White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Postcards from Chicago: America’s Second City in Poetry and Paint

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Long before my first trip to Chicago by plane, I traveled there by poetry and stories.

Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” took me to the city as a teenager. The poem’s opening verse added to the foundational image of the city which my father, a Boston-based meat broker, built with his stories about the Chicago meatpacking industry:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

In 1914, when the poem was published, Sandburg was working in Chicago for Day Book, a newspaper which fashioned itself as a defender of the common people. In the poem he attacks the city’s immorality, which he wrote about in his newspaper articles:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

Despite its terrible side, Sandburg defends Chicago’s pride and industriousness:

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Like Sandburg, my father loved the vitality of Chicago, especially its laborers. He had some of the best times of his life in the city as a bartender, during a summer break from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, in one of the landmark hotels.

Some of the worse times in his life involved Chicago — like the time a truck carrying a load of meat byproducts that he sold to a dog food company overturned on an icy highway south of the city, spilling its contents.

In the dead of night, the Illinois state police notified my father about the accident. The next morning, he flew to Chicago and helped with the highway cleanup.

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people.
Laughing!

My father laughed about shoveling frozen animal lungs, spleens, livers and kidneys on that highway as rushing vehicles sprayed him with bloodied snow and ice. But his laughter about that awful work came years later.

A Magnificent Mile of Murals

Artist Marina Zuni’s enchanting mural of kissing deer on the campus of Chicago’s Columbia College.

On a recent trip to Chicago for a television shoot, my husband and I stayed at a hotel on South Michigan Avenue, amid the Columbia College campus. It was a lucky choice because I’m a muralista – a devoted follower of murals – and the campus buildings are resplendent with them.

Along the side of the building across from our hotel, there was a surrealist mural of a black chain-link fence turning into a swarm of bright orange-and-yellow butterflies. There were four fabulous murals on the walls of the building surrounding an outdoor parking lot on South Wabash Street: one, by artist Marina Zuni, depicts a buck and a doe kissing while submerged in an ice-blue lake in an enchanted forest. Another mural pays tribute to the comic strips that were born in Chicago, including “Brenda Star,” “Dick Tracy,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Moon Mullins” and “Little Orphan Annie.”

Columbia College, which specializes in the arts and media, had an interesting birth. It was founded in 1890 as the Columbia School of Oratory by Mary A. Blood and Ida Morey Riley, both graduates of the Monroe Conservatory of Oratory, now Emerson College in Boston.

Anticipating a strong need for public speaking at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, the women were inspired to open their school in the exposition city, Chicago, and adopt the exposition’s name, according to a history of the college.

This Columbia College mural reflects Chicago’s important place in comic strip history.

Blood and Riley, who became the college’s first co-presidents, established a coeducational school that “should stand for high ideals, for the teaching of expression by methods truly educational, for the gospel of good cheer, and for the building of sterling good character.”

In 1904, when it was incorporated in Illinois, the college’s name was changed to the Columbia College of Expression. As radio broadcasting grew in the 1920s and 1930s, the college was advertised under different names, including the Columbia College of Speech and Drama, the Radio Institute of Columbia School of Speech and Drama, and the Columbia College of Speech, Drama, and Radio. It settled on Columbia College in 1944.

Photos: Linda Gasparello

The Husband and Wife Who Founded Memorial Day

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(Channeling Gen. John A. “Black Jack” Logan)

WASHINGTON — It’s Memorial Day. I see you’re walking from Logan Circle to Constitution Avenue to watch the parade honoring all the nation’s veterans.

I’ll be there, too. In spirit.

Do you see the bronze statue in the circle? That’s me: Gen. John A. Logan, sitting erect on my horse, my sword drawn and the ends of my thick mustache flying in the wind. I was nicknamed “Black Jack” for my swarthy complexion, boot-black hair, eyes and that mustache.

At the outset of the Civil War, I won re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Jacksonian Democrat from Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, a region that had partisan and divided loyalties. I tried to take a neutral stance, but I ended up fighting to preserve the union. I rose from colonel to major general, distinguishing myself in eight major campaigns. Many historians consider me to be best of the Union Army’s “political” generals.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant offered me a brigadier generalship in the postwar U.S. Army, but I returned to politics, winning three more U.S. House elections as a Republican from Illinois, and an advocate of African-American civil rights and public education.

Later I won three U.S. Senate elections, which spurred me to run for higher offices. I was a vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket that lost the general election in 1884, and I failed twice to become my party’s presidential nominee.

Enough about my political career. If you can dally, I’d like to tell you about the origin of this national holiday, which involves me and my wife, Mary, an indefatigable Washington hostess and a prodigious writer and public speaker.

In March 1868, when I was a congressman and commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, my wife and I were invited to tour the battlefields of Virginia. Unfortunately, I couldn’t accompany her on what she called a “pilgrimage” in her May 30, 1903, article in The Los Angeles Times, headlined “Memorial Day: A Noted Woman’s Story of Its Origin and Growth.”

She wrote that on her visit to the oldest church in Petersburg, Va., whose bricks had been brought from England, “as we passed through the rows of graves, I noticed that many of them had been strewn with beautiful blossoms and decorated with small flags of the dead Confederacy.”

When I met her at the train station, she told me about this “sentimental idea” and I said, by her account, “What a splendid thought! We will have it done all over the country, and the Grand Army shall do it! I will issue an order at once for a national Memorial Day for the decoration of the graves of all of these noble fellows who died for their country.”

While I’d known about the Decoration Day observances in the South (and mentioned them in a speech in 1866), my wife’s enrapture with the idea likely got me moving on an annual national day to honor the fallen.

On May 5, 1868, at Grand Army headquarters in Washington, I issued General Order No. 11, designating that May 30 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion. … It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope it will be kept up from year to year …”

Now, on your way to the parade. But I hope you’ll take the time, as I said in my order, to visit the graves of our heroic dead and “garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of springtime.”

Photo Gallery: American College of the Building Arts

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Above Photo: The college occupies the 1897 Charleston City Railway Car House.

The American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, S.C. is the seat of a renaissance in education. The college, opened in 2005, is creating “educated artisans” – modern-day Leonardo da Vincis.

“Students complete an integrated liberal arts curriculum, where both academic and artisan courses build upon each other,” a college brochure states.

Already, ACBA students have attracted the attention of master artisans in Europe. The prestigious Fondation de Coubertin in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, France, has awarded two students scholarships to further their artisan and academic training. “It’s the Rhodes scholarship for artisans,” according to President Colby M. Broadwater III, a retired three-star general. Just 30 students a year, from France and foreign countries, are awarded this 11-month scholarship.

Here are some of my pictures of the college and the students’ and professors’ works, which exemplify one of Leonardo’s sayings, “Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.”

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Postcards from Macon, Ga.

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The Mound Builders of Georgia

The Ocmulgee Earth Lodge’s doorway. Credit: Linda Gasparello.

On a January day at the Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, Ga., a hiker ambles up the Great Temple Mound, a flat-topped, earthen ceremonial structure built by the Mississippians around 900-1100 AD. Just as the Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson described Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1887, the mound is “entirely suggestive of solidity and repose, of serene majesty asleep.”

Macon lawyer Christopher Smith, a tall mound of a man, guided my husband Llewellyn King and I through the national park, which preserves an area that has been inhabited by humans since the Ice Age (before 9,000 BC).

From the Visitors Center, we walked across a wooden bridge over a stream flanked by spindly Georgia pines and up a hill path to the Earth Lodge, which was probably a meeting place for the town’s political and religious leaders.

Crouching, we entered the grass-covered lodge through an opening buttressed with thick wooden planks. Bent at our waists, we walked through a narrow hall with woven reed walls into the reconstructed council chamber of the Mississippians.

The circular chamber incorporates and protects the original clay floor, which is about 1,000 years old. There is a round fire pit and a raised platform in the shape of a large bird, where the chiefs or high priests sat. The chamber’s wood-beamed ceiling and clay walls give it the look and feel of a Tudor chapel.

The Tudor chapel-like earth lodge chamber. Credit: Linda Gasparello.

“The site of Ocmulgee is synonymous with Georgia and Southeastern archeology. During the 1930s, it was a training ground for a whole generation of American archeologists, some of whom later became the ‘fathers’ of modern American archeology,” according to the National Park Service.

The history of the park, from its inception as a Depression-era works project through to World War II, is intertwined with archaeological project management on a grand scale by the Smithsonian Institution, various federal relief agencies (the Works Project Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Federal Emergency Relief Agency) and the National Park Service.

From 1933 to 1942 as many as 1,200 people excavated the site under the direction of Arthur R. Kelly, a Harvard-trained archaeologist working for the Smithsonian, and built the Visitors Center, which contains beautifully crafted dioramas of human habitation of the area from 10,000 BCE to the early 1700s. The 702-acre site was designated a National Monument in 1936; it is now a national park.

We toured Ocmulgee a day before its closure on Jan. 20, due to the government shutdown. That day, the national park posted a message on its Facebook page that the Visitors Center and Earth Lodge would be closed during the shutdown, but the roads, trails and outside grounds would be open as usual, daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Dee Shannon Garrison left this comment on the page, “Stupid congress critters. Ain’t happy unless they putting somebody out of work.” 

True Grits

Recently, I read in Yankee magazine that the Algonquin Indians of New England, not Southerners, invented grits. That may very well be true, but I don’t trust New Englanders — not even Rhode Islanders who make a corny cousin, johnny cakes — to cook grits.

Northerners just don’t get grits. In 1980, when I was living in Manhattan, I watched Stan Woodward’s hilarious and insightful documentary about grits on PBS’s WNET. Using a hand-held camera, the South Carolina filmmaker went from the streets of New York to the grist mills of the South asking people a simple question, “Do you eat grits?” A New York City construction worker replied, “Grits? Ain’t that the stuff on my collar?” New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, who grew up in Indianola, Miss., replied by making a grits souffle.

True grits are cooked in the “grits belt” that stretches from Virginia to Texas. Kevin Whitener, who was our neighbor for nearly 30 years in The Plains, Va., and cooks at the Old Salem Cafe in nearby Marshall, makes the grits of my dreams.

Georgia is the middle hole of the grits belt: the one that’s comfy for someone with a grits belly. Grits became the state’s official prepared food in 2002.

Chris Smith, host of our Georgia trip, treated us to dinner at the Grits Cafe in Forsyth, near Macon. I ordered the fried catfish, remoulade and cheddar soft grits. I left the restaurant full as a tick.

High Sticking, Tripping and Roughing in Macon

I grew up in Massachusetts: a hotbed of ice hockey rest. So I just can’t get my head around professional ice hockey teams in the South. Sure, you can build a rink and import players from Boston. But how do you build a fan base in a region where people only like ice when it’s in Coke or sweet tea?

Yet there are five National Hockey League teams in the South. The Southern Professional Hockey League has 10 teams, including the Macon Mayhems, who were the 2017 President’s Cup champions.

Southern ice hockey teams have crazy good names, like the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs. But hands down, the best-ever professional hockey team name is the Macon Whoopees. The defunct team played in Southern Hockey League during 1973-74. A Macon reporter told me, “The first game the Whoopees played, folks left during halftime because they thought the game was over.” Poor attendance led the team to disband mid-season.

The Macon Whoopees rose again in 1996, renamed the Whoopee. After several owners endured seasons of poor attendance and financial losses, the team went belly up in 2001.

An East Coast Hockey League team, the Tallahassee Tiger Sharks, relocated to Macon in 2001. They became known as the Macon Whoopee and played just one season. The Macon Trax, a later effort to continue professional hockey in Macon, got stopped short.

I hope the Macon Mayhems, a relocation of the former Augusta River Hawks, will play in the city for a spell.

 

Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.

The Truth is on the Walls

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VILNIUS, Lithuania – In May 2016, local artist Mindaugas Bonanu painted U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump locking lips with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the wall of Keule Ruke, a barbecue restaurant near the city’s Central Station. Painted next to the passionate pair was the phrase “Make everything great again,” a riff on Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Bonanu’s mural took inspiration from one on the east side of the Berlin Wall which depicts East German leader Erich Honecker kissing his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev. That mural, painted by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel in 1990, is titled “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.”

Dominykas Ceckauskas, the barbecue restaurant’s owner, said the mural was “predicting that if Russia and the USA would ever make out, it would happen in the Baltic states … with tongues or with tanks,” NBC News reported.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

Three months later, vandals whited out the mural, which had become an international sensation.

“The purpose of the attack was to remind us, the people of the free world, that there are still active advocates of authoritarianism in our society,” Ceckauskas said on the restaurant’s Facebook page.

He promised to reinstall the mural, which he called “a world famous symbol of liberty and defiance.”

Delivering on his promise, there is a new mural which depicts Trump and Putin sharing a joint: fellow authoritarians having a puff.

In the restaurant’s garden, there are two murals on the back wall. The first is inspired by “American Gothic,” American artist Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of a farmer and his daughter standing in front of a house with a gothic window. The farmer is holding a pitchfork. But in the mural, their heads are penises and the farmer, holding a trowel, is building a brick wall topped with barbed wire.

Next to that mural, the wall is painted black. At the top of this mural, these words are painted in stark white letters: “Dirty Mexican Wall.”

Eating Crepes with Gusto

I ate my first crepe in Paris, on a solo trip at age 12. I spent a week there in a youth hostel, under the wing of the Didac Agency, which placed teenaged American girls as au pairs in French families. The agency thought I was too young to be an au pair, even though I was already babysitting in Hingham, Mass., where I grew up. So they placed me with a gregarious family in the southwestern Landes province — the Albert Barrieus — as a companion for their children.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

With a limited budget and an unlimited curiosity about French food, a crepe was an easy choice for lunch on the day I checked out the Gare d’Austerlitz, from which I would take a train south to Dax, where I would meet my French family.

At the station’s buffet, I ordered a simple crepe au fromage. The crepe I ate at that buffet (one of Paris’s major train station buffets which the French railway authorities promoted as “gastronomical buffets” in 1960s) is the one by which I have judged all crepes for 50 years.

That delectable experience made me a train station buffet buff. My husband Llewellyn King is one, too. We have eaten very well in train station restaurants in Lyon, Brussels, London and Vilnius.

Vilnius’ Central Station was a short walk across a park from the Panorama Hotel, where we stayed during our recent trip to attend the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists. After taking a look at the old trains in a fenced-in museum park near the platform, we decided to eat at the station’s Gusto blynine. It is basically a Lithuanian IHOP. Lithuanian crepes (lietiniai su varske), American-style pancakes and Lithuanian grated potato pancakes (bulviniai blynai) were listed on seven pages of its 34-page menu.

We ordered spinach-and-curd cheese crepes, made with “traditional” wheat rather than buckwheat (grikiu) batter. They were made near our table in an open kitchen and served folded in a neat square, which kept the batter spongy and the filling oozy.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

Although we ate at a few other restaurants in the city, all superb, we returned twice to Gusto blynine. We ate more spinach-and-curd cheese crepes, crusty potato pancakes with fried bacon and hot soup, beetroot with fried ham and tomato with hot paprika.

One evening, we recommended the restaurant to some English and Irish colleagues, who were staying at the Panorama and wanted to dine nearby.

The next day, I asked David Lennon, a former Financial Times correspondent, where they went for dinner. “We found a nice Lithuanian restaurant, which had a lot of little rooms,” he said. “Somehow, I ended up eating a potato sausage. Whoever thought up such a thing?”

And to think that he could have eaten crepes with gusto, as we did at the railway station find.

Postcards from the Baltic Sea: Part I

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Cruise Shore Excursions: Theater off the Sea

By Linda Gasparello

To take or not to take shore excursions. That is the question for cruisers.

Having cruised on five continents, my answer is to take them. The guides are competent — mostly moonlighting high school teachers and college professors — and often they’re characters.

The first cruise my husband, Llewellyn King, and I took, on the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas in the early 1990s with the now-defunct Royal Cruise Line, introduced us to shore tour theater.

In Constanta, Romania’s largest and most important port city on the Black Sea, our shore excursion guide was a droll fellow named Mikhail. We visited the city not long after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried by a hastily arranged military tribunal that was set up on Dec. 25, 1989, put up against a wall and shot, all within an hour. It was a city still in shock from 24-years of their mismanagement that brought food shortages in a country with dark, rich soil; torture and executions; and, most famously, state neglect of orphans and disabled children.

During our tour of the city, we stopped at a Belle Epoque hotel where, Mikhail told us, “Nazi leaders lodged comfortably in the early years of World War II.” The hotel manager made us feel welcome by setting out trays with tiny fruit tarts and small glasses of tuica (Romanian “white lighting” made from plums) on a large table in a paneled, ground-floor reception room. As we entered the room, the staff, who stood at the opposite end, watched as most of us sampled the tarts and tuica. As the last person in our group walked out of the room, I looked back and saw the staff make a dash for the table, grabbing whatever was left.

We traveled north to the Greco-Roman city of Histria. Mikhail gave us a detailed tour of the city, which was founded by Greeks in the 7th century BC and thrived for seven centuries. He interspersed his commentary about Histria, which became the richest city in Ionia (Asia Minor), with sarcastic comparisons to Romania’s “golden age under the Ceausescus.”

We returned to Constanta on a coastal road. Nearing the city, we saw thick pipes that seemed to stretch for miles along a beach. “That would be a beautiful beach, but the pipes lead to a chemical plant that Mrs. Ceausescu built. She had a doctorate in chemistry, but she did not even graduate from high school. Fancy that!”

Mikhail said Mrs. Ceausescu was nicknamed “Codoi,” referring to her mispronunciation of the chemical compound CO2 ( “C” for carbon, “O” for oxygen, and “doi” which is Romanian for “two”). He added that “codoi” was a word in Romanian, too, meaning “big tail.”

“Her big tail was her nose. She would kill anyone who took her picture in profile,” he said.

“These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.” Photo: Linda Gasparello.

For nine days this month, Llewellyn and I cruised the Baltic Sea on the Getaway, a Norwegian Cruise Line megaship. Anna, our guide on a day cruise along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, was a notable shore tour entertainer.

On the bus, as we drove from the cruise ship to the river boat, Anna told us that men in Russia were “as precious as diamonds. So ladies, hold onto your husbands. Do not lose them. And please send us your sons, nephews, brothers, uncles.”

Anna teaches Russian history in a St. Petersburg high school, and she wrangled us as though we were her students on a field trip. She taught us how to say “I love you” in Russian. “Ya lyublui vas. Just say, ‘yellow blue bus.’ We Russians are so emotional.”

The sunny day brought out what Anna called her “Russian emotions.” Pointing to the buildings decorated like wedding cakes along the river, many designed by the 18th-century Italian architects Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Carlo Rossi, she said, “Rastrelli, who built the Winter Palace, which you can see along the embankment, liked pale blues and greens, and Rossi liked pale yellow. These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.”

So, too, is vodka. Anna said, “When you have a cold, you drink vodka with lemon. When you have a headache, you drink vodka with pepper. And when you are depressed, you drink vodka.”

But the funny lady was serious about showing us St. Petersburg’s historical sights: no significant edifice on the banks of the Neva or ship moored on it (including the great, gray cruiser Aurora which fired the blank round at 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 25, 1917 that started the Bolshevik Revolution) escaped her commentary.

“Just look at the taste and temperament of Peter the Great. Here is his small, elegant Summer Palace. But across the river, on Vasilyevsky Island, is the Peter and Paul Fortress, which he designed. It was the Bastille of the tsars,” Anna said.

Across from the fortress, she pointed to the Soviet-era KGB (now FSB) headquarters. “That’s the ‘Big House,’ ” she said.

Those of us seated on the upper deck were grateful that Anna was serious about reminding us to duck when we approached one of the many low bridges across the Neva.

“Please keep seated,” she said. “But if you want to be like Catherine the Great and get rid of your husband, have him stand up.”

How emotional, how Russian.

Matroyshkas and Movies: A Souvenir Shop in St. Petersburg

You great, big, beautiful dolls. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

While I prefer to go to souvenir shops of my own volition, I’ve stopped resenting being shanghaied into them on cruise shore excursions. Sometimes, they’re sights that shouldn’t be missed, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: a maze of souvenir shops.

After our Neva River day cruise, we were bussed to a cavernous souvenir store. Norwegian Cruise Line billed it as a “bathroom stop.”

It was just that, for some on our bus. But busloads of tourists, including many on ours, were just raring to hit the mirrored shelves laden with fur hats, amber jewelry, Faberge-style Easter eggs and matroyshka dolls — especially after getting emotional on complimentary cranberry vodka, served at the entrance by young women wearing traditional, red jumper dresses.

Against a wall, near one of the store’s side exit doors, stood colossal Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump matroyshka dolls. As I took a picture of them, I heard one shopper say, “Same size as their egos.”

The store occupies part of what was once a movie theater in St. Petersburg. The theater’s architecture is Stalinist big box. The huge concrete-slab marquee over the entrance advertised four movies or other events. Riveted onto cement columns near the entrance are metal sheets imprinted with scenes of bears frolicking in a forest, peasants threshing wheat, and people going about their business on a wintry day in St. Petersburg. There is one of Russian troops tending their wounded in the Crimean War – a war that stirs up sacred memories, leading to actions even unto this day.

Power Tower

More is more. That was the approach of the two greats, Peter and Catherine, and Empress Elizabeth asked their European architects to take in St. Petersburg.

Lahkta Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

The city’s historic center is a feast — a grand bouffe — of Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, including the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, and the Marble Palace. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage site in 1990, noting, “The unique urban landscape of the port and capital city of Saint Petersburg, rising out of the Neva estuary where it meets the Gulf of Finland, was the greatest urban creation of the 18th century.”

The more-is-more approach is operating today with the construction of the Lahkta Center, which includes a twisting glass-and-steel tower that will serve as the headquarters of the state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The project, which was proposed in 2005, has changed its name (as many times as St. Petersburg) and location, due to criticism from preservationists and residents that its 1,515-foot tower — which will be the tallest in Russia — would destroy the city’s horizontal harmony and violate a law prohibiting new buildings higher than 157 feet in the historic center.

In 2010, the project moved to a site northwest of Vasilyevsky Island, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It is scheduled for completion in 2018.

Designed by the architectural firm RMJM London, the center’s website says “the tower bears more than a passing resemblance to a ship’s mast, while the building that lean against its base represent the hull. This theme continues through the wave-like bearing structures and the overall organic form of the building, both of which symbolize the power of the sea.”

The project already holds a Guinness World Record. Between Feb. 27 and March 1, 2015, it set a new record for largest continuous concrete pour, with 25,667 cubic yards poured over a period of 49 hours.

Some of the Lakhta Center’s remarkable innovations include:

  • It will be the first skyscraper in St. Petersburg to employ an ice formation-control system. To prevent ice accumulations and help maintain good visibility, the glass on the highest floors will be heated; and to prevent ice formation, the tower’s spire will be made of metal gauze.
  • The center’s lighting will be designed to make it bird-safe during migration in the fall and winter months, complying with the World Wide Fund for Nature and FLAP’s (Fatal Light Awareness Program) bird-friendly building program.

This project has Petrine boldness. While it could suit a man who would be a great, Putin, he has yet to weigh in on it.

 

Gallery

Neva River Sights

Street Life

Soviet Movie House / Souvenir Shop

Graffiti

Signs of Faith: Portuguese Culture Thrives in West Warwick, R.I.

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I live in the Riverpoint section of West Warwick, R.I., which I call “Portugal on the Pawtuxet River.” Riverpoint has a Portuguese American Citizens Club; the Jerry’s supermarket stocks Portuguese food brands, like Gonsalves; and there is a Portuguese bakery, Matos, in nearby Arctic Village – I recommend their three-bite, egg custard tarts, pasteis de nata.

Photo: Linda Gasparello

All around the circle at Riverpoint, but especially as you go up Providence Street to Arctic Village, you’ll see modest houses, each with baroque front yard landscaping: flowering cherry trees shaped like umbrellas, espaliered shrubs and statuary – especially Virgin Mary statues, either brightly painted or stark white.

Most of the Virgin Mary statues are adorned with plantings – often with perennials, like hostas, and sometimes with plastic flowers or small American and Portuguese flags.

In the backyard of a house near the Bradford Soap Works, there is an Our Lady of Grace statue: a Virgin Mary with outstretched arms, standing on the serpent Satan. The blue paint has largely peeled off her robe, but the snake hasn’t lost any of its black paint. It looks lifelike — and like it is headed into the poison ivy that is creeping closer to the statue.

Just off Riverpoint circle, there is a house where another Our Lady of Grace statue stands among well-tended hostas in a tiny plot along the driveway. I call her “Our Lady of the Hostas.”

I have a chit-chat friendship with the Portuguese American woman who lives there. Recently, when she saw me admiring the lush plants, she said, “I think Our Lady is smiling because the Pope has made saints of two Portuguese children.” She was referring to Pope Francis’s canonization of siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto who, with their cousin Lucia Santos, reported that on March 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary made the first of six appearances to them while they grazed their sheep in Fatima, Portugal.

My favorite religious statue in Riverpoint is on East Main Street. It occupies the entire side yard of a house, where you’d expect to see a picnic table and benches or a circle of lawn chairs.

Actually, it is a tableau of brightly painted statues: a statue of Jesus is flanked by one of St. Anthony holding Baby Jesus and another of the Virgin Mary. Fourteen winged cherubs, hands clasped in prayer, stand at their feet. I can only surmise that the boys are dressed in blue, and the girls are dressed in pink.

Bygones Worth Remembering

My first encounter with the Portuguese wasn’t in Portugal. It was on a train from Paris to Dax in June 1968. I was 13 years old and I was headed to this spa town in southwestern France, whose thermal springs and mud baths have been noted for the cure of rheumatism since Roman times, when it was known as Aquae Tarbellicae. There I was to meet Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu with whose family I would spend a few life-expanding summers.

The afternoon before I was to take the train to Dax, Madame Berri, who owned the suburban Paris agency that paired me with the Barrieus, warned me to get to the Gare d’Austerlitz early. “The trains to the southwest are crowded on Saturdays,” she said, handing me my ticket. It was going to be a long trip, over six hours, and I couldn’t wait to take it.

I was staying at a youth hostel at 11 rue du Fauconnier in the Marais – and 49 years later, the Hotel Fauconnier is one of three youth hostels in Paris. After a week in Paris, I was a Metro master; I knew it was about a 10-minute ride from the St. Paul station to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Even so, I packed my suitcase, showered and slept in my dress that Friday night. As I remember, I wanted to have more time to eat the breakfast the hostel laid out for the always-hungry youth: croissants, bread rolls, butter, apricot jam, and small bowls of coffee with hot milk.

Eating that breakfast turned out to be one of the smarter things I did that day.

I got to the station with a lot of time to spare. When my train was announced, I noticed that people where running down the platform and pushing into the cars, and shouting to each other in a language I couldn’t identify. I had a second-class ticket, and all those people seemed to be headed to second-class cars.

I couldn’t run fast because I was wearing wooden-soled clogs. By the time I climbed into one, all the seats in the compartments were taken – and all were taken in the other second-class cars.

As the train pulled out of the station, I placed my hard-sided, American Tourister suitcase in the aisle of one of the cars, and looked out the window. An unsympathetic conductor took my ticket and told me that I might have to stand a long time because “the train is filled with Portuguese, who are going back home for their national holiday.”

Clogs were the right shoes for standing for hours. I was alternately standing and looking out the window, or sitting on my suitcase looking at the Portuguese family across the aisle in a compartment.

About two hours into the trip, the father pulled down a couple of suitcases from the overhead racks. Out came the bread, the sausage, the cheese, the fruit and the wine.

A girl about my age asked her mother something. Then, through the open compartment door, she asked me in French if I wanted some of their lunch. I thanked her and helped myself to some bread and cheese. It was the first time I had eaten a papa seco – a soft, baby bottom-shaped roll. Poof went my memory of the hostel’s petits pains.

The train arrived in Dax in the late afternoon. I got off and waited for M. and Mme. Barrieu on the platform, as Mme. Berri had told me to do. A blonde woman accompanied by a teenaged girl looked at me for a while. They spoke with each other, shook their heads and walked away. No one was left on the platform but me, so I took a seat – and I was happy to do so.

After a couple of hours, the station manager approached me. “Are you still waiting for someone?” he asked.

I told him that I was supposed to be picked up by Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu who live in Pouillon. “It is a village not far from here. Do you have a telephone number?”

Just as I was reaching into my dress pocket to get it, I saw the blonde woman with the teenager walking toward us.

“Are you Linda?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Mme. Barrieu’s blue eyes filled with tears of relief. “We are so sorry. We saw you, but we thought you were Dutch,” she said.

They were confused by the tag on my American Tourister suitcase, which looked like the flag of the Netherlands, and by my clogs.

 

All photos by Linda Gasparello

Linda Gasparello is the co-host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.

Cities, I Know Them by Their Bread

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By Linda Gasparello

I’ve always associated cities with bread. Boston, south of which I was raised, I associate with oatmeal bread. Washington, D.C., where I spent most of my life, I associate with white bread — the Wonder kind.

New York, where I lived for a few years, I associate with seeded rye bread. If you said “New York” to me, I’d think of the malty, sour taste of the rye flour, the slight licorice flavor of the caraway seeds and the fight my teeth would have with the crust. Seeded rye bread is assertive, like New York.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have lived in Rhode Island for nearly five years. But I don’t yet associate a bread with Providence. This is curious because the city abounds with artisan and ethnic bread bakeries, especially Italian and Portuguese.

What’s really curious is that restaurants in Providence and around the state don’t routinely bring you bread at some point between sitting down and getting your food.

Restaurants serve bread for a number of reasons. Here are two: Traditionally, serving bread has been a way to welcome guests; and practically, a basket of bread or a small loaf keeps guests happy before the food arrives.

When the poet Omar Khayyam said ecstatically, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou,” he was sitting beneath a bough with his beloved, reading a book of verses. Just think, if the 11th-century lovers were alive today, they’d be sitting in a Persian restaurant (alas, there isn’t one in Providence), reading their menus and eating nan-e barbari, a flatbread with pillowy ridges.

I could associate Providence with a flatbread that is ubiquitous in the city: pizza. Providence is a welcoming city. It’s not a stretch to associate pizza with the share-a-slice-with-us welcome that my husband and I have gotten from the city.

It’s Comedy and a Concert Tonight!

Last October, I was introduced to the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra by a friend who sings with the Providence Singers. Under the superb direction of guest conductor Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra and singers performed Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” on Oct. 15.

Before stepping onto the podium, Tovey told the bizarre story of how Mozart got a commission from a court intermediary to write a piece commemorating the death of Count Franz von Walsegg’s young wife, Anna, which the pretentious count could pass off as his own. The musical heavyweight died, at 35, while writing the requiem.

Tovey’s lecture came as a surprise to me. Conductors, in my symphonic concert-going experience, never spoke and carried a small stick. My friend told me that the orchestra’s musical director, Larry Rachleff, loved to talk to the audience: It was his schtick.

For 21 seasons, until his retirement from the orchestra on May 6, Rachleff often gave short lectures before he lifted his baton. He is a noted music educator, and currently holds the Walter Chris Hubert Chair at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, where he lives with his wife, mezzo soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, and their young son, Sam.

Rachleff is also a skilled standup comedian, as I found out during his farewell concert on May 6.

The performance of the second piece he chose, Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” was delayed to deal with an offstage problem with the soloist’s – his wife Susan – gown. For about 15 minutes, Rachleff summoned all his comedic talents: He told a story about how his family had encountered a naked woman in a lobby of a hotel in Geneva. When someone walked onstage with his score, he joked, “Usually the librarian hands me the score, but tonight she must be otherwise engaged.”

His adoring audience laughed, and they cried when he took his final bow.

Cry Me a River

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time,” said Leonardo da Vinci.

For nearly a week, if you dipped your hand into the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., you’d touch mounds of filthy foam and pieces of white styrofoam blocks.

From morning till night, I watched this dreck float down the river, collect on the banks and cascade over the dam. I watched pairs of mallard ducks and flocks of geese wading in the smelly suds trapped in the shrubs on both banks. I watched cardinals and other birds, that usually stop for a bite at my neighbor’s porch feeder, pick at the styrofoam icebergs and carry off pieces, presumably to their nests in the wooded banks.

I took pictures and reported this to Anna Cole, a technical staff assistant at the state’s Department of Environmental Management. She dispatched Robert Fritsche, an environmental scientist the department’s Bureau of Environmental Protection, Office of Compliance and Inspection, with impressive speed.

My husband has praised Rhode Island’s beauty in columns in The Providence Journal, on our television program, “White House Chronicle,” and on Rhode Island Public Radio. Now I praise the government for taking the preservation of that beauty seriously.

Above: Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., Photos by Linda Gasparello.

Signs of the Times, Modern and Ancient

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I take the train a lot from Providence, R.I. to Washington, D.C. For a long time, it passes through what people would call the most beautiful scenery of the trip: the Connecticut shoreline. And for a short time, it passes through what they would call the most blighted scenery of the trip: the walls along the railroad tracks between North Philadelphia and 30th Street Station.

Katharina Grosse, psycholustro.

But I look forward to the beauty in the blight along that stretch of the trip. I’ve seen some of the most stunning artwork on those walls and buildings along the tracks, one commissioned, like contemporary German artist Katharina Grosse’s “psychylustro” — a warehouse with windows that look as though they were blown out in a blaze of orange and white – but most done by anonymous artists. Whether their frenetic art is benign or malign, I don’t care. It transforms my trip.

I work the graffiti on the walls the way people do the difficult crosswords in London’s Sunday Times. There is meaning, sometimes clear, in the words on the walls. On the walls, I read, “ZeroSmyle,” and I sympathize with the graffitist. Skrew, a loud graffitist, spray-painted a message — maybe for China — on a wall, “Drama, Tibet.”

I think about what master graffitist Banksy said in “Wall and Piece” about these artists, “Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”

Photo: Linda Gasparello.

One person’s defacement is another’s decoration. I’ve enjoyed grafitti on walls or buildings all over the world. Vienna has some of the most magnificent graffiti. I like to take the hydrofoil between Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia, so that I can see the museum of temporary art along the Danube walls.

While living and traveling in the Middle East, I’ve seen graffiti galore — and one of the best writs on a trip to the Greco-Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey. Carved on a pillar near the city’s brothel – the “Love House,” as it was called by the ancients – a guide said there is some advice to lovers and other strangers: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Mercury was the ancient treatment for syphilis.

The ancients were always kissing and telling on prostitutes. “Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome,” Thornton Wilder wrote in his epistolary novel “The Ides of March.”

Now, back to the future. Donald Trump’s presidency has revived the art of the protest sign and placard, not seen since the nation’s hippie days. Gitta Hasing, who I’ve known since she was a child, participated in January’s Women’s March and last week’s March for Science in Washington. She and her husband are biological scientists.

Neither wind nor rain could keep Gitta, her toddler son and her parents from marching on the Mall. She is a talented photographer and took pictures of protesters and their signs in both marches in the same exacting way she photographed parts of North and Central Florida trees for a book, published by the University of Florida.

If Paris is The City of Light, Washington is The City of Sayings. They are carved on government building walls, museum and monument walls, and plazas. The one that always makes me cry is part of the last verse of Walt Whitman’s Civil War-era poem “The Wound-Dresser,” carved in the granite around the Dupont South Metro entrance:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad

Photo: Linda Gasparello.

Two days before the March for Science, as I was sitting on a wall at the Watergate, waiting for Gita’s mother to arrive for a performance of Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. I looked up at two signs hanging from a street light near the Embassy of Saudi Arabia. The blue sign read “The Kennedy Center, JFKC: A Centennial Celebration of John F. Kennedy” with his picture – his 100th birthday would have been May 29, 2017. The orange one read, “Courage, Freedom, Justice, Service, Gratitude.”

Trump can’t take those words away from me. They’re carved in my memory and the memories of millions of Americans. And a sign with bold hand lettering, posted on a pillar at Cafe La France in the Providence Amtrak Station, proves that so well:

WE WELCOME

ALL Races

ALL Religions

ALL Countries of Origin

ALL Sexual Orientations

ALL Genders

We Stand With You

You Are Safe Here

 

 

March for Science on the Mall — Photos by Gitta Hasing

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The Coptic Crisis: A Story of Benign Neglect by Anwar el-Sadat

Church of St. Barbara, Cairo

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By Linda Gasparello

Forty years ago, I attended Easter Sunday mass at the Church of St. Barbara in Old Cairo, also known as Coptic Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile. I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo, and this was my first Coptic mass. At it, regrettably, I had a front-row seat to the routine disrespect Coptic Christians suffered in Egypt under President Anwar el-Sadat.

The Church of St. Barbara is a fine example of Coptic architecture with its white plaster walls, marble double-colonnaded nave and timbered roof, carved cedar pews, and rare, gleaming icons. It is one of the most popular in the district, and it quickly filled to capacity.

No sooner had the mass begun, when I heard the sound of firecrackers outside the church. The noise pierced the solemnity of the mass, but the congregation took no notice and prayed on.

During the communion, a man in a suit, accompanied by two other men, marched down the center aisle of the church. The man in the suit was a government official, I was later told. In a symbolic gesture meant to mollify the Copts, who comprised about 10 percent of Egypt’s population, government officials made appearances at churches during Christmas and Easter.

The three men pushed into a pew, sat down and started chatting with each other. The congregation brushed away this disruption of the holiest part of the mass as easily as street flies. A woman sitting behind me muttered, “Ma’alesh.” In Egyptian dialect, she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

The Copts were used to disrespect and, far worse, persecution, which they had suffered since St. Mark founded the Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria around 43 A.D. In fact, the Church of St. Barbara stands on the site of a church dedicated to St. Cyrus and St. John in 684 A.D. that was destroyed during an Arab assault. The story goes that when some Christians from Damanhur, a city about 100 miles northwest of Cairo, including Cyrus and John, confessed to their faith, they were shot with arrows, burned in a furnace, tied to a horse’s tail, dragged through the streets and survived – to be beheaded. One of the church’s chapels contains the remains of St. Cyrus and St. John; another contains relics of St. Barbara, a beauty from the Greek city of Nicomedia, whose pagan father had her tortured before he beheaded her in 306 A.D.

The Copts were being excluded from the “new society” plan that Sadat had highlighted on his trip to Washington, D.C., just a week before Easter. The Egyptian president held his first meeting with President Jimmy Carter on April 3. In his toast at a state dinner on April 4, Sadat said, “Mr. President and dear friends, as you know we are embarking on an ambitious program to rebuild our society along lines which ensure more justice and equal opportunity. We are revitalizing our system with a view to enable it to cope with the immense problems we encounter, old and new. We are determined to build this new society on ideals of faith in human dignity, which we inherited from the ancient Egyptian civilization. This heritage has kept us united together and optimistic in the face of the most difficult of challenges.”

Actually, Sadat’s state was falling apart. It ceded to the religious institutions the provision of education, financial assistance and health services to the public. Sadat, who was a devout Muslim, allowed Islamist groups to flourish in society and on campuses, countering the leftist and Nasserist domination of them. Religion – an emboldened Islamism — was replacing the “Egypt for the Egyptians” nationalism of Nasser as the country’s foundation. There was a rising level of disregard for the Copts, who became increasingly fearful for their future. In 1977, there were clashes between Muslims and Copts in Upper Egypt.

I should have left the Church of St. Barbara with a sense of joy — the mass was beautiful. Instead, I left with one of foreboding: I thought the rise of the Islamists and their disrespect of Copts, condoned by the government, would lead to mass deaths.

And so it did – to Sadat’s death and to hundreds of deaths of Muslims and Copts, including at least 45 in two church bombings by ISIS on Palm Sunday.

 

Photo: August 11, 2012 Church of St. Barbara, Cairo, Nadia Ismail. Used under the Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License