Musings
View WSW from Beltline bridge over North Avenue (33.77110,-84.36391).
No reason WikiPee doesn’t have this right, so this nightclub used to be an excelsior mill. I had only a nebulous idea what excelsior is, and finally looked it up. Wood wool. Little fine curls of timber. So, it was a factory for reducing trees to fluff.
Strange what repurposing can make (historical) bedfellows….
Note how the strange weather “cut off” the tops of the downtown buildings—this was soon after the rain stopped….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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The Fates intervened in our neighbors’ lives, and they offered us the opportunity to tour, in their stead, Ponce City Market, the former City Hall East, the former Sears, Roebuck, and I don’t know what else. The building is something like 2 million square feet, with 56K panes of glass. This is an interior wall, I think dating to the 1920s, the original building phase. Interestingly, this building, adjacent to the railroad bed that’s now the BeltLine, which hosted a spur that went into the building, is built atop springs. That are still producing. Some goes into storm sewers; some is used as grey water. Anyway, fascinating tour….
BTW, the developer, Jamestown, did Chelsea Market and bunches of others; they seemed to know what they were doing at all scales, mega to user to neighborhood to environmental….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Can you see the two goslings between Mama and Papa?
I’m guessing this is the goose family I saw in the making the other day…. I found the next empty except for some fluff being dispersed by the wind.
Sorry to send more goose-poopers out into the world; on the other hand, it’s a victory for Mother Nature to produce something from what had been for decades a yucky industrial site.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Despite predictions of freezing rain, I walked the park, and even saw maybe 30 seconds total of sunshine, in two reveals—enough sun to make shadows. Heartening.
Posted at 9:32 PM |
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I’ve been wandering lately (aka procrastination)—via satellite views on GoogleMaps. I found the Costa Concordia on its side next to the Isola del Giglio….
And I found a grey-face? Maybe? Is this an intentional distortion? An artifact of shadows?
This is on a partly destroyed cold war missile installation inland on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, called Tolchester. Still find the face mystifying.
Posted at 7:23 PM |
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Saratoga Springs. Yes. New York. (Can’t find web domain; like I note, soooo last century.)
Ah, so last century. In a good way.
Here at lunch time. Ate not here at the yuppie place, but down the street at a diner, serving breakfast all day.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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The Indian name for this place, I swear, must have been something like “Rapids with herons and turtles downstream.”
Indeed, the post-Colonials who dammed this stretch must have been channeling (ahem) ancient times, when they named their flow-stopper Eagle & Phenix Dam (two majestic birds of reality and myth).
Of course, when they blew the dam, archaeologists…monitored…what was revealed….
And now, six months after the dynamite (or whatever they used), we saw many turtles, including one with a shell more than a foot long, and herons, including one that nabbed and swallowed a feesh right in front of us, just downstream of the old dam site (or dam old site).
Posted at 9:33 PM |
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Sometimes when you’re traveling (or amidst life), you have to let serendipity prevail. We made a side loop to visit…Cadillac. Because it was there.
And discovered it’s a walled town, with some plain but impressive ramparts (if, indeed, that’s what they are).
Then we took another side loop to check out a cultural feature signposted as “Pont Eiffel.” There was no pullout nearby, and no way to see the lacy metal support structure of the small (like three car-lengths) bridge in any detail, and we can only guess that the tour-Eiffel engineer had a hand in this one instead of merely influencing it. So, no bridge pix—only this one of the mill just upstream (no public access). Moral of this story: serendipity is sometimes just for your eyeballs—and imagination—and not for your camera.
Sometime later, we passed through an area where the grape-harvest was well underway. The trucks from the fields apparently back up to the gate appropriate to the variety they are carrying. The smell of souring grape-juice and the busy insects were the most dramatic impressions/activity at the moment we encountered this cooperative.
We covered some territory today, and the agricultural crops and general landscape went through several noticeable changes as we left the coast and moved through inland zones. We are overnighting in Perigord, and it is nut/fruit country—no grain and olives are long behind us, as are the chateaux of Bordeaux.
We’re staying in a really small town—the only biz is our B&B—with several homes and a church getting major attention from historic preservationists. The cracks in the walls are being monitored as restoration continues, using these simple calibrated slips.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Descending from the heights, like many people through history, our first stop was Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Its medieval section is basically one main street, with perpendicular side streets (it’s not a hilltop town), adjacent to a river with a gorgeous little bridge. We saw school-bound kids crossing, stopping, as children will, to look in the water.
We were there early, and saw many shopkeepers opening for the day. You can tell that, although many shops catered to the tourists, people also live here—not many tourists buy apples by the kilo….
We detoured to Bidache to check out this ruined chateau. Without an appointment, we could only walk up to the front, but that by itself was pretty darned spectacular. We both found the tops of the stone window frames standing tall without their intended wall/roof partner-elements visually compelling.
How can this be last? Still, it was chronologically.
When we stood on the beach in the late afternoon, watching the surfing crowd trickle in (we theorized: after their day jobs), we knew we’d made tracks this day—from dawn in the Spanish Pyrenees to marine layer, late-day light on the Atlantic. What a great world.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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There’s a region near us, or where we’re staying now, called the Minervois, defined now as a wine region which historically was centered at Minerve. Many of the towns in this area have a version of Minerve in their names, a pattern I don’t remember from elsewhere in France. We looked in vain for a dolmen in the shrub-dominated garrigue on the ridge above town. Instead we discovered an incredible view, tinted in gorgeous shades of blue.
Several dolmen are known across the Minervois. This one is called Dolmen des Fades (or some variation thereof). Dolmen are, at least in the original definition, Neolithic-period megalithic tombs built across a broad swath of Europe. Seems to me that most of them are “empty” by now. We could tell there was quite a bit of reconstruction on this one, but the big stones did not appear to be from this hill. That’s a quick assessment, though.
A bit later, we arrived at the east gate of the Cité, the fortified old town of Carcassonne (history in summary here and detailed here). The fortification has (at least) double walls, many towers and shooting positions, and encloses a separate fortified chateau (had a moat? now filled?)—look here (43.20731,2.36313).
I haven’t mentioned the Canal du Midi—we saw it yesterday (near Beziers first), and have been seeing it here and there as we cruise the countryside. Okay, here are the boaters at Homps, the “port” for Olonzac (our present home). The canal was built to facilitate a shipping route that avoided the Iberian coast, including the Barbary pirates.
I knew I could get us back to the political economy.
Posted at 12:26 PM |
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