Saucers

So I've made it to New York City, my base of research operations for the next couple of weeks. Today I went to the public library's main humanities and social science branch (the famous one with the lions), to consult the special collections there. Research was good, but they didn't open until 11:00 and I stupidly arrived at 8:30. Fortunately it was snowing - heavy, wet flakes that built up quickly. I took some pictures in Bryant Park, just behind the library and a few blocks from Times Square if you know your way around Manhattan. (I don't, but I do know how to get to Bryant Park now.)

There's something about New York that looks good in black and white, so those are the tones for today's picture.

mithicallaneous

I think I'm done with my research here in Ithaca, so it's on to New York where there are five or six sites that I need to consult. I don't have any new photos from today, so I'll post another one from yesterday - one that shows the scale of the waterfalls shown below. I was standing on the bridge you see at the left, more or less showing what happens to the lake once it begins to fall away. Cornell University used to use this waterfall for hydraulic power, thus the deteriorating building on the right, which is almost my favorite part of the view.

After work today I walked down the hill about a mile to Ithaca's downtown, where I had dinner at the Moosewood Restaurant, surely the world's most famous vegetarian restaurant...although...actually...it's not a vegetarian restaurant. But they do serve the world's most famous vegetarian food! One of the restaurant ideas I like best is to offer only 4 entrees, but change the menu twice a day, every day. Tastes like the cookbook!

Two Gorges. Damn!

That's right, there are two gorges on either side of Cornell's campus. The one that I saw yesterday is much smaller than the one I saw today, so they are not to be considered equal.

The archives close for an hour at lunch, so I'm forced to go wandering about for 40 minutes after I've had something to eat. Not a bad find for the day.

Ithaca is Gorges

Perhaps you have seen the phrase "Ithaca is Gorges" on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt somewhere. My arrival in Ithaca has, unfortunately, coincided with the death of the man who coined that semi-famous phrase. But here I am, in Ithaca, at the beginning of a three-week dissertation research trip. I've never been here before, and in reminds me of home in Iowa, except somewhat more prosperous and somewhat prettier. For one thing, its woodsier: less of the land has been given over to agriculture. For another, it's less flat. Cornell University is situated at the top of the hill around here, and this administration building is more or less then top of campus. It's nothing too steep, but anyone mounting an attack on the campus with a bicycle brigade would certainly be slowed by its insistent verticality.


It hardly seems fair that glaciers should have left my corners of the Midwest with fewer undulations than a heart monitor hooked up to a pickle and this place with lakes, furrows, and waterfalls all around. But so it goes. Indeed, I learned today that the campus of Cornell University is more or less squinched between two gorges. I walked over one on my way to the library today, but it was impossible to get a really good photograph of it. I'll go to the other one tomorrow and see if I can get a better one. It also snowed tonight, so things should look a good deal more wintry. That's probably for the best.

New pantry shelving

So, after we did the floors in the pantry the shelves looked woeful. They were warped, wrapped in ugly faux-wood paper, and wedged into a crumbling wall. So they became the target of the latest condo modernization project, and perhaps the last one of any great significance: the previous owners did a lovely job with the kitchen and the bathroom, leaving only the pantry in a state of yuck. Here is the way things were, taken without flash to exaggerate the ugliness. The first picture shows in the inside of the pantry with from the kitchen. When you walk into the pantry and look to the left, you see the view in the second picture.














The old shelving had been attached with old wood nailed to the wall, and much of this wood was splintering, and much of the plaster was crumbling. I decided to remove the wood from the wall. Since it was in truly bad shape, chunks of wall came off with the planks. The next step was, then, to spackle and compound the wall back to health and even things out a bit, followed by coats of paint to make that side of the wall match its opposite, which we had painted when we replaced the floors. Because we didn't want the wall to support the new shelving, we bought a freestanding unit. It cost more, but seems much more stable. We're more organized, have a lot more storage space, and are finished with our pantry renovations!

A hard rain has a'gonna falled

I wasn't sure how to take a picture of a rainstorm in the dark, so I took a picture of a streetlight reflected in a giant puddle in the middle of the street. I don't think this experiment was a success, but you expect illustrations around here so you get it anyway. The amount of leafy detritus this time of year means that any heavy rain washes a great deal of it towards the drains...which then clog. There were 4-5" inches of standing water on my street until I went out with a neighbor and a shovel and unclogged the drain, removing at least 50 pounds of soggy leaves in the process (there were many many more pounds to be had, but the bag couldn't take any more.) The puddle began to shrink before our eyes, until we can the only dry corner for blocks.

P.S. I know I'm always on about how weather systems in these climes are chaotic, and there are natural random fluctuations that lead to unexpected and extreme weather events each year, and that, although these are "extreme", they are still normal. Similarly, if you flip a coin 1000 times, you expect to have some long runs of heads in a row in there...if you didn't get any sequences of 8 or 9 heads in a row over that amount of time it would surprise you and tip you off that perhaps the coin wasn't fair. So some apparently anomalous things are normal. All that said: it should not be 65 in January, there should not be tornadoes, and this rain should probably be a lot of snow. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and laughing it up, as a local weatherman did, is not endearing. It's sick.

Mom's travels

Mom's going to be in India for three weeks, and she's started a blog to tell you about it.

DQed

The sunlight came through the window and hit the little statue of Don Quixote that I keep on the bookshelf in what struck me as an interesting way today, so, for no particular reason:

Compost bin

I intend for this space to be non-political, but some of our environmental commitments are hard to avoid. And there shouldn't be anything controvertial about not taking risks with our future. So while I'm distressed by how little I can do, it does please me to take a few steps in the right direction whenever possible. In that spirit, Nicole and I recently purchased a compost bin for our condo association - pictured here under a pleasant pile of recent snow. Chicago, which has a long way to go before it deserves its green reputation, also seems to be taking little steps that make me feel better about living here as the months pass. For one, they offered these compost bins (and rainwater barrels, which we couldn't use) at highly subsidized prices at their Center for Green Technology. (See also this article about our alleys.) Composting our kitchen waste seems to reduce our personal trash by 40-50%. When spring arrives, the pile of leaves and scraps will decompose quickly, and we'll be able to use it to improve the soil in our common backyard.

Indiana Dunes

We went to the Indiana Dunes today to enjoy the sunny fall weather and the last days of seasonal color. Even the ferns were getting into the act:

The forest was mostly quiet; we saw very few birds. But for whatever reason there were ladybugs everywhere at the beach. I was looking poking around in the dune grasses and found these. The dark blue in the background is Lake Michigan.

Mexico, 1950

Here are some of the pictures that Simeon Leland (see posts below) took of Mexico in 1950:



I've showed some of the photos of more rural areas to people who have traveled throughout Mexico more than I have, and they suggest that, based on the clothing that people are wearing, they were probably taken in Oaxaca or Chiapas. This guy, judging by his pants, has been to Los Angeles or thereabouts.

The Zocalo, Mexico's main square:

Below you can see what the same space looks like in 2007. Fewer trees, no cars, more people, a metro stop that you can't see. Another thing that you can't see: the Templo Mayor of the Mexica / Aztecs, which was thought to be lost but in fact is right next to this cathedral. It wasn't found until the late 1970s, so although you can't see it in either photo, it wouldn't have been there at all in 1950.

Comparing Buenos Aires

Here's are comparison photos from me in 2006 and Simeon E. Leland in 1950 (see post below) of the "obelisk" in Buenos Aires.

1950:


2006:


And here's one that Nicole took that lets you see the considerable increase in the use of fluorescent signs:

Fifty-six years later

I think I've mentioned here in the past that my great grandfather, Simeon Leland, was once the chair of the department of economics here at the University of Chicago. He was also something of an amateur photographer. It turns out that he took some kind of official trip to Latin America in 1950, and Dad's visit here meant that I had the chance to digitalize some of the slides that he took at that time. He and I have been to some of the same places, and so you can compare rather directly how things have changes over fifty-odd years. I have slides from Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico. I'm not going to post them all at once...but here's one from Chile's major port, Valparaiso, where we had almost the exact vantage.

As you can see, in 1950 it was already quite a busy port:

Here it is in 2006. If you look at the photos at full size it's easier to see how much more closely packed the hills are.

New Floor

I'm back in Chicago, and Dad has been visiting here the last week. Our major project has been to re-do the floor in the pantry. The previous owners of the condo had done a beautiful job doing the bathroom and the kitchen, but the pantry remained undone. When we were preparing the floor, we found two things: under the linoleum, a penny from 1953 and a scrap of newspapers from 1925. The 1925 paper probably dates the layer of tarpaper, directly above the wooden flooring; the penny probably dates the linoleum. At any rate, here is how it used to look:

Since we didn't want to pull up the old linoleum, but needed to even out the floor, we put down a layer of cementboard. The old baseboards seemed moldy, so we pulled those off as well:

On top of this layer, we put down the tile. When we went to the store to get new tiles, we didn't find a sufficient number of the red ones that we liked, so we put some white ones in the middle. I'm glad it worked out that way, since I think this looks even better that it would have with all of the light-red tiles. After putting down the cement mastic, we added the grout and the new and newly-stained baseboards. Now it looks like a real pantry! Thanks for all the help, Dad.

Hurricane Dean

Well, Hurricane Dean hit the Yucatan, went across the gulf, and has now hit central Mexico. According to the link there, the eye of the hurricane passed within 95 miles of Mexico City. Thus it has been raining here all day, though there have been no high winds. It feels strange - during the summer here it rains every afternoon. But it started to rain at four in the morning, and hasn't stopped since. I went to the National Library anyway, which is down on the enormous campus of the main public university of Mexico, the UNAM, which has almost 300,000 students. Next to the library is a something like an ecological reserve, with a number of beautiful sculptures. Here's a picture of one of the flowers there (which actually do a remarkably job of matching the sculptures around them), with the library in the background.
Everything should be normal by the time I leave on Friday.

Mexico City and the Environment

Mexico City has a reputation as an environmental catastrophe, and to a certain extent, this is obviously true. The problem du jour seems to be that overuse of water is leading to a rapid depletion of the aquifer below the city, leading to rapid settling and sinking. Many of the old colonial buildings found in the city center, not to mention the pre-Hispanic buildings, are tilted and sunk. But apparently large parts of the eastern half of the city could sink and flood in sewage water following just the right kind of rain.


On the other hand, there have been a few areas of serious progress. In addition to an extraordinary metro system, with 11 lines, Mexico City built a "metrobus" line a few years ago. It took a major street (Insurgentes) and prohibited any small street buses from operating there. Removing all of these old buses greatly reduced emissions in the area of that street, and they were replaced with a very smart system. The median of the street has been converted into a series of shelters and the adjoining lanes have been made into bus-only lanes. The metrobuses run up and down those lanes, so they don't have to worry about traffic, creating an additional advantage to the bus by making it relatively more attractive when compared to driving. Another benefit is that emergency vehicles can use the lanes to get down the street quickly. The biggest problem is that there aren't enough buses to handle the number of people who want the service, which makes them packed at almost any time of day. The city is considering many more lines like this, which are obviously much cheaper to create than an actual metro. It is an idea that I'd like to see copied in American cities. One might object that this will create more traffic problems, and this might be true. In a US city there won't be reduced levels of traffic because of pulling lots of little buses off the street. But still: the people on the buses won't be stuck in traffic, and so more people will use the bus, pulling cars off the street and hopefully reducing emissions.

The other thing to notice is Xochimilco, at the end of the city, which used to be the site of watery gardens that fed the Mexica empire. Today this area is the only part of the greater city area that retains the aquatic character the city would have had 500 years ago - there are boatmen and canals here like Venice. Twenty years ago the land was a polluted, swampy mess, but some treatment plants were built and whole areas were replanted. Although people still feed the ducks far too much, the environmental health of this area has clearly improved. Small reasons for hope.

Teotihuacan

OK, so you're in Mexico City, you're obligated to go see Teotihuacan. Much of it was constructed between 100 and 650 AD, thus predating the more famous civilizations that the Spanish encountered. Teotihuacan, in fact, was a ruin when the Mexica (Aztecs) were the dominant empire.


I stitched together this panorama from a few shots. It's taken from the second largest pyramid on these grounds, known as the "Pyramid of the Moon." On the left side of this main footpath is the third-largest pyramid in the world, known as the "Pyramid of the Sun." (Those at Cheops and Cholula are bigger.) Still, it weighs more than three million tons, and was constructed without the wheel or animal labor. This means that if there were a million people working on the structure, they would each have to move 6,000 pounds of rubble. Yet the population of this town peaked at 175,000 -- though they probably used tribute labor from other parts of the empire to help build it. In any case, a mammoth achievement. Although this pyramid is known as "of the Sun," recent evidence indicates that it was actually used to worship the rain god, Tlaloc. (Known by the name of a similar deity worshipped by the Mexica, since the name used at Teotihuacan is not known. Teotihuacanese glyph writing has not been deciphered.) In the picture below, which I took half-way up the pyramid, you can see more evidence of this. People have been leaving notable sacrifices to Tlaloc, though we will have to see if the God of Fresca's jealousy is needlessly aroused for a lack of contributions.


It is very difficult to imagine Teotihuacan as it was more than 1500 years ago. A pile of rock today, the pyramids would have been covered in plaster and paint. The Pyramid of the Sun was apparently red, which is a terrifying and intriguing prospect. A few segments of mural that have survived. They can be found in a beautiful but out-of-the-way museum, and an impressive original structure that is equally out of the way. (They're both outside of the official grounds of the archaeological site.) This picture is from the latter site, so you can see both the richness and the limitations of what remains:

Taxco

This weekend's trip took us about three hours to the south of Mexico City, to the "preserved" colonial city of Taxco. ("Preserved" in quotations because it has grown, but government enforcement requires any new building to be constructed in style of the older structures there. Even the taxi fleet of Volkswagen beetles have been painted entirely white to match the buildings.) It is a beautiful city, with thin and winding streets twisting their way through the hills. In this picture, you can see the hillside covered in houses, and if you click on the picture to magnify it you may be able to make out the open-armed Jesus statue on the hill in the upper right corner:


Taxco was once a silver boom town, but since the veins have tapped out, the town has re-created itself as a center for silver design. Lots of what you get in other countries as "Mexican silver" was worked in Taxco, and there are hundreds of shops and galleries. But you don't get to see those, you get to see part this eighteenth century church:

Gulf Coast II

After spending our day in Veracruz, we headed about 30 kilometers to the north to a beach frequented by Mexican families from other parts of the country. The most unusual features were the sand dunes, which Nicole, having gone and "read" a "book", knew were five kilometers away. Five kilometers, said I? No way. Five kilometers later, we arrived, a bit footsore but happy to be there.


There were pieces of sand dollar strewn up and down the beach. When I went to the beach as a child, I always used to wonder how one particular uncle always managed to find whole sand dollars. I had never in my life found one, but I found one this weekend. I think I discovered the trick to the process: just walk far enough that no one else has picked them up first. Having found it, I became curious about what the animals is like when alive. As it happens, when swimming later on, I stepped on one out in the ocean. I picked it up, and then, having pulled it out of the water, discovered it was brown and covered with little spines. Having found this, I quickly threw it back. It's a strange animal: it seems like the "dollar" must make up 95+% of the mass, with a very tiny fleshy part inside.

The other area attraction were the ruins of Cempoala, the center of a local empire that Cortes encountered when he landed in this area. The buildings here are relatively modest, but 500 years ago, they were apparently covered in plaster, and one of Cortes' footmen mistook them for silver. Today, they are surrounded by farmland, mostly sugarcane, and indeed some of the buildings are fenced off, inaccessible, in the middle of people's fields.

Gulf Coast

Nicole and I made a weekend trip to the Mexico's Gulf Coast, to take some time to think (away from the archives), while at the beach. Our first stop, about a six hour bus ride through a surprisingly diverse range of ecosystems, was the port city of Veracruz. I suppose Veracruz is probably most famous for getting invaded, sometimes significantly. Like Cortes, on his way to "Mexico City," in 1519. Or the US Navy, occupying the port during the Mexican Revolution in 1914. The city's highlight (for me, at least) was the site of San Juan de Ulúa, where fortifications were built in the sixteenth century, and where subsequent phases of building have added depth and complexity. (An overhead view of the place can be seen at its Wikipedia article.) You can see three of the main phases of the building in this photo, with the tower at the back left belonging to one of the oldest phases:


The base level (which is really large), is, astonishingly, made of coral. Sometimes bits of wall have worn away, and the coral can be seen underneath. Other times it seems not to have been covered at all. Here, you can the coral seawall (SJdU used to be an island, but filled land has since made it a peninsula) and a bridge over a canal.


Other parts of the site have been used as a prison, including to house future President Benito Juarez. The cells were very damp, and in a short period of time (a couple hundred years) stalactites and stalagmites have formed there. Water torture--constant, inescapable dripping on one's head--was apparently used to make some of the prisoners crazy. (It is a myth, a tour guide said, that the water would eventually bore through your skull. Not a myth I'd heard before, actually.) Apart from the cells and part of one tower that holds a bizarre assortment of bombs and shells belonging to the Mexican Navy (and a couple of seamen), the ex-island is now quite a nice place: a nice place, that is, to employ my one photographic skill. Thus: