The other guy

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.

The last of Vancouver

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.

Vancouver nurses - and gargoyles

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

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)

City of angels

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?

Ben Franklin and Philly cheesesteak in... Boston?

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

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:

Back in business, baby!

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.

Calgary Herald

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)

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

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

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

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.

Canada Day: The night before, the day after

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!

Wide-mouthed lion

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!

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...

Last glance at Baltimore

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.

B-2

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

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.

Bunch of bloggers

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.