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.
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:
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 I took this picture 10 days ago, and it’s way, way out of date already.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!
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.
But not the University of Chicago, which actually has way more gargoyles than I posted here.
This architectural doodling (above) is on the former Richmont Hotel, now a Red Roof Inn. (How could they stick a class joint like this with the name “Red Roof Inn”? Even if it is a Red Roof Inn?)
The fellow melting into the awning down at the bottom can be viewed better here:
I didn’t actually stay at the Red Roof Inn. Not on this trip anyway. (I stayed there when it was the Richmont back in aught-84 or so.) Nope, this time I stayed around the block. But it struck me that the Richmont/Red Roof guy looked a bit like he might be related to these guys up in Lincoln Park:
Maybe. Then again…
So I strolled along 57th Street from the Medici, truth to tell, looking for a pay phone so I could call a taxi to take me back to my hotel and then to the airport. (There didn’t seem to be any taxis just cruising by.) A cell phone was forced upon me by my sister last fall, but alas, it works in only Ontario and Quebec. (Yes, yes, it probably works elsewhere, but I haven’t figured out how.) When I arrived at Regenstein Library, I though, “Surely there will be a pay phone here.” Not so. But a kindly woman at the information desk let me call on her phone.
As I waited outside for a taxi that never showed, I noticed the U of C’s Hull Gate across the street, with its procession of undergraduate gargoyles, aspiring to the status of graduate.
Here is the terrified freshman. I almost looked like this when the taxi did not arrive. Then I became apoplectic. Then I grew resigned. I am still sitting outside Regenstein.
I was in Chicago a week or so ago for a neurology conference (no big deal – it’s not like it’s brain surgery!), and decided to swing by the University of Chicago neighbourhood to take a look at Walter Arnold’s gargoyles on the Medici on 57th, a campus pizza restaurant. I particularly wanted to see his coffee drinker, but the caffiend also has a pizza-eating brother.
Walter is a busy stone carver/sculptor whose work also appears on Tribune Tower in Chicago and National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
More on the University of Chicago gargoyles to follow…
I have been tagged by Chicago architecture writer Lynn Becker, bless him, which requires me to:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
So, here goes:
1. The nearest book – literally, the closest book to me as I type this – is Perspective! For Comic Book Artists, by David Chelsea.
2. Okay.
3. I’ve found the fifth sentence, but am I supposed to post that? Or just the next ones? I guess just the next ones. Here goes:
4. “So, do you think you’re ready to do some three-point drawing? Am I! Here, hold this.”
5. I am tagging:
Walt Taylor because I wonder what he’s reading.
Ros Went because I know she looks in on my blog and so will see this.
George Murray to whom I am not related.
Colette Copeland because I haven’t seen her in a while.
Armand Frasco because he’s a good guy.
I’ve already said it was Lynn who tagged me. If you missed the hyperlink above, he’s also listed in my Links.
Now what? I noticed that Lynn also tagged Donald Trump and Mark Cuban, but so far, they haven’t done the fifth sentence thing.
No multipart tirades … for now. Just pictures of a few of the six firefighter gargoyles on the former headquarters of the Philadelphia Fire Department. The building is scheduled to be demolished as part of the expansion of the Philadelphia Convention Centre, which I thought was plenty big enough as it was when I was there last month. It’s said that these gargoyles will be saved, along with some other architectural ornament on the building.
Just before Christmas, two heritage buildings were demolished despite their protected status. (The Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic Inga Saffron documented the whole sorry mess in the newspaper and on her blog.) When I was in Philly for a conference last month, TV monitors throughout the convention centre played and replayed tape of the demolitions.
The poor fellow with a toothache (right) is in a good place, affixed as he is to the Evans building, the flagship building of the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
The building went up in 1915, and I’d like to think that since then, his toothache has been attended to and he is simply howling in sympathy with students, faculty and alumni who are upset about the renaming of Logan Hall, previously the home of Penn’s medical school, business school (Wharton) and currently several departments of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Logan Hall was named in memory of James Logan, William Penn’s colonial secretary and a founding trustee of the College of Philadelphia, the University’s predecessor. According to Penn’s Website, Logan Hall is an “integral component” of the National Register’s University of Pennsylvania’s Historic District.
But it’s about to be renamed in memory of Claudia Cohen, a recently deceased alumna who earned a bachelor’s degree in communications there in 1972 — and went on to become a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News. She was also an entertainment correspondent for the TV show “Live With Regis Lee and Kelly Lee,” and garnered some boldface mentions for herself for her lucrative divorce (rumoured to be $80 million) from husband Ronald Perelman, the billionaire chairman of Revlon and a Penn alumnus.
It’s Perelman — or rather, his $20 million donation to Penn — that effected the change.
In 1995, the year after Perelman and Cohen divorced, he donated the unprecedented sum for the renovation of the Perelman Quadrangle which includes Logan Hall. The university, in turn, gave him the option to rename Logan Hall. He’s taken up the offer, and according to a Penn news release, “the name change (to Cohen Hall) will take place over the summer in order to be ready for the fall 2008 semester.”
Cohen died of ovarian cancer in 2007 at the age of 56.
But the renaming is not something Penn faculty, students and alumni are happy about. For example, history professor Richard Beeman, who was Dean of the College from 1998-2005, said he had not been informed of any potential name changes.
He also told <a href=http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2008/03/27/News/Whats.In.A.Name.A.Lot.Say.Profs.Alums-3286524.shtml
>the Daily Pennsylvanian that although naming buildings after donors has become a common practice, it’s unusual to completely rename a building when they can carry hyphenated names of both the original name and the most recent donor.
Ronald Shur, a 1977 Wharton graduate, commented that the Logan Hall designation should stand because the building is an “icon … not a whiteboard that you can constantly erase.”
Terry Murray 