Many thanks to Doors Open Toronto and...

all the enthusiastic gargoyle hunters who came out for the Faces on Places walking tours! You have motivated me to update and maintain this blog after a lapse (due to the crush of work at my day job). Stay tuned - new posts coming soon! Keep looking up! For those of you who couldn't make it: CTV News walked with us on the first tour on Saturday (http://toronto.ctv.ca/ - look under "Latest Videos" tab on the right for "Doors Open city architecture tours kick off"), and CBC Radio's Here and Now promo'd the walks on Friday but they don't seem to have archived the interview (or not yet).

Gargoyles, whiskey and long life

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.

Sitting on top of the world!

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.

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.

Let's put on a show!

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.

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:

The strange obsessions of the gargoyle hunter

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

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.

STOP! Don't click away from this site!

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

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?

Happy 4th of July!

"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

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!

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...

I spy...

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 in Toronto

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

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!"

OBAMA!

Gargoyle from Design Toscano

The U.S. Election in Gargoyles

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

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.

Surprises in Scarborough

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.")