When Ansel Adams turned fourteen, his father gave him his first camera. For you camera junkies out there, it was a Brownie Box model by Kodak. Just after that, his family vacationed in the Yosemite Valley, a trip that would change his life and the face of 20th century photography.
Last month, I stood in awe of a large collection of his images and notes on his life at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. There’s an exhibition underway until January 19, 2025.
An only child born to wealthy parents, Ansel Adams survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake but suffered nasal injuries that left him a mouth breather for the rest of his life. He was prone to frequent illness and hypochondria and contracted the Spanish Flu during the 1918 flu pandemic. During his recuperation, he read a book about lepers and became obsessed with cleanliness. He was an intelligent young man who taught himself to read music and play piano.
The thing that truly captured his interest and attention was photography and nature.
These are things I learned at the museum. I also saw a picture from his first trip to Yosemite as a fourteen year old. Adams wrote “I climbed an old and crumbling stump of arboreal grandeur with my camera and was about to snap the shutter when the stump gave way, and I plummeted to the ground. On the way down, I inadvertently pushed the shutter.”
Friends, that photo teenage Ansel Adams made while falling off a stump was superior to anything most of us will ever make. Sigh.
It’s an interesting collection of photos that represent what you might expect of Ansel Adams and some things I didn’t expect to see. Photos of indigenous people, ancient cliff dwellings, Georgia O’Keeff, and a New Mexico church caught my eye as much as any of the landscape portraits he was known for creating throughout his career.
There were also some terrific portraits of Adams throughout his life and the entire experience went a long way toward humanizing this larger than life artist.
Discovering Ansel Adams will run through January 19, 2025 at the Cincinnati Art Museum. This museum is amazing and general admission is free but there is a $12 admission for adults to view this exhibition. Seniors, college students and kids pay a reduced rate. Learn more here.
Cincinnati has a ton of things to entertain you for a fall or winter weekend. Live performance, the American Sign Museum, bookstores, a walk at Spring Grove, the Newport Aquarium (just across the river in Kentucky) and lots and lots of public art to enjoy will keep you occupied and wishing you had more time.
Fall vacation is finally here and I couldn’t be more pleased. Exhaustion had set in so I’m relieved for some R&R at home and for some adventure days out in the world.
It’s a fine line to walk. I’m tired on most average days but life is more than sleep and work. The thing that brings me the most joy is something that many would consider an afterthought or altogether unnecessary.
Going out to explore the forests, the back roads, cities, museums, bookstores and all the other fascinating places that make this world amazing is the thing that brings me the most joy.
It’s the thing that infuses me with enough energy and enthusiasm to face another day.
The above picture is from Pittsburgh. There’s a walking trail that my friend introduced me to partly because she wanted me to see this place. It’s private property and is the site of a fabulous collection of vintage signs and assorted fun stuff. It looks like the guy who owns it ran out of garage space and his wife told him to move it somewhere out of her way. .
It’s a fun surprise and a feast for the eyes. It’s the kind of thing that sparks excitement in my heart and spirit.
I hope there’s something in your life that brings you such joy. If so, go embrace it! Even if no one else understands.
The Continental is a fabulous-from-the-outside diner in Old City Philadelphia. It seems to be closed now and I realized after snapping this photo that a person was sleeping on the stoop.
That stack of dice still turns, giving me a shred of hope the rest of the place will sometime spring to life. At this point, the sign is the best part of this place. Here’s hoping someone will polish up the place and make the pancakes the best part of the Continental.
High on a hill overlooking Cleveland’s famed Lake View Cemetery is a memorial to President James A. Garfield.
Ohio is sometimes called the Mother of Presidents because seven US Presidents were born here including Garfield who was our twentieth. Born in poverty and in a log cabin in northeastern Ohio, Garfield was a lawyer, preacher, Civil War general, US Senator and member of the US House of Representatives.
His was a life of service and he used his power to advocate for civil rights for African Americans, to support an educated electorate and to fight corruption in the postal service. He was a pretty progressive guy for the day in 1881 and even for modern times.
In case you don’t remember your history, an assassin fired and struck Garfield twice – one bullet caused a minor wound to his arm and another went through his back, shattering a rib and embedding in his abdomen. He died months later after unsanitary methods employed by his doctors caused infection to develop and grow.
He was interred in another location in this cemetery until his memorial was completed about nine years later and his body was moved. Our tour guide said that Garfield’s wife Lucretia was instrumental in choosing the location for the memorial and in planning its design. She chose the highest point in the cemetery, giving her husband, the President, the highest resting place in the cemetery as he had once held the highest office in the land.
You ascend twenty steps to enter the heavy front doors. A larger than life statue of the twentieth president stands beneath an impressive light fixture with twenty bulbs. Awe inspiring stained glass windows represent each of the original thirteen colonies and his home state of Ohio. Each of these windows features a woman who is holding something that represents that state in her outstretched hands.
Spiral stairs give access to the crypt where Garfield’s flag draped casket sits next to that of his wife. Go up stairs to an interior balcony that looks down on the rotunda and also get a better view of the dome above. One more flight of stairs up will give you access to an exterior balcony with a sweeping view of the cemetery and downtown off in the distance.
This memorial is extraordinary both in appearance and in atmosphere. It feels sacred. At first glance, you might mistake this space for a church and the women of those windows as angels.
You can tell that Lucretia Garfield and whoever designed this memorial wanted to honor the man and his place in history while emphasizing the weight and importance of the US Government. Reverence and respect were paid here.
I hated to leave this place and have thought often about our time there. Garfield was both preacher and politician. He fought for what was right and died because of some things that were wrong with his world. I can’t help but wonder how our country might have improved and grown had he served his entire term rather than a few short months. Would the civil rights movement have advanced more? Would we be less tolerant of the lies of corrupt politicians?
If you’re in Cleveland, Lake View Cemetery is home to this memorial and to the graves of many other famous people. We didn’t get to explore here long but it was one of my favorite things in Cleveland. Learn more here!
Cleveland’s west side neighborhood known as Tremont would be a quiet place if not for the decision made more than forty years ago to film portions of a low budget Christmas movie at a house on West 11th Street.
Those responsible for the movie magic behind A Christmas Story needed a large downtown department store in a city that would accommodate filming of a Christmas parade in late winter. They found exactly that in Cleveland where the historic Higbee Department Store had agreed to leave up their over-the-top Christmas decorations through the new year in 1983. The city streets and store exterior were transformed into 1940 Hohmanm, Indiana for middle-of-the-night parade filming.
Hohman was a fictionalized version of Jean Shepherd’s hometown of Hammond, near Chicago. The movie is based on a collection of Shepherd’s semi-autobiographical short stories. Ironically, he grew up on Cleveland Street, perhaps a bit of foreshadowing of what was to come.
After securing the department store location, there was a long list of places and things that needed to be scouted. Much of the film was made in Canada and a lot of the interior shots were done on a sound stage in Canada. However, when they stumbled into 11th Street and found the now infamous two-story yellow home with a large front porch and picture window looking into a remarkably unremodeled front room, movie magic was alive and well.
This is the story our tour guide shared when we toured the house earlier this month. He shared lots of other stories including how difficult it was to track down the homeowner only to find that he was nursing a drink in the back of a neighborhood pub just down the street literally every time they went in looking for help to locate him. He had no interest in their scheme to rent and stage his home to look like a forties era middle class household for a Christmas flick. That is, he had no interest until they offered to pay him $60,000 for his trouble. So he moved out and gave them free reign to do as they pleased.
The house was purchased several years ago and transformed into a museum. A lot next door serves as a very small parking lot. Next to that is a home turned Airbnb where you can stay. They call it the Bumpus House. If you don’t understand that name, you really need to watch the movie. You can also stay in the Christmas Story House where a portion of the house is an Airbnb and where overnight guests have the run of the home outside of tour hours.
Across the street, another house has been turned into an artifact museum and one next to that is a gift shop. A garage in between is home to a 1939 fire truck and an Oldsmobile like Ralphie’s Old Man drove.
The street is narrow. The place is popular. There’s precious little parking and signs at every driveway boldly demanding that visitors not block their driveway. Personally, I would either have to move or lose my mind if I lived in this neighborhood. It’s just too busy with the tourists to not make a person crazy.
Still, it’s a neat place to visit and a fun little tour if you enjoy the movie as much as I do. It wasn’t a smash hit when it was released but has since become a cult classic with so many quotable lines and vignettes that many of us can recall the entire script by heart.
If you’re not familiar, it’s about a boy named Ralphie and his quest for a Red Ryder BB Gun during one special childhood Christmas, America was still on the cusp of joining World War II. Entertainment came from gathering around the radio with his parents and brother. Fun with neighborhood friends sometimes led to trouble and education was a mixture of elementary school classroom and the flaring temper of his father who “wove a tapestry of obscenity, that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.”
Ralphie calls his dad “the Old Man.”
You can pose in front of the Christmas tree with a Red Ryder B.B. Gun and a blue bowling ball like the one the Old Man received. You can take a selfie with the infamous leg lamp in the window and even crawl under the kitchen sink like when Ralphie’s kid brother Randy did because he was sure their dad was going to kill Ralphie.
Two people on our tour wore pink bunny suits similar to the one Ralphie received from his aunt Clara for Christmas that year. The Old Man said that Ralphie looked like “a deranged Easter bunny” in that costume and this description wasn’t far off for the people we saw wearing their own. It was ridiculously hot that day so the teenaged girl and middle aged man who donned these costumes had to be truly dedicated to their cause and willing to suffer heat stroke in the name of enjoying the moment.
Either that or they lost a bet.
Speaking of people on the tour – manage your expectations if you are an introvert or really hate crowds. There were forty people on this tour and that was about twenty too many for my comfort level. We made do and it was fine but it was a little overwhelming in these small spaces.
In the museum across the street, you’ll find vintage toys from Higbee’s Christmas window, some original costumes, letters and other memorabilia.
I am not always a fan of guided tours but this one was a good compromise. The tour guide kept everyone together to tell us stories and then turned us loose to explore on our own in the house and the museum.
If you go, remember, parking is a pain so this might be a good time to take an Uber. If you have to drive, be courteous and don’t do anything that will get your car towed.
While it may be tempting to go at Christmas (because how fun would that be?), I will tell you now that this will be no fun at all. If it was this nuts in July, imagine how awful it will be in December.
It was called Cleveland’s Crystal Palace when it opened in 1890. As one of America’s first indoor shopping centers, the Arcade was unlike anything ever seen in that area of the country. It didn’t come cheap either. The $875,000 price tag was funded by some of the country’s best known millionaires including John D. Rockefeller and Steven V. Harkness.
The tract of land was chosen specifically to create an indoor commercial passageway between two of the city’s most important thoroughfares – Euclid and Superior.
Today, it’s home to boutique shops, a luxury spa, restaurants, an art gallery and the Hyatt Regency Hotel.
It eventually fell into disrepair and there was fear that the wrecking ball would be near. Luckily, this gorgeous landmark lived to see another century when a $60 million renovation was completed in 2001, securing its place in Cleveland architectural history hopefully for many centuries to come.
We visited early Saturday morning, hoping to catch it before it got busy. I’m glad we did because we mostly had it to ourselves to roam around and explore the beauty of it all. It was peaceful and looking up at the glass ceiling was awe inspiring.
I had the feeling that if I turned my head quickly enough I might catch a glimpse of a Victorian couple – him in a seersucker suit and her in a long white dress with puffy sleeves – strolling from one shop to the next. I never did see them but I bet they were near.
