for their founders, and all three founders were very much alive and well at the time of the War.  In fact, once the city was created, they took turns being mayor.  Which is nice.

But in the beginning, we had three rival Founding Fathers – – who were classic examples of that all-American hybrid, the Politician-Capitalist–Land Speculator.  The competition between their settlements was so intense, they deliberately laid out their streets, so that they didn’t intersect with their rivals’.  Even today, most of the bridges in this city have to cross the river on a diagonal, posing a hazard for boats, as a result of this nonsense.

 

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1885 Milwaukee River. NY Public Library

In 1845, the state government ordered the creation of a bridge over the Milwaukee River, between Juneau’s and Kilbourn’s sectors.  This proved widely unpopular on both sides of the river, as they enjoyed being independent entities, and feared they would lose out financially if they became part of a bigger collective.  There was also the simple economics of deciding who would pay to maintain and run the bridge.

Then and now, here and abroad, the “West Bank” always seems to be problematical.

On May 8, 1845, the people of Kilbourntown started the war, by simply dumping their half of the bridge into the river. They destroyed the drawbridge, to prevent those on the East Side from entering their town.  In retaliation, the Easterners destroyed other small bridges, to prevent the denizens of the West from crossing to Juneautown.  There were fistfights and worse, but no one was actually killed, and the ridiculous and petty war shortly fizzled out.  The next year, sanity prevailed and a united city was created.

 

In any case, the Germans had started arriving – including soon-to-be-famous brewers — Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, and Blatz – and somehow the whole East Bank – West Bank thing didn’t seem so important, after a couple of steins of beer.

Solomon Juneau served as the first mayor, and his rivals Walker and Kilbourn also had their shot at running the city.  Juneau married a member of the Menomonee Nation, and retired to the country.  Once a year, his cousin Joseph would write to remind him, that his town was still called Juneau, Alaska, and why exactly was Solomon’s place called Milwaukee now?  (Ok I made that last part up, but Juneau really is named for Solomon’s cousin.)

Byron Kilbourn went on to various elected positions and business speculations, until his sharp-dealing caught up to him, and a bribery scandal caused his railroad to go bankrupt.  He ended up forgotten in Jacksonville, Florida.  About twenty years ago, the city dug him up and reburied him here – – he was kind of a disgrace, but they wanted a complete set of Founding Fathers.

George Walker was a fur trader, and never had the cash of the other two, and lost control of his patch of land.  But he did get to be mayor.  Twice.

A minute, trivial footnote in history, for a city almost reduced to the skids.  But a good lesson about a place that shook off its selfish, bridge-burning past and united, and made a contribution to America.

 

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My first day in Milwaukee

Footnote

Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by bridges – the architecture, the symbolism, and the stories.  A good bridge is not just beautiful, it almost always carries with it a good story or two.   So when I first set foot in Milwaukee, I looked at my little map and headed for the river.

My guidebook said the river has Bascules.  My keen, college-educated mind presented three options:

  • If I remembered biology class correctly, a bascule is the digestive tract of an amoeba, or,
  • a mysterious ethnic group in northern Spain, that used to blow things up, or,
  • a mythological creature that asks you three questions or riddles or something, and if you get it wrong, it eats you or you fall into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Or something.

So, it turned out, all three guesses were wrong.  A Bascule is a kind of drawbridge.

The drawbridge was being pulled up when I got there, and I looked across the river to see what had caused the Panic & Alarum — an attack on Milwaukee, expecting to see maybe…a horde from the Sons of Norway with battle axes?  Scott Walker & The Tea Party, waving torches?  The Menomonee Nation on the warpath?

But it dawned on me — the lift bridges are just  to let the boats go out to the lake.

 

Bascule bridge Chicago 1890 LOC

Bascule bridge. Chicago 1890. LOC

 

There is an endless stream of stories about bridges:

  • Brooklyn Bridge 1910 LOC

    Brooklyn Bridge 1910. LOC

    T. Barnum’s parade of elephants, to prove the safety of the Brooklyn Bridge .

  • A really cool science lesson called “aeroelastic flutter,” “mechanical resonance,” or maybe “sympathetic vibration” (I don’t know, whatever, did you think I was a physics major?) when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge turned into “Galloping Gertie” and ripped itself apart – – just very cool, and scary, to see a suspension bridge start bucking in waves, look up the video.
  • The storied London Bridge, (“London Bridge is falling down, falling down…“) now sitting on an artificial lake in Arizona.
  • The Millennium Bridge in London, a beautiful sculpture, and a fantastic pedestrian walkway over the Thames — except the engineers forgot that pedestrians are human beings. When it opened, the first people walking across it, instinctively compensated for the slight swaying motion — and their reactions collectively made it sway harder and harder, until it was impossible to walk.  I thought it sounded fun, but they added more guy-wires to fix it.
  • The Waterloo Bridge, with bronze lamps made by melting down Napoleon’s cannons
  • Tappan Zee Bridge – NY’s sagging, staggeringly expensive symbol of governmental infighting and dysfunction
  • Golden Gate Bridge LOC

    Golden Gate Bridge LOC

    The Golden Gate – beautiful, impressive, but a magnet for over a thousand suicides

  • Even the Roeblings weren’t infallible – – their Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge lasted forty years, carrying trains on one level and pedestrians on another, but when locomotives got heavier, it had to be replaced with a homely, but stronger, steel arch bridge.
  • Hell Gate Bridge LOC

    Hell Gate Bridge LOC

    Hells Gate Bridge in NYC, so-called, because when you cross it, you’re in Queens.  The model for the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia.  To my eye, kind of ugly, but incredibly strong.  Part of it is supported by another span, far underground, over a fissure in the rock bed.    The bridge’s piers are on two islands, and supposedly, they were made of very smooth stone, so that inmates on the islands’ mental asylums couldn’t climb up and escape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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