« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
Now
Then
A couple of days ago Gothamist had a post about the New York photographs of Testsuo Kogawa. Kogawa has put two sets of photos online: A set of black and white pictures from 1976-1979 and color photos from 1978 to 1993. I could make out the address, 240 Sullivan, on the awning above (larger original) so I thought a comparison was in order.
In 1953 Frank Stoeber, a true visionary, began making a ball of twine on his farm. In 1961, when the ball was 11 feet in diameter and used 1.6 million feet of string, Stoeber gave the ball to the town of Cawker City. To not fall behind the big ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota, Cawker City holds an annual Twine-a-thon on the third weekend of August, where you can add to the ball. Twine was painted on the sidewalk and many windows in town had reproductions of famous paintings that incorporated the string. I'm not sure how wide the ball is now, but a sign said it now contains 7,801,766 feet of twine and weighs about 9 tons. It was a very impressive sight!
For souvenirs the gas station in town had little balls of twine. Too bad it was closed! So was an art gallery/gift shop. So was most of Cawker City on the Saturday afternoon I visited. No matter, I had barely enough time to get to my next encounter with visionary creation.
The old gas station on Highway 281 in Lebanon was covered in western-themed stencils (with a few K-State Wildcats thrown in for good measure).
Did you ever study the Rand McNally's road atlas and wonder about the faraway points of interest labeled with small, red italicized print? The Geographic center of the conterminous, or lower 48, states is one such place in the atlas. The center is located a couple miles northwest of Lebanon, Kansas on Kansas Highway 191, which seems to have been built just for the purpose of getting to the center. The center is quite pleasant. There was a monument, a picnic area, a tiny chapel and an abandoned motel. What more could a tourist want?
There was a little sign in the chapel asking visitors to leave their name, hometown, and comments. I didn't have anything to say and I didn't see any paper anyway so I didn't leave a note. As I was buying souvenir postcards and magnets from the grocery store in town the woman who looked to be the store's owner asked if it was my first visit. Then she asked if I had left my name at the chapel. She shook her head with disappointment when I said I hadn't, tore off a piece of a cardboard box, and very sweetly let me know that I should leave my name and hometown.
Art Alert!
Untitled (The Grates), by Elana Herzog.
Detail of On, Under and Between by Emil Lukas
North Overlook by McKendree Key
Silver Tunnel by Mischa Kuball
This year is the 20th anniversary of the Riverside Park Fund, the organization that supports the park. To celebrate, the fund is sponsoring the park's first ever public art exhibit, Studio in the park. There are eleven different works placed in the park from 72nd to 145th Streets. The last photo, Silver Tunnel, is quite a sight but was falling apart on the first day of the exhibit. The On, Under and Between work consists of four big pieces of cast concrete that pull double duty as benches. The tops of the pieces have designs embedded in them. When I stopped by the artist, Emil Lukas, was there handing out sheets of paper and pencils to people interested in making a rubbing of the surface.
As I was taking pictures of the art several people stopped and asked me if I was a professional photographer. I don't know if it was because I was using a tripod or the subject matter. If only they had seen my experiments with long exposure close-ups of the river...
Studio in the park remains in the park all summer.
Lingering in the gift shop of the Cather Foundation I spied a book I hadn't seen in many years. A book I most surely first saw at the Wilber Czech Festival, perhaps the greatest of all small town festivals. Even though it was inexpensive, I could never justify buying the book back then because I was in graduate school and dirt poor. On this late-April day in 2006 I was going to get the last copy in the store.
The Times ran a story a few days ago about Phyllis Pellman Good, the editor and publisher of the "Fix-It and Forget-It" series of cookbooks, the best-selling cookbooks in the country. She solicits recipes from women across the country, chooses the ones she likes, then has them tested by a number of volunteer home cooks. There's nothing much fancy about the food, just plain homestyle cooking for the most part.
"Favorite Recipes of the Nebraska Czechs" is very much in that style of cooking. First published in 1968, it is now on its tenth printing.
Read that title carefully. It doesn't say "Favorite Czech Recipes of Nebraskans" but "Favorite Recipes of Nebraska Czechs" and the book is exactly that: favorite recipes of the descendents of Nebraska's Czech settlers. There's plenty of recipes for kolache and kuba, jaternice and jelita ("if no blood oozes out, jelita is done."), saurkraut and dumplings to satisfy one's Czech food cravings. There's also midwestern cooking in all its 1960s glory: grasshopper pie, stroganoff supreme, cranberry marshmallow salad and six variations on hamburger casserole. I probably won't make any of the casseroles or vegetable dishes but many of the baked goods look mighty tempting to me.
Time to leave Nebraska and head toward the center.
Willa Cather's childhood home, Red Cloud, Nebraska
Last surviving building in New York in which Willa Cather lived, 82 Washington Place. John Phillips Sousa owned the building next door!
State Bank Building (1883) and Red Cloud Opera House (1885). Nice, aren't they?
Willa Cather was born in Virginia but her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska when she was nine. She went to school in Red Cloud, graduating in 1890. While she was in high school she worked at the town pharmacy, getting paid in books, a magic lantern and rose wallpaper that is still hanging in her room in the house at top. She also had a laboratory for dissecting cats and dogs in her father's real estate office. Cather then studied at the University of Nebraska, where today you can enjoy the Willa Cather Native Weed Garden as you walk from Avery Hall to Love Library.
A fictionalized Red Cloud lives in Cather's prairie novels like O Pioneers, My Antonia, and Song of the Lark. The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation is located in the beautifully restored Red Cloud Opera House. The Foundation offers tours of Cather sites in town, hosts an annual Willa Cather Conference and sponsors cultural events in the Opera House.
I toured the Opera House but declined on the town tour because it didn't start until 1:30, it was only noon, and I needed to be somewhere in Kansas by 3:30. After the tour I bought a few postcards and a special souvenir for myself. I also asked the two women at the foundation what place in town was good for lunch. It was a bad sign when they both recommended the Subway (you can see the yellow awning in the bottom photo), because it was "better than other Subway's we've been to". Throwing advice to the wind and refusing to eat at Subway left me with a choice between a cafe with windows or a bar without. An hour-and-a-half later I finished the patty melt special and greasy fries at the cafe. Just in time for the walking tour, but I was way behind schedule and had to get to the strange and magical land known as Kansas.
During the trip I started reading The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. One-third of southern plains residents left the region during the 1930s. The book is about the two-thirds that stayed. Most of the book's story is centered on the panhandle of Oklahoma, but Egan includes extensive quotes from the diary of Don Hartwell of Inavale, Nebraska, which is about 25 miles from where these pictures were taken. With the book and location in mind it was exciting to see evidence of much older dust storms while driving toward Red Cloud.
South-central Nebraska is covered in loess, or wind-blown silt deposits. The loess was blown here from the mountains to the west during and after the last ice age. Soil forms rapidly in loess and is very rich, which is why much of the midwest has such productive farm land. But there's a dark side. Loess deposits are unstable. The only thing holding the silt to ground in the photos above are eight inches of little bluestem roots. Plow the grass under, get unlucky with a dry year, and the soil and silt starts blowing away.
That concludes the geography and history lesson. Next up, a literature, geography and history lesson with a cameo appearance by a Greenwich Village building! By the way, I hope all the Kool-Aid fans saw the 1939 survey of popular soft drinks I put on Flickr.
Dust Bowl Resources:
Timeline - American Experience: Surviving the Dust Bowl
Dust storm movie - Wind Erosion Unit of the USDA at Kansas State University
Dust Bowl pictures - WERU, Kansas State University
The Plow that Broke the Plains - Dust Bowl era documentary movie
Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection of "audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, and
ephemera" at the Library of Congress
More minimum maintenance: Joey Harrison explores the abandoned Broderick Building in Detroit. See 34 floors of glorious decay!
Absolutely spotless.
Coffeehouse interior
Go Big Red
Unfortunately named cheese spread
Whether it was the beautiful weather or that I had driven several hundred miles the day before, Saturday morning was a lazy morning in Hastings. My laziness would have repercussions later on but I enjoyed walking around downtown Hastings.
The coffeehouse above was very nice and I mostly had it to myself while I was there. Their bagels didn't look half-bad but my mental map of bagel goodness does not extend to Hastings. It was only 10-15 years ago that bagels became popular across the country.
When I lived in Saginaw two bagel places opened. One was a chain whose name I forget, but their bagels were okay. The other was a bagel bakery that some guy decided to start. Why he decided to start baking bagels was a mystery. I still remember the quote in the paper "They say you're supposed to roll the dough to make the hole. That's a waste of time, I just form a ball of dough and stick my thumb it." Out of morbid curiousity I bought one of the lumpy beasts. I'll give him some credit, unlike the awful west coast Noah's New York bagels, the Saginaw guy knew to use high-gluten flour. He must have used all high-gluten flour as his bagel made a fine chew toy.
I had to make one more stop before leaving town and that was to Nebraska Food and Gift because I knew they would have a Huskers room. Two minutes of scarlet and cream overload was all this proud alumnus could take and it was time for me to head toward Kansas.
Recent Comments