A Capitol Obsession, pt. 3

(continued...)

Victoria, British Columbia

Date: June 2010

Building: Neo-Baroque style. Completed in 1898.  Adesite.  Dome: Copper. Statue:  Capt George Vancouver. Francis Rattenbury, architect.

Trivia:  In 1932, murals depicting local history were painted in the dome, but the portrayal of indigenous peoples was viewed as insensitive. In 2007, the legislature carried out the seemingly contradictory action of spending millions to restore the murals to their original condition and then constructing false walls over them to hide them from view.

Comment:  Really a very nice government complex.  I'm not a fan of the baroque style, but I have to admit that is well executed here.  Some really lovely statuary distributed around the facade.

Rating: 



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Annapolis, Maryland

Date: May 2010

Building: Georgian style. Completed in 1779.  Brick.  Dome: Wood. No statue, but the lightning rod is original and was installed under the direction of Benjamin Franklin. Joseph Horatio Anderson, architect.

Trivia:  The Maryland State House is the oldest state capitol in continuous legislative use.  (Refer to New Hampshire's claim to see how petty organizations can get about being "the oldest.")  It is also topped by the largest wooden dome in the United States constructed without nails.  

Comment:  I love the warmth of the brick and the intimate scale of this building.  The octagon on which the dome rests is especially satisfying.  It is very cozily perched on a grassy wooded hill.

Rating:

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Austin, Texas

Date: February 2010

Building: Italian Renaissance Revival style. Completed in 1888.  Red Granite over limestone.  Dome: Metal. Statue:  The Goddess of Liberty. Elijah E. Meyers, architect.

Trivia:  This was built under one of the largest barter agreements in history.  The builder was paid with more then 3 million acres of public land in the Texas panhandle which ultimately became the biggest cattle ranch in the world.  Most of the construction was done by convicts.  It exceeds all other state capitols in size.

Comment:  Huge like Texas.  My appeciation of the building is unfairly clouded by how prominently and permanently Texas' identity in the Confederacy and as an independent nation are sort of brazenly on display in the rotunda floor mosaics.  You can easily see the simliarities between this design and the Denver capitol, with only slight improvement here.

Rating:

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Lincoln, Nebraska

Date: August 2009

Building: Streamline Moderne style. Completed in 1932.  Indiana limestone.  Dome: Gold tile. Statue:  The Sower. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, architect.

Trivia:  The tower was originally intended to house the State Library, so the ceilings are 17 ft high to accommodate lofty stacks.  Today it only houses offices.

Comment:  Stunningly beautiful and meaningful.  The soaring clean lines really inspire optimism.  The sculptural and decorative arts used to ornament the building both inside and out are really remarkable.  Some of the most striking interior design of any capitol I've seen.  The doors to the (now vacant because Nebraska is a unicameral legislative state) east legistlative chambers are memorable--using native American decorative motifs and combining them with art deco sensibilities that are entirely respectful but also entirely original.

Rating:

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Indianapolis, Indiana

Date: June 2009

Building: Italian Renaissance. Completed in 1888.  Indiana limestone.  Dome: Copper. Statuary above the portico:  The Westward Journey.  Edwin May, Adolph Scherrer, architects.

Trivia:  Faces directly onto the historic National Road.  It was wired for electricity when it was built, even though there was not yet any sort of electric grid in Indianapolis.

Comment:  Objectively, the building is lovely.  The extensive stained glass skylights in the interior are especially lovely.  Subjectively, it leaves me a little cold.

Rating:

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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Independence Hall

Date: April 2009

Building: Georgian. Completed in 1753.  Brick.  Spire: Wood.   Edmund Wooley, Andrew Hamilton, architects.

Trivia:  Was the Pennsylvania State House when the Continental Congress met here prior to and during the Revolutionary War.

Comment:  It's freakin' Independence Hall.  You think I'm going to criticize it?

Grade:

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Unfortunately, this is when I got my iPhone; prior to this I had not discovered RAZR self-portraits, so my prior capitol visits are not documented.  I was collecting picture postcards of each capitol I visited, but of course they are not digital.  I'm debating whether to continue discussing the capitols I've been to even though I'm missing pictorial evidence...   I think I will just have to think about revisiting and getting photos as my travels allow and post them when the timing seems right.

The sequence of my visits to the remaining capitols, as best as my memory can serve, is:

New Mexico
North Dakota
Virginia
Michigan
New York
Wisconsin
New York
Iowa
Montana
Idaho
Oregon
Utah
Kansas
Tennessee
Oklahoma
North Carolina
Kentucky
Ohio
Florida
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Rhode Island
Louisiana
Arkansas
California
Nevada

Yet to visit for the first time:

Missouri
Wyoming
South Dakota
Maine
South Carolina
Delaware
Mississippi
Alaska
Hawaii

A Capitol Obsession, pt. 2

Atlanta, Georgia

Date: February 2012

Building: Neo-Classical style. Completed in 1889.  Indiana Limestone.  Dome: Gold Leaf. Statue:  Miss Freedom. Willoughby J. Edbrooke & Franklin B. Burnham, architects.

Trivia:  There's very little of interest about this building.  It was meant to symbolize the New South as part of the reconstructed US.  Even with its golden dome, it just is pretty uninteresting.

Comment:  Uninspired.

Rating:

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Montgomery, Alabama

Date: January 2012

Building: Greek Revival style. Completed in 1851.  Brick.  Dome: Cast Iron.  No statue, but a very large clock over the pediment. Barachias Holt, architect.

Trivia:  Briefly served as the first capitol of the Confederacy.

Comment:  The most prominent feature of this building is how overwhelmingly white it is.  Seems whiter than the White House.

Rating:

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Washington, District of Columbia

Date: August 2011

Building: Neo Classical style. Begun 1793; last extension completed 1958.  Georgia Marble.  Dome: Cast Iron.  Statue: Freedom. William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, architects.  Grounds: Frederick Law Olmsted.

Trivia:  The original East front columns are now in the National Arboretum.

Comment:  What can one say.  It is the measure by which all other government buildings are measured.

Rating:

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Saint Paul, Minnesota

Date: September 2010

Building: Italian Renaissance style. Completed in 1905.  Georgia Marble.  Dome: Marble.  Quadriga: Progress of the State. Cass Gilbert, architect.

Trivia:  Patterned after St. Peter's in Rome.

Comment:  Another stunningly beautiful building.  The Daniel Chester French Quadriga sculpture is unfortunately hidden by scaffolding in my picture.

Rating:

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Denver, Colorado

Date: August 2010

Building: Neo Classical style. Completed in 1894.  Colorado Granite.  Dome: Gold Plate. Elijah E. Meyers, architect.

Trivia:  The steps approaching the building are marked in three different places as being 1 mile high, due to improvements over the years in calculating elevation.

Comment:  Ellijah Meyers almost made a career about doing nothing but design capitols.  I think the proportions of this dome are off--the actual dome seems too small for the colonnaded barrel just below it.

Rating:

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Boston, Massachusetts

Date: July 2010

Building: Georgian style. Completed in 1798.  Brick.  Dome: Gold Plate. Charles Bullfinch, architect.

Trivia:  The original shingle dome was first covered in copper by Paul Revere.  Later gilded, then painted black during the War, it was once again regilded in the 1990s.

Comment:  The building is sort of a mess due to an enormous yellow brick addition in the rear, but the core of the original building is beautiful and situated perfectly at the top of Beacon Hill overlooking Boston Common.

Rating:

To be continued...

A Capitol Obsession, Pt. 1

The first in a series of self-portraits documenting my quest to visit the state capitols...

Phoenix, Arizona

Date: November 2012

Building: Classical Ecclectic (?) style. Completed in 1901.  Malapai, Granite. Dome: Lead Alloy. Windvane:  after Winged Victory of Samothrace.  James Riely Gordon, architect.

Trivia:  This building is entirely a history museum with all government functions being conducted out of a number of undistinguished office buildings surrounding the original territorial capitol that the state sold and is now leasing back from a private developer.  The state seal mosaic in the rotunda floor is prominently missing two of the five "c"s in the motto:  citrus and cattle.

Comment:  The campus seems barren, but suitable to the Arizona landscape.  The surrounding 1960s office buildings are horrible.  The placement of monuments around the grounds seems nonsensical.  I hope plans for razing the new buildings and redesigning this campus are carried out.  (Also, the angle of the sun made getting a selfie impossible...something for the next visit to Phoenix.)  This original building seems a little off, but appropriately so, I think.

Rating:

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Olympia, Washington

Date: September 2012

Building: Beaux Arts style. Legislative building completed in 1928.  Washington Limestone. Walter Wilder and Harry White, architects.  Grounds: Olmsted.

Trivia:  It is the the last state capitol built in a classical architectural style.  The self-supporting masonry dome is fourth largest in the world.

Comment:  This is really a lovely government complex.  The dome is gorgeous but the building itself lacks grace.

Rating:

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Hartford, Connecticut

Date: August 2012

Building: Eastlake style. Completed 1878.  Connecticut Marble and Rhode Island Granite. Dome: Gold Leaf. Richard Upjohn, architect.

Trivia:  The only capitol in Eastlake style. Actually one of the biggest buildings anywhere in this high Victorian style.  It originally had an enormous statue atop the dome "The Genius of Connecticut" that was damaged in a storm and then melted down for the war effort.  A new one was finally cast in 2009 but awaiting funds to be reinstalled.

Comment:  It should be stunning, but it's just a little too much.  

Grade:

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Concord, New Hampshire

Date: July 2012

Building: Greek Revival style. Completed 1819.  New Hampshire Granite. Dome: Gold Paint. Statue: Eagle. Stuart Park, architect.

Trivia:  This is the oldest state capitol in which the legislature meets in its original chambers.

Comment:  Perfectly pleasant but forgettable.  

Rating:

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Montpelier, Vermont

Date: July 2012

Building: Greek Revival style, completed 1859.  Barre Granite. Dome: Gold Leaf. Statue: Ceres. Thomas Silloway, architect.    The Doric portico was salvaged from the 1833 capitol destroyed by fire, architect Ammi Young.

Trivia:  Montpelier is the smallest city to serve as a U.S. state capital.

Comment:  It is hard to imagine how this gem could be more perfect.  

Rating:

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Springfield, Illinois

Date: June 2012

Building: French Renaissance style, completed 1889.  Joliet Limestone.  Dome: Zinc.  Cochrane and Garnsey, architects.

Trivia:  Tallest non-skyscraper capitol in the US.

Comment:  I know I'm prejudiced but I think the Illinois Statehouse is absolutely lovely, and would be much more highly regarded if it were in a better setting.  (I have to apologize for this shot which was taken from a moving Amtrak train.  Please use Google to see a better image of this lovely building.)

Rating:

To be continued....

Desolate in Disney World

I just returned from spending 4+ days in sunny Orlando, Florida, and as I noted on Facebook, I was never once even tempted to preserve a moment with a picture or even a note.  I was there for work and had essentially no time to explore, but I was staying in a resort in the heart of the Disney parks and one would have thought I would have at least felt some nostalgic desire to relive my childhood, which appears to be the main appeal for adults returning there.

But as it turns out, my memories of Disney from my past are not of the magical type, I suppose.  A few points of background.

• My parents virtually NEVER took me to see movies as a child.  i can tell you the name of every single movie I saw in a theater before I graduated from high school:  Gone with the Wind (at the Lincoln Theater when I was about 5), Oliver! and the Reader's Digest Tom Sawyer with Johnny Whitaker (at the BAC Cinema, now sadly gone), Blackbeard's Ghost and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken at the Saturday matinees they used to run at the Ritz in Belleville (now a Baptist church), Rocky with the Belleville West Social Studies Club (yes, there was a Social Studies Club to which I belonged but of which have no recollection except going to play miniature golf and then seeing Rocky at the end of the school year), Young Frankenstein in its original run (for which I was too young to actually find very funny even though I pretended to think it was), and Grease (at summer music camp in Champaign, IL at the Co-Ed, also now destroyed). So I have no references to any of the classic Disney movies ingrained in my psyche.  To this day, the only two I have actually seen are Snow White and Beauty and the Beast. 

• I did have a dog-eared copy of the novel 101 Dalmatians from the Memorial Hospital Book Bazaar that I read about 40 times in immediate succession.

• I had these odd little figurines that we must have gotten by saving boxtops called Disneykins.  They were mainly broken, and of characters from seemingly uninteresting movies like The Jungle Book and Pinochio, but I remember playing with them very much imagining some sort of impossible world fantasy world that I can no longer recreate.

• I read a book in the Belleville Public Library's summer reading program called Mickey Sees the USA, in which Mickey is on vacation and gets his camping trailer stuck when trying to drive through a giant redwood.
• My classmates would talk about Disney things ALL THE TIME.

This all added up to a huge craving to drown in the magic of Disney, based solely on knowing that it was something from which I had been excluded.

Also, I had never been to any sort of amusement park.  I had been taunted by visions of the wonders of Dutch Wonderland in Pennsylvania on a family trip some years earlier but denied entry by my parents.  (Details will have to wait for another blog entry).

So finally, in 1974, when I was 12, we took a family vacation out west, primarily to see the great National Parks.  In my mind, it was going to be the best of both worlds, we would see Disneyland--my first every amusement park, and then, like Mickey, drive through a California redwood!  We got to Los Angeles and I don't think my parents, even then, were going to take us to Disneyland until we visited a distant relative who lived in Long Beach and who visited Disneyland often because of discounts offered through his work.  Back then there was no admission charge (or it was a nominal fee) and instead, the public bought individual tickets for rides.  So we were given a bunch of partially used coupon books which convinced my parents that we could get by without spending too much.

First off, we arrived quite late in the day so time was limited.   And of course, it turned out that the only remaining coupons were A and B tickets, so we could only go on the most tame of rides.  My primary memory is begging to go on the ride with the slogan "Steer your own motorboat through rapids!" to find out that the boat moved slower than you could walk, was locked into a narrow channel so there was no steering of any sort possible, and the rapids were just 3/4 inch pipes here and there gurgling water at roughly the equivalent velocity of water from a garden hose AFTER you've turned off the spigot.  We did get one "premium" ride, but because I was youngest and we had to split evenly, I had to go to It's a Small World with my Mom and sister while my Dad took my two brothers on the Matterhorn.  (Until I started writing this, I had sort of blocked that memory...)  So Disneyland was not all I had dreamed it would be.

A couple days later I learned that the redwood you could drive through had died and fallen down.  So much for a dream vacation.

I did go to Disneyland on my own around 1992 when I was doing some consulting in the region and my client gave me a pass to get in.  This time, without the limitation of coupons, I thought I would recover the magic I'd missed before.  What I learned was that Mr. Toad's Wild Ride as a solitary adult is not very thrilling.

So anyway, my background with Disney is somewhat checkered, but I don't think that is the issue for my current utter disinterest.  Since those days I have grown and experienced adventures, good and bad, all over the US and in a few foreign spots.  In that time, my most pleasurable memories are those in which there was some actual adventure, a discovery of something entirely unexpected, a confrontation with something of unimaginable beauty, or even where the was a little loss of control.  

The thing about the mode of operation of Disney is to create a world separate from reality, where everything is perfect--where things are invented to entice you in but to never fully satisfy--to keep you always wanting more, expecting more, buying more.  The control and the artifice that is the main value is precisely what I find no value in.  But it seems to be exactly what almost everyone else wants.

This makes me a little sad, in that it reinforces my feeling of being out of step with the vast majority of the population.  But not so sad not to have been so happy to return home to southern Illinois in the middle of an ice storm, to my falling down garage, to the unfinished wiring and plumbing.  This is the kind of Adventureland that makes me happy.