Winter Giveth and Winter Taketh Away

It's the fourth week in January. The paperwhites in the front of the shop smell great & the hyacinths in my window at home are ready to open, but nobody's fooled. It's still winter, and here in Chicago, it's going to be winter for a long, long time yet. Which is fine with me: I love winter.

I also love antiques. Put those two things together, then toss a week in New York City into the mix and what you get is the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, now going into its umpteenth year. If you don't already know the Park Avenue Armory, it's a massive red-brick pile on the Upper East Side, built by the veterans of  the Seventh Regiment in the late Nineteenth Century, with a series of grand reception rooms decorated & furnished by the biggest names of the era--Tiffany, Herter, that crowd.

Photo copyright by the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy

Even during the Armory's  decades-long period of benign neglect, its heroically-scaled interiors were impressive, but thanks to the efforts of the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy, its carved woodwork & art glass windows and geometric tile floors look just as handsome as they did when the place was new. The only difference is that, back then, the whole fashionable world was full of Eclectic-style rooms that--on a much reduced scale, at least--showed a similar taste, and these days, it's not. But that's OK. Even when these rooms were new, they were never meant to appeal to the masses. The Eclectic Look has come down in the world since then.  Today the word pretty much means anything you want it to mean.

Photo copyright by agent j loves nyc at Flickr.com

At any rate, the Armory is once again a showplace, and when the greatest antique dealers in the world install a zillion dollars worth of their best pieces in the great Drill Hall, well, it's a don't-miss event. One of the dealers whose booth is always one of my favorites is Barbara Israel Garden Antiques, whose specialty is just what it sounds. This year, among other good-looking pieces, she's showing this Nineteenth Century marble bust of   Perseus. 

Photo copyright Barbara Israel Garden Antiques

My own taste for classical statuary & the odd  architectural fragment got a jump-start one year in high school in Beloit, Wisconsin, when I  made a sandcast plaster-of-Paris mask of Apollo using as a model a busted head of the god that I found in the art deparment's storage closet. When I asked the teacher where Apollo had come from he looked puzzled. "Who? Oh, you mean David? He came from the College"--meaning Beloit College, right across the Rock River from the school. 

  

Photo copyright by Roland Bello for O at Home magazine,  Autumn 2008

As it turned out, the Eclectic Style wasn't the only thing that came down in the world. Slumming around with the bent bicycle wheels & splintered bushel baskets that were stored in the art room prop closet--and missing part of his plaster nose besides--Apollo no longer looked like much, but  he had probably started out, I later learned, at the very top: First on Mount Olympus, then at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where blinding white (and electrically lit) classic style buildings stretched for an entire mile along the shores of Lake Michigan.

In 1893, the government of Greece had sent a huge collection of full-size plaster casts of classical sculpture to Chicago, and after the fair closed, the collection of casts was dispersed, some of it going to the Art Institute and other pieces going to Beloit College

Photo courtesy the amazing John Chuckman

where the best pieces went on display in the college museum. As tastes changed, however, most of the collection was slowly  banished to storage in the college basement, from which area a lot of the pieces disappeared. When Apollo's missing head surfaced at my school, he was sent right back to storage, this time in the art department's prop closet, which is where I came across him. Anyway, my copy-of-a-copy Apollo was the start of my collection of fragments, most of which, I'm sorry to say,  have an even shakier provenance than he does. Nothing's worth much.

A few years back, I saved this handsome five-foot section of the Parthenon frieze from probable destruction. Of course, that's what Lord Elgin said, too, but in this case, it's absolutely true, since I found it in the neighbor's trash pile.

My marble urn, on the other hand, is probably worth more than everything else I own, all put together.  I had always assumed it was a Victorian piece--and the top, with its carved figure of a grieving woman really is a Victorian replacement of a missing lid--but a few years ago, after my first visit to the newly-installed Classic galleries in the former Dorotheum at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized that my urn may actually be older than I thought--lots older.

 Photo copyright metmuseum.org

This incredible piece dates to Second Century Rome, and, with its refined double strigilation & elegant serpent handles, it makes my simpler version look a poor country relation, but mine has the same elegant shape, and the fact that my urn has a lid gives it a distinct practical advantage over the one in New York: that is,  in summer, I can store my winter scarves in there.  You can't do that with the Met's. You can't even touch the thing.  

Speaking of which--winter, that is--I didn't make it to the Winter Antiques Show after all, this year. I never go on Thursday because Opening Night tickets are $1000 a pop, or more than I budget for the entire week, but by Friday afternoon, I'm usually either zooming off to O'Hare or--if I have more time--down to Union Station to take Amtrak: the train is generally more fun. But this year, as I said, I never made it out of town. Then again, on Friday, no one was going anywhere. Not out of Chicago, they weren't.  But it was OK.

Photo copyright by Opacity at Flickr.com

In the end, of course, it all balanced out. Because as much as I was hoping to make it to The Winter Antiques Show this year, if I had been in New York on Friday night, I would have missed this view from my bedroom window. 

And on a night like last Friday--antiques or no antiques--there really is no place like home

DIBS!!

When last year's big blizzard hit, it caught us completely by surprise, meaning that after spending half an hour shoveling out the 20-foot parking spot in front of our shop--Jeeves was off that day--I realized we didn't have a single busted plastic lawn chair or rusty grill to set out, which items, according to Chicago's unwritten etiquette, are the correct thing for claiming Dibs on a parking spot after you've shoveled it. (And if you don't know about this wonderful tradition, check out the column in today's Chicago Tribune by the great John Kass)  But hey, I didn't watch "MacGyver" all those years for nothing. So lacking the proper symbols, I made do: I dragged an antique leopard-spotted  chair out to the curb, where it not only served to stake out our territory, but also--for a few minutes, anyway--helped to elevate the tone of our neighborhood, which is still, as they say, 'up and coming.'  High & Low, you know?  It's all about the mix. Or so they tell me.


When I was a kid growing up in Beloit, Wisconsisn, my mother worked for a group called Community Concerts, whose goal was--and, apparently, still is--to bring music to small towns without orchestras of their own, and one year, we had a group called the Norman Luboff Choir. They probably sang for an hour and a half, but I the only thing I remember of the whole concert was a silly but gorgeously-sung snippet of an encore that lasted all of about ten seconds: "Help keep our junkyards beautiful--throw away something lovely today." It got a big laugh because it was the era of Lady Bird Johnson's campaign to get Americans to stop throwing trash out their car windows.

That same impulse towards beauty,then, was the motive behind my hauling our leopard chair out to the slushy street--except that I wasn't really throwing it away. Not, of course, that some people didn't slow down, just in case.

Anyway, so the line in that song was what was running through my mind as I ran back & forth across the street, dodging traffic to adjust the chair's angle, trying to get a shot of it sitting just so in front a pile of dirty snow before I lost the light. Well, that line, and the personal mission statement that Elsie De Wolfe came up with over a century ago:  "I am going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life.”

Elsie, what a gal: actress, decorator, honored with the Croix de Guerre & the Legion d'Honneur  for her work in WWI, and named Best Dressed Woman in the world at age seventy.  Personally, compared to her, I feel like a total slacker, with not a single medal to my name. But we all do the best we can. If, in my case, that meant sticking an antique leopard-spotted fauteuil outside in a puddle of slush for the sake of a picture, so be it. Even if it was only there for a moment, it was long enough. Besides, Elsie always did  like leopard.

 

                  

                                                            Elsie Photo By George Hoyningen Huene, 1930 

By the way, if you're in town, stop into the shop this weekend for the last few days of our January sale: Twenty percent off all antiques and up to sixty percent off selected items. And just so you know, I cleared that parking spot for you. I don't even have a car. We're at 1822 West Grand Avenue. You'll recognize the chair. Antinuous will greet you.
          

However you greet it...

I hope that 2012 is even happier for you than this year was: that it brings you more success,

more friends, more fun, more laughter, more--well, booze, apparently.

 Anyway, whatever you do to celebrate the evening, and whoever you celebrate it with,

don't forget to preserve the good times in pictures, so that, fifty years from tonight,


our children can have as much fun, laughing at all of us, as we have laughing at our parents.

 It's the least we can do for those who will follow us. The Circle of Life is a wonderful thing. 

And for those who prefer, as I do, to spend a quiet evening at home, Pleasant dreams.

I Looked on Beauty Bare*

I walked into our shop this morning, and discovered that, during the night, the dainty little fir tree that we stuck in an antique urn a week ago had dropped most of its needles. Then, as I reached behind it to turn on the lights in the shop, I bumped it and it lost the few needles that were left. Some people would take one a look at the tree's bare branches and haul it straight out to the trash. In fact, I know they would, because my father did exactly that one year when I was a kid.

I remember my little brother sobbing disconsolately as Dad stripped the ornaments & lights off the naked branches, and I wonder about the long-term effect of such early trauma on impressionable young minds. I say that because my brother still sometimes refers to The Year Dad Wrecked the Tree. He doesn't remember that a half an hour later we all got into our pink-&-copper Rambler wagon and went down to the Piggly Wiggly parking lot to get another tree. Of course, by that time--it was only a few days before Christmas--all the decent trees were gone, this being back in the olden days before relentless tree-manicuring began producing millions of identical cone-shaped trees, when, whether for good or for evil, every tree on a lot had its own individual character. At any rate, the good trees were long gone and we ended up with a stunted specimen that wasn't even straight. Worse, it was some sort of shaggy, long-needled, pine imposter, not a proper tree like we had always had until then--you know, a fir tree, a real tree. Then again, the new tree, crooked or not, did still have its needles. What can I say? Life's full of compromises.

The first three people in the shop the shop this morning all referred to it as a Charlie Brown tree, but really, there's no comparison between our tree and Charlie Brown's. His was sad & pitiful, and ours, even sans needles, is still handsome. In fact, it may be more handsome than it was before, because the textural contrasts between the tree's rough bark & stiff twigs and the beaded garland's curves & rich color read better without all those needles cluttering up the view. But maybe that's just me.

    One of our old-school blown glass bird ornaments on a weed I dragged in from the alley. Context is everything.

After all, I'm the guy who stuck a rotten tree stump on an antique mahogany table and had the result published in a national magazine. Beauty is wherever you find it. And I happen to find it in dead branches and dead weeds and leafless trees. And a good thing I do, too, because, at the moment, that's all there is. It's the most wonderful time of the year! In fact, if I could be anywhere else at the moment, it would be right here, right now...

Central Park, "The greatest art object of Nineteenth Century America"--Central Park's Historian Sara Cedar Miller

Meanwhile, wherever you find yourself and whatever your plans, I hope your next few days are wonderful. And if you happen to be in Chicago, stop in and see us. We're at 1822 West Grand Avenue.

For the ulimate in easy-care trees,  may we suuggest a Nineteenth Century copper roof finial?

---------------------

         Euclid Alone Has Looked On Beauty Bare *                                                 

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

                                    Edna St Vincent Millay
                                    

Living the Hardy Life

"As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her

the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable;

which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement,
 

by a species of microscopic treatment,of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain;

which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiring effect upon life

as wider interests cursorily embraced."

----The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy


Have a great weekend, friends. Sorry I've been away.

Urban Oasis II: As Seen on TV



                                      Sneak Peek inside HGTV Urban Oasis 2011 by Mary

Urbs in Horto--City in a garden. Garden in the city. There's a difference, of course, but in weather like this, who cares? Anything green and shady is good. Not, of course, that every oasis needs to be a literal garden. Or that it needs to be outdoors at all, for that matter. In fact, HGTV is just about to unveil a 1000-SF condominuim on the 35th Floor of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, as part of their "Urban Oasis" series, which is apparently aimed at people who like Nature in small doses and who prefer to live in the heart of a vibrant city---even in a hot city--to living on, say, a beautiful but isolated (read: boring) beach, or in some beautiful but underpopulated mountains, or in an area that, twenty minutes ago, was still farmland, with all the social & cultural advantages thereof.

 Don't get me wrong. I grew up in small towns and I enjoyed finding baskets of luscious, still-warm-from-the-sun garden-grown tomatoes sitting on my front porch as much as anybody--Mrs johnson, my next door neighbor was a sweetheart--but I'll still happily trade all that for being able to attend a CSO concert less than an hour after I leave work. Besides, those ginormous tomatoes usually went bad before I could eat them all, anyway. Too ripe. And don't get me started on the zucchini. They started out as single specimens but quickly grew in size and number, and finally, I ended up taking them to work with me and tossing them into the dumpster out back so that Mrs. Johnson wouldn't find them in my trash, and I'm sure she used to check. Like I said, she was a nice lady and all, and her tomatoes really were good--the ones I got around to eating--but I refused to feel guilty over tossing extra zucchini. These days, I'm a city guy, so I don't have to deal with zucchini anymore.  

Zucchini Photo from Chiot's Run

Anyway, one day back in March, who should drop into our store but Vern Yip, who explained that he was looking for accessories for this season's "Urban Oasis" project in Chicago. Very cool! Except that those of you who know me also know that I don't have a TV, so when Vern first walked in the door, I had absolutely no idea who he was. I 'm probably the last person around who's never once seen HGTV. Fortunately, Vern introduced himself and I recognized his name--in the same way that I recognize, say, Paul Konerko's name, although I don't know what he looks like, either--so I played along and didn't (I hope) look like a complete mope in front of Vern, or, at least, if I did, he was nice enough to pretend he didn't notice. Thank you, Vern.

So he looked over the whole store and picked out several good-looking items for the show. He chose a set of black-shaded brass wall sconces in the form of three-foot-long animal horns, and he took a handsome pair of carved oak figures that, a hundred years ago, must have been part of an Elizabethan Revival bookcase in a grand English library, which carvings--full disclosure here--would have been at my place by now if Vern hadn't bought them. Memo to Self: you snooze, you lose. But Vern also chose this little accent piece, which subtly suggests a garden theme, even if said garden happens to be indoors and thirty-five floors up in the air: our Olmsted Faux-Bois Concrete Planter, done in the informal, rustic style that was common in urban parks at the turn of the last century, and named, naturally, after the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

To me, this planter is one of our shop's signature pieces, partly because it sums up the aesthetic of Debra Phillips--our owner--who has a long-time thing for faux-bois, and partly because it's almost always available. A lot of our pieces are Debra's one-of-a-kind finds, meaning that if you go home to think about something, there's a good chance that it will be gone when you come back, but we almost always have a few of these wonderful planters around. You can't go wrong with a classic piece like this, even as short-term decorating trends fade to black. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, and Love--even in decorating--means never having to say you're sorry. Still, a hundred years ago, the rustic look was a lot more common than it is today, so someone must not be getting the message about certain styles' longevity in the face of decorating fads. This is one of those styles.

Probably the greatest surviving assemblage of rustic-style pieces in this country--benches, bridges, shelters, you name it--is in New York's Central Park, which Sara Cedar Miller, the Park's Historian and the author of Central Park, an American Masterpiece--another book

Bridge No 32 by Jim in Times Square at Flickr.com

to get--calls "the greatest art object of 19th Century America."  It's the Urban Oasis to beat all others.

Not that our local parks couldn't boast examples of the rustic style, too. Historically, Chicago's West and South Side parks were always the most impressive for the simple reason that when the parks were being developed, that's where the money was--the old money, that is, or what passed for old money in an upstart town like Chicago. So, naturally, the idyllic landscapes in those parks were where Frederick Law Olmsted's influence was most clearly seen.

chicagopostcardmuseum.org



chicagopostcardmuseum.org

The North Side was still full of working families, but they had nice parks, too. Part of the problem with Lincoln Park, though, was that it was long and skinny, and the farther north you went, the skinnier it got until it sort of dwindled away to nothing. At least, it did before they started filling in the lake up in my neighborhood in the 1920s. But up to that point, the narrow footprint sort of left out the kind of grand landscape effects you could create with a bigger area. Still, Lincoln Park made up for the lack of ground with festive structures. The old boat house seen above is long gone, and the High Bridge in Lincoln Park--known informally as Suicide Bridge--was taken down for obvious reasons, but Lincoln Park can still boast a vaguely Chinese-looking rustic gazebo made of peeled logs. Unlike the rustic
structures in Central Park, which perch high atop rocky outcroppings or nestle themselves in bosky dells, the rustic Gazebo is plunked down front & center like a tantrumy kid in the middle of the candy aisle. You couldn't miss it if you wanted to. But you wouldn't want to, anyway, because, siting issues aside--it's squeezed into a narrow strip of land between busy Stockton Drive and the North Pond--the gazebo is a beauty, with a brown shingled roof and logs painted a soft Aesthetic Green, a color that Oscar Wilde would have approved, especially in such a bucolic setting. It's a charming vestige of a calmer era, and in contrast to the myriad of interesting park structures that we've lost over the years, it's been maintained in decent condition. But it's not only buildings that are subject to change or loss, and the big storms we've had this summer have not been kind to Chicago's parks. It doesn't help that once-in-a-hundred-years storms happen as infrequently as they do if they happen to come this year, which they have. The big hailstorm in early July smashed thousands of panes at the Garfield Park Conservatory, raining shards of broken glass onto the rare specimen trees below,  

 photo: garfieldconservatory.org

and in Lincoln Park, just fifty yards north of the Gazebo, the same storm took out a hundred-year old cottonwood, not to mention the damage it inflicted on hundreds of other trees that lost limbs. So Eden sank to grief--not that poetry helps all that much when you're faced with devastation like this.

This is too sad for words, but sometimes, out of the wreckage you manage to somehow, salvage...something. Which is why, in our shop, we not only have the Olmstead vase--cast after a period original of a hundred years ago--but we also have a handsome  faux-bois bench & a console table to match, whose tops were made from a mold created by gluing


our Vaux Faux Bois Concrete Console

some bark taken from a fallen tree--as it happens, taken from a fallen tree in Debra's own back yard: waste not, want not--to an aged wooden plank, and then casting the whole deal in concrete. Call me a Panglossian, but sometimes, the best way to deal with things is by taking whatever positive action there is--even if, in the larger scheme of things, it doesn't seem like much. Debra's old tree is gone, but there's still a little echo of it left right here in the shop, where everyone can enjoy it.  And a fragile slip of that fallen cottonwood tree in the park, carried home on the bus the next night along with a four-foot-long section of bark, is now in some damp sand at my house. Cottonwoods are usually the first real trees to establish themselves in sandy dunes along the lake, so we'll see what happens. I figure an oasis has to start somewhere. Why shouldn't it be at my place?

Meanwhile, I'll be watching to see what Vern does down at Trump Tower. Or, at least, I'll be doing that once I figure out which of my friends will let me come over just to watch a decorating show.  As for everybody else? Check you local time and listings.

Urban Oasis I

Urbs in Horto--City in a Garden--has been Chicago's official motto since the early days, so it's appropriate that the Dearborn Garden Walk, which just had its 53rd anniversary on Sunday, is one of the oldest in the country. And thanks to its annual midsummer date, it's also one of the hottest.

I have a clear memory of being forced against my will through an endless series of scorching brick terraces at a tender age, which put me off gardens--particularly Chicago gardens--for years. Way too hot. Somewhere, there's a Kodachrome slide of me at age eight or nine, wearing a snappy red-&-white seersucker sport coat, a clip-on bowtie and a hateful scowl that could have buckled steel, except that, obviously, the July sun was capable of that all by itself. Why in the world my parents dragged my little brother & me to the Dearborn Garden Walk on the hottest day of the year is beyond me, unless it was because they couldn't get a babysitter. Actually, that's probably it, because we didn't live in Chicago. We were up here from Danville for the weekend, visting one of my dad's Marine Corps pilot buddies & his wife.

Photo courtesy of John Chuckman.

Anyway, we all got dressed up--people did that back then, even in hundred-degree heat--and we spent the afternoon wandering through the hellish gardens of people we didn't know. I hated the gardens, all of them, and it seemed like we saw dozens, although there were probably only three or four. They say that the whole idea of a garden walk was still a novelty back then. That may well be. I only remember the heat. Well, that and my seersucker jacket. At least it was cool, even if I wasn't.

Fast forward forty nine years, and in a lot of ways, Sunday's garden walk was much like my first. The punishing heat was the same, and if the color of my seersucker jacket was different--red then, lime green Sunday--the wrinkles were the same.  And did I mention the heat? Holy kamoly. And yes, sure, in a jacket & tie, I was hot, but I wasn't any hotter than the women in sleeveless tops & men in polo shirts--and they were getting a nasty sunburn, besides. Face it, on a day like Sunday, you're going to be miserable no matter what, but I figured that dresssing a little better than was strictly necessary, and going with more rather than less clothing might also ward off sunstroke. And it seemed to work. But here's the real question: Why can't the North Dearborn People do this in, say, November? Oh, well. It's for a good cause, and hot or not, I realized that this would likely be my only chance to see some of these places, so I went. And I'm glad I did.

I will say this: the people who put this all together every year deseserve a ton of credit: the planners, the gardens' owners, who allow perfect strangers to wander through their property, the cheerful volunteers who stood long hours in the sun waiting to make a little 'X's in our program books, the designers who created little vignettes in some of the gardens--something about travel and Elizabeth Taylor, but my brain was too hot to pay much attention to that part--and the real heroes of the day, the musicians who gamely played through their misery in beautiful but fiendishly hot surroundings. Then there were the personable tour guides--I remember Eric & Edie--who talked about the architecture of some of the houses on Dearborn to those of us whose post-Garden Walk energy levels hadn't yet flatlined.

What, two days later, impresses me the most out of the more than a dozen gardens I saw? Well, it wasn't the private garden the size of the infield at Wrigley, elegant though it was, nor the ET-themed vignettes, and it wasn't the perfectly manicured hedges & container-based floralscapes of a gated community that I didn't even realize was there. No, my hands-down favorites were the two least flowery and staged-looking gardens of the bunch.

The first standout was a pair of conjoined gardens created in the late twenties by Edgar Miller out of  gerrymandered spaces between existing buildings, using random architectural debris from demolished Victorian houses he picked out of the trash--stuff that no one else wanted at the time. But in Edgar Miller's talented hands, broken tiles & busted carvings became art. And Miller embellished his quirky assemblages of found materials with his own distinctive terracotta sculptures, which he located at strategic points--in place of a keystone of a rubble-brick arch, inset below the windows in a vageuly Moderne bay, atop a crooked stone wall--and the results are enchanting, a word I don't ever remember using in my life. Here, though, it's perfectly appropriate.

And the visuals aren't the only appealing thing here. There's also water, moving water, a really good thing to have on a day like Sunday. And when I say "moving" water, I don't mean those gurgly, trickly fountains--what I think of as nail-bar fountains--but gutsy fountains, fountains with fish the size of my fist, fountains whose full-throated splashing managed to drown out the noise of the busy neighborhood. And Miller's gardens' appeal doesn't depend on conventionally pretty flowers.  In fact, around here, flowers are irrelevant.

Anyway, if you missed yesterday's walk (and if, like me, you're not fortunate enough to know anybody who lives in this amazing complex--known originally as the Carl Street Studios, and known now by its address, 155 West Burton Place) it's too late to see these
Photo courtey of ChicagoGeek via Flickr

beauties, but you can still get a great sense of Edgar Miller's genius in Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home: Chicago's Forgotten Renaissance Man, a great book written by my friend Richard Cahan & Michael Williams, with spectacular photos by Alexander Vertikoff. Let me be as clear as I can about this book: it's about the biggest, handsomest, best-produced art book I've ever seen in my life, and having it be about a guy who just happens to be a Chicagoan is just a plus. Buy it now.

The other garden that I really liked was the last one on the tour, the one at the Cardinal's Mansion, a dark-red mid-Victorian pile at 1555 North State Parkway. All the other houses & gardens on the tour were proteced by high walls & locked gates, and a few seemed to have actual security guards. There's a fence around the Cardinal's house, too, but it's the kind of fence that's easily cleared by a ten-year old with a running jump--basically, by me, fifty years ago. And their fences aren't the only difference between this place & some of the other gardens. Fences are merely symbols. The other properties are all about exclusion. This one welcomes--or, at least, seems to welcome--everyone. And on Sunday, it did, as long as you had paid your 30 dollars and had your book to prove it.

But there's another difference, one of tone. Here, on one of the the largest & most historic properties in the most expensive neighborhood in Chicago, the garden is nothing more elaborate than a simple circle in the lawn, with an unpretentious mix of vegetables & ordinary-looking flowers: some healthy-looking tomato plants climbing on wooden stakes--and judging by the height of those stakes the cardinal has some really high hopes for his crop this year--plus some dill, a few roses. Basically, it's the same kind of down-home garden your great-grandmother might have had in her backyard when you were young, and the only thing missing to complete the illusion was the spin & rattle of an old-school push mower. Talk about escape.

In fact, that wonderful feeling of ordinary-ness seemed to catch one woman off-guard because I spotted her absent-mindedly fingering a fuzzy shoot of something or other that had grown through the plastic-mesh fence that surround the actual plants--I'm not a plant person, so I'm not even sure what kind of plant it was--and I could almost see what was running through her mind: Is stealing a cutting from the Cardinal's garden a venial sin or a mortal one? Maybe if Eve had thought a little bit harder about whether or not to go for that apple, we wouldn't all of us be in the mess we're in now. Maybe if she hadn't helped herself without permission, the weather forecast for the next ten days wouldn't be Hotter than Hell. It's hard to say.


End of the World Series: Solar Flare. Lithograph by Rockwell Kent

At any rate, the woman must  have decided the risk wasn't worth it because she slowly moved on. Of course, not everyone appreciated the lack of Wow Factor. On my way out I stopped to I chat with the volunteer at the gate, and while I was talking to her, a couple came out of the gate and the woman made an exasperated, dismissive gesture back in the direction of the Cardinal's tomato plants. "Did we miss something? Is that it?" And I wanted to say, Yes, that's it and Yes, you definitely missed something--but I didn't. I figure some people get it, while others will never get it, but in the long run, it doesn't matter, anyway. All I know is that Hot or Not, I'll definitely be back for next year's walk.
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Anyway, as I strolled through Edgar Miller's tiny courtyard gardens, the rough Chicago brick walls & the plants climbing over the architectural fragments & the bird songs & the splashing fountains reminded me of something--our shop! At SG Grand, we have all of those things--everything, that is, but Miller's genius. But everything else can be copied, and sometimes, a copy is good enough. 

The shop at SG Grand, 1822 West Grand Avenue

So if you find yourself on West Grand Avenue past Ashland, and you need a break from the heat & glare, stop into SG Grand Urban Antiques, where it's cool & dim we have lots of cool things to look at.

We're at number 1822 and we're open every day but Monday. You can call us at 312-226-6654 if you want to make an appointment to come in, but you don't really need an appointment. Till then, stay cool.

 Only fourteen weeks till November!

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TO EDGAR!

Photo Copyright by Wayne Cable