Travelogues & History
The cold snap that gripped huge parts of the country earlier this month put me in mind of one of my favorite things - and I feel deprived, because I've never lived in a place where such things happen. Back in 1984, Judy and I took a train trip across Canada from Vancouver to Banff. It was November and brutally cold by the time we reached our destination, but we braved the wind and snow to do a bit of hiking in the beautiful terrain near Lake Louise - just breathtaking, both literally and figuratively. While walking along a stream, we came across a cascade that started about ten feet over our heads. It had frozen over for the most part, and I recall the hollow resonance of the water flowing rapidly behind the waterfall's blue-white armor - a sound I've never forgotten. But the visual effect! I've always been a big fan of the Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudí, and there's something about the
Business and pleasure have carried me to Atlanta more times than I can count through the past 30 years. On many of those occasions, I attended trade shows in the Georgia World Congress Center and found myself with enough time on my hands that I was able to enjoy Centennial Park, where people from all over the world once gathered to celebrate the Olympic Games of 1996. I'd seen this area before the Olympiad, and I must say that the degree to which the city remade itself to host this international showcase event is truly remarkable. Particularly welcomed is the abovementioned Centennial Park, a broad, open space that I've strolled through often enough that it feels a bit like home. I am persistently intrigued by the Fountain of Rings, the park's big, interactive waterfeature. Lots of times, I've seen the fountain teeming with kids running wild through varied jets of water, but on several occasions the timing's been right and I've caught one of the choreographed shows set to music of many descriptions. This fountain, some say, is the precursor to
Business and pleasure have carried me to Atlanta more times than I can count through the past 30 years. On many of those occasions, I attended trade shows in the Georgia World Congress Center and found myself with enough time on my hands that I was able to enjoy Centennial Park, where people from all over the world once gathered to celebrate the Olympic Games of 1996. I'd seen this area before the Olympiad, and I must say that the degree to which the city remade itself to host this international showcase event is truly remarkable. Particularly welcomed is the abovementioned Centennial Park, a broad, open space that I've strolled through often enough that it feels a bit like home. I am persistently intrigued by the Fountain of Rings, the park's big, interactive waterfeature. Lots of times, I've seen the fountain teeming with kids running wild through varied jets of water, but on several occasions the timing's been right and I've caught one of the choreographed shows set to music of many descriptions. This fountain, some say, is the precursor to
I started to appreciate the fact that my Aunt Genevieve was one of the coolest women in the whole wide world in the Spring of 1964. In the days just after the New York World's Fair opened that April - while the networks and newspapers were still agog about one pavilion or another and how amazing the whole scene was - she sent a small package to me in California containing an embossed, gold-leafed invitation, a fair ticket and a keychain with a medal depicting the Unisphere attached to it. Even at eight years old, I knew my aunt was
I started to appreciate the fact that my Aunt Genevieve was one of the coolest women in the whole wide world in the Spring of 1964. In the days just after the New York World's Fair opened that April - while the networks and newspapers were still agog about one pavilion or another and how amazing the whole scene was - she sent a small package to me in California containing an embossed, gold-leafed invitation, a fair ticket and a keychain with a medal depicting the Unisphere attached to it. Even at eight years old, I knew my aunt was
I’ve been a student of California history for many years – and particularly of its water history. I was hooked as far back as the sixth grade, when I wrote a big report on the California Water Project and how we were, in the 1960s, just beginning to move water from the Feather River in northern California and feed it by circuitous means to
I confess to having a weakness for this sort of fountain: There’s probably something about the mixture of water and “animated” sculpture that grabs my imagination in a way that isn’t true of many large-scale water displays.
It this case, it may also have something to do with serendipity and the fact that, the first time I saw this composition, I came upon it entirely by chance. It was about ten years ago, while I was in Irving, Texas, for a series of meetings and had part of a day to myself to walk around and take in the nearby sights.
It was early in the morning when a view of Williams Square opened up and I saw the Mustangs of Las Colinas, a string of larger-than-life bronzes by Robert Glen that seem to run through a narrow watercourse. (That “stream” and the surrounding plaza were devised by SWA Group, a landscape architecture firm with offices in California, Texas and overseas.)
The composition was eight years in the making by the time it was unveiled in 1984, and I remember well the high (and much-deserved) level of attention and praise it gathered in the architectural press at the time.
This is exactly the sort of chance encounter that made me happiest about being a steady traveler for so many years. If you find yourself in the Dallas area and have any opportunity to see this work of watershaping art in person, I strongly recommend the effort!
To see a brief video of the Mustangs at Las Colinas, click here.
Once while visiting our nation’s capital, I walked past an odd-looking fountain that really didn’t make much of an impression at the time. Silly me, because of all the fountains and other watershapes I’ve seen, this one turns out to have one of the most weirdly interesting stories I’ve ever encountered.
This isn’t one of the display fountains that are so common around the district; rather, it’s a drinking-water fountain donated to the city of Washington, D.C., in 1882 by Henry Cogswell, a San Francisco dentist and national temperance crusader who believed that access to fresh, cold drinking water would lure the casual tippler away from the temptations of the city’s many saloons.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union backed a similar campaign, but where that organization’s drinking fountains were on the plain side, Cogswell had grander aesthetic ambitions and aimed at installing one of his elaborate, self-designed drinking fountains for every 100 saloons in cities across the country. His saw the fountains’ simple engraved messages of faith, hope, charity and temperance as the linchpin of a nationwide campaign to encourage abstinence.
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons"There were a couple problems: First, even in 1882 the total number of saloons across the country was overwhelming; second, Henry’s fountains leaned toward the ornate side, with water issuing from the mouths of scaly dolphins. Then there was the fact that cooling the water meant stocking the basin with blocks of ice on a steady basis – a maintenance nightmare that cities overcame by disconnecting the supply pipes.
Dry fountains don’t offer much comfort or satisfaction to anyone, which may explain why Washington’s Temperance Fountain has been moved on a few occasions – shifting from its original, prominent position on Pennsylvania Avenue to the far-less-prestigious placement on Indiana Avenue near the National Archives. (That’s where I happened upon it early in the 1990s.)
It’s interesting to note that the aesthetic undesirability of Cogswell’s fountains is said to be single-handedly responsible for the emergence of civic arts committees that are charged with reviewing and approving applications for the installation of monuments in cities across the country. I hope that’s not entirely true, mainly because I see these fountains as hearkening back to the days when all public drinking water came, for good or ill, from sources such as these.
So while Cogswell’s Temperance Fountains may be as homely as mud fences, they’re also keenly interesting from historic and cultural perspectives – which makes me glad that the one in Washington at least is on the National Register and will be with us for years to come. Examples can also still be found in New York City, Pawtucket, R.I., and Rockville, Conn. Alas, they were built but have been torn down elsewhere, including Buffalo and Rochester in New York, Boston and Fall River, Mass., and in San Francisco, San Jose and Pacific Grove, Calif.
The saloons may have won the day, but to me, I’ll always have a place in my heart for Cogswell and his weird, well-intentioned fountains.
I was the third of four McCloskey children to attend UCLA. All three of my sisters went there, two of them before me, one after. My middle sister, Susan, started in the fall of 1968, and I recall that there was quite a buzz about this weird new fountain that had just been commissioned on one of the campus’ many plazas: It was essentially upside-down, with water flowing from the edges toward an off-centered well, and it soon became known as the Inverted Fountain. I was 13 or 14 the first time I saw it. I’d gone with Susan to some on-campus event, and she gave me a brief tour of the place – including the plaza with the weird new fountain. At that point
My family moved away from Chicago when I was just four years old, but I have three vivid, very specific memories of the place: icicles hanging from the eaves of our home in Evanston; the long freight trains that ran constantly on tracks at the far edge of the open field across the street; and Buckingham Fountain in downtown Chicago’s Grant Park. When I returned to the Windy City on business in the early 1980s (several years before I became directly involved with watershaping), it wasn’t to Evanston I went; instead, once I’d checked into my hotel on that bright spring day, I made a beeline to the
