Terry Murray

The "Handball Gods" of Northern Secondary School, Toronto

2012-01-22T16:14:00.018-05:00

I recently discovered the website of The Decorated School Research network, a largely European group whose focus is sculptures and murals in and on 20th Century schools, and the relationships between architects, artists and educators through that art.

"We are interested in understanding more about how the art came to be commissioned, how the subject matter was decided, what was its function, its life story and what ideas about education or childhood, if any, were intended to be conveyed," according to the website.

The network, which seems to have begun last year, has a two-year plan including seminars, a final international conference and a book, motivated by the fear that "many of these [artworks] may be in danger as school buildings are becoming replaced often with scant regard to the treasures that they contain."

Having found this group (which I've included in my list of links, to the right), I thought I'd revisit some of the schools I included in Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto (my 2006 book on Toronto's architectural sculpture) as well as to bring out pictures of school sculptures in Toronto and elsewhere that I haven't included here before.

Northern Secondary School, whose architect was C.E.C. Dyson, the Toronto District School Board's own architect, was built in record time in 1930. When I went to shoot the dozen masks all around building in the summer of 2005, a janitor leaned out a window and called to me, “You taking pictures of the funny people?”

“Funny people” they are indeed—and some are contented, goofy, frightened, frightening, or sad — but there is no information on the Oxford-like faces to be found in architectural journals, at the school itself, or in the Toronto District School Board Archives. (In fact, the archive does not even have a file on Dyson, who was the board’s architect from 1921 to 1949.)

I appealed for information — even pet names that students, faculty, or staff may have had for their stone classmates — on the website for Northern’s 75th anniversary in that year. I heard from several of the original graduates, who had a wealth of information on the history of the school, but nothing specifically about the faces.

Then I heard from Amir Fatemi, a more recent graduate. “When I attended Northern between 1993 and ’98, my friends and I played a lot of handball outside the south doors,” he said. “We frequently referred to the gargoyles as the ‘Handball Gods’ since they could oversee everything.”

There is also a wealth of sculpture inside the school (which is known for its art programmes, among other things), and I was recently told by the parent of a Northern alum that the students paint murals on the lockers in the corridors.

Neighbourhood lights

2011-12-31T10:54:00.006-05:00

As our snow lay on the ground indecisively while the heavens alternately rained and snowed (and sometimes sleeted, or freezing-rained), this snowman kept hanging around (suspended from a tree) in front of a North Toronto house.

Happy new year!

Lights! Camera! No lights!

2011-12-23T17:43:00.008-05:00

But pictures of lights!

Alas... The Trail of Lights at Downsview Park is not happening this year, due to construction at the site. So here are some pictures shot from the car last year (when, as you can see, it had been a bit rainy).

Looking out my back door

2011-12-21T18:57:00.007-05:00

Actually, looking out my back window. (Taking a break from ranting about dumbing down the language.)

Living in even a quiet, North Toronto residential neighbourhood, their are interesting and sometimes surprising scenes outside my back window. (This is where my office is - hence, the lights from my little office Christmas tree on the left side of the picture).

This is not the first time I've seen men in trees

but it's the first time when it hasn't been summer.

What I didn't capture well enough to post was the tree-trimmer sweeping up afterward.

Happy Winter Solstice!

I feel stupidified

2011-12-20T07:18:00.009-05:00

I spoke too soon in my ridicule of the Toronto Star use of the term "storified."

Actually, that should be Storified. "Storify" seems to be a new-ish neologism for a proprietary tool that allows a journalist to pull in elements of "social media" to build a story. Hence, "storify." I mean, "Storify."

It's not that new - I just found an article about Storify, from almost exactly a year ago, on the website of the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Florida.

I suppose Storify as a verb is no more stupidifying than Google as a verb, or referring to the brief messages that are sent using this global system of interconnected computer networks as "tweets." Tim Berners-Lee, one of the architects of the Internet, famously said, "The World-Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project."

I wonder whether Berners-Lee and his colleagues dreamed it would ever become principally a tool of commerce; secondarily a way of perpetuating falsehoods, hate and insipidity; and third, a repository of most of the world's exclamation marks (OMG!). The "pool of human knowledge" thingie has fallen somewhere much farther down the list.

So, mea culpa, Toronto Star - this time. I guess you did legitimately Storify that... story.

However, I plan to continue to resist adopting and perpetuating these wacko neologisms and meaningless buzzwords and catch phrases.

Storify - I'll retire to Bedlam...

English language: 0 - Toronto Star: 1

2011-12-19T22:37:00.009-05:00

The Toronto Star today ran a story - online, anyway - about how the children's singer/champion Raffi Cavoukian has started a Twitter campaign to "mute Don Cherry." Raffi encouraged his followers to mute their TVs during last Saturday's Leafs-Canucks game when the "Coach's Corner" segment aired during the first intermission of "Hockey Night in Canada." Cherry is a former NHL coach and flamboyant, loud-mouthed broadcaster, who likes the physicality of the game - including fighting and head shots.

Raffi, a children's advocate who was recognized by the Canadian Paediatric Society in 2010 when the organization made him an honourary member, told the Toronto Star: “For years I’ve been watching him [Cherry] get louder and louder. He sounds and acts like a bully. That’s not fun and it’s not a good example for the kids who are watching. In this day and age of all the hockey violence, we should be putting a stop to this.... I have nothing against the man personally. I’m just saying his act is uncivil and doesn’t belong on our public broadcaster.”

("Hockey Night in Canada" airs every Saturday on CBC TV.)

Good on Raffi! Boo, Don Cherry!

And boo on the Toronto Star. The first story I referenced at the top of this post was nothing more than a series of tweets between Raffi and his followers, and a Toronto Star poll. Okay, I guess. As a sidebar anyway.

But the "byline" read "storified by the Toronto Star."

WHAT? It reminds me of one of my favourite comic strips - "Get Fuzzy," which features Bucky Katt, a perpetually apoplectic Siamese who regularly murders logic as well the English language. One of my favourite Buckyisms is "You can wordify anything if you just verb it." And that's what the Toronto Star has done.

The other guy

2011-12-19T08:37:00.004-05:00

Thanks for your expressions of concern, but I haven't lost my job.

You're thinking of that other Terry Murray, who was fired last week ... or "relieved of his duties" as head coach of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, as news reports described it.

A Civil War remembrance

2011-11-11T23:27:00.001-05:00

Today is Remembrance Day (or Veterans Day for you American readers), which was begun after the First World War. So, in a departure from gargoyles and architecture, I'd like to write today about my great-great-grandfather Adolph Redick, who fought on the Union side in the U.S. Civil War.

He didn't die in a Civil War battle, but a battle of another sort, the story of which has been pieced together by the joint efforts of my sister the genealogist and me.

Adolph Redick was born in Posen (then in Prussia) in 1827. A stonemason (I guess this is related to the usual theme of this blog!), he emigrated with his wife Christina to Chicago sometime around 1860.

In 1864, Adolph’s friend John Stubenbeck encouraged him to enlist in the 51st Illinois Volunteer Infantry, Company K. (That's a picture of some of the men of the 51st Illinois, Company K, at Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee, above. I checked with an archivist at the United States Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which holds the photo, but was told that none of the men is identified in the picture. So I just imagine that GGGrandfather Adolph is among them.)

During the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee), which has been described as "second only to Gettysburg in importance during the entire war," he was clocked in the head with the barrel of a Confederate rifle:

“While making a charge on the enemy we were attacked by some infantry hidden behind a rail fence. Redieck (sic) received a blow on his head with the barrel end of a gun which stunned him and he dropped. I, being a neighbor of his at home and had induced him to enlist, I assisted him as much as I could and looked for him to be placed in an ambulance. A week or so later he performed his duty again," Stubenbeck said in support of Adolph's disability application (“Proof of Incurrence of Disability") more than 20 years later.

According to the “Declaration for Original Invalid Pension” completed in 1885, Adolph also contracted malaria while on duty in New Orleans in 1865, resulting in “dropsy and general debility.” He was treated at regimental headquarters up to the time of his discharge, and “ever since then.”

(Adolph entered the 51st Illinois as a private, and mustered out as a corporal at the end of the war in 1865. Above is a photo of a replica of his dogtag.)

Once home, Christina reported that he grew increasingly "irascible," according to my conversation with a cousin, Adolph's great-granddaughter. Christina ultimately had him committed to the Cook County Insane Asylum at Dunning in 1886, where he died of a hemorrhage three years later.

In his statement, Stubenbeck also said, "I believe the blow (from the Confederate rifle) was what made him insane and caused his death.”

A “Claimant’s Affidavit,” completed (with assistance) by Christina on 15 November 1898, tells the story of his commitment to Dunning: “My husband was sick on bed until the last eight months of his life. He was complaining ever since he returned home from the war of sickness, mostly about his severe headache. His only brother who died two years ago living in close neighborhood took him often to doctors, dispensaries, etc. The only doctor I had to go along was the County Physician Dr. Bluthardt who send him to the Insane Asylum in 1886. He died in 1889 there. It was my brother in law who attended to my pension claim in 1890. I cannot speak English whatsoever so I left everything to him.”

According to Dunning records, he was buried in the asylum's cemetery.

Dunning, like many similar institutions of the time, was a scary and shameful place to be associated with. In his book Challenging Chicago. Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920, Perry Duis (a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago), wrote:

"For many generations of Chicago children, bad behavior came to a halt with a stern warning: 'Be careful, or you’re going to Dunning.' The prospect sent shivers down the spines of youngsters, who regarded it as the most dread place imaginable… Dunning … evoked images of gloomy institution walls, the cries of the insane, and the hopeless poor peering from its window."

Adolph's reward for winding up in Dunning? His son changed the family name from Redick to Richard.

But there was another indignity to come. Dunning officially closed on 30 June 1912, and reopened the next day as Chicago State Hospital. It later became the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center. The asylum's graveyard was forgotten until excavation for a commercial-residential project on the site was begun in the late 1980s. The crews working on the site found skeletal remains and a mummified corpse, and a “cemetery genealogist” (according to a Chicago Tribune story) estimated the cemetery that stood there contained 38,000 bodies. It was determined that it had been the public burial ground for the indigent and mentally ill from nearby poorhouse-insane asylum complex. Owing largely to the efforts of Rev. William Brauer, the remains were transferred to five acres of state-owned property nearby and made into “Read-Dunning Memorial Park.” It features eight markers indicating the groups who are buried there, including “insane asylum,” “orphaned/abandoned children,” and unclaimed corpses from the Great Chicago Fire.

Jurisdiction of the park - and hence, responsibility for maintaining it - has been in dispute, but the cause of preserving it has been taken up by a local group. On the day I visited in September, the lawn was freshly cut.

Gargoyles, whiskey and long life

2011-11-02T22:33:00.008-04:00

Gargoyle-hunting in Toronto is a challenge. There are faces and some actual gargoyles, but it takes real searching to find them. Gargoyle-hunting in Montreal, on the other hand, is more like shooting fish in a barrel. They’re everywhere. I’ve been shooting them practically every time I’ve been there since 2001, but I somehow missed this guy. He is about half a storey tall, and prominently displayed on the former Seagram House on Peel Street.

For you sticklers out there, he is not an actual gargoyle because he doesn’t have a spout. (There is a spout above him.) He has gargoylian features, however, but he also has the features of a telamon, a support sculpted in the form of a man. (The plural is telamones; when the supporting sculpted figure is a female, it’s called a caryatid.)

Construction of this building was completed in 1929, and remained as Seagram Company Ltd. headquarters until 2002 when it was given to McGill University. It is currently known as Martlet House (so called for the mythical birds on the university coat of arms), home of of the university's development and alumni relations department.

The Seagram Company was founded in 1928 by Samuel Bronfman, after he acquired Joseph Seagram & Sons, which he amalgamated with his own Distillers Corporation. In fact, you can still see a stylized Romanesque DCL on the façade of the building.

The architect was American-born David Jerome Spence, who later worked in partnership with Frederick David Mathias beginning in 1937, but Mathias is credited with designing the façade of the Seagram building.

The building contains several ornamental nods to the Scottish spirit the company produces. It is modeled after a 16th-century Scottish baronial castle (including a portcullis), and features not only the magnificent gargoylamon above, but also a relief portrait of Robbie Burns.

There is also a bewhiskered gentleman just above the gargoyle, with the incised legend “aged 152 years.” (He’s hiding behind tape while renovations are going on. At the moment, the roof is being replaced.) He’s not Father Time (who is almost certainly older than 152), nor is he Joseph Seagram. I suspect he is Thomas Parr, aka “Old Tom Parr” or simply “Old Parr,” born near Shrewsbury who was reported to have lived for 152 years (1483-1635).

However, doubt has been cast for some time on his supercentenarian status.

There is a brand of whiskey named for him although not made by Seagram’s.

The mysterious, magical Farcroft

2011-10-29T22:07:00.023-04:00

This little guy is the keeper of the key to an unusual building on the north side of Chicago. The Farcroft Building in Rogers Park is reportedly the northernmost highrise building in the city. Construction of the 13-storey building began in 1928, the work of architect Charles Wheeler Nicol. The Farcroft was built with 84 three-, four- and five-roon suites. Maybe this fellow was one of the original tenants:

The Farcroft is adorned with about a dozen grotesques, including these characters:

Not much appears to be known about this building. Even the architect who is working on restoring the Farcroft has posted a request for information on an architectural history listserv, including the location of Nicol's archive, if one exists. The dearth of information seems remarkable since Nicol designed more than 1,200 buildings, largely in the U.S. Midwest. Then again, being prolific is no guarantee of being remembered.

There's more to doing research than Google searches and finding what's on the Internet, but from Toronto, that's the only way I'm able to research a Chicago building. Here's what I've turned up about the Farcroft:

A Chicago Tribune article from February 1928 — admittedly, before the building had even begun — described, only cursorily, the exterior, not mentioning the faces at all. The interiors were described in a bit more detail:

"Color will play a prominent part in interior equipment and decoration. For instance, the kitchens will have colored tiled walls, to match the cheerful hues manufacturers at last are putting into culinary utensils and kitchen furniture. Several bathrooms will have gay tinted tubs to splash in, with walls and fixtures to match."

David Blixt, a Shakespearean actor, writer and former tenant of the Farcroft, wrote an intriguing, provocative post on his blog of building lore he picked up from other tenants and the company that formerly owned it. Nicol, Blixt said, "fancied himself a magician, and wanted the building to be a nexus for mystical energy."

None of the rooms in his apartment had right angles, "the better to funnel the 'mystic' energy."

When he and his wife moved in, they met another resident in the elevator who gave him a business card and said, "This is the name of my exorcist. He did a wonderful job."

I suppose some sinister, mystical, magical energy could be expected at a 13-story building located at 1337 West Fargo Avenue.

And this wizard appears at each storey up the front of the building:

I'll post any additional information I get. In the meantime, Happy Halloween, everybody!

Who knows what evil...

2011-10-22T21:51:00.007-04:00

... lurks on the walls of Chicago apartment houses?

So, last summer, my sister and I were driving around Chicago, attending various family reunions. (Actually, they were newly discovered family, so they weren't so much REunions as... I guess, just unions.) Anyway, while we were driving I noticed the flute player on this house, and asked my sister (the driver) to stop so I could shoot it. (She's getting used to this.)

I did a little research and learned from Robert Powers's excellent blog, A Chicago Sojourn, that the same developer responsible for the flute player had also incorporated the Three Wise Monkeys "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil") on other buildings.

But why? Thanks to the digging that Powers did, the answer seems to be simply: "Because." The headline of a Chicago Tribune article from 1956 says it best: "No reason, but monkeys adorn dwelling units."

The story says that Angelo Esposito, president of the general contracting firm that built the house and apartments, had always put sculpture on his buildings. The monkeys were chosen "for no special reason," he said, but added, "The fact that it has created talk and interest, tho*, indicates the idea accomplished what it was meant to do."

I have a special fondness for the "hear no evil" monkey, who clearly is open to hearing anything and everything:

*Back in the 50s and 60s, and probably before and probably since, the Chicago Tribune, no doubt like other newspapers, used to use these shortened versions of words (e.g., tho, thru) to save space. So I never understood why the Trib insisted on using "clew" in its headlines. That "w" takes up a huge amount of space.

Top of the book pile

2011-10-11T13:12:00.005-04:00

“You've tricked and fooled your readers for years. You've tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You've introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You've withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it.”
— Lionel Twain, played by Truman Capote in the 1976 movie Murder By Death

It’s for those reasons that I have never read mystery novels. I’ve been afraid, not that I wouldn’t guess whodunit, but that it wouldn’t make sense to me when the central detective figured it out. I didn’t want the mystery to be ... you, know... mystifying.

Such is not the case with Paula LaRocque’s Chalk Line, the first in what I hope will be a long line of Ben Gallagher mysteries. You’ll never guess the murderer of an old family friend of Ben’s — a man his widowed mother was about to marry — but, for those of you who are as insecure about these things as I am, you will be able to follow the steps in solving the mystery.

It would have been easy to make Ben and the the rest of a large cast of characters one-dimensional caricatures, but LaRocque has provided them all with enough contradictions and personal quirks to make them seem like frustratingly real humans.

Ben Gallagher, who has a doctorate in fine arts, is chief of detectives in Arlington, Texas. The book opens with him driving to the state penitentiary to pick up his brother Andrew who has just completed a 10-year sentence in Huntsville prison for his part in a prank gone bad.

Once home, but before Ben and Andrew can have a reunion dinner with family and friends, Dayton Slaughter (a fitting name for the victim) is murdered in Ben’s house. Ben manages to cop two days’ head start from his boss to find the killer before the case is handed over to his Nigerian-born partner (who also holds a PhD, in chemical engineering) and their team, consisting of a Comanche and a lesbian. The cast consists of practically the full complement of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual-orientation possibilities, but mercifully no Texas stereotypes.

The case takes Ben and Co. on a multiple mystery tour from Texas to Michigan and back again, solving not only Slaughter’s… um, slaughter… but also a 40 year-old cold case, and uncovering family secrets.

LaRocque is a former assistant managing editor and writing coach at the Dallas Morning News and author of several books on writing that I have used in training new journalists. So I expected her writing to be as evocative as it was. In fact, LaRocque’s use of detail is such that once you’ve read the book and then seen the movie when — and there will be a movie — you will swear you’ve already seen it.

The night the lights went out too early

2011-01-02T13:40:00.006-05:00

For the last several Christmas seasons, a three-kilometre-long Trail of Lights has been installed at Downsview Park in northwestern Toronto.

The trail is set up mostly for driving, although one night a week it's closed to cars and only pedestrians are allowed in. The advantage of staying in a car (apart from the obvious protection from inclement weather) is that you can tune your car radio to an unused frequency and listen to the music that is provided by the former Canadian Forces Base.

Through 2 January this season, the spectacular trail — incorporating more than 400,000 LED bulbs into themeed light displays, more than half of which are animated — has been open five nights a week, until 11pm. That was supposed to be the case even on New Year's Eve, when I, somewhat belatedly, decided to take in the trail.

Throughout the drive, at a maximum allowed speed of 20 km/hour, the closed-circuit radio station urges you to take pictures, but not to stop or get out of your vehicle. Everyone ignores the no-stopping rule. However, there are several small displays at the end of the trail where you are encouraged to get out of your car and take pictures.

As I said, we were there on New Year's Eve. The trail was supposed to be open (and lighted) until 11pm, with the entrance gate closed at 10.45pm. So we were a bit surprised when we completed the trail at 10.30pm, and just as we were getting out of the car, cameras in hand, the lights went out. At the end of the trail! The gate was closed and I guess the attendants decided they'd had enough and it was time to find a New Year's party.

It was rather less shocking for us than it was for people who were already taking pictures of the end-of-the-trail displays. The lights just went out. In the dim light, I saw one man look down at his feet, apparently thinking he'd tripped over a power cord and de-lighted the whole park. But all that was under his feet was mud and muck left after the rain and unseasonably warm temperatures we'd been having.

I sympathize with people who work on holidays, but it was so close to quitting time anyway, couldn't they have stuck it out for another 30 minutes?

If we have time tonight, we're going to go back and try to shoot some of the end-of-trail lights, without having to pay the $25 entrance fee again.

Mia, the young friend we had brought along with us, began composing her letter of complaint on the drive home. The Downsview Park management should brace themselves for her letter. Last year, President's Choice cheated her and came in for a stern letter. A package of PC Christmas crackers we'd bought promised that none of the prizes would be duplicated, and Mia had her eye on a little wooden penguin ornament. We had to pull all of the crackers so she could get her penguin — but there was no penguin. Instead, there were two candy cane ornaments. She wrote to PC asking for a penguin ornament, but was sent only a $10 coupon for PC products instead.

Sitting on top of the world!

2011-01-01T18:49:00.002-05:00

Okay, more like standing. And as for it being the top of the world, it's only the top of Toronto's Old City Hall. This picture was taken in 2003 when the Ventin Group, the restoration architects working on the building, allowed me to come up on the scaffolding of the 103.6-metre tower to take pictures of the gargoyles that were being replaced.

Happy 2011!

2011-01-01T02:01:00.003-05:00

Happy new year, everybody! Wishing you all good things in 2011!

Getting closer...

2010-12-31T04:11:00.003-05:00

...to 2011!

2010 slips away...

2010-12-28T14:07:00.002-05:00

... or drips away.

Murray Christmas!

2010-12-22T20:18:00.004-05:00

“ ‘I think the Christmas card was one of my best inventions,’ [the Devil] said. ‘Yes, I think the Christmas card has done as much to put Christmas to the bad as any other single thing. And I began it so cleverly; just a few pretty Victorian printed greetings, and then – well, you know what it is today.”

Robertson Davies
When Satan Goes Home for Christmas

Lute Lady

2010-12-15T21:12:00.012-05:00

My mother died 19 years ago tonight, far from her Chicago home. At about the time she died, my sisters and I discovered a nifty way to memorialize her in her old North Side neighbourhood.

The Mid-North Association, a Lincoln Park area civic group, began selling personalized bricks with which to repave a park known variously as Mid-North Park and the Belden Triangle, and to rehabilitate it somewhat. For U.S.$60, we had two lines engraved that said, simply, "Maggie Murray" and "I Miss Chicago."

On my next trips to Chicago after ordering our brick, I would visit Mid-North Park to see whether it had been installed yet. I finally found it - quite near bricks bought by local businesses she used to patronize, as well as Bill Kurtis, the TV newsman she so admired.

Whenever I'm in Chicago, I still make a little pilgrimage to that park.

But in the intervening years, the park has changed. At the time of the brick-laying, it featured a beautiful sculpture of a veiled woman playing the lute, with two children on either side of her. A few years ago, I noticed that the sculpture was gone - replaced by a (forgive me) rather uninspiring fountain. It was installed as part of a beautification project to renovate or construct 18 fountains in parks, triangles formed by some of the city's weird intersections of three streets, plazas and other open spaces.

I think Mid-North Park/Belden Triangle got one of the more pedestrian fountains. But I always wondered what happened to the sculpture.

I decided to seize the moment, probably prompted by the anniversary of my mother's death, and contacted Chicago Park District (CPD) historian Julia Bachrach. She directed the years of research that resulted in the Chicago Park District Guide to Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures, an impressive online resource providing the histories of those features in CPD parks.

Julia told me that the sculpture I was interested in, known as "Lute Lady" or "Seated Woman With Children," was originally part of a bandstand in Lincoln Park designed by Chicago architects Pond & Pond, and sculpted by Lorado Taft in 1915.

The Lute Lady has had a rough ride. In 1983, she and other sculptures were found along Lake Michigan, north of 39th Street, where they were waiting to be used as landfill! Julia sent me a story from the Chicago Tribune (6 May 1983) describing the find, which included columns from the city's old federal courthouse building and the bas relief backdrop to "The Spirit of Music," a memorial to Theodore Thomas, founder of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The Trib article quoted Ben Bentley, then the CPD's director of public information, saying that the CPD warehouse had become too crowded with materials that no one had asked about. The sculptures were going to be used as part of a landfill to help retard lakefront erosion.

"What we have done is a perfectly legitimate thing," Bentley is reported to have said at the time.

Since then, the Federal Building columns and the conserved "Spirit of Music" have been installed in Grant Park, Julia said.

And what of the Lute Lady and her children? "They are currently in storage, which is probably a good thing, because they are marble and really shouldn't be outside in the Chicago climate," she added. "We really need to find a good indoor location for the Lute Lady."

As to the photos in this post: I'm not sure whether they're mine or were taken by my sister Roxe Murray. We shared our prints back then - at least the ones relating to our mother's memorial and family history. Somewhere in my cluttered home office, I have a full photographic study of the Lute Lady, shot from a variety of angles. I'd like to think I was prescient when I took those photographs, but I probably just wanted to fully document my mother's memorial. When I find those prints, I'll scan and post them.

South High School, Denver

2010-12-08T00:12:00.019-05:00

Toronto's Bishop Strachan High School is not alone in not knowing why there are certain sculptures (in this case, chimps) on its building. As I discovered in researching the stories behind many of Toronto's architectural faces, that information is lost for a lot of buildings - but I was left with no doubt that architects and stone carvers had specific people or ideas in mind when they created those faces.

One school that has an elaborate sculpture programme and has kept the stories behind it alive in its yearbooks and on its website is South High School in Denver. My friend Kathy Lingo, one of the principals in Avenue L Architects, took me on a tour of the school (designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1992) when I visited Denver a few years ago. CORRECTION: Kathy Lingo has informed me that contrary to its claim, South H.S. is not a National Historic Landmark and not listed on the National Register. It is, however, a Denver Historic Landmark. (Thanks, Kathy!)

The Romanesque building, designed by the architectural firm of Fisher & Fisher (actually a whole family of architects, which you can read about in this PDF), was completed in 1924. The Fishers, originally Canadian, became a force in Denver architecture.

Apparently, Arthur A. Fisher was a proponent of using painting and sculpture in Denver public buildings, and influenced the use of the sculptures adorning South High.

The most prominent exterior sculpture is the slightly more than one metre tall gargoyle on the roof, the "symbolic protector of South," according to the school's website. Created by sculptor Robert Garrison, it is said to have been inspired by one on Italy's Spoleto Cathedral.

Striped poles flank the front entrance. They are topped by figures said to be faculty members holding creatures representing final exams. The creatures seem ready to devour students whose heads are on piles of books in front of them (see right).

One of two friezes above the main door (pictured below) is known as "Faculty Row," and shows the principal in the centre of a line of the entire faculty. To his right is the assistant principal; on his left is the dean of girls (no longer a position at South). The second frieze, called "Animal Spirits" and not shown here, has figures the symbolize unscholarly behaviour such as rubber-band shooting and gum chewing. (To think that those were the big behaviour problems in classrooms as recently as 10 years ago; now it's students using cell phones and iPods in class.)

Above another door is a frieze showing children going to school - some eagerly, others less so. The less enthusiastic children tend to be toward the back of the line, like this one seen here in close-up:

Chimps in chains, update

2010-11-29T15:51:00.004-05:00

I've just heard from Sue Dutton, the archivist for Bishop Strachan School, and she has no information about why a pair of chimps appears on the school building.

" We also have a dragon and a lion, but I have never seen any documentation that explains these decorative choices," she wrote in an e-mail. "The oldest wing of the current school building was built in 1913-1915. Although the BSS Prospectus for the 1915-1916 school year goes to great lengths to describe the style of the new building, Collegiate Gothic, and many modern features such as hot-water heating and sound-proof music rooms, it does not mention these sculptures. I believe it can be assumed they were simply added as whimsical decorations that the girls attending the school would enjoy."

I've read similar articles in architectural journal that frustratingly, elaborate the innards of buildings but either never mention the outside (beyond a simple description, such as "Collegiate Gothic") or refer only vaguely to sculptural details, but not in detail.

But I am convinced that architects didn't and don't stick any old animals or bearded figures on their buildings for the hell of it. There's a reason, although it may have been lost.

South High School in Denver has an extensive sculptural programme - and the background information explaining the architects' choices is contained in the school's yearbook. Stay tuned for a forthcoming post featuring pictures from that school.

Why are there two chimps on a girls' school?

2010-11-27T12:40:00.007-05:00

The main façade of Bishop Strachan School, the private girls' school in Toronto's tony Forest Hill neighbourhood, sports two stone chimps, each clutching although not apparently restrained by a ball and chain.

Why?

I've searched the internet, called the school, checked a few architectural journal articles from 1916 when Sproatt and Rolph designed the building, and not found the answer.

Does anyone out there know, with a reference? Or have any ideas?

Stay tuned - I haven't given up finding the answer.

Happy Thanksgiving to our U.S. friends

2010-11-23T05:41:00.004-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving (a few days early) to our American friends!

It seems especially appropriate this year that the symbol of Thanksgiving is a flightless bird, as we wait to see how many travellers are grounded for refusing to submit to security screening "pat-downs."

Turkey-and-corn relief is from the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver.

The last of Vancouver

2010-11-16T23:50:00.008-05:00

I've already posted most of the faces that I found on the Hotel Vancouver (sorry, The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver) - here and here.

But after posting the sculpture of George Vancouver's ship Discovery yesterday, I had to finish off with this sculpture from the Georgia Street entrance of the hotel. (Actually, this is the third Hotel Vancouver on this site, at Georgia and Burrard. The Architects were John S. Archibald and John Schofield who began construction in 1928, and finished 11 years later, in time for the first Canadian visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.)

Above it is Hermes, the Greek messenger god who was also the god of commerce. (His Roman counterpart is Mercury.)

And here ends the faces I bagged while in Vancouver. There are more, but there is only so much hunting I can do when I'm travelling for the Day Job.

Marine Building, Vancouver (part 2)

2010-11-14T22:17:00.012-05:00

The Marine Building, at Hastings and Burrard, is one of Canada's great art deco masterpieces. Construction began in 1929 and almost immediately upon completion in 1930, became a victim of the Great Depression. Its owners had trouble attracting tenants and by 1933, sold the building which had cost $2.3 million (more than $1 million over budget) for a paltry $900,000.

The Marine Building has an interesting history, but I'm keen to get back to the decoration. The Burrard Street entrance (above), features a ship's prow sailing out of the sunset, with Canada geese flying across the rays.

Along the inside of the archway at the entrance are terra cotta reliefs of ships that are significant in Vancouver history — including, of course, Captain George Vancouver's ship, HMS Discovery, with which he explored the coasts of British Columbia in 1792.

As for faces on the Marine building (apart from the faces of the sealife that appear everywhere), there are two images of Neptune. You can glimpse one of them in the picture of the top six or seven storeys in the previous post. Here's a close-up, in which you can clearly see the Roman god of the sea clutching his trident.

Neptune also appears as the figurehead on a ship on a two-storey-long sculptural work on another corner of the building. The detail here also gives a nice close-up (if I do say so myself) of a seahorse:

Marine Building, Vancouver (part 1)

2010-11-14T02:39:00.019-05:00

Another McCarter & Nairne work in Vancouver (see article on the Nurses of Vancouver below) is the Marine Building.

I'm interested primarily in buildings with faces, and while the Marine Building has a few of those, it's a riot of sculptural decoration. The exterior is covered with, among other things, terra cotta representations of 1920s-vintage modes of transport.

True to its maritime name, many of these are seagoing vessels, such as a naval ship,

a Viking-type ship,

and a submarine.

There are also a biplane,

a Zeppelin

and a steam locomotive.

More about the history of the building and its faces tomorrow.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

2010-10-29T14:00:00.002-04:00

... from Vancouver

Vancouver nurses - and gargoyles

2010-10-29T13:31:00.004-04:00

If you looked at the Ital Decor slideshow noted (and hyperlinked) in my previous post, you will have noticed that the Ital Decor team also installed gargoyles on Cathedral Place, which I failed to mention. I shot them, but they're quite high up and far back, so this is the best I could do:

I had better luck with these guys from the older Hotel Vancouver:

And see that blue sky? There was no blue sky in Vancouver last week. Truth is, I actually took these pix when I was there in June (for another conference).

Stay tuned for more from Vancouver... although not more nurses. The Cathedral Place "Rhea sisters" were the only ones I got to shoot on my last trip (i.e., the one in June) to Vancouver. But check out the B.C. Nursing History document hyperlinked in my previous post, and you'll see just how many nursing memorials that city has.

The nurses of Vancouver

2010-10-28T21:21:00.010-04:00

I was just in Vancouver at a conference attended by nearly 5,000 infectious disease clinicians (for the Day Job, of course), but do you know what I saw the most? Nurses. Architectural nurses.

Vancouver must hold the world's record as the city with the most monuments to nurses. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The one I saw the most, on my trips between my hotel and the convention centre, was this one, at the corner of Georgia and Howe. (Never mind that the street sign says Burrard.)

There are actually three of her on this building, and the trio are known as the Rhea sisters. (About which, more later.)

This isn't the original building and these aren't the original nurses.

What was first on this spot (in 1929) was the Vancouver Medical-Dental Building. At about the 10th storey level, in each of the three corners of the building that were visible, stood 11-foot tall terra cotta statues of a nursing sister from the First World War.

According to a report (the link is a PDF file) by Nina Rumen and Glennis Zilm of the B.C. History of Nursing Group, architects John Young McCarter and George Colvil Nairne had both served overseas in the First World War. McCarter had been seriously wounded and credited the nursing sisters with saving his life - so when he and Nairne started their firm and got the medical-dental building commission, they saw it as an excellent opportunity to pay tribute to the nurses.

Sculptor and architect Joseph Francis Watson (who worked with the McCarter Nairne firm) designed the nursing sister statues.

The Medical Dental Building was demolished in 1989, and replaced by Cathedral Place, a 23-storey office tower. At the time, there was an effort to save the original statues for the new building, but they were too heavy and difficult to remove. So replicas were made of fiberglass and mounted at about the 3rd-storey level.

The Burnaby firm Ital Décor made the castings from which the new figures were made, and took the least damaged original, patched it and keeps it in the company’s showroom. (You can see a slide show of the project here.)

According to the Rumen-Zilm report, in 1992, the Vancouver museum took a head from one of the broken statues, patched and repaired it and holds it for display. A fiberglass replica is also on display in the Cathedral Place lobby.

That ain’t all. Replicas of the same statues were installed on the University of British Columbia’s Technology Enterprises Facility III, which houses some offices of the UBC School of Nursing.

Almost forgot: the Rhea Sisters? Gono, Dia and Pyo. (medical joke)

Let's put on a show!

2010-10-18T19:08:00.000-04:00

My friends Michal and Yaniv at the Yonge/Eglinton Aroma Espresso Bar have booked me for a three-week photo exhibition. The pictures, which I hung on Saturday night, are virtually all from Faces on Places, my book on Toronto's gargoyles and other architectural sculpture.

It seemed like a good theme for the period leading up to and including Halloween. Stop by if you get a chance, between now and the 6th of November.

City of angels

2010-10-11T07:32:00.001-04:00

Who'da thunk Boston would be a city of angels?

So it seemed to me when I was there about a month ago, in the limited sightseeing I did. (I was there for the Day Job, which involved covering a major infectious disease conference - and being felled by a respiratory infection.)

These cherubs were under the window of my room in the Omni Porter House Hotel:

and these were around the corner on the Tremont Temple Baptist Church:

I know, I know - they're actually called putti (and I've photographed and remarked on other Boston putti in the past), but it wouldn't have sounded as mellifluous to call this post "City of putti," would it?

Lunch?

2010-10-10T21:23:00.000-04:00

You all know the photo - "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," the one by Charles Ebbets of 11 construction workers sitting on a girder, high above Manhattan, having lunch.

Well, New York sculptor Sergio Furnari has rendered them in 3D, and they caught the eye of Les Abro, president and CEO of billboard company Abcon Media. And now a version on Furnari's sculpture is in my neighbourhood.

At first, I thought this was sort of cool. But as I thought and read about the installation, I realized it wasn't done so much in the name of art as for advertising.

As you can see, the lunching construction workers are no longer seated, but standing - standing so they'll be visible behind billboards.

There is some advertising that functions as art, but not in this case. It turns out that Les Abro has been trying to get these sculptures on top of an uptown Toronto building since 2007. His initial target was Yonge and Eglinton, where they would have supported three billboards:

The Yonge and Eglinton area has plenty of tall buildings so this would have fit in - or at least, fit in better than it does in the Yonge and Lawrence area where it is now. But the city councillor for Yonge/Eg nixed the plan.

Abro managed to get a variance in the zoning bylaw from our councillor, and in June, the sculptures went up in the relatively low-rise neighbourhood, at the corner of Yonge and Deloraine:

In fact, Spacing Toronto published an interesting article detailing the whole story.

I want to like these sculptures. I really do.

But they really don't fit in the Yonge/Lawrence neighbourhood, and the 17 figures are mostly hidden by the billboards. I disagree with Edward Brown, writing on the Torontoist website, that the Furnari sculptures represent "art tinged by artful marketing."

It's art obscured by advertising - and advertising that debases public spaces.

High-powered mythological guardians

2010-09-20T02:11:00.006-04:00

Theories abound as to why Western architecture has been ornamented with figures — whether they be gods or mortals, celestial beings or rude humans, the devil himself or souls trapped in stone on their way to hell, recognizable animals or bizarre hybrids. One school of thought is that traditionally they were used by the Church to instruct the illiterate masses or terrify them into compliance with the Ten Commandments. Another suggests that the figures were believed to keep away evil spirits and protect a building’s occupants.

The building at 45 Milk Street in Boston is richly endowed, but the figures don’t seem to have any work to do.

It started life in 1893 as the International Trust Company Building, by the architect William Gibbons Preston (1844-1910), who enlarged it in 1906. Sculptor Max Bachman
(1862-1921) provided the ornament which includes Hercules over the front door. (You can tell it’s Herc because he’s wearing the skin of the Nemean lion he killed, with its head as a helmet.)

Hercules is flanked by the most fearsome griffins (also spelled “griffons” and “gryphons”) I’ve ever seen.

But the building seems empty—the main floor looked especially empty although there were lots of lights on, including some very impressive chandeliers. All that high-powered mythological help going to waste…

Ben Franklin and Philly cheesesteak in... Boston?

2010-09-16T19:15:00.007-04:00

Yes, I'm using a different background, mere weeks after resuming this blog. My sister Roxe, master genealogist, found this template and used it for her new blog, Genealogy PMP*, and I thought it was so cool that I decided to switch. I don't know how it looks to you out there, but it's pretty unimpressive on the screen of my ancient laptop.

Today's picture is... you guessed it! Benjamin Franklin! (You knew that because of your familiarity with American hundred dollar bills, right?) This piece is on the front of a building on Milk Street in Boston that proclaims itself as Franklin's birthplace. It was around the corner from my hotel in Boston, where I travelled last weekend for the Day Job — another infectious disease meeting, and another infectious disease meeting where I developed a respiratory infection that had me holed up in my hotel room for two days.

It was probably a combination of being sick, the vague similarity between two revolutionary war-era towns and... well, mostly being sick that made me very confused about where I was when I saw this building. Franklin's image is all over Philadelphia. I never associated him with Boston. The room service menu in my hotel didn't have chicken soup, which I craved (of course not! they had only chowdah!) but it did list Philly cheesesteak! (What kind of Boston hotel offers Philly cheesesteak? And no baked beans? Which I didn't really want - I'm just saying.)

So, I was very confused about where I was - the virus, Franklin, Philly cheesesteaks. And staying in a hotel room for 48 hours straight can really mess with your head.

I was scheduled to come last night, which I did, but I was probably too congested to fly. I think I blew out my right ear. I'll post again as soon as I can hear again.

*I know that "Genealogy PMP" looks like it needs an "i," which would turn my sister into a genealogy p*mp. But PMP is the designation of someone who has been accredited by the Project Management Institute, and Roxe's idea with the blog was to describe how she's applying her well-honed project management skills to exploring our ancestry. She's been working on this, on and off, for decades. It's been a mostly discouraging effort, until just recently when she made all kinds of progress on virtually all fronts of our mongrel background - the Irish, Greeks and Germans. So, no p*mp jokes, okay? We're the only ones who can do that.

Time and place

2010-09-04T13:55:00.008-04:00

Having spent 10 days in Chicago and with two weeks more off from the day job, I decided to play tourist in Toronto. So I took a double-decker bus tour.

I am as interested in music as the next person — possibly more so, since I used to be a semi-professional musician in another life — but I've never felt the need to be, literally, constantly plugged into the soundtrack of my life. (Neither have I felt the need to be constantly on the phone, but that's a post for another day.)

Anyway, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, I believe in having a life to which the music that I hear forms the soundtrack instead of all-soundtrack-all-the-time.

When I took the coach tour, this girl who sat ahead of me clearly favoured the latter. She generously plugged one ear bud into her own ear, and the second into her mother's ear — rendering them unable to hear the surprisingly informed and witty commentary of the tour guide.

That was their loss, and didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the trip... although I did wonder what the point was of paying nearly $40 and then shutting out the tour guide. (I recognize that language may have been a factor in this case.)

But then the child apparently tired of her iPod — and began serenading us a series of random notes on a blue plastic harmonica, and my mood returned to that one of my stone friends in Chicago:

The strange obsessions of the gargoyle hunter

2010-08-30T21:32:00.005-04:00

I don't expect to get much sympathy, but truly, being a gargoyle hunter is not easy. It's not easy on the hunter and it's not easy on the hunter's friends. The only person it's at all easy on is the gargoyle (and yes, I realize I just called a stone building ornament a "person").

If you've been following this blog of late, you'll know that I spent 10 days at the end of July in Chicago with my sister Roxe, the family genealogist (whose life is also hard, but I'll her get her own blog to complain about the travails of the family-hunter). We attended one arranged family reunion (the Murrays) and a dinner Roxe organized with a few members of the Kalodimos side of the family.

As you can sort of tell from this map of Chicago* I posted in our hotel room, replete with little Post-It flags showing all the places we had to go, we had some ground to cover. For reasons too complicated to go into here, Roxe did all the driving and I did all the navigating. But everywhere we went, I was checking out buildings for interesting faces. (While I was navigating - which is easier and safer to do than gargoyle-hunting while driving.)

To her credit, Roxe did not wring my neck, although she did ask several times, "What?! What happened?! What are you looking at?!" thinking a crime in progress or a crash site had caught my attention.

She also agreed to drive up and down Clark Street so I could find this fellow

who I shot when I was in the city in 2004. On that trip, I rode the #22 Clark bus all the way to the northernmost end of the line, way past Diversey where I lived for a short time. (Sorry to bore those not familiar with Chicago with these details.) It was a long ride, up to Devon (which Chicagoans mispronounce). It was on that bus ride that I saw this guy, hopped off and shot him (and a partner he had on a neighboring building) and I thought it would be fun to find him again and reshoot him.

We drove up and down Clark Street three times — and I never saw him or his friend. Who knows what happened to my stone friends? I fear his building may have been torn down in the intervening six years. I actually felt bereft... until Roxe had enough of Clark Street and announced that we were going to do some actual genealogy work, whereupon she turned into one of the cemeteries just off Clark where our maternal grandparents are buried.

* A common feature of Chicago maps is the truncation of the South Side. To any Chicago mapmakers who might be reading this: give us back the South Side! It should be possible to put the whole of Chicago on a map. Besides, the South Side is an important part of the city. When was the last time the North Side baseball team won a pennant, never mind the World Series, hmmm?

Faces in the 'hood

2010-08-29T19:59:00.009-04:00

While in Chicago for the family reunions and genealogical research, we stayed in a Days Inn in Lakeview, the old neighbourhood (where I lived for a time way back in ... never mind). I wandered around and found a bunch of faces and gargoyles I never noticed when I lived there. But of course, I lived there before my gargoyle awakening.

They're everywhere! I don't know what these buildings were originally - I'd research them if I weren't working on another book - but they were highly decorated.

A pox on your ivy!

2010-08-25T00:02:00.011-04:00

Ivy clinging to walls looks all scholarly and academic, but it can be destructive when its roots worm their way into fissures in the stone.

So I was shocked and concerned when I saw that many of the sculptures on Ryerson University's Kerr Hall were completely obscured by ivy when I led a Heritage Toronto walking tour there on Sunday, based on Faces on Places, my book about Toronto's architectural sculpture.

The ivy was much, much thicker than is seen in this picture, shot in 2005. The sculpture pictured here is of a javelin thrower by Elizabeth Wyn Wood. She was one of four leading Canadian sculptors of the mid-20th century (the others were Dora de Pédery-Hunt, Jacobine Jones and Thomas Bowie) who were chosen to decorate Kerr Hall when it was built in the early 1960s with sculptures representing the aims of an institute of higher learning in the heart of a city.

Ryerson president Sheldon Levy has made no secret of the fact that he'd like to see Kerr Hall torn down. He's been saying that since before the university's "master plan" was released, envisioning greater integration of the campus into downtown Toronto.

That was four years ago, and Kerr Hall is still standing. Is it Ryerson's apparent ambivalence about Kerr Hall that has resulted in this inaction? For the sake of the sculptures, which surely will be saved if Kerr Hall is demolished, the ivy should be removed and any necessary repairs or cleaning undertaken. Several people on the tour, unprompted by me, voiced that opinion, which I hope they will communicate to the university.

Speaking of opinions, researchers in Oxford, England, are investigating whether ivy is actually damaging, or whether it plays a "bioprotective role ... on the surface of historical buildings and structures as an agent of thermal and moisture regulation."

Hmmmmm... With all the gargoyles and whatnot in Oxford, you'd think they would know. But over on this side of the pond, Yale University - an actual Ivy League school - has been waging a war on the vines for some time.

Chicago cemetery sculpture

2010-08-20T01:31:00.013-04:00

My visits to Chicago cemeteries were largely to find and record the gravestones of distant and not-so-distant relatives, all of whom had pretty unexceptional stones. But I noticed a few that I thought worth taking the time to shoot. And of course, the most striking sculptures would have to be the ones marking the graves of children...

This one (left) was for a whole section of the cemetery labelled "Lullabyland," where mostly young children were buried. I don't know who created it or why a child staring down a lamb was thought to be appropriate, but I do like the look of determination on the girl's face.

This one (right), which seemed to cry out to be rendered in black and white, marked the grave of a girl named Lauretta who died at the age of seven in 1898.

The cemetery where we had no relatives at all and as a result had only 15 minutes for a quick drive-through was Graceland Cemetery where anybody who was anybody in Chicago history is buried. I'd like to take a tour of the place the next time I'm in Chicago, to see the graves of the notables and some of the fantastic sculpture there. The only figure I had time to snap (and from inside the car at that) was "Eternal Silence" by Lorado Taft which watches over the grave of Dexter Graves (yes, that's his name), one of the city's first settlers.

This figure is also known as the "Statue of Death," and originally was entirely black, except for the face, hidden in the hood of the robe.
Legend has it that if you look into the face you will glimpse your own death. But legend also has it that the figure is impossible to photograph, and that cameras won't function in its presence. It certainly is eerie, but obviously, photographable.

Note to Pamela Williams: Your cemetery sculpture gig is secure!

Deerly departed

2010-08-15T22:31:00.008-04:00

I have just returned from a family reunion in Chicago. Actually, not having ever heard of these relatives, let alone met them, I suppose it was more of a union than a reunion. Part of the trip involved going through cemeteries and shooting family monuments (and interesting cemetery sculpture, following the lead of Pamela Williams - see links; results will be posted shortly).

We noticed a couple of bucks wandering through one cemetery, eating the flowers and whatnot, and spent about 20 minutes following and shooting... I mean, photographing them.

Yes, the first pic (top) was shot through the car windshield, but then I got out and followed them around:

Back in business, baby!

2010-08-07T07:39:00.006-04:00

Sorry for the long absence, folks. The day job and numerous other responsibilities have occupied all of my waking hours over the last year. (Has it been that long?!) But I'm back now.

NEWS: See the sidebar (right) for an upcoming Faces on Places-themed walking tour, and a link to a chapter of my forthcoming biography of Merle Foster.

Photos and regular updates to resume presently.

RIP Mary Travers

2009-09-17T21:18:00.014-04:00

We lost Mary Travers yesterday. (If the name doesn't ring a bell, she was the "Mary" of Peter, Paul & Mary.) She was diagnosed with leukemia several years ago, and underwent chemotherapy which allowed her to have a life-saving bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, it was the side effects of the chemotherapy that killed her.

I saw PP&M several times—although only after they'd split up and then got back together again. Every concert was memorable.

They came in for a lot of criticism from "real" folk singers for having homogenized harmonies and too precise tempos, but their voices blended beautifully and their political and social beliefs literally resonated in their music.

They also came in for some criticism, especially after they got back together in 1978, for being anachronistic, part of a long-ago faded fad. But as Mary said during one concert, "Folk music is not a fad because you [the audience] are not a fad."

But they helped make history. They were invited by Martin Luther King Jr. to sing at the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech and they sang "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer."

Probably the most memorable PP&M concert I attended was in the early 1980s at the old Ontario Place Forum. The Forum was an outdoor venue with seating under its roof for about 3,000, and surrounding grassy hillsides that comfortably accommodated another 8,000 (although some rock concerts drew audiences of more than 20,000). The stage was 20.4 metres in diameter and rotated the full 360° every hour. Rain was forecast for this night, and many people sat on the hills in the drizzle. But then it really began to pour, and the masses moved down to try to at least stand under the roof. Instead, Mary invited as many as would fit to sit on the stage. I don't know how many people wound up sitting on the stage, but it looked pretty cozy. I don't know how the Ontario Place management felt about it, but it was a generous thing to do.

photo credit: Sally Farr

So hammer on, Mary. Keep an eye on us — we still need you.

photo credit: Barry Feinstein

One of my favourite PP&M songs is "Day is Done," which this clips shows them singing for a not-terribly enthusiastic Japanese audience in 1990:

One other note: this Sunday is the 25th anniversary of the death of Steve Goodman, the Chicago folkie who wrote "The City of New Orleans," among other songs you've almost certainly heard. He died of leukemia in 1984. Below is a picture I took of Steve—funnily enough, at the Ontario Place Forum in 1978—which my friend Clay Eals used in Facing the Music, his 2007 biography of Goodman.

Calgary Herald

2009-09-06T09:40:00.000-04:00

These figures—from the cast of characters of newspaper newsrooms of old (i.e., even before I started my career)—were cast from the originals on the Calgary Herald Building that was demolished in 1972.

This trio is now located on the Alberta Hotel building on Stephen Avenue, but originally the Southams (then owners of the Herald) commissioned Royal Doulton in the U.K. to design and make 44 figures and masks for the exterior of the newspaper building.

According to information on a Calgary Public Library website, the gargoyles were the work of sculptor Mark Villars Marshall (1879 - 1912), who died shortly after the gargoyles were installed in 1912. Marshall had been a stone carver working on Victorian Gothic Revival churches before he went to work at Royal Doulton's Lambeth Studios in the late 1870s.

At the time of demolition, the Herald building was known as the Greyhound Building, and the gargoyles were scattered, including to other buildings including the Calgary Convention Centre and the University of Calgary.

Maclean-Hunter Ltd. (RIP)

2009-08-22T21:52:00.008-04:00

These aren't from a newspaper office, but from the building that used to be the head office of Maclean-Hunter Ltd. on University Avenue here in Toronto. It was built in 1961 for MH which published Maclean’s and Chatelaine magazines as well as a large stable of trade publications.

Maclean-Hunter had been on this site long before that — the company, including its printing plant, had been on the corner of University and Dundas since 1911. The printing plant moved — when? — to Yonge Street and Highway 401, and later to Aurora, Ont.; Maclean-Hunter moved to College Park (the former Eaton's College Street store) in 1983, and ceased to exist when it was bought by Rogers Communications Inc. in 1995. Rogers now publishes Maclean's, Chatelaine and a much smaller (and shrinking) stable of trade and professional publications (including the Medical Post, where I do my Day Job).

So this building was never actually a newspaper office, but it was the hub of a considerable proportion of Canadian periodical publishing. As I describe in Faces on Places, it features an incised naked woman floating in front of a long ribbon on one side of a building, and a naked man floating and holding a ribbon on the other.

When she won the commission for “exterior decorations” on the new MH building, Elizabeth Wyn Wood apparently thought the company had something more sculptural in mind.

“Symptomatic of the diminishing role and significance of sculptural decoration in modern Canadian architecture, Maclean officials agreed to only two simplified entrance panels on ‘Communications,’” said Victoria Baker in her examination of Wood’s life and work.

“Wood interpreted this theme in the form of female and male nude figures symbolizing ‘Sending’ [above] and ‘Receiving,’ [below] respectively.”

Chicago Tribune

2009-08-19T05:55:00.001-04:00

I'm still experiencing re-entry to the Day Job, after four weeks off, so forgive me (again) if I don't expound on the future of publishing just yet. However, I wanted to continue the series of newspaper office faces. These two are from Tribune Tower in Chicago.

"Souvenir of Tribune Tower," an undated booklet (looks as though it might be from the 1920s or 1930s) that gives the story of the building and the newspaper (and that I scored on eBay earlier this year), also describes the sculptures in and on the building.

It says that the "whispering man" (above) typifies "insidious rumour," while the "shouting man" (below) is the "spirit of open rumour or news."

Hmmm ... not sure I ever thought of news as "open rumour."

San Antonio Express-News

2009-08-10T05:56:00.001-04:00

This is the second in a series of pictures of sculpture on old newspaper buildings. This is the San Antonio Express-News building. While a star marks Iowa City on the map on the former Iowa City Press-Citizen building, one of the figures here is merely pointing to San Antonio's location on this map. (See detail below, and click for larger)

The frieze, titled "Enlightening of the Press" and designed by sculptor Pompeo Coppini, allegorically describes the mission of a newspaper. The globe is connected to phone and telegraph wires representing news being communicated around the world. The six figures surrounding the globe represent Labour, Education, Knowledge (he's the one whose finger points to Texas on the globe), Enlightenment, Truth and Justice.

I'm still on vacation, so speculation on the future of journalism in general or newspapers in particular will have to wait for another day. It's too damned hot for serious thinking anyway.

Iowa City Press-Citizen

2009-08-04T05:58:00.002-04:00

I'm just back from four days in Iowa City at my sister's wedding. I took more than 340 pictures at the wedding, rehearsal dinner, reception, visit to the county recorder's office, etc., so forgive me if I post some pictures I took from 2002. (That was the year she moved to the Midwest. She had fibromyalgia or something like it at the time and wasn't able to drive. So being the outstanding big sister that I am, I drove her (and her two cats and dog) from Blacksburg, Va., where she had been a math professor at Virginia Tech, to Iowa City where she was about to become a student again, in the University of Iowa's creative non-fiction programme. Yay me! I deserve a medal but will get one only if I bestow it upon myself.)

I shot these pictures on that trip — the sculptures on the former Iowa City Press-Citizen building, which include methods of newsgathering (above; there's a star on the map of the U.S. where Iowa City is), and these symbols of what goes on in Iowa City and environs:

This time I had other things to do in Iowa City than to contemplate the future of newspapers in particular and journalism in general, but as I post pictures of the sculpture on the buildings of other cities' current (and defunct) newspapers, I may do some musing on those subjects as well.

STOP! Don't click away from this site!

2009-07-26T23:31:00.006-04:00

This is still Terry Murray's blog, featuring gargoyles and other architectural sculpture from Faces on Places and elsewhere.

I just felt the need for a change.

What do you think?

They're everywhere! Part 2

2009-07-26T12:47:00.011-04:00

A few weeks ago, I posted a picture of a gargoyle at Denver International Airport, remarking on how gargoyles (generically speaking) seem to appear everywhere.

Guess where else they appear? How about on a mausoleum? This guy (above) is on the Massey mausoleum in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Yes, that's the "Massey" of Massey Hall, Massey-Ferguson, Raymond Massey (the late actor) and Vincent Massey (the first Canadian-born governor general of Canada).

It's not as though the Masseys couldn't have afforded a proper gargoyle. I mean, look at this spout (below) with all the fancy detail around it. With the face on the turret, why couldn't they have sprung for a face on the spout that would turn it into an honest-to-god gargoyle?

Sculpture: from clay model to bronze statue

2009-07-18T12:49:00.011-04:00

Earlier this week, I was one of 20 people on a tour sponsored by the Art Gallery of Ontario of the Artcast foundry in Georgetown, where Eric Knoespel (left) and his staff have been casting sculptures in clay and other impermanent materials into bronze and other metals for years.

We were walked through all stages of the process, from producing a rubber mold of the original (on the table in the picture at left), to making a wax duplicate which is then covered with a ceramic shell mold (which Eric is displaying, above and below).

(See the red wax inside the ceramic shell? Click on picture to see larger.)

The wax is then melted out of of the ceramic shell. The shell is fired for extra strength and then placed in a bucket of sand, at which time the molten metal is poured in the ceramic mold:

The mold and metal are left to cool, at which point the ceramic mold is chipped away, and voila! A bronze sculpture!
Okay, this is a very oversimplified explanation of how it's done — there are several additional steps throughout the process I've described, and afterward. For example, the Glenn Gould statue in front of the CBC Broadcasting Centre on Front Street was cast by Artcast, and a work that size has to be done in pieces, which means there are later steps in its reconstruction.
But essentially, that's how it's done. And Eric gave a great tour.

Shaking Man

2009-07-12T12:20:00.019-04:00

Back on June 22, when I posted the picture of one of Terry Allen's gargoyles in Denver International Airport, I mentioned "Shaking Man," his sculpture in San Francisco. Well, here it... I mean, here he is, from a couple of angles.

Isn't he great? Even though I think Terry did a particularly good job on the tie, I shot a close-up of the Shaking Man's extended hand. Those seemingly unattached fingers really contribute to the shaking effect.

Happy 4th of July!

2009-07-03T07:46:00.004-04:00

"Close enough," this girl seems to be saying to herself about the work of the artist outside Washington's National Cathedral.
This is the best I can do for a 4th of July picture. It's not a bad choice though - it's in the national capital, it's a building liberally festooned with gargoyles and it was taken during the summer. Well, truth is, it was mid-spring, but still...
More on the National Cathedral gargoyles later. In the meantime, Happy 4th!

Canada Day: The night before, the day after

2009-07-02T20:23:00.007-04:00

These are not my proudest photographic moments, but I offer them in the spirit of Canada Day.
I've been in our nation's capital (Ottawa) for the last 10 days, covering a pediatrics conference for the Day Job and then visiting with my sister. We drove past Parliament Hill on the night before Canada Day (30 June would be the night before, and 1 July was the Big Day itself), and witnessed chanteuse Sarah McLachlan doing her sound check for the big show the next day.
I didn't have a tripod but got this picture of Sarah on the big screen, with a few adoring fans gathered below.
This is a blurry version of what the stage looked like:

And this is the overall view, with the Parliaments Buildings and Peace Tower providing the backdrop.

Next time I'll know to bring my tripod.
So that was Canada Day Eve, and because I was travelling back to Toronto on the day itself, I wasn't able to post until now. So a belated Happy Canada Day to everyone!

What is this man doing?

2009-06-30T00:54:00.005-04:00

If there were no words, would this sign say "Hazardous bridge ahead" to you?
Or would it say "Watch the road when you ride your bike"?
I shot this while on a tram tour of Saguaro National Park outside Tucson in 2003. When I picked up the processed film (yes, it was in the olden, film days), the woman who had done the work pulled this picture out of the pack and said, "It looks like he's peeing!"
The picture could have been used to illustrate this story from Bloomington, Minn., last April about a man who was trying to pee off a bridge but fell to marshy area below. The awkward headline was "Man Falls Urinating Off Highway 77 Bridge."

Mayflower madam?

2009-06-29T13:00:00.001-04:00

Another picture from last fall's visit to Washington, D.C., and more sculpture on the Mayflower Hotel. Although I doubt this lady is a "madam."

Wide-mouthed lion

2009-06-29T06:00:00.003-04:00

Having just covered another pediatrics conference for the Day Job, I'm taking a few days off to turn our national holiday (Canada Day, formerly Dominion Day, July 1st), which falls on a Wednesday this year, into a long, long weekend.
So, another post from a past trip. This one is a lion mascaron from the Mayflower Hotel (yes, that Mayflower - as in Mayflower Madam, and home base for former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's downfall) in Washington, D.C. I shot this when I was at an infectious diseases conference there last fall.

They're everywhere!

2009-06-22T07:49:00.001-04:00

Even airports have gargoyles!
This guy—one of a pair called, collectively, "Notre Denver" by Terry Allen—watches over the baggage claim area at the Denver International Airport. He... I mean, they... were installed as part of the then-new Denver airport's ambitious art programme in 1994.
("Notre Denver"... geddit? geddit? As in the gargoyles on Notre Dame in Paris?)

I actually shot this guy back in 2003, but I've recently been going through my boxes of prints (from back in the 35mm film days) and scanning some of them. So for the next week or so, while I'm covering yet another conference for the Day Job (about which, more later) I'll be posting some older pictures.
Which reminds me — Terry Allen has a freestanding bronze sculpture in San Francisco called "Shaking Man" which I also shot. When I find that print, I'll scan and post it here. It is very shaky. Even the guy's tie. You'll see...

Silly putti?

2009-06-18T21:00:00.007-04:00

Not a chance. These putti ("cherubs" is really simpler and doesn't sound as pretentious) seem to take their job very seriously. Whatever their job is. I think they're merely decorative. Who would give a gargoyle's job to an out of shape boy? Certainly not the architect of the Burrage mansion!
The Burrage House was built in 1899 as the winter home for attorney, businessman, philanthropist and copper magnate Albert C. Burrage and his family, so says a report by the Boston Landmarks Commission.
It remained in the Burrage family until the death of Burrage’s widow Alice in 1947. Since then, it has been converted, in turn, into doctors' offices, a clinic, a nursing home and condominiums. (In fact, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady lived there until recently.)

Charles Brigham was the architect and Hugh Cairns is thought to have done most of the sculpture. Cairns was a Scottish artist who counted H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church in nearby Copley Square among his other significant projects.
With this mansion, Burrage and Brigham were hoping to achieve the opulence of New York's Fifth Avenue, where the Vanderbilt and Astor mansions were built in the chateau style. In fact, the Burrage House is said to be "the only fully executed chateau in Boston," inspired by Chenonceaux, a chateau built in the Loire Valley between 1513 and 1521.
A report by Otis & Ahearn Real Estate estimated that the house's exterior sports nearly 200 griffins, dragons, gargoyles and cherubs.

The American Institute of Architects' Guide to Boston called it "the one exception to Boston's avoidance of flamboyant architecture."
The Boston Landmarks Commission report also says it's apparent that for Brigham and Burrage, "complexity was favored above simplicity, magnificence above charm, and stimulation above peace."
However, this fellow seems to have found some peace and stimulation (of the intellectual variety).

Wedged in at the Burrage

2009-06-14T06:15:00.011-04:00

It was a bit tricky shooting this critter at the Burrage in Boston two weeks ago. He's located right in the corner (and in the right corner) above the front door. So the lighting was problematic as was his position. But I think I've managed to capture him well enough here.

This putto (below; putto is the singular of putti which is what chubby, winged male figures are called who aren't really angels; it's not wrong to call him a cherub, although it should be made clear that "cherubs" are not really related to the Cherubim. Got that?) and his lions are also wedged in a corner - more obviously than the griffin above. I mean, the poor lion on the right is roaring straight into the wall.

I spy...

2009-06-10T07:26:00.004-04:00

Back at H.H. Richardson's Trinity Church, a gargoyle peers over the shoulder of a saint.

Both of them actually looked away when this fellow (below) came by to use the church wall just below them:

Back to Boston

2009-06-09T13:52:00.005-04:00

Well, not literally. I mean back to Boston for blog purposes. This fellow and his compatriot (below) adorn the doorway of Burrage House, formerly the Burrage mansion. The one clear day I had for shooting was intermittently brilliantly sunny (hence the deep shadows and warm tone to the first monk playing peek-a-boo)

and the somewhat duller but more even appearance of his buddy.
Burrage House was a riot of gargoyles, grotesques and other architectural ornament. I particularly liked this fellow at the base of a conical roof. Or maybe I just liked the colour and texture of those roof tiles.

Newspapers on the web...in 1981

2009-06-08T12:54:00.004-04:00

Way back in 1981, this report appeared on KRON-TV News in San Francisco. This not-young man who OWNED A HOME COMPUTER had dispensed with reading his daily newspapers on paper in favour of reading them online. It took only two hours to download the paper using his Radio Shack computer and acoustic coupler. "We're not in it to make money," says the editor from the San Francisco Examiner, and 30 years later, newspaper publishers still haven't figured out how to make their websites pay.
"Engineers now predict that the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer," says KRON reporter Steve Newman, "but that's a few years off."

Last glance at Baltimore

2009-06-07T13:38:00.007-04:00

I didn't like Baltimore. I probably didn't see enough of it or at its best, but what I did see didn't really make me interested in going back. I spent most of my time at a pediatrics conference for the Day Job, but on the shuttle to and from it every day, I saw a depressed, boarded-up downtown. The skies were slate grey and rained much of the time I was there, which didn't help my impression either.
But I did see a bit of architectural sculpture. These figures on the defunct Hotel Junker caught my attention because this type of architectural ornament really doesn't appear anywhere in Toronto.

When these supporting sculpted figures are female, they are called caryatids, but males are known as telamones (singular: telamon) or atlantes (singular: atlas as in Atlas, who bore the sphere of the heavens on his shoulders.

Toronto actually does have one (below, as shown in Faces on Places), on the former Bank of Montreal that is now the Hockey Hall of Fame. He is mostly identified as Hermes, though - the god of commerce.

Back in Toronto

2009-06-05T20:39:00.012-04:00

So when I was driving around the GTA a few weeks ago, I noticed a house that had a riot of birdhouses and garden ornament. There were these bird condominiums (left - sadly the clouds rolled in for this shot), and this interesting configuration of birdhouses on the wall of the human-house:

It was a corner house, and when I turned into the perpendicular street, I saw a profusion of garden ornament, of which this picture offers only a hint:

Okay, so they're not gargoyles, but I shoot a lot of things.

❖❖❖

A friend drove me home from the Distillery District a few weeks ago, where I'd read from Faces on Places as part of Toronto's 175th anniversary (the theme of which was Toronto writers and books about the city) and Doors Open Toronto. We took a short cut which took us past a garage with the head of Caesar on one corner of the roof

and a lion or cat over the main garage door. Of course I was curious about who they were and why they were there, so I phoned the people listed as living there, and learned they were props from a couple of movies that were shot here - "Bulletproof Monk" and "The Incredible Hulk."

The props (made of styrofoam, by the way) were just sitting around, so the owner of this house (a carpenter in the biz) rescued them and gave them a good home - his.

B-2

2009-06-03T01:07:00.012-04:00

Here I am in the second stop in the B-city tour — Boston, aka Beantown, where I've been staying in Back Bay. (Can't get much B-er than that.)
This is a gargoyle on Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church on Copley Square, against a reflection of the sky in the windows of John Hancock Tower (not to be confused with the John Hancock CENTER in Chicago). I shot this on Saturday, just before a conference on organ transplantation started (which I'm covering for the Day Job) and when it was sunny and bright.
On the opposite side of Copley Square is the Boston Public Library, the main door of which is guarded by this fellow (who, please notice, is announcing that the library is free TO all — he is NOT encouraging a free-FOR-all).

It may have been sunny and bright since then, but I've been indoors , seeing as the shortest (and quickest) distance between my hotel and the convention centre is through several pedestrian overhead walkways and one shopping mall.
However, tomorrow (when it is supposed to cloud over and rain), once I've covered the last presentation, I plan to head out and shoot some more of Boston.
I still have a few souvenirs of Baltimore to share with you, as well as the shooting I did in Toronto — AND a report on the late Michael Camille's book on the gargoyles of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which was delivered just as I was leaving for my trip here.

So stay tuned.

A brief note about Henry Hobson Richardson: his style appears in turn-of-the-century (19th turning into 20th, that is) buildings in Toronto as well. Examples of it are in the previous posts "Watcher at the Window" and "I'm back, baby!"

B-cities

2009-05-30T23:46:00.004-04:00

For the day job, I have begun a tour of major U.S. cities beginning with the letter B, or so it seems. Actually, it's only two cities - Baltimore and Boston..
The entire time I was in Baltimore, the skies were slate grey and it rained almost every day. The city - or what I saw of it - was quite depressed and boarded up. The conference, although interesting, presented new challenges for covering as a reporter. Medical groups, for reasons that escape me, are clamping down on photography and audio recording - which we rely on as supplements to our old-fashioned notetaking. Unaware of the ban on photography, I merrily shot some pictures (okay, not so merrily), and was nearly carted off in handcuffs for it.
So, apart from dinner with a friend, my best time in Baltimore was travelling out to Frederick Douglass High School and shooting reliefs like this one on the building. The reliefs all featured females, which makes me think this used to be a girls school - especially since it's the latest, in a long string of locations, for Frederick Douglass H.S. In fact, I was looking for one of the earlier incarnations, which I knew had clever little sculptural figures. But I'm not disappointed I wound up at the current school.

Watcher at the window

2009-05-16T21:37:00.005-04:00

A couple of Fridays ago, the weather in Toronto was glorious - sunny, warm - and it promised to be the same on the weekend. So late on that Friday afternoon, I managed to get a deal on a rental car, and spent the weekend driving around the GTA (Greater Toronto Area - yes, I even ventured into Mississauga) and shooting.
This house is one of my finds. In the University of Toronto Annex neighbourhood, it has two faces on either side of the main door, and a face on each of two bay windows.
The late architectural historian Patricia McHugh described this house as having "too many quick and fussy decorative details for its own good," but I think that's a bit harsh.

Toronto faces by Harry Wayne Owen

2009-05-13T21:14:00.003-04:00

Back somewhere in the depths of 2008, master carver, sculptor and painter Harry Wayne Owen (of Harry's Folly) and I swapped our handiwork. I sent him a copy of my book, Faces on Places, and he sent me some of his sculpted ornaments.
Working down in Atlanta, he then interpreted some of the faces in my book and produced the ornament you see here. (He posted others on his own site back in January.) This fellow and his confreres are from Toronto's Old City Hall.
Wayne's ornaments are great, but his walking sticks are fabulous. Be sure to swing by his blog.

I'm back, baby!

2009-05-12T21:30:00.003-04:00

Okay, this time I REALLY am back, baby! It's springtime and I have bagged me lots of faces, in Toronto and elsewhere, to share with you. This fellow is from a house in the Annex and here

is his buddy, on the same house. I don't know their stories, but will find out.
For now, I just wanted to get back to posting.

How will "ER" end?

2009-02-23T17:32:00.008-05:00

My sisters - Roxe from Ottawa and Marge in Iowa City - and I have been fans of "ER" from the beginning of the series, lo these 15 years ago. But in recent years (like, maybe the last 10?), the plots have become increasingly grim, leading us to speculate on just how (apart from bringing back many of the former stars of the show) the producers would end the series. I mean, they started off this last season by adding Dr. Greg Pratt to "ER" docs they've killed - Drs. Mark Greene, Lucy Knight, Robert Romano, Michael Gallant (in Eye-Rack), Dennis Gant among others. (Of course, there was Dr. Ray Barnett - they didn't kill him; they just amputated both of his legs.)

Roxe is not one for idle speculation. No, she has planned out the remaining few episodes, and included dropped characters and plot lines. I'm sure the real thing won't be anywhere near as good as this.

First, a note: "Aunther" is a current character -- she's the aunt/acting mother (hence Aunther) of a little white girl. Aunther is dying and desperately needs a new heart. The Little White Girl (TLWG) is coping remarkably well with her aunt/mother's illness, and is mature beyond her (and the entire ER combined) years. One is led to believe the Banfields (Doctor, played by Angela Bassett, and her husband, played by Courtney B. Vance, Angela's real-life hubby) will adopt the child -- hence little WHITE girl... Big Susie is, of course, Susan Lewis, and Druggie is her ne'er-do-well sister Chloe, birth mother of Little Susie.

Roxe's story line includes key elements like stuff ripped from the headlines, and that all-important Canadian Connection (and to a former Prime Minister no less!!!).

Herewith Roxe's vision of how ER will end:

ER – THE FINAL EPISODES

Starting from the information contained in the last episode (2009-02-19), here’s the way it will end…

• Dr. Carter
John Carter and his French wife have been having marital difficulties – her constant babbling in French has gotten on John’s nerves, giving him headaches. In an effort to work off his frustration with his wife, he has started an intensive work out regimen, causing aching muscles. He’s been taking vast quantities of Advil extra strength gel caps for both the headaches and the muscle pain, and sadly has gone into acute renal failure (hence the dialysis). One of the last arguments John and his wife had before their departure from Darfur was her saying «Dit vous ainsi - c'est échec rénal de ces dragées à la gelée de sucre de rien d'un dieu que vous avez étées décriquage! Maintenant regard - il est permanent. Retournez à vos copains Chicago et voyez s'ils peuvent vous aider. Vous n'écouterez pas MOI! » (or en anglais, “Told you so – it is renal failure from those god damn jelly beans you’ve been scarfing! Now look – it’s permanent. Go back to your buddies in Chicago and see if they can help you. You won’t listen to ME!”) They part company.

• Paging Dr. Benton
John shows up in Chicago, gets a job at County, and seeks out Peter Benton for help with his failing kidney(s). John phones Peter from the County General break room, but gets his answering machine. Peter, who has been learning French in advance of an upcoming holiday to Shawinigan, Que. (which includes a special seminar on choke holds in the martial arts from a local master), has recorded an outgoing message in that language. Carter, on hearing the French, momentarily loses his mind, has a muscle spasm, and inadvertently stabs himself in the arm with a pen. He bandages the wound, but the blood seeps through the bandage, his long-sleeve t-shirt and his scrub top while working on a trauma case in the ER. People notice. How embarassing...

• The end of Drs. Carter and Benton
Peter Benton learns that Carter is trying to contact him, and shows up at County. Sadly, Carter has become septic due to the stab wound, collapses and dies in the ER. Benton enters just after Carter’s collapse, trips over the lifeless body, whacks his head on the corner of the admin desk and dies from head injuries.

• Green ribbon confusion
Meanwhile, County staff are confused by John Carter’s green ribbon, thinking it is promoting organ donation and not kidney disease awareness (or the other myriad causes it represents, including depression (both adults and children), bipolar disorder, mental health or illness, eye injuries, Tourette’s Syndrome, bone marrow transplants and donation, Fanconi’s Syndrome, worker and driving safety, Von Hippel Lindau, glaucoma, missing children, leukemia, environment, fibrodysplasia ossificans, neural tube defects, mitochondrial disease, growth and rebuilding, Progressiva, cerebral palsy, Save Darfur, and stem cell research, but not to be confused with the lime green ribbon which stands for... oh never mind).

• Goodbye Dr. Rasgotra
Miraculously, Aunther has survived the botched heart transplant, is rushed to the OR where Neela transplants Carter’s heart without realizing there was a problem with sepsis. (Hey, he was a doctor and if he was wearing the ribbon it must be OK to transplant his organs…) Alas, after the transplant Aunther buys the farm for real this time, which causes The Little White Girl to completely lose it. TLWG proceeds to beat Neela to death with one of the hearts Aunther had, and is then arrested. Of course, no jury will convict her.

• Archie and the Susies and some others
In the meantime, Druggie Lewis (Chloe) is back in Chicago, running away from her husband. After years of being clean and sober, Druggie is hooked again, and is using Little Susie in assorted plots to get money for her habit. Big Susie (Dr. Susan Lewis) comes after her and they meet up in the ambulance bay at County. A cat fight ensues, with Big Susie and Druggie slugging it out. Archie, Frank and Jerry come out to see what the commotion is, and start laying odds and taking bets on the outcome. Unfortunately Archie’s lady cop buddy (Claudia) comes to break it up, tasering them all repeatedly. She’s still p.o.’d because Archie embarrassed her in front of Salter, her cop mentor. Salter beat an innocent suspect to death and Claudia was trying to stick to The Code - not ratting out your cop buddies, even if they do something heinous. (One wonders if that has anything to do with the "accidental" surprisingly high voltage on the taser.) Archie, Frank, Jerry, Big Susie, and Druggie all die as a result. Which leaves Little Susie all alone.

• Paging Dr. Banfield
Banfield comes to the rescue, comforts Little Susie, and contacts her father. Her father, distraught, crashes his car on the way to catch a flight to Chicago and dies. The Banfields decide to adopt Little Susie – now their family is complete. And bonus -- they can both retire. In addition to their savings, pension, the $15K they didn't have to spend on IVF, and the insurance money from their first kid (who died at County General), they know they can always earn extra pocket money running scams with the experienced Little Susie.

• Paging Dr. Clooney... I mean, Dr. Ross and Nurse Hathaway
The multiple tragedies at County make the national news, even in Seattle. Doug Ross, Carol Hathaway and their twins travel back to Chicago to comfort the remaining people at County. On the same day the Ross/Hathaway clan visit County, Sam and Tony, wanting to keep their kids close given the recent events, bring them to work. The kids (Alex and Sarah) sneak off to a supply closet, set up and light 50 or so candles to enhance the mood, and proceed to make whoopee. The candles are, of course, knocked over, and the room catches fire. County, in debt because of all the insurance payouts from all the recent deaths, has disconnected the sprinklers and removed batteries from the smoke detectors in cost-saving measures. Unfortunately, as the unnoticed fire reaches further into the ER, multiple oxygen tanks explode.

• Holy helicopters!
The fire at County unfortunately occurs at rush hour. Two traffic helicopters hover overhead to report on the fire and resulting traffic delays and detours. The two helicopters get too close, their blades collide, and they plummet. They land in the fire and exploding oxygen tanks, causing the total destruction of the entire hospital.

But all is not lost -- Chicago Hope is now able to reopen!

•Not quite The End...
That’s not quite the end of it -- the publicity of County's demise (the building, staff and patients) becomes front page news. Or at least Section 1 news. In a surprising plot twist, we find Bob the Polish thoracic surgeon working for the Chicago SPCA, unable to resume work as a surgeon because the AMA won't recognize her foreign credentials. (SPCA pays better than cleaning the ER... Remember? Back in Season 1?) Adding insult to injury, Bob lays posthumous charges of animal neglect and abandonment -- Susan's cat and Greene's dog. (Remember? Back in ...)

NOTE: The possibility for spin-offs and/or resurrection still exist as a number of the characters actually survive. Consider “Chicago SPCA” starring Bob; or numerous possibilities for storylines around the Banfields as well – related to Chicago Hope; a “Little Miss Marker” remake starring Little Susie… We can’t rule out an ER franchise either -- “ER: North Carolina” starring Elizabeth Corday; “ER: Paris” starring Carter’s wife. All is not lost.

Back in a minute...

2009-02-03T18:49:00.001-05:00

I have sadly neglected this blog for several months, but now I'm back... or will be in a minute or two.

Patricia McHugh

2008-11-13T03:16:00.001-05:00

Patricia McHugh, who wrote one of the seminal books on Toronto's architecture, died in September in New York. Her death went largely unreported here, which is a shame since her book — Toronto Architecture: A City Guide — is one of the key references, along with Toronto, No Mean City by Eric Arthur, for anyone who's interested in this city's built heritage. There were two editions of the book, both published in the 1980s. It's sad to see how many buildings were demolished between publication of the the first and second editions, and then to see how many of the buildings in the second book are no longer standing.

When I began research for Faces on Places, I wanted my own copy of McHugh's book, but it was out of print and seemed to be unavailable. I kicked myself, remembering that I'd seen it in the World's Biggest Bookstore when it was new, but my funds were low at the time and I didn't think I had a spare $15. I subsequently found the book on eBay and bought it, from a seller in San Antonio, for $5 U.S.

I read about McHugh's death in Catherine Nasmith's Built Heritage News. The only other obit I found was at the Website of the Municipal Art Society of New York, which also has two quite nice pictures of her. (The MAS didn't respond to my request to use one of the pictures here; hence, the rather uninspired photo of my copy of the book.)

Yma Sumac, 1922-2008

2008-11-06T19:30:00.001-05:00

Yma Sumac, a Peruvian singer with a four-octave range, died last weekend. You can read her obit in the New York Times, and see more about her on her Website.

The way I heard of her was through Thomas Meehan's New Yorker story "Yma Dream," which is performed in the YouTube clip above by Christine Baranski. The visuals are just pictures of everyone mentioned in the story.

During David Letterman's rather disastrous hosting of the Academy Awards a few years ago, I don't think anyone got it that his bit of introducing Oprah Winfrey to Uma Thurman, and then to Keanu Reeves ("Oprah, Uma; Uma, Oprah; Oprah, Keanu...") was in fact modelled on this story.

This story begs to be heard. I don't think simply reading it off the page, silently to yourself, could have the same effect.

OBAMA!

2008-11-04T23:11:00.002-05:00

Gargoyle from Design Toscano

The U.S. Election in Gargoyles

2008-11-04T11:02:00.009-05:00

Gargoyles from Design Toscano

When it's all over, one of them will be president, and one will still be a gargoyle.

Bunch of bloggers

2008-11-02T20:56:00.009-05:00

Last weekend (starting on Thursday the 23rd) a bunch of bloggers descended on Washington, D.C. The bunch was not, alas, as numerous as initially planned but we carried on. I was there, principally to cover a major infectious disease conference for the Day Job, and consequently did not get to hobnob with the other bloggers (largely sketch-bloggers) as much as I would have liked. Still, it was a treat to meet Sparky Donatello himself (he goes by a variety of other names including Wally Torta and Walt Taylor, but he'll always be Sparky to me), as well as Amanda of Craftmonkeys, her 16-month-old daughter Oonagh (who doesn't have a blog yet; slow learner, I guess), her sister Lydia who used to blog at Cootie Garage, and Sam of problemchildbride. In fact, you can see sketches, photos and tales of the weekend on their blogs.

I took my reportorial responsibilities so seriously I didn't even get out to hunt any new Washington gargoyles - although on the shuttle bus to and from the convention centre, I spotted this lion. At first, I thought he had buck teeth but that's a downspout. He graces the front of a former fire station on U Street.

Rumour has it that the bloggers (known, for reasons too detailed to go into here, as "Hosses") will meet again next year in New York, which has a gargoyle or two.

Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

2008-10-31T21:50:00.006-04:00

Ah, sad news out of Chicago: Studs Terkel died today at the age of 96.

Studs was many things: an actor (most recently in "Eight Men Out," the 1988 movie about the Chicago "Black Sox" scandal of 1919), a disc jockey, an activist and more. But he'll be remembered best for his interviews - radio interviews with just about anybody who was anybody, as well as books of interviews with everyday people: people who lived on a single street in Chicago (Division Street: America), people who worked in all kinds of jobs (Working), people who came through the Great Depression (Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression) and the Second World War (The Good War), race relations in the U.S. (Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession), and many others.

I've been listening to WFMT radio, the Chicago station where Studs had a daily show for 45 years (and was billed in the staff directory as "free spirit"), which is running old interviews by him and reminiscences about him. One of the reminiscers said that Studs had been saying for the last year or so that he was ready to go - he'd apparently been telling everyone, "I ain't buying any green bananas!" But then last week, he said he had to live to see the outcome of the U.S. election. He was living in his own home, and his absentee ballot apparently arrived in today's mail.

Studs was one of my own heroes when I decided to study journalism. The great thing about his interviewing style was that he was fully engaged and certainly brought his own personality to his interviews, but he didn't dominate them. He didn't compete with his interview subjects, and he knew when to listen and let them take flight. As I write this, WFMT is replaying his interview with the U.S. contralto Marian Anderson, and she just spoke, uninterrupted, for at least four minutes.

Someone - it's attributed only to Newsweek magazine - said, back in the 1960s or 70s, that "No journalist alive wields a tape recorder as effectively as Studs Terkel." And it's also been said by several observers that Studs didn't invent oral history - but he might as well have.

I never met him. The closest I came was on a visit to Chicago in 1992, when he was participating in mock soapbox speeches in Bughouse Square, the informal name was given to Washington Square Park where cranks and religionists and labour unionists used to hold forth. The park is across the street from the Newberry Library, which has organized recreations of free-speech gatherings each summer in conjunction with its annual book sale. I took some pictures there, and when I find them, I'll post them, but in the meantime, I'm using the cover of his memoir that was published about a year ago. Another new Studs book - P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening - is scheduled to be released on 15 November.

You can read his obit in the Chicago Tribune here, and I found the following mp3 of his reflections on 40 years of interviews:

	Studs Terkel (c) HighBridge - Voices of Our Time

	Found at bee mp3 search engine

As Studs used to sign off his WFMT show: "Take it easy, but take it."

Ankle biters?

2008-10-15T21:55:00.007-04:00

Most gargoyles and other architectural sculptures appear *above* doors and windows, or at rooflines. But when I was in Montreal recently, I saw these two female heads at the bottom of the door frame.

Here's a closer view of the lady on the left:

And the one on the right:

In fact, the figure on the right has a companion who overlooks the steps up to the restaurant next door:

Merry Madmen of Montreal

2008-10-11T17:36:00.004-04:00

What can I possibly add to these pictures? Except to say that they all appear on one building, under windowsills, so they're quite low and easy to shoot... which I did, on my way back to the hotel on the last day of the CWAHI meeting.

Dora de Pédery-Hunt, 1913-2008

2008-10-09T09:48:00.017-04:00

I spent last Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Montreal at the inaugural meeting of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (CWAHI), where something startling, puzzling and disappointing happened.

CWAHI, based in the Art History Department at Concordia University, is a project aimed at bringing scholars together to promote research about Canadian women artists — those born before 1925 and who did most of their work before 1967 and who were overlooked in survey texts and courses on Canadian art history, and who have been neglected by galleries and other institutions and consequently rarely known to the general public.

On the last day of the meeting, I read the Globe and Mail during the lunch break, and saw an obit for Dora de Pédery-Hunt. She died on 30 September at the age of 94. She had been a major Canadian sculptor who produced medals primarily (although not exclusively). You may not have heard her name, but you've seen her work — she sculpted the image of the Queen that appears on Canadian coins minted between 1990 and 2003.

I returned to the final conference session early to mention Dora's death to one of the organizers. Her response threw me: "I'm not going to announce her death," she told me. "It's all I can do to get through this conference." She was clearly stressed, and anxious for the conference to go off without a hitch, which, as far as I could tell, it had done.

But how distracting or disruptive is a simple mention of the death of a leading Canadian artist — and at a conference devoted to the study of Canada's women artists? The mind reels. As I walked away, the organizer allowed as how "that's the kind of information we (CWAHI) need to keep track of."

That's Dora in the picture above in March 2003 when she was presented with the J. Sanford Saltus Award for Signal Achievement in the Art of the Medal by the American Numismatic Society (ANS). (She is flanked by Stephen Scher on the left, who endowed a lecture that is presented every year in conjunction with the Saltus Award presentation, and Robert Wilson Hoge on the right, the ANS's Curator of North American Coins and Currency.)

The Saltus Award citation called Dora "one of the foremost, and most prolific, medallic sculptors of the 20th and now of the 21st centuries," "a premier artist of Canada" and "Canada's grande dame of medallic sculpture."

I met Dora only once, about 18 months ago. I included some of her work on Ryerson University's Kerr Hall in Faces on Places, my book on architectural sculpture in Toronto. (See picture below.)

She had heard about the book and asked to see it. I brought her a copy, and was then treated to a tour of her very cramped apartment in downtown Toronto. It was so full of photographs, sculptures in progress and completed work, that it was necessary to walk sideways. Her niece told me that Dora seemed to have projects planned for the next 20 years when she died.

I won't repeat the story of Dora's life here, which was extraordinary and well told in the obit by Sandra Martin in the Globe and Mail. If anyone from CWAHI swings by this blog, you might want to send an e-mail or letter to be read at her memorial service next month. It would make up for the puzzling refusal to seize the moment during the conference in Montreal.

Have you missed me?

2008-09-28T12:57:00.005-04:00

Ah, my poor, sadly neglected blog. September has been a busy month, hence the absence of updates. But that doesn't mean I haven't been out hunting for faces.

If I were to do Faces on Places over again, or a second volume, I would include a chapter on lions. Man, but there are a lot of lions in Toronto! Here is one of my favourites. If it were a human face tangled up in this foliage, it would be called a "green man." I don't know if there is a category of architectural sculpture known as the "green lion," but there ought to be, based on this example alone.

Lions may be so ubiquitous in architectural sculpture because of their frequent use in heraldry, and because they stand for virtually everything. About which, more later... but sooner, if you know what I mean.

Surprises in Scarborough

2008-09-09T09:00:00.006-04:00

This Reading girl and her Riting and Rithmetic friends were a pleasant surprise I discovered on a Scarborough public school. I'll be including all three Rs along with other Scarborough finds, in addition to a sampling of pictures and update on some of the buildings from Faces on Places when I speak to the Scarborough Historical Society in two weeks. (See the link to the left, under "Mark Your Calendar.")

Even more ruins!

2008-08-31T12:44:00.005-04:00

Guildwood Park in the east end of metropolitan Toronto (excuse me, that's the Greater Toronto Area, aka GTA) contains more than 70 architectural fragments and sculptures collected by Rosa and Spencer Clark. They rescued fragments from demolished buildings in and around Toronto and used them to create a sculpture garden.

To the right is the one of the columns from the Greek Theatre, which includes the lintel block, Corinthian capital, and two column fragments from the Bank of Toronto.

Below are fragments from the Temple Building and North American Life Assurance Company.

And below is an amalgam of the decorative elements from several demolished banks, and the limestone and marble entranceway of the Bank of Nova Scotia. At least, I think that's what it is. I left my map at home that day...

Where to relocate Our Lady of York?

2008-08-24T19:53:00.006-04:00

Despite the heat and humidity, about 90 people came out on Saturday afternoon for the Heritage Toronto "Faces on Places" walking tour downtown.
I discussed (and showed pictures of) the former York County Registry Office at 60 Richmond Street East, with its sculptures by Jacobine Jones of a woman and the County of York coat of arms, which I've written about here before. It was demolished last year and the sculptures are in storage, awaiting relocation, possibly to the new building that is going up on the site.
I referred the walkers to a really informative comment I thought had been left on one of those earlier posts - but discovered when I arrived home that the comment had been sent to me in an e-mail. I had intended to post it at the time (in April), but failed to.
So here it is now, hoping it's better late than never - but apologies for the delay to Stanley Dantowitz who was a former employee of the Registry Office of the East and West Ridings of the County of York, who provided the information.
"I had wondered what had happened to (the sculptures) in the recent demolition," he wrote. " I agree that they should be on display to the public outside a building, not inside. If they are not suitable to affix to the outside of the new building at 60 Richmond St East, I suggest that they be located in a nearby public park."
The County Registry Office was at Berti and Richmond from 1946 until the mid 1960's when it moved to the current Toronto City Hall, which also housed the City of Toronto Registry Office.
"Prior to the 1960's the City of Toronto and Land Titles Offices occupied a building just about where the south-west corner of the current Toronto City Hall is now. Between the south-west corner of the current Toronto City Hall and Osgoode Hall is a strip of lawn. In the centre of the lawn is a children's playground," Stanley said.
"Perhaps the sculptures could be located on the lawn south of the children's playground?" he suggested. "They would be almost on top of the site of the former City of Toronto and Land Titles Offices. A suitable plaque could describe the three former offices."
Stanley included Toronto Community Housing's Leslie Gash on the e-mail, and she replied after talking to Sherry Pedersen in the Heritage Section of the City Planning Department.
"We spoke last summer about the fate of the sculptures," Leslie said. " I have sent her your email Stanley as well as the link to your website Terry and the renderings of the new building. They are willing to look at other alternatives for the sculptures. We still have lots of time on this but it was good to get the discussion started."

That is very encouraging, especially because all too often, sculptures from demolished buildings are either lost, or place inside the new buildings, where they aren't seen by the public.

Stanley also provided some information on the "Deeds Speak" motto that appears on the County of York coat of arms. He cited an article by Carl Benn (PhD) in last summer in The Fife and Drum, the newsletter of the Friends of Fort York and Garrison Common.
Benn, who is chief curator of the City of Toronto Museums and Heritage Services, attributed it to the Rev. John Strachan while he was rector of the Town of York, who used the phrase in praise of the York Militia in the capture of Detroit during the War of 1812.

I'll stay on top of this, and will post news of further developments in a more timely manner.

More ruins

2008-08-14T03:16:00.008-04:00

Taking his cue from Mackenzie King's Kingsmere, Stephen Braithwaite used pieces of demolished Ottawa buildings (along with some new bronze sculptures) to create "Strathcona's Folly," a sculpture/play structure in Ottawa's Strathcona Park.

The somewhat unsettling looking faces are from a Bank of Montreal branch.

Ruins

2008-08-07T01:59:00.007-04:00

I am spending some time in and around Ottawa, and that included a visit to Kingsmere in Gatineau, Que., yesterday. That's the former estate of our WWII-vintage prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The grounds have several of these "faux ruins" that King brought in during the 1930s, largely from buildings being demolished in Ottawa. Not much in the way of faces, but neat ruins.
More about this later since I'm using a temperamental dial-up connection.

I will only add, for now, that this has got to be the most photographed scene at Kingsmere - portraits taken through this now-empty window. In fact, this woman was telling her children as she tried to arrange them (there's a third child you can't see - I think he fell off the back and down into a field of choke cherries)that when they got home, she would show them the picture her parents took of her in the same spot.

Making book on the Booker

2008-07-30T17:20:00.006-04:00

Congratulations to Joseph O’Neill whose new novel, Netherland, has been long-listed for the Man Booker prize. It was published in May to exuberant reviews (“rave” doesn’t begin to cover it) in the daily New York Times (by Michiko Kakutani) as well as snagging the front-page of the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.
In the Review, senior editor Dwight Garner called it “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”
He went on to say: “On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.”
Just after the long-list of 13 titles (known as the Booker Dozen) was announced yesterday (29 July), bookmakers William Hill opened the betting with Netherland their 3/1 favourite. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence was second with odds of 4/1.

In a news release listing the opening odds on the list, William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said, "Although Salman Rushdie is the man in form having won the Booker of Bookers, that book is now over 20 years old and his recent work has not been winning literary awards. However, Joseph O'Neill's novel, Netherland has been creating a real buzz and is also being suggested as the first novel to become a serious contender for the Bookie Prize - the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and for that reason we believe it is a worthy favourite.”
(Cricket among Commonwealth expats living in New York is one of the principal settings for the novel.)
I first encountered Joe O’Neill when I read a laudatory review of his second novel, The Breezes, in the Guardian Weekly. In those pre-Amazon days, I called a bookshop in central London and ordered a copy over the phone.

That novel—about a fortnight in the life of a family (the Breezes) who endure “misfortune of absurd but tragic proportions” (Amazon.co.uk)—was funny and poignant, and I felt compelled to write a fan letter.
At the time (the late 1990s), Joe—an Irishman, largely raised in the Netherlands, working as a barrister in London, but latterly living in New York City—was completing Blood-Dark Track, his investigation into secrets in the lives of his grandfathers—one Turkish, the other Irish. I read the book, and interviewed him about it by phone for an article I wrote for Spotlight, an English-language magazine published in Munich.
I met him for dinner when I was in New York on business in early 2002, at which time he said he was working on something to do with cricket. But since then, he has also been a regular contributor to The Atlantic and New York magazines.
Even if it weren’t for the personal connection, I’d be rooting for Joe to win the prize—for the £50,000, sure, but also because he’s a good writer, and Netherland (said she, having just started reading it) is terrific.
The short-list will be announced on 9 September, and the winner on 14 October.

Race Street Firehouse R.I.P.

2008-07-28T00:32:00.003-04:00

To update an earlier post: it appears that the Race Street Firehouse in Philadelphia has been demolished. I've checked periodically for news, and just found on the Philly Chit Chat blog, pictures of the demolition which started a week ago (21 July).
No word about the firemen gargoyles, but they were to have been saved.

That was the week that was

2008-07-21T00:18:00.008-04:00

Well, it looks like the interest in Terry (the L.A. Kings one) Murray has died down, judging by the Sitemeter stats for this here blog. So it's back to gargoyles, looking out my back window and monitoring the progress of the construction at the end of the street.
Thanks to everybody who swang by thinking this was the blog of Terry-the-Kings-Coach. I hope you weren't disappointed to find what you found.
I had to take my digital camera in for repairs on the weekend - good thing I bought the extended warranty and the shutter mechanism decided to die just weeks before it expired - and now I've got a streaming summer cold... just in time for my vacation.
But I will be posting nonetheless. Stay tuned.

Rear window, part 3: Men in trees

2008-07-18T23:54:00.008-04:00

The first of five weeks' vacation - which I am spending at home, working on the Merle Foster book (about which, more later) - has just ended. As I puttered around this morning, I heard the sounds of shouting and some kind of machinery.
I wasn't surprised seeing as there is construction going on at the corner (although I thought the heavy lifting was pretty much over) and for all I know, there is some going on at the other end of the street.
But when I moved to work in my study at the back of the house, it became clear what was going on. A truck drove slowly through the back lane, then stopped and a cherry picker rose up.

And lo, there was a man with a chain saw, lopping wayward branches from trees and tossing them to the truck below (occasionally getting them caught on hydro wires) where they were being fed to a wood chipper.
It made for intermittent entertainment over the course of about two hours, and a few good pictures.

Oh, and I guess that should be " 'man' in trees."

Coach Terry (the Other One) Murray

2008-07-18T18:11:00.006-04:00

Mon Dieu! Quel surprise! Terry Murray (one of the other Terry Murrays) has been (finally) named coach of the NHL's L.A. Kings!

If you think he and general manager Dean Lombardi look less than thrilled here, take a look at the picture on - and have a read of - the post on Greg Wyshynski's blog. And you can see more clearly in the picture there that the jersey seems to have pulled from a remainder bin, with its zero and eight numerals of different sizes.

More about that other Terry Murray

2008-07-17T11:00:00.008-04:00

Well, well - good luck to you, Terry, on your imminent appointment as coach of the L.A. Kings. The news, and the apparently protracted nature of the announcement, has driven literally hundreds of visitors to this site. (Yesterday there were more than 200!)
I can mostly thank Greg Wyshynski whose Puck Daddy blog on yahoo.com has linked to this one. He says, after a review of Murray's career, "So that's Terry Murray. And so is this [link here], and boy is he [crossed out after corrected by a reader] she happy about the extra Web traffic. Bottom line is that either of them is going to be an improvement over Marc Crawford."
So when I wash up in medical journalism and gargoyle hunting, I'll try for coaching an NHL team.

I'm not THAT Terry Murray

2008-07-16T00:54:00.005-04:00

I noticed that yesterday my blog had 65 hits! Sixty-five! Virtually all were from California and few visitors spent more than a few seconds.
I suspect it's because Terry Murray was in the news. Not me, but the Terry Murray who is the the former hockey player, who spent parts of eight seasons in the NHL, mainly with the Philadelphia Flyers but also with the Washington Capitals and the Detroit Red Wings.
He's probably better known as a coach than as a player - and now it appears that he's about to be named coach of the L.A. Kings. And all those fans thought this might be his blog, but they found out pretty quickly that it's not.
For today, at least, it will be even easier to tell.

I know there are a lot of Terry Murrays out there - a surprising number (well, it surprised me) - including the retired CEO of Boston's Fleet Bank and an Australian musician. There used to be a Terry Murray selling real estate here in Toronto, and a Terry Murray who worked in the Ontario Fire Marshal's office. And others.
And then there's me.
I guess when I run out of ideas for posts, I can run pictures and bios of all the other Terry Murrays.

Gargoyles of Washington, D.C.

2008-07-11T00:10:00.004-04:00

No, no, not Bush and Cheney and Co. And actually, this guy isn't strictly a gargoyle, but wotthell.

A friend and soon-to-be-former colleague is moving to Washington, D.C., shortly, and in her honour (and since I have no specimens from Victoria), I am posting this fellow who I shot on Connecticut Avenue in 2002.

From the street, I noticed what looked like several Atlases on the roof of a 1920s apartment building in the Dupont Circle area. They seemed to be holding the earth over their heads. But when I looked through my 300mm lens, I saw that they had horns!

The building manager let me go to the roof to get a closer look (which surprised me, given that it was so soon after 9/11, but I guess I didn't look like a terrorist and there were no major U.S. government installations in the immediate vicinity), where I shot two rolls of film (back in the film days). She also showed me the building's entry in "Best Addresses: A Century of Washington's Distinguished Apartment Houses," which described the figures as demons getting ready to drop boulders on intruders. Very welcoming...

There goes the neighbourhood (part 7)

2008-07-10T22:37:00.002-04:00

Too whacked tonight to do much more than post this picture, taken two days ago of the current state of construction of the two houses on the Woburn side. Not my best photographic effort, but the better camera is still ailing. More later, but ... must...sleep.

Trafalgar Square, Canada Day 2006

2008-07-02T09:15:00.007-04:00

Yesterday I was listening to "Q," yet another in a series of oddly-named CBC Radio 1 programmes. The largely pop culture show was being broadcast from Canada House in Trafalgar Square in London. Normally I actually can't stand listening to Q (and find its host a little too much in love with the sound of his own voice), but it gave me an idea. Two ideas, actually. The first idea... more of a thought actually... was Hey! I was in London on the 1st of July two years ago, and Trafalgar Square was all kitted out in Canadian flags and maple leaves and whatnot. I guess that wasn't a one-off event. The second thought was, after not being able to bag me (photographically) any gargoyles in Victoria, I could resurrect my now two-year-old pictures from London. Which actually are not all that spectacular because I was trying out my first digital camera - a point-and-shoot - at the time.

Then I had a nap. Which is why the pictures are appearing here a day late.

More Victoria

2008-06-29T00:43:00.004-04:00

I have posted so little this month that I decided to make up for it in the last days of June. My camera decided to function today (of course - not when I needed it for the pediatrics conference), so I took some pictures in my hotel room. Here, for instance, is my travelling buddy* studying a map of Victoria.

*This does not mean I am taking up hunting garden gnomes and giving up gargoyles.

Victoria, B.C.

2008-06-29T00:28:00.003-04:00

My camera decided to quit when I arrived in Victoria to cover the annual meeting of the Canadian Pediatric Society. So I have no Victoria gargoyles to show you. But I do have this great commerical for Lotto 6/49 from the B.C. Lottery Corporation. The music is great and I'm not sure who/what I'm more entranced by - the leaping cats or the woman's bowl of Froot Loops:

There goes the neighbourhood (part 6)

2008-06-08T18:56:00.003-04:00

Good Lord, but I haven't posted anything about the corner house(s) since March! I took this picture 10 days ago, and it's way, way out of date already. You can see here that they've added "bricks" to the house on the Jedburgh side, but that has progressed well beyond this point, and the house on the very corner on the Woburn side is looking quite "bricked" these days too.

And to think that grand old corner house was demolished only six months ago. Time is money! Gotta get these babies sold. Millions are at stake!

Gargoyles of Paris via Chicago

2008-05-19T00:40:00.008-04:00

At the time of his death from a brain tumour in 2002, University of Chicago art historian Michael Camille was completing a book on the gargoyles of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It's said to be the first comprehensive history of these world-famous gargoyles - which most people think were part of the original building, construction of which began in the 12th century. In fact, they weren't added until the building's restoration in the 19th century.

I've been waiting and watching for its publication, so imagine my delight when I saw on Amazon.ca that Monsters of Modernity: The Gargoyles of Notre Dame was scheduled for release this month. I checked the University of Chicago Press Website which also said its release was scheduled for fall of 2007, and then when I checked Amazon.ca again, it showed a re-revised release date of January 2009.

The University of Chicago Press confirmed that there was "a significant delay in the production of Gargoyles of Notre Dame," and that the current date they expect to receive stock is next January.

So I've pre-ordered my copy and you can expect to see a review here, whenever the book finally makes an appearance.