Item From the Past: Zaharakos

So much for March going out like a lamb. More like a walrus fresh from taking a dip under the ice, since the last days of the month were blustery, rainy and only a bit above freezing. Today, on the other hand, was downright spring-like. Windy and overcast, but not cold at all. So today's a candidate for the first day of spring.

Gozaic, created by a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is an interesting site. A little busy, but chock full of items about places worth seeing. I learned about it in my usual circuitous way. I wanted to find some updated information about a place called Zaharako's in Columbus, Indiana, a memorable ice cream parlor. In early April 2002, we had lunch and some ice cream there, and I wrote the following.

"At the end of the tour, we walked down the main shopping street and found a place I had seen from the bus, Zaharakos. It’s an ice cream parlor, first opened in 1900 and not looking much different now, tricked out with oak fixtures, an onyx soda fountain and a mahogany bar. The sandwiches were good, the lemonade better, and the ice cream best. The place also has a working Welte German pipe organ, installed in 1908."

A Gozaic blog post from last summer says: "Zaharakos has been a Columbus institution since it was opened in 1900 by three Greek brothers with the last name Zaharako. The store closed in 2004, but was restored and reopened in June 2006... There is a Tiffany-style lamp on the bar and the Welte Orchestrion, which had been removed and sold to a collector, was purchased back and returned to Zaharakos... All the ice cream is made on the premises, and the Green River Float is a bright green soda with a lemon lime flavor."

I have a postcard of the place somewhere, but couldn't find it among the stacks of cards I have around the house, so no scan of the card will appear here. Some images appear at the shop's web site, the home page of which plays "The Entertainer" upon opening. Which made me wonder: would the shop's pipe organ have played ragtime back when that music was new? Or is that more of a tribute to the fact that a lot of people remember "The Entertainer" as a mid-70s hit from a hit movie? My guess is the latter.

Item From the Past: Benjamin Harrison's Final Resting Place

In March 1999, I visited Indianapolis’ Crown Hill Cemetery. It’s an enormous, picturesque, old-style cemetery with plenty of trees and headstones and even a few hills. President (Benjamin) Harrison is buried there, so I went to see his stone, but it was a fairly drab affair, an undistinguished family stone surrounded by artless individual stones.

Though I don't seem to have taken any pictures it, the nearby monument of Vice President Thomas Hendricks -- Cleveland’s first, a Hoosier who died in office in 1885 -- was a more aesthetic stone. Best of all in the vicinity was Gov. Oliver Morton, the “War Governor” of Indiana (in office 1861-67), who has a spiffy bust of himself atop his monument. By golly, he wanted people to remember him. Of course, almost no one has.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery, Munster

Roadside America, that "caramel-coated-nutbag-full of odd and hilarious travel destinations" (its own words) calls this building material -- the stuff behind the girls in this picture -- "sponge rock," specifically sponge rock from "a mine in Arkansas."

The scant information I can find on line about "sponge rock" associates the term with perlite, a silicous rock that when heated expands to many times its original volume. The material we saw didn't resemble the perlite I see on line. But whatever it is, there's a lot of it at Our Lady of Mount Carmel monastery, in Munster, Indiana, which we visited on Sunday a short while after Valparaiso University (the interlude being lunch).

The monastery's Discalced Carmelite friars built the Grotto of the Holy Mother and the Holy Sepulchre Chapel out of these rocks, and it's an odd effect at first. Cave-like inside, but also as if the cave were ordered from the Sears Catalog back when you could get structures delivered to you in pieces for DIY construction.

The friars themselves say at their web site: "After the Second World War, a group of Polish Discalced Carmelites, including former chaplains of the Polish Army, came to the United States. They fulfilled St. Raphael Kalinowski's dream of a Polish Carmel in America when they established a monastery in Hammond, Indiana. Two years later they moved to Munster, Indiana... They built a monastery and Shrine dedicated to Mary under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and in the monastery garden constructed a grotto in her under the title of Our Lady of Lourdes."

Roadside America, with its less serious attitude, takes it from there: "Small shrines and prayer spots populate the grounds. There's a memorial to the Polish Underground; a shrine (surrounded by barbed wire) to skinny Maximilian Kolbe, the martyr priest of Auschwitz; and another to St Therese of Lisieux, the 'Little Flower of Jesus,' who is sculpted as she tells her tearful dad that she's off to join the Carmelites.

"It's dark inside the Holy Mother Grotto, and warm -- hundreds of candles are burning. Decoration is sparse [no it isn't], with occasional marble sculptures, stained glass windows, and accents of fluorite, dogtooth calcite, dolomite and rose quartz to enliven the gloom. Overall, this place seems more like a twisty sponge rock catacombs than a religious shrine... We expected the same when we walked down a path to the Holy Sepulchre Chapel, but it has some surprises. Inside is the Flagellation Chapel, with a marble Jesus tied to an alabaster pillar.... In an adjoining alcove lies dead Jesus on his bier. Beneath his carved pillow and blankets is an impressive altar crafted from giant minerals -- a huge backlit ball of crystals evokes the image of a glowing sacred heart."

I didn't know the story of Maximilian Kolbe. The plaque next to his memorial on the grounds of the monastery says, Blessed Maximillian Kolbe O.F.M. Conv. • Priest • Publisher • Prisoner • Martyr of Brotherly Love • Gave His Life For a Fellow Prisoner in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp on August 14, 1941.

More detail came be found at the Jewish Virtual Library, including the fact that he has been canonized since the plaque was created (one of John Paul II's many new saints; the second one of his pontificate, as it happens). It was hard to get a good picture of the memorial, but if you look carefully you might see that his statue is partly surrounded by barbed wire threaded through wooden posts that evoke the camp.

Chapel of the Resurrection, Valparaiso University

On Sunday, we visited Valparaiso and Munster, which didn't involve logistically difficult, or even impossible, transits between metro Chicago, Chile and Germany in a single day. Those are also towns in Indiana. Even better for our purpose, they're towns in northwestern Indiana -- so close they're part of the Chicago CMSA, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Valparaiso is in Porter County, Ind., while Munster is in Lake County, Ind.

Which isn't too say that these places seem close, because driving through gooey traffic on forever under-construction highways is usually necessary to get to that end of the metro area, opposite from ours. Sunday meant that traffic was fairly light, however, and so it took us about an hour and a half to arrive at the Chapel of the Resurrection of Valparaiso University.

That's only the chancel; the rest of the chapel, which is a lot of building, trails off to the left in my pic. This blog has a lot better, and a lot more, images of this handsome modernist chapel, inside and outside.

Ann was especially taken with the place, exploring it at some length, and insisting that I take her picture in front of the chancel's stained glass. It was hard to go wrong with a setup like that.

"The chapel was dedicated in 1959, three years after groundbreaking ceremonies..." says the university's web site. "Architects for the building were Charles Stade and Associates of Park Ridge, Ill., although other designers were involved in special elements such as the stained glass windows and the baptistery.

"Inspiration for the design of the building was provided in part by the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem... The chancel of the Chapel of the Resurrection is 98 feet high and is circular in shape with a roof shaped like a nine-point star. The nave is 58 feet high and 193 feet long. There is seating for more than 2,000 people, although capacity varies depending upon the configuration of the movable pews."

I'm always glad to see an example of a modernist structure, and there are some, built with some regard historical context and the people who will be using it. Almost everything about the Chapel of the Resurrection says "Eisenhower era" and yet the design idiom is fully that of a Western church. It's vaulting and full of natural light, and neither lavishly ornate nor austere. The architect made it all work.

There's all kinds of interesting detail around the building. Including the cornerstone -- or rather, the temporal cornerstone, Jesus being the "chief cornerstone."

Not only do you read the year of dedication anno Domini, you're provided the Reformation Year too. Valparaiso U. is a Lutheran school, after all.

Item From the Past: Indiana '02

I've written about our visit to south-central Indiana in late March 2002 before, and I try not to repeat myself. (See March 24 and April 2, 2003.) But I didn't publish images in those days.

Such as an exterior view of the Ameritech/SBC switching station at Seventh and Franklin in Columbus, Indiana.

This is a better picture. The Columbus C&V Bureau notes: "Paul Kennon of Caudill, Rowlett, Scott designed this building in 1978. It is encased with a skin of reflective glass. The result mirrors activities of the surrounding neighborhood. Giant yellow, orange, red and blue 'organ pipes' on the west side are both functional and decorative."

After visiting Columbus, we went on to Nashville, Indiana, which has a history as an artists' town. To repeat myself from April 3, 2003: "There was one shop in Nashville that we liked more than the others, just a bit off of the main street, and we bought an inexpensive watercolor there. It illustrated the town of Story, Indiana, some miles south of Nashville.

"The man behind the counter, burly, tattooed, graying and about 50, told me that Story was worth seeing, very rustic, and that the drive there was hilly, not very Midwestern at all. Then he said, 'Thanks for buying my painting. I did that one.' And indeed, his mugshot and a short bio were pasted on the back."

I would mention his name now, but when I removed the watercolor to scan the other day, the information was missing, and I can't quite read the signature. This is the watercolor:

Tobacco Road

There’s probably something in Seymour, Indiana, besides the motel-restaurant-service biz glop near the junction of I-65 and US 50, but we didn’t see it. Seymour was an overnight stop for food, fuel and rest.

On September 3, we headed southeast from Seymour on a mildly cloudy, warm day. In North Vernon and Vernon, two towns along Indiana 7, the thing to do over Labor Day weekend seems to be to hold a yard sale. We stopped at three sales and looked around and bought a few small things. Everyone else in the car wanted to stop at others, but I wanted to drive.

I suggested – seriously – that we return next year and spend more time in North Vernon and Vernon, checking out the sales. Yuriko (and now Lilly) are enthusiasts. My theory about why this might be, for Yuriko anyway, is that the yard/garage/jumble sales are virtually unknown in Japan.

Indiana 7 takes you to Indiana 56/156, part of the Ohio River Scenic Byway. It’s good that the Ohio River gets a little recognition. Long and large, important to the development of the Northwest Territories, but overshadowed by Old Man River. Tough luck, Ohio, you get to be a second banana to the Mississippi.

The road meanders along the river, passing through Switzerland County, Indiana, which has to tell us something about the settlement of extreme southeastern Indiana. In fact, the county seat of Vevay sported both US and Swiss flags hanging in public areas. A minor amount of research tells me that it’s the only county of that name in the several states, though there’s a town near Jacksonville, Fla., called Switzerland. At the moment I’d rather not look into it any further. Maybe Switzerland County is really the 27th canton.

Soon after arriving at Ohio River Scenic Byway, I started noticing fields of tobacco. Not many, but enough to be noticeable. I hadn’t seen tobacco fields in years, not since I used to tool around Tennessee and Kentucky a lot more than I do now. Saw some drying sheds too (or is it curing?).

I mentioned the fact that we were passing tobacco fields to my family, and Lilly asked me how they got it into those little red bottles. I was tempted to make something up, but in the end told her what it really was used for.

Queen of the West

Labor Day is over and I was sure I was going to have polished off most of my major paying assignments by now. I was more than half right, but I’m not quite as far along as I’d like. So I’ll be brief. Or maybe not.

But it was Labor Day weekend, and the thing not to do on Labor Day or its weekend is work. The thing to do is drive to Cincinnati by way of south-central Indiana and then come back. We got a late start on Saturday and so didn’t see much that day, one or another of us had a cold the whole time, and my advice to travelers to Cincinnati, Queen of the West, is to take a good map. My fuzzy memories of an hour’s visit to downtown in 1989 were useless in navigating, and my Rand McNally Road Atlas wasn’t much better—no detailed closeup of downtown or really any part of town.

Also, we ran slap into the biggest riverfront event of the year in metro Cincinnati, both sides of the river, a Labor Day Sunday fireworks show over the Ohio River, which bollixed traffic and parking near our hotel.

Sounds like a lousy trip. But on balance, it wasn’t. There were plenty of bright spots among the aggravations:

We got to visit my brother Jay and nephew Sam, who were in town -- Sam’s now a graduate student in architecture at the University of Cincinnati, and Jay was helping him move in.

We managed to drive two lovely yet lightly traveled roads, one in south-central Indiana south of the town of Nashville, the other hugging the north shore of the Ohio River across from Kentucky.

The fireworks over the Ohio River might have been bad for traffic, but on foot that night we saw explosions framed by the grand old Roebling Bridge.

Had a delicious lunch in a seemingly unlikely place, Aurora, Indiana, and while the 5-way chili at Gold Star Chili in Covington, Kentucky, really wasn’t better than mediocre, it was good to try it, and support regional cuisine.

We chanced on Eden Park, a venerable old Cincinnati park, and took a good walk there. From there we watched a Stealth fighter fly by a few times as part of the festivities along the river.

We visited Cincinnati’s Union Station on Jay’s recommendation, because we could find that and not the William Howard Taft NHS. Completed: 1931. Interior Space: Vaulting. Restored murals on the walls: Intriguing. A fine structure all around.

Erin Go Boom

You find yourself in downtown Indianapolis on a cold evening in early March and you want to eat dinner. No car is available, since you took an airport limo into town. So you head out down Meridian on foot to check out a diner sort of place the desk clerk mentioned.

Before long, a ragged, muttering black man starts to follow you, even crossing the street when you do. Almost no one else is within sight on the street, and only a few cars pass by. Mere panhandler, or something else? The diner is still a couple of blocks away, but he’s getting closer.

That’s how I ended up eating dinner on Tuesday night at the Claddagh Irish Pub, “Authentic Irish Food & Spirits,” in Indy. My shadow actually entered the foyer of Claddagh after I did, but at the same time as him two women were also entering, and he muttered to them, “I’ll hold the door for you ladies.” That was the last I saw of him. Probably he just wanted a voluntary donation to his drink fund, but I wasn’t sure. It isn’t good to be paranoid about street crime, but I don’t want to ignore the possibility, either.

Once inside the restaurant, I looked around and thought, might as well eat here. The theme was Irish alright, with a bar dominating the room, and plenty of ads for Guinness and Bailey’s. Though well lit, the place seemed dim because everything was brown—the tables, the stools, the pattern wallpaper, the floor. Note: stools. There were no chairs, only stools. I ordered a pint of Kinsale, an imperial pint of 20 oz., the menu said. Ah, excellent. The buttinskis of Brussels have no sway here in the USA, and cannot pester us into trashing traditional weights and measures. I’ll raise a pint to that anytime.

The waitress told me that the fish and chips were the house specialty, and I saw a few plates of it go by, monster fish fried brown, hunks of brown fried potatoes. Looked great. But I wasn’t in the mood for it, so I ordered something a little less familiar, bangers and mashed. I got an artfully prepared plate of tender sausages arrayed on a pillow of garlic mashed potatoes. How authentic is this? I don’t care. The sausages were as good as sausages get.

The menu also told me that the design of the restaurant was meant to evoke the pubs of old Ireland, old as in 1916. I thought that was an odd date to choose, but I guess the owners sympathize with Irish nationalism. It’s just the place, then, to have some pints and get ready for your part in the Easter Rebellion.

Indy for the Nth Time

Usually, I wrap up writing about short trips with miscellaneous observations, but today I’m going to start with them—observations of various sizes and shapes from my recent 24 hours in Indianapolis, which started on Tuesday afternoon and ended on Wednesday afternoon.

It’s a hiccough airplane trip across the flatland between Chicago and Indy: one state over, one metropolis down. Up you go, get your drink, down you go, do not stand until the plane has made a complete stop. Leaving Indianapolis this afternoon, I got to see the city from up high, making the downtown especially look like a model of itself on a table. Off to the west was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the famous race, looking like a model Circus Maximus in a model of ancient Rome.

I’ve been to Indy so many times now, I’ve lost count. This was my nth trip, then. But I always forget how empty downtown seems, even in the full flush of a business day. My business in town took me from my hotel, the Hampton Inn on Meridian Ave., to the huge Marriott down Maryland St., a wide street, as many of the CBD streets are. I walked the five blocks or so several times. I’m used to the rush and din of Chicago, where the downtown streets always flow with cars, and the sidewalks always sport pedestrians. In Indianapolis, cars seem to trickle down the major thoroughfares, and there are only a handful of walkers on each block.

Many of the crosswalks have timers. That is, along with the standard Walk-Do-Not-Walk ideogram lights, there’s another electronic sign, a timer, to let you know how many seconds are left until the light changes from Walk to Do Not Walk. I’m fairly sure Indy was the first place I ever saw that particular pedestrian aid, though I have seen it a few other places since.

It was cold during my visit, but this time precipitation didn’t chase me, like it did when I came to town in January, or like last week in Michigan. I did notice, while walking to my gate at Midway yesterday, that a lot of flights to LaGuardia had been canceled. Later, the Weather Channel confirmed that a late-winter blast had hammered the Northeast U.S. that day, illustrated by beleaguered pedestrians in Manhattan and snow-shoveling Bostonians. This is the kind of thing that excites the Weather Channel. Gives them some thrilling weather to report till tornado season gets under way.

Saw an enormous man—a 100 lbs. my senior in bulk, at least—reading a comic book at the Indianapolis airport. I mean, a graphic novel. Dungeon, was the name, I think. Sure, they’re supposed to be for adults. But I don’t see too many adults actually reading them in public. Maybe it’s because we suspect that, despite adult themes, they’re still just comic books. Besides, “adult” themes usually don’t mean stories about dealing with your spouse, your kids, your house, your job, or other activities that fill the days of adults. No, it means large breasts slung in small cloth, plus a little ultraviolence, if the cover of Dungeon is any indication.