"Down in the Dump" below the Sidaway Bridge...

[First-time readers on Cleveland, Ohio's Sidaway Suspension Bridge are directed to my earlier articles on this website, from both 2011 and 2012.]

This long-postponed blog is in memoriam to Larry Lindsey, one of several "bridge-area" residents who I have had the pleasure of meeting since August, 2011. He is pictured here during our sole meeting, on Monday, April 9, 2012, just months before he passed away unexpectedly.

 Larry Lindsey with a part of the Heritage View Homes behind him, on the site of the Garden Valley Projects

 where he spent much of his youth (Monday April 9, 2012)

Whatever my timing, my hope is that the memories of Larry and others will aid in any efforts to revive and re-use the bridge.

I met Larry just after my most sobering time to date in the area of the bridge - during an exploration which I covered a year ago in "Barriers to Preservation - a walk south of the Bridge on April 8, 2012".

His positive recollections happened to largely be geared to the idea of nature in the city which I had already thought of as maybe the major basis on which the bridge can be re-used, and also took me out of the modest emotional "dump" where I had just been - saying that deliberately, as his greatest joy was in recounting time "down in the 'Dump' " - an area for trash lying partly below the bridge during his youth.

On the one hand, a number of the aspects he recollected could be taken as very negative and labeled just as displaying inner-city strife and filth - starting with the City of Cleveland using part of the Kingsbury Run Valley as a trash site, and affirming the sense of division which the bridge came to connote, or, more concretely, how Garden Valley boys would fight with white boys from the south side of the bridge.

A lot of that side of the ledger, though, seemed to be within a warm glow, as one of his major emphases in our short discussion was of the Dump as a "playground" in what sounded like a very nature-filled area, Larry commenting that he was familiar with "every fruit tree down there, apple trees, grape vines, salamanders, strawberry fields, onion fields...I'm telling you, I knew everything that was down there...we had trails all the way down there."


This was punctuated and framed by the literal nature of 2012, as he twice noted seeing a red-tailed hawk as we spoke and added that there were deers downhill from the old Garden Valley area as of much more recent times.

It's likely that this "outstretched" view of him...

came as he said "that was my thing, the Dump," but it definitely was taken as he felt a sense of ownership and happy times.  While I am sorry he is not still here, I'll also remember the feeling he expressed of being "fired up (to explore the Dump)" and I hope that the excitement he felt in April, 2012 for nature and a human landmark is transmitted to others.

***********************

Larry Lindsey was born on March 28, 1954 in Meridian, Mississippi and passed away in Cleveland on Nov. 16, 2012. He grew up in the Garden Valley projects from ages 4-19, served in the United States Air Force, worked as an electrician thereafter and lived in both Euclid, Ohio and the West Side of Cleveland.

His wife Rosa, in a phone call I had with her this past June (of 2013) noted that she grew up in Garden Valley as well, and I want to thank her for letting me add his recollections to this website.

Additionally, my thanks to Allen Norris, seen here near his Heritage View home this past August....

Allen was a friend of Larry when both of them lived in the the Kinsman neighborhood and he introduced me to him in April, 2012.

[Additionally, Larry and I expressed a mutual interest in walking downhill from the bridge when I'd make a future visit, and I pursued that through three cards to him thereafter, with the last one coming after his passing.]

While I may make changes to this blog, it will remain dedicated to Larry.

Cheyenne, Wyoming - ready for a second visit!

 On occasional visits to one of my brothers in the Denver area in recent years, we have been fortunate to take day trips out of the city, with the early trend on those sub-journeys being the almost magnetic attraction of the nearby Rocky Mountains, but on my most recent visit in late May, we decided to go to Cheyenne, partly with an interest in cities and its role as a state capitol.

Despite those two "credits" in its favor, my not knowing what to expect was conflated with at least a tiny dose of the underestimation that East and West Coasters can have for "fly-over" country. While Cheyenne is not large as compared with Denver., etc., and this may initially be illustrated with this wide-open space just nine miles south of the city and east of I-25.... 

 

as well as decidely non-dense scenes within the city limits, like this one perhaps two miles southwest of the Capitol building....

looking west on Lincolnway near Cutler

...Cheyenne definitely has the pleasures of old urban aesthetics and actually somewhat of an eastern feel which apparently stems partly from its boom-town days, after it was chosen over then-tiny Denver to gain a prominent spot on the transcontinental railroad as that line's creation was underway in the late 1860's.

That decision is at least one reason that Cheyenne's former Union Pacific Station, dating largely from 1887, is so beautiful....

and that it may have once housed the most important constituent in a city and state built, to a great extent, by the railroad, with it being said that the capitol, seen here....

 

was designed to face and pay homage to the railroad, housed at the south end of Capitol Avenue....

with the station "looking north" to acknowledge the State, as with the fashionable 1890's lady in the sculpture here in front of the station....

During our short time in Cheyenne, my brother Dan and I paid our respects at the Capitol, including, in part, its atrium....

and a room with paintings of a few of its chief executives, including Governor Nellie Tayloe Ross....

 

who was voted in over an opposing (male) candidate to fill out the remainder of her husband's term after he died in 1924 - not such an anomaly of feminism in a state where women got the right to vote in 1869 - before those of any other territory or state in the post-Civil War decades.(1)

Shortly after seeing the portrait of Governor Ross, Dan and I were about to meet another pioneer of Wyoming politics, as we looked at the House of Representatives' chamber on the east side of the Capitol.....

and began to note its paintings honoring figures from Wyoming's past, such as trappers....

with that elegance overlooking an empty chamber, and, at one of its desks, an open book on ethics; when he saw it Dan said "it looks like someone's working here off-season" and within perhaps a minute, the representative from that desk asked if we wanted to come into the chamber, and we readily accepted.

She was Lynn Hutchings...

and she identified herself as the "first Black conservative Republican" in the state's legislature. Representative Hutchings was a great host for our quick discovery of her working home, talking a little bit about her work, as here just outside the House chamber with Dan....

close to a few of the many photos on Capitol walls of Wyoming representatives and state senators over the years, including James Byrd, another Black representative from the Cheyenne area, of whom she said good-naturedly that "he and I are (as she then made a clashing sound)", and a respectful nod to his mother - H. Elizabeth Byrd, a representative in the 1980's pictured nearby, who was ailing in late May.

Besides her proudly wearing a politically right-wing mantle, and conscious of her race as she noted Whites having said "how dare you vote like you do (with their expecting a left-leaning approach since she is Black)", we did not talk politics as I recall, and certainly not in regards to the liberal and/or moderate ideologies that are a large part of the worldview in our family, but I sensed we might have had a constructive exchange of views and the type of conversation sorely needed in our sometimes way-too divided country.

On a lighter note, Dan and I achieved our life-long dream to dominate Wyoming and its huge tally of electoral votes, with me as the speaker and Dan ably if nepotistically assisting me as ambassador to Colorado....

(or at least basking in the glory of the speaker's platform for the few seconds it took Rep. Hutchings to take our picture!), but - all kidding aside....

Meeting Representative Hutchings was certainly one great part of a quick first visit for me to Wyoming's southeastern corner, and I hope that I will reacquaint myself with the state and its capital in the future.

********************************

(1) "Historic  Walking Tour / Downtown Cheyenne", by Richard Ammon [Cheyenne: Downtown Development Authority, 2011], pp. 27-28; .... 
"Dec 10, 1869:Wyoming grants women the vote" (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/wyoming-grants-women-the-vote), which interestingly, says that "[t]hough some men recognized the important role women played in frontier settlement, others voted for women's suffrage only to bolster the strength of conservative voting blocks. In Wyoming, some men were also motivated by sheer loneliness--in 1869, the territory had over 6,000 adult males and only 1,000 females, and area men hoped women would be more likely to settle in the rugged and isolated country if they were granted the right to vote."....
"TODAY IN 1869: WYOMING EXTENDS VOTING RIGHTS TO WOMEN" (http://westlawinsider.com/legal-research/today-in-1869-wyoming-extends-voting-rights-to-women/), which says in part that "when [in 1890 the] U.S. Congress threatened to withhold [Wyoming] statehood over the issue, Wyoming officials responded that [they would rather have the area] remain a territory for 100 years than join the union without women’s suffrage. Congress relented."

Monumental Denver - an introduction

This will be a quick celebration of a few high-profile sites I've seen in these last two days in the Denver area cityscape, the highest of them being the mountains, whether snow-capped or not...

 

 looking west to the Rockies from a train on the very new "West Line" of the public transit RTD system

...and the rest of them, in this article, being in the adjacent Civic and Arts Center areas of downtown, including, most dramatically, though now close to seven years old, the Hamilton Wing of the Denver Art Museum, with its main statement arguably in its "prow" (as I'd call it) jutting out over West 13th Avenue as if to challenge the south elevation of the Denver Public Library (DPL) main branch to the right...

...or as seen from a plaza just outside of the DPL...

 

 ...and from below on 13th Street...

with some big neighbors keeping it company, including the sculpture "Denver Monoliths"...

looking north towards a tower of the DPL main library

and, more whimsically perhaps, "Big Sweep" by (not surprisingly) Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen.... 

 (accompanied by a protective plaque in front of it...)

In closing, I hope that I have faithfully followed the above rules and that this submission will win the approval of the Denver City government, its City Hall seen in the right-side background below...

[...with the Denver Art Museum 1971 wing to the left]

...the city's business establishment north of the arts and government cluster...

and the State government, wrapping this up in a sense under its now imprisoned Capitol dome...

 

A brief walk on the "CU" campus in Boulder, Colorado

Yesterday, I was very lucky to take a brief walk in wonderful weather on the campus of what I've generally called the "University of Colorado" (!), as suggested by a carved "name plate" on one of its older buildings....

[the University's Powerhouse of 1909, also seen below...]

while the school is widely known as "CU" here in its home region.

The walk, which only scratched the surface of this post-Civil War institution, became a way to see a few uses of the area's beautiful stone, partly as it overlapped with campus design in general, AND the impressive natural surroundings, with it being harder to go wrong in the latter case.

The look of the campus is very much based on the local stone, and in the few CU buildings I have seen, it sometimes works, as in the beautiful simplicity, shapes and roof of the Mathematics Building's auditorium, and the way one of its diagonal lines blends into another angle of the Engineering Center, seen here in the right background....

and here with a larger part of the Math Building to the left....

At another level, it at least begins to be successful, as with Crosman and Reed Halls, in the right and left halves respectively...

with the two peaks of Reed perhaps reflecting the natural ones behind them...

At the same time, my walk easily led to a sense that there can also be an uneasy mix between the rusticism of the Italian and Italianate on the one hand and the manifestations of the modern, whether in the need for height, bulk or other utilitarian considerations.  The two key examples of the latter, in my partial exposure to the campus, were the very similar mid-rises known in shorthand as JILA and Gamow, which can be taken as one example of design, and, very nearby, the Benson Earth Sciences Building.

While I wouldn't put a bag over the two towers' heads if I was forced to take either of these twin sisters out on a date - given the attractiveness of their materials and a structure which lets in more light at the bottom level in each case, they do not display a graceful marriage of styles and needs, especially with Gamow's highest "notes" of an antenna on top of a bland, gray concrete block....

and the very nearby JILA...

but a la Martin Luther King's "do not judge a person by the color of their skin but by the content of  their character", things were a little more interesting inside, with an engaging potrayal at the ground level of the work of JILA....

the "Joint Institute of Laborataory Astrophysics", which was founded as a collaboration of CU and the Federal Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a few years before its tower was opened in 1967.

Gamow is named for George Gamow, who (with acknowledgement to a display case in the ground level at Gamow)....

  

lived from 1904-1968 and was active in astrophysics, cosmology and other fields, as well as being translated into several languages, as with these two books, among several in the case...

and appears to have had a sense of humor as he lobbied for (more space for his academic department I am guessing!) as in this 1964 cartoon by him....

Just east of Gamow, the Benson Earth Sciences Building continues the regional stone, but that clashes with dull whitish panels as with those on its left (or west) side...

Benson, with the east stands of Folsom Stadium just to the left

If the design of this and other structures are too close to earth, you can always turn to nearby and more elevated visitas, whether at least beautiful, as with the mountains seen in these photos to the west of JILA....

or arguably spectacular at the national level, for the "Flatirons" to the southwest....

[...as seen from the Warner Imig Music Hall and as seen with Libby Hall below....]  

Naturally and famously, the beauty of Boulder has attracted lovers of the outdoors and its rocky surfaces, and I began to see this love expressed on the surfaces of CU's campus. At first, I did not know what to make of someone climbing on the walls of university buildings, but learned a little bit about how they are a dress rehearsal, or an end in themselves, from Tom Williams...

who at 47 has been rock-climbing, both in mountain areas and at selected CU locations, since he was 12, and says that the latter recreation spot has actually been "very relaxing".

Additionally, both Boulder and CU have had a special place in his heart and mind since he was growing up in Denver, and, as "a little kid, wanted to go to CU", one reason being that "the romance of the pink stone was really overpowering", and something that he ultimately inhabited when he lived in a student dormitory at Sewall Hall, most likely seen here...

[https://housing.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/images-bldg-hall/IMG_3334.JPG]

and if so, definitely "romantic" as Tom said.

Tom and his wife run a business which imports goods from France, and he also shares his passion for climbing as a part-time teacher at the nearby Red Rocks Community College, with his being happy to give me a short visual lesson here on an east-facing wall at the basement level of the Engineering Center ....

Thanks, Tom, for sharing your interest, and good luck with your hopes to re-do your area home in the Boulder-area stone, as I "un-Bouldly"post, live at the main branch of the Denver Public Library on May 22, 2013:)!...

Cleveland in the News! Ugggggh...

This past Monday, along with people all over the country, and soon the world, I was greeted with the rarity of high-profile news from my native region. At first, it was very satisfying - from both a human perspective and the Cleveland "Chamber of Commerce" angle which is definitely in my mind at times like those - with the triumph over captivity of three Cleveland women - Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight - and the cheers of their neighbors when they were freed from ten years of imprisonment in the house of Ariel Castro near 25th and Clark not far from downtown. The neighborhood's joy was easily reminiscent of that of residents in Watertown, MA and other Boston suburbs last month following their brief lockdown during the manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombings.

Since then, in brief, the often prominent news of post-abduction and discovery on "NPR" and "BBC" has seemed more like "CDN" (Cleveland Depravity Network) where, as with Cleveland-area Puerto Ricans saying Ariel Castro was not representative of us, I as a Cleveland-area native would add to what I am sure current Clevelanders are saying,  that the 10 years of horror at 2207 Seymour Avenue are not representative of Cleveland.

Pittsburgh parallels converge, where five plus six equals one

 From a map of Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle", if dim but serviceable here....

 a closer look, as in so many cities, shows the routine site of numbered streets running parallel to each other - with specific reference here to Sixth and then Fifth Avenue two streets below that (with both of them visible under the "WOOD STREET" notation)....

but looking again at what's above, you will see that Sixth Avenue takes a turn for the weird below the right center of the map and intersects Fifth Avenue, with that encounter seen below in the flesh, or at least stone, glass and more, and where the tunnel to the right above Sixth Avenue - if built long after this strange meeting - makes me think that, in combination with nearby freeways, hasty urban renewal may have seen this latter part of Sixth Avenue as just a "pass-through" unworthy of renaming ....

looking west on 5th Avenue towards the intersection of 5th and 6th Avenues, Th., Jan. 3, 2013

On the other hand, I feel we have too few weirdnesses like this, so I'll take it! And whether it is an old or new story, it is even better in being graced by one of the great works of American architecture - the now ex-jail of the 1888 complex designed by Henry Hobson Richardson for the Allegheny County Courthouse - at its southwest corner, and partly seen here....

with one final view for now at the corner and more of the "Richardsonian Romanesque" landmark off to the left....