My Home Town

I recently spent most of a week in Fremont, Ohio, visiting family and enjoying the full colorful spectacle of an eastern autumn. It's a small town of about 16,000, built by pioneers with great taste. They've left us dozens of great monuments, especially beautiful churches and public buildings.

When I grew up this was the county jail, blackened with soot and dark as coal. My brother helped organize a cleaning and burst of adaptive reuse that turned it into offices for the county commissioners.

Built in 1890.

The Sandusky County Courthouse. Dignified.

Pioneer history in the park out front of the courthouse.

Classic. Built to last by ancient founding father Lutherans.

Another Lutheran Extravaganza just blocks away. Grace Lutheran. 

Catholics were no slouches, either. This is St. Joseph's. Less than a mile away is St. Ann's, also built of red brick. Both beauties and speaking to the high aspirations of the county seat of Sandusky County.  While I was home it occurred to me that there are literally thousands of small

American towns with this kind of architecture. I don't have pictures of the houses, but the whole town is filled with giant old two-story's, many of them kept up, many struggling and selling for less than $100,000. Great place to visit, town of my father's people and cemeteries filled with my relatives.

The ambience of 15th and L

  I walked east to buy chocolates at Ginger Elizabeth on Thursday and strolled here through the tree canopy at downtown Sacramento's lively corner of 15th and L streets. There's always a lunch gaggle here, the office crowd and lobbyists gossiping about who's up and who's down. Eye-catching. Great little detail there with the rickshaw. 

The Indefinable Look of the 2000s

The 1990s and 2000s have possessed a certain indefinable look - especially in infill housing of the sort that just opened in downtown Sacramento. This is Mercy Housing's income-qualified housing project  near the courthouse and county jail on a formerly very dead corner. It's a great little piece of infill development - the kind you see featured in one of my favorite magazines of all time, Urban Land from the Urban Land Institute. They love this stuff. So do I.

The Continuing Echoes of Rome

Forgive me the brief ramble of history, but I am engrossed this winter in the first and second volumes of  Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." That means being hyper conscious of the Roman Empire's influence still visible in our lives. I'm a guy who took Latin throughout high school. I visited Rome twice, in 1978 and 1981, to soak in the ruins of what must have been a truly magnificent display of architecture in its time. I came across the Sacramento County Law Library on a recent lunch time walk. It's a little corner place near the Amtrak station, all tucked away and invisible to most of the city. The ancients' good taste endures.

Room With a View

We went to the Crocker Art Museum in downtown Sacramento last Sunday and ran into a huge crowd visiting for the Norman Rockwell exhibit. It was great. So was this million-dollar view of downtown from inside the museum. Even better on a rocking chair.

Joyeux Noel, 2012

Christmas is gone and New Year's Day is soon to come. I end 2012 with this small memory, a picture taken on Christmas Eve while waiting for light rail to the suburbs. This is Ambrosia Cafe, a lovely little place on a corner in a main downtown square of Sacramento.

Waiting for the train on late darkening afternoons of fall becoming winter this year, I have often felt spellbound by the warm welcoming light coming from this little coffeehouse. Ambrosia is a favorite gathering place for Capitol policy wonks, lobbyists and the ocasional legislator. They drink coffee and tea here and gossip about the latest.

The cafe anchors the ground floor of an older building about six stories high, approximately the favorite height of people strolling urban areas. I forget now where I read that. I believe it was about Paris being abundant in that kind of architecture. I love the holidays wreaths here, the Christmas tree anchoring the corner and the informality of the street-level holiday greeting.

So many of the best architectural sights, the litlte feel-good places, happen almost by accident without trying too hard. Small holiday sights can get frozen into memory. This is mine, Christmas Eve with Ambrosia closed for the holiday.  The cheer was contagious. Happy New Year everyone, and happy sight-seeing in 2013!

School of Design

My wife and I sauntered off today to the Elk Grove Pumpkin Festival, stopping first to tour the Elk Grove Historical Society's heritage park. Next door is this renovation-in-progress, the historical old home of  the 1884 Reese School.

I add it here because of the classical entrance. They obviously added this touch to say: "Enter here a place of learning, a very important place."

Contrast this with today's schools, which seem designed by the same companies that do prisons.