A few scenes around Beantown

I didn't spend much time in Boston when I wasn't in their fabulous Museum of Science, but we did a little walking between train stations, museum, and meal spots. So I got to snap a few samples of the city's fine architecture.

the Custom House, glimpsed among more recent structures

Not surprisingly, there were several handsome churches along our walk. I'm pretty sure this one is the Old West Church, a sign on whose fence I featured last Wordless Wednesday. Not just one shot would suffice for such a lovely building...

This impressive structure, just a few blocks from the museum, caught my eye, but my google maps research couldn't tell me what it is...

Just across the street is a really remarkable building that looks like it could have been designed by a Soviet-era architect on acid...

It is enormous, and google did help us here: it's, not too surprisingly, a government building, housing state mental health and revenue agencies, among other offices. Definitely distinctive, we couldn't decide if it was just ugly or strangely beautiful, but it was eye-catching!

We passed the Gahden on our way into town, and caught our train for home at the North Station which is adjacent to it. Fortunately, we didn't need this handy garage, though...

...although if I were to need a parking garage in Boston, I guess I'd have to use the preferred garage of the Celtics!

Next time I venture north to visit this little lady, we'll have to make another trip to Boston and see some more of its fascinating sights.

Wordless Wednesday: a good thing to believe in

Signs of the times

Yes, it does! And close to 2,000 fellow San Antonians agreed with this lady forcefully enough that they braved blustery winds and threats of rain yesterday to march in support of science, facts, and the value of evidence and clear-thinking in public life. 

(I know that 60° sounds downright balmy to some of my readers, but the cold front that arrived just before our march yesterday was kind of a shock to folks who normally expect 90's at the end of April!)

I myself didn't actually march, since I was volunteering and stayed at my post by the water tent. (If those 90's had materialized, there would have been much more demand for the bottles in our coolers than we eventually saw!)

But I had a good view of the pre-march "pep rally"...

...as well as the post-march crowds and speeches...

The handsome building serving as a backdrop for the march headquarters is San Pedro Playhouse, a small theatre providing the city with high-quality quirky as well as standard repertoire productions. It's located in lovely San Pedro Springs Park, the oldest park in Texas and touted as one of the oldest in the country. A perfect setting for this Earth Day confab.

And it was exhilarating getting to meet, greet, and visit with like-minded folks of such passion and creativity. The creativity was very much in evidence on the signs...here are some of my favorites:

one of the best...in intention and execution

one of several signs chiding our embarrassment of a Congressman

well, duh!

some signs were more militant than others

another sign pointing out practical benefits

this group was new to me, but a friend is a member
and she told me about it

a couple of clever commentaries

yes, she did co-discover DNA

love the physics humor

Some of the folks had signs of a more personal nature...

Really?

how much easier it would be!

The enthusiastic and hard-working young organizers of our march were very pleased with the turnout. And I was happy and proud to work with them. It's encouraging to meet young people who seem capable of repairing at least some of the damage done by my generations' inability to craft a worthy future for them.

Wordless Wednesday: a good idea

Pacific coast architecture

This was the view at sunset our first evening in lovely San Diego, from the roof of our hotel. I was intrigued by the elaborate tower lit so attractively by the low sun. Little did I know that the next day I would learn that it's just the tip () of an iceberg full of amazing buildings in Balboa Park, just a few blocks away.

This is the California Tower, part of a gorgeously ornate collection of buildings constructed for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. When we visited the San Diego Natural History Museum (read about it here) we also got to ogle many of these amazing buildings along the way. Here's a sampling...

street-level view of the Tower and  dome of the Museum of Man
(wish we'd had time to climb the Tower!)

Casa del Prado (south wing)

Botanical Building (at the Botanical Gardens,
another site I wish we'd had time to visit)

California Building (the base of the Tower)

not sure which building this is...but can you believe those trees?!!

Of course, there are other fine buildings elsewhere in San Diego, and we did get to see a few during our very brief visit. This is our almost decadently luxurious hotel, the Inn at the Park (Balboa, that is):

Handsome, isn't it? And boy, did we feel pampered!

We also had a nice little stroll around a neighborhood in Coronado, where we saw some lovely flowers that I showed you a few posts ago, as well as quirky residential decorative touches, like this imaginative gate...

Distinctive features of many San Diego neighborhoods are alarmingly steep ravines, like this one...

,,, fortunately often spanned by useful footbridges like the one shown here. I mean, why let something like a 100-foot chasm limit your building sites?

Crossing one of these ravines (on the Spruce Street Suspension Bridge) led us to a real gem of residential architecture, a house not only lovely and historically significant, but of personal importance to my husband and his sister (who was with us for this walk).

Here is the ravine that the bridge spans (more pictures are on the website linked above)...

...and here's our destination, a house Henry and his sister remember visiting as children...

 

This is where Henry's wonderful Aunt Lucy lived for many years. We were in San Diego for her memorial service, as I told you back at the beginning of these San Diego posts. And as you know if you read the obituary I linked there, she was quite a remarkable lady, and definitely famous enough for her house to be designated a historic site.

According to this listing of sites from the San Diego Historical Resources Board, the house is not only an architectural treasure (built in 1920) but is also significant for Lucy's having lived there (although the listing doesn't mention Henry's visiting it ).

We miss you, Aunt Lucy!

Maine art

While most of the museum visits on my coast-to-coast trip last month were to those of the children's or science variety, I did briefly take in some art at this fine museum in Portland.

It doesn't hurt that New England seems to produce more than its fair share of artists that can be featured at a regional museum like this. I was particularly excited to see a couple of lovely paintings by Rockwell Kent, who spent some time in Maine. This was my favorite of his at the Museum (even though it's not showing a Maine scene!):

My personal interest in the peripatetic Mr. Kent stems from the fact that my father spent some time at one of his former homes, in Newfoundland in the 1950's. (You can read about his time there on this web page; see more pictures of Kent's house in this Flickr set.)

The Portland museum offers a lot to see in a relatively small space. And the space is lovely in and of itself, with all kinds of interesting touches. Like these look-good-enough-to-eat apples that decorate a mezzanine facing...

There's also an impressive display of Native American-inspired art up on the top floor...

But as is often the case, smaller items provide their share of highlights, too...

  

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The art of New England isn't confined to museums, for sure.

I've shown you the lovely domestic architecture on display in the kids' neighborhood before. On this visit I snapped a couple of lovely structures in a different part of town, when meeting a friend for lunch on a foggy day...

Aren't they handsome?!

I got to see some great architecture on the other coast during this trip, too. Next up: San Diego buildings of note.

Wordless Wednesday: best sellers, still

MOS and NAT

I got to visit two fabulous science museums, one on each coast, during my February-March cross-country trip. I showed you a neat exhibit from the Nat in San Diego last time, and I will tell you more about that Museum in a minute. But first, the even more spectacular Boston Museum of Science, which is right on the "banks of the River Charles," as you can see...
 

Its exhibits are fun and fascinating, especially their dinosaurs, which were a big hit with my youngest companion. But I was really agog during the whole visit by the building itself. It's so big, it's difficult to convey the super-coolness of its design in still photos...

...but I can give you some idea of the beauty and creativity of the place by focusing on a couple of elements that you can see in the shot above.

First, on the right you see what looks like a greenish deep-plus velvet stripe down the wall. It's actually a gigantic vertical planter box!

Part of an exhibit on water (and specifically, Boston's river), it's nourished by a sheet of water and is both beautiful and astonishing...I've never seen anything like it!

Another design element that caught my eye is the ceiling above the walkway that you can see in the middle of the photo above. I mean, why just have a ceiling of acoustical tile, when you can have a gorgeous, changeable, hi-def video featuring scientific topics?!

fishes (with human companions for scale)

star nursery

prehistoric aquatic creatures?

Aren't those videos stupendous?! (BTW, our newly renovated and expanded Witte Museum in San Antonio—whose wonderful reciprocal membership benefits have saved us lots of money at both the museums in this post as well as elsewhere!—also has one just inside and above the new front door. I'll try and put a picture of it in a future Wordless Wednesday post soon and show you more of this great new exhibit space when I can.)

And there was at least one other great visual feature that you could actually manipulate on your own. I took a turn at making these lovely squiggly lines do all kinds of mathematically sophisticated acrobatics. (I didn't care that almost all of the other museum visitors that did this were half my size and 1/10 my age! But I should have taken a video.)

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Across the country we visited another great science museum in San Diego, their Natural History Museum.

It is also situated on scenic property; here's a look out one of their second-floor windows at the very photogenic Casa del Prado, just across the street...

Like several other buildings in Balboa Park (although not the current NAT), it was built for the Panama-California Exposition in 1915. which celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal. I'll show you more pictures of these iconic San Diego buildings in a future post.

There were all kinds of cool exhibits in the Museum, including the "Citizen-Scientist" room that I referred to above. I really enjoyed their large collection of animal sculls, from the tiniest (that the Adorable Granddaughter would have found enchanting) to some behemoths. But unfortunately my photos of those exhibits didn't turn out well. (You can see some of the big sculls here, but inexplicably they don't have pictures of the teeny ones!)

I did a little better with this rather menacing shark replica...

...as well as this amazing clockwork....thingy (I couldn't find anything on the website that tells what it is, and I neglected to take a photo of the informational card that was with it). But isn't it gorgeous?!

Here's a closer look at the "egg," as well as a very large piece of jade that was on display. I foolishly didn't have Henry stand next to it for scale, but it was probably 3 or 4 feet high!