Tag Archives: Museum

Trip Peek #86
Trip #133
Rock ‘n’ Rail Redux

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This picture is from my 2016 Rock ‘n’ Rail Redux trip. Readers may recall that previous railroad based trips to Washington, DC, have had issues ranging from extremely late trains to completely canceled trains. This one was essentially problem free. The “Rock” in this particular outing was a Willie Nile concert at, as the sign says, The Hamilton Live. In addition to a pretty much on schedule train ride and a rollicking concert, I enjoyed a day on the National Mall including an independence for Punjab parade.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Trip Peek #85
Trip #148
Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio, and Nile

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This picture is from my 2018 Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio, and Nile trip. It consisted of a day driving to Pittsburgh, PA, a day in the city, and two days driving home during which I got to visit with three old friends. The picture shows the Duquesne Incline which I rode down on after riding up on the Monongahela Incline. I also checked out a couple of museums in Pittsburgh and another on the way home. The Allegheny and Monongahela are the rivers that meet in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio. Willie Nile is the musician whose concert the trip was centered around.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full-sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Burning Man at CAM

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I have never been to Burning Man but I’ve a son who has. I texted him while attending the recently opened “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” at the Cincinnati Art Museum. “Those things aren’t supposed to make it off the playa”, he said. “Burn it. It’s in the frickin’ name.” Those aren’t angry words. They’re amused words. In context, he seemed to be chuckling at the idea of people trying to understand the annual gathering by looking at some things that had once been there. I’d already picked up some sense of how silly this was from the exhibition’s title. “No Spectators” comes from Burning Man’s “radically participatory ethic”. “Participation” is one of the community’s ten principles. No one attends the actual event as a spectator. The joke (possibly even intentional) is that, regardless of the name, the majority of people viewing the objets d’art at the museum are 100% spectators. Silly or not, I spectated profusely.

As is apparent from the first photo, the Burning Man pieces are not shuttered off in an isolated gallery but share space with the museum’s permanent displays. The Truth is Beauty standing at the top of the main staircase is a third the size of the original 55-foot tall sculpture that appeared at Burning an in 2013. A description is here; Another view here.

Although several examples of the art of Burning Man are unavoidably encountered on the way, there is a gallery devoted to Burning Man history which is a good place to visit before actively seeking out the rest. Burning Man of today bears little resemblance to the original 1986 event. Today it is well organized and scheduled far in advance. The “city” that is created annually in the Nevada desert now has a population near 70,000. Given the name Black Rock City, a Department of Public Works exists to operate the city and a group called the Black Rock Rangers patrols it. A large part of the Ranger’s success is credited to the fact that they are not outsiders but participant volunteers helping keep other participants safe and enjoying themselves. There is a brief description of the DPW and BRR here. The jacket belongs to DPW founder Will Roger Peterson.

The history display includes some actual artifacts from past events. Starting in 1998, Crimson Rose, one of the organizers, has collected remnants of the Man on the morning after the burning. The keys were found on the playa by organizers Michael and Dusty Mikel between 2005 and 2012.

The guy on the right of the first picture is Thorax, Ambassador of the Insects. The mutant vehicle in the center picture is from 2008. It is named Tin Pan Dragon. I liked it so much that I grabbed a full side view and a shot of the video playing nearby. The big screen visible beyond the dragon show a loop of various Burning Man scenes with seating for a small audience.

The capacity of this theater is much higher with three rows of four seats each. Although No Spectators officially opened on April 26, several items, including this self-propelled theater were in place when I visited another exhibit just about a month ago. On that occasion, I took this picture of the screen with my phone. This time I took no screenshots but did sit through the entire presentation of silent shorts.

While some of the Burning Man pieces appear a little bit awkward in makeshift settings, this piece and this circular room seem made for each other. Gamelatron Bidadari is comprised of 32 bronze gongs played by computer-controlled mallets. There’s a better explanation here.  The few minutes I spent in this room were the most pleasant of my entire day.

Photos of Shrumen Lumen appear in promotional materials for this exhibit including the program cover. It is one of the few items that require a little participation and at least slightly supports the “no spectators” idea. As explained here, each ‘shroom is activated by stepping on a pad at its base. In the third picture, a non-spectator steps on a pad then steps back and back again to watch the show.

Phase 1 of “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” opened on April 26. Phase 2 additions will be made on June 7 and everything will remain through September 2. I’ll be back for Phase 2 and to listen to those gongs some more.

ADDENDUM 4-Aug-2019: As promised, I returned to the museum for Phase 2 and reported on the visit here.

Time of Pharaohs

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The renovated Cincinnati Museum Center takes another step at getting back in the swing of things by hosting the U.S. debut of Egypt: The Time of Pharaohs. The exhibit is new but the objects in it are anything but. Some of the 350+ artifacts on display are more than 4,500 years old. 4,500 years isn’t old like a colonial era cabin, or a New Mexico pueblo, or even a European castle. No, we’re talking old like a pyramid which is, of course, where some of these items come from.

I was there Friday evening for a members only event. It was a well attended members only event. Part of me was really happy to see that lots of people support the museum with their memberships and that same part was really happy to see that lots of those members also support special extra cost exhibits such as this one. Another part of me kind of wished all those people would just get out of my way.

I was smiling when I wrote that last sentence. Timed entries kept the exhibit from being overrun but attendees were not being hustled through it. The crowd simply meant I had to occasionally wait a bit to read a placard or study an artifact up close. It also meant that most photos I took had one to twenty people in them but just about every one of those people was seriously curious and that’s a very good thing.

Based mostly on Hollywood movies, my idea of Egypt includes a lot of gigantic stone things like the Sphinx and those pyramids. But, almost immediately I found a wooden jackal, a bronze cat, and a clay cup. A sign next to the cup dates it to the 1st half of the 3rd millennium BCE. The 2nd half of the 3rd millennium BCE started 4519 years ago. By comparison, the cat is almost modern. It’s from the 3rd century BCE. The jackal is from around 1000 BCE.

These bronze statues are just a few inches tall and quite detailed. That’s Amun-Ra on the left and Isis on the right with a sun disk on her head and Horus on her lap. I didn’t catch a date for the Amun-Ra statue. The Isis statue is from the 6th to 3rd centuries BCE.

My Cecil B. DeMille based ideas weren’t entirely wrong; The Egyptians did do a fair amount of stone carving. The first stele features the crocodile god Sobek. It was carved sometime between roughly 1290 and 1190 BCE during the 19th Dynasty. I screwed up and got no information on the second stele. The third picture shows a plaster cast of a carved wall of the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak. The plaster cast is 135 years old. Like the first pictured stele, the wall was carved during the 19th Dynasty. The casting is a solid grey. The colors are from a projector that cycles on and off to show the wall as it was originally. A replica of a 13th century BCE chariot stands in front of the wall.

Of course, you can’t have an Egyptian exhibit without a sphinx and some mummies. This limestone sphinx is a baby just a couple of feet long. It’s from the 3rd to 1st centuries BCE. The coffin is from the 14th or 15th centuries BCE. It’s a mix of wood and plaster with gold trim. The mummified cat comes from the same time period as the sphinx.

There is actually plenty of modern technology mixed in with the multi-millennium old artifacts. An audio guide is available that provides commentary keyed to specific displays. There are several interactive exhibits that help explain timelines, hieroglyphics, and more. The final display is pretty high-tech. High resolution CT scans have recorded the details of every layer of a mummy from about 750 BCE. Holography is used to project a rotating 3-dimensional image inside a clear pyramid. The image cycles through the layers as it rotates. It’s a time warp that even Doc Brown might appreciate.

Egypt: Time of the Pharaohs is at the Cincinnati Museum Center through August 18.  

The Holocaust and Humanity Center is Open

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The Cincinnati Holocaust and Humanity Center reopened in its new location last Sunday on the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I had seen the space it moved into on a “hardhat tour” during the Cincinnati Museum Center’s member’s preview in November. At the time, I noted my failure to visit the center in its current location despite it being on my list and relatively near my home. I once again resolved to get there “before they start carrying stuff out” but I failed. I tried after about a week had passed, but it was already too late. The move had already begun and the operation at Rockwern Academy in Kenwood had already closed.

I would not get inside the Center today, either, but it wasn’t because I was too late. I arrived about half an hour before the 1:00 opening ceremony when the space around chairs provided for holocaust survivors and family members was wide open. I could have staked out a spot right next to them but didn’t. By the time the procession of survivors and descendants began, my best view was via the giant screens at either side of the stage. The processional was quite moving not only for those participating or watching familiar faces enter the rotunda, but for folks like me who recognized no one. Some in the procession may have been experiencing memories of when they first saw Union Terminal. This was where many people escaping Europe or recently freed from Nazi concentration camps arrived in the 1940s to begin a new life in Cincinnati. The last picture shows the center’s Executive Director Sarah Weiss cutting the ceremonial ribbon along with Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley and Nancy and David Wolf for whom the center is named.

Entry to the Holocaust and Humanity Center was free on Sunday via time stamped tickets. I doubt that people were actually being forced out of the center after fifteen minutes, which was the interval on the tickets, but it was pretty obvious that this was not the day for a leisurely stroll through the exhibits. I thought it absolutely wonderful that the opening had attracted so many people, but quickly decided to take advantage of one of the perks of being retired and come back sometime during the week.

Incidentally, the HHC opening wasn’t the only thing bringing people to the museum center on Sunday. The picture at right, taken long before the crowd appeared for the opening ceremony, shows a line of people stretched across the front of the rotunda waiting to get museum and movie tickets. There probably wasn’t a lot of overlap with the HHC crowd; Most of the groups in line included young children. I noted in my post about the theater reopening that families with school age children were flocking to the renovated Union Terminal during the holiday break, and it looks like that flocking continues on weekends. I bet it’s the dinosaurs.

I made it back on Tuesday. Entry to the Holocaust and Heritage Center is not included in Cincinnati Museum Center membership, but tickets are sold through the CMC kiosk in the rotunda and there is a discount for CMC members. These sculptures were at the front of the rotunda and usually surrounded by people on Sunday. At present, they are near the stairs leading down to the HHC. The HHC is right next to where the Cincinnati History Library and Archives was and will be. The library closed in 2016 along with the CMC and has not yet reopened.

We were given a peek at a small portion of this mural on that November “hardhat tour” and I had been looking forward to seeing the whole thing. It didn’t disappoint. The 63 foot mural covers more than one wall of the center’s lobby area. I had some time to look it over as I waited to enter the “Winds of Change” theater that separates the lobby from the museum galleries but know I have some more looking to do. I believe all of the mural’s twenty-six scenes come from stories that are told, at least partially, inside the museum. Inside the theater, holocaust survivors now living in Cincinnati tell pieces of their stories in a video. The local connection appears throughout the museum in the display of artifacts and quotations from local survivors.

The first gallery beyond the “Winds of Change” theater begins with the story of the rise of Nazism. It’s a story of relatively small steps that go from Jews being valued members of their communities to their extermination being seen as a solution to something. The HHC utilizes two types of interactive exhibits. One uses touch screens to allow selection from a small set of recorded first person accounts related to the display they are part of. The second uses sliding panels operated by push-buttons. This not only provides more surface area for images and text but involves visitors ever so slightly. At first I thought this was a little hokey but I quickly became a fan. If you don’t press the button, you will miss out on something, and when you do press it, you’re kind of committed to studying what is revealed. 

In addition to the big mural, I believe that every description of the center I have seen mentions the bullet picture and the train window. The bullet picture is an image, reproduced with empty shell casings, of Jews being gunned down in a burial pit they had been forced to dig themselves. The train window is simply a window in the museum wall that opens onto the active tracks behind the building. Only a tiny bit of passenger traffic trickles through Union Terminal but freight traffic passing through the yard is quite significant. Visualizing human beings stuffed into box cars isn’t difficult.

The aftermath of the holocaust is also examined. I was on the leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation. The war was over and the death camps liberated before I was born. Some of the war crimes trials occurred in my lifetime but I certainly don’t remember them. However, I do remember seeing the movie Judgement at Nuremberg in a theater during its first run and same day TV coverage of the Eichmann trial. This was in 1961 when the events they dealt with were less than twenty years in the past. The holocaust was just outside of my own memory but was rather fresh in the memories of the adults in my world.

The “Points of Light” theater marks the end of the Holocaust Gallery and the beginning of the Humanity Gallery. From here on out, the exhibits deal more with today’s world. People called “upstanders” are identified and their stories of resisting hate or doing something else to improve their part of the world are told. The last picture is of the “Make Your Mark Wall”. Visitors can leave their thoughts and impressions via the touch screens and add their selfie to the wall if desired. On the day I was there, a portion of one of the large screens was blacked out, but I’m guessing that was just from someone leaving their coffee in front of a projector or something similar.

The Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanities Center is an impressive and welcome addition to the Cincinnati Museum Center. I entered the “Winds of Change” theater by myself, but took my time going through the galleries, and found myself in the presence of several other visitors by the time I exited the museum. Even so, I know I need to go back. It is really impossible not to see similarities between the increasing hatred seen in some corners today and some of the events described in the center. The centers’ creators were certainly aware of these similarities, and I don’t doubt helped make them more apparent here and there. That sure doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

Max is Back

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I saw a movie on Thursday. I suppose I could have made this a movie review but I was really more interested in the theater than the movie. Besides, if I used this as a review to be posted on Wednesday, I’d have to resort to some canned article for the regular weekly post.

Thursday was the first day the newly renovated Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX® Theater at the Cincinnati Museum Center was open to the public. It was partly luck that put me in the theater for the first showing of Volcanoes: The Fires of Creation and more luck that put me in one of my favorite seats near the projector. The seat was part of the renovation. It was new, a little wider than what it replaced, and quite comfortable. I took no pictures inside the theater. Some can be found online in professional reports. The picture that opens this article is the only one I took of any part of the theater. It’s a room that patrons pass entering and exiting. In the old days, huge rolls of 70 millimeter film laid on tables here to feed the big projector directly overhead. Nowadays the movie is digital and probably stored on something roughly the size of a grain of rice.

Not being certain that I would be in town for the opening, I’d made no plans and was surprised to see that loads of tickets remained for all showings. That produced a deep lack of urgency and I was equally surprised when I approached the museum and found a long line of cars working its way into the parking lots. I later learned from a staff member that it had been like this at the recently reopened Museum Center ever since schools closed down for the holidays. “And the rain helps”, she added.

I instantly realized that I should have committed to a specific time and bought my ticket online but, although the theater doors were opened well before I reached them, I was safely in my seat before the action began. As I entered, it was announced that the showing was sold out but there were still many empty seats when the lights went down. The wider seats have reduced capacity from 245 to 227 but I’m guessing that won’t often be an issue.

With the lights still up, differences in the screen were obvious. The old screen was more porous and the speakers behind it could be seen when nothing was being projected on it; A little staring revealed the seams where panels overlapped. The new screen is a little whiter and less porous; There is no overlapping of panels. Some darkish lines, which I believe are bits of the backing frame, can be detected if you look hard enough. There are still speakers behind the giant screen but now they can only be heard and not seen. They say that the new sound system sounds better and I believe them. It certainly sounds wonderful but so did the old one and a side-by-side comparison just isn’t possible.

The action on the screen starts, as it has since the theater’s beginning, with the attention gripping light tunnel. There are improvements but they are subtle and they remain subtle into the feature. The images seems crisper and a little brighter. The slightly fuzzy focus and warping that sometimes crept into the edges is virtually gone. I’m guessing that some of that is due to the theater, and some is due to the camera and recording technology. The movie begins with an animation of Earth’s collision with the planet Theia some 4.5 billion years ago. The images are sharp and crisp. They seem just as sharp and crisp when the scene changes to humans backed by a lake of lava. Although I know that the second scene came through a camera’s lens, that knowledge doesn’t prevent part of me musing about whether the lake is real or a man-made special effect. No doubt, the conditioning that comes from seeing action movies with similar scenes produced by CGI is partly to blame but it’s also a testament to just how good the “real” scene looks.

Most of the improvements are a matter of perception. One is an indisputable fact. The floaters are gone. No matter how hard theater operators tried, it was impossible to keep those over-sized rolls of film entirely dust free. Specks of dust would occasionally appear on the screen like floaters in your eye; Not with digital.

Using Volcanoes to reopen the theater was a good choice. According to the movie’s website this is the tenth theater to show it. A fair amount of science is mixed in with the dramatic visuals. Those visuals include lava lakes, billowing plumes of smoke and ash, startling eruptions, scenic landscapes, and even some animals such as elephants and giraffes on the plains of Africa. There is considerable footage of the recent lava flows in Hawaii. I found the shots of eruptions particularly impressive. Incredible power is very much in evidence here. Dark spots in the smoke and flame can appear to be floating upward like scraps of burning paper at a camp fire, but when they stop their climb and plummet downward it quickly becomes apparent that they are massive boulders tossed into the air by the volcano’s explosive force. Sometimes the recording equipment is close enough capture the thud of their landing.

A schedule for future movies at CMC has not yet been worked out. In fact, I found no information on when Volcanoes’ run here will end. Plans exist for the return of the popular Weekend Classic series In January. That will most likely start with a digital version of National Park Adventure which was the last movie to play here in the old analog days. My review includes a shot of the room at the top of this article when it was filled with gear and those big rolls of film.

Got the Hanger Before the Plane

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The title is my questionable attempt to make an aeronautical version of that saying about getting the cart before the horse. I started on a trip yesterday that is aimed at having me at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for the 115th anniversary of the Wright brother’s first flight on Monday. In anticipation of that, I recently revisited some Wright related sites in nearby Dayton, Ohio. This was actually the main reason I was in Dayton when I made the Carillon Historical Park visit that yielded last week’s Christmas themed post. There’s been a bit of a squabble between Ohio and North Carolina over where this flying business got started, but my title is not a reference to that. I’m just acknowledging the fact that this blog post about the Wright brothers in Dayton is going up before my trip journal entries about the brothers in North Carolina. Dayton was the Wright brothers’ home and there are quite a few locations associated with them. Probably the most important single location tied to the Wrights and their development of human flight is Huffman Prairie Flying Field where a replica of their 1905 airplane hangar stands. A placard in the hangar is here.

Official input to the squabble included North Carolina putting “First in Flight” on their license plates in 1982 and Ohio following with “Birthplace of Aviation” in 1997. In theory, the argument officially came to an end in 2003 when the U.S. Congress recognized Ohio as “the birthplace of aviation” while acknowledging that the first flights occurred in North Carolina. The text associated with that recognition is here. It’s easy and maybe somewhat natural to think that Ohio got the nod because the Wrights lived there but that the actual “birthing” happened in NC. The fact is that the brothers did a lot more than live in Ohio. Tremendous amounts of research and experimentation occurred in Dayton both before and after the trips to NC, and almost all of it that took place after December 17, 1903, took place at this field near what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Both of those slogans are correct. The first flight — actually the first four flights — happened in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; Aviation was born in Dayton, Ohio.

The reason for the Wrights’ trips to North Carolina was the strong and steady winds there. They had proven that their machine could fly, but further development was required. The brothers naturally wanted to avoid the time and money consuming trips to the coast but Ohio winds are weak and fickle. They might lay out as much as 240 feet of rail only to be forced to move it when the wind shifted. The catapult near the hangar is a replica of the one they used to shorten takeoff distance to 60 feet with less need for a headwind. The brothers improved on the machine they flew in NC and eventually learned to control the craft to the point of flying around the perimeter of the field. Their flight path is kept mowed and may be walked.

Not far from Huffman Prairie Flying Field, a Wright Brothers Memorial stands atop a hill that bears their name. The area containing the field is included in the view from the overlook behind the monument. There is a small museum and interpretative center across the road from the monument.

What I think is one of the coolest sculptures around stands in the median of Main Street in downtown Dayton. Called “Flyover”, it is a full scale representation of that first flight in Kitty Hawk. The sculpture’s length matches the 120 feet covered by that first flight. Each of the flight’s 12 seconds is marked by a set of wings showing the craft’s climb and descent. It’s really eye-opening to walk the length of the sculpture and realize just how short that first giant hop for mankind was. Another full scale sculpture stand just a few blocks away, on Monument Street. The plane depicted is the 1905 Wright Flyer III in which the Wright brothers improved their design and skills at Huffman Prairie. The real thing shows up in a couple of paragraphs.

The Wright Brothers National Museum is inside Carillon Historical Park. It’s been there since the park opened in 1950 but just received the “National” designation in August. More Wright brothers artifacts are displayed here than anywhere else. The bicycle in the second picture is one of five Wright brand bicycles known to exist and one of two on display in this building. The Wrights eventually built a wind tunnel and other devices for more accurate measurements, but some of their earliest testing involved mounting variously shaped surfaces on the horizontal wheel then peddling into the wind to see how they reacted. This may not be the most famous camera in the world but it is responsible for taking one of the most famous photographs in the world. Orville set up the camera before climbing aboard the flyer, Wilbur handed off the bulb so he could help steady the craft during takeoff,  and John T. Daniels pressed that bulb at the right time to head off the “pictures or it didn’t happen” crowd back in Dayton.

The story of how this display happened is almost as cool as the display itself. In the 1940s, when Colonel Edward Deeds was putting this park together, he had a chat with his good friend Orville Wright about making a replica of the first Wright Flyer. Orville had a better idea. Why not rebuild the real Wright Flyer III? This was the first truly practical flyer and the brothers considered it their most important aircraft. It had served its builders well in their 1905 developments at Huffman Prairie, then had been shipped to Kitty Hawk for U.S. Army trials in 1908. Following the trials it had been more or less abandoned although there were some pieces in various locations around the country. Orville knew where those pieces were and of course he knew everything there was to know about the original plane. What followed has been called “The first pilot’s last project”. Not only did Orville contribute to rebuilding the airplane, it was his idea to display it in a sort of pit so that visitors could get good views of the whole thing. It is believed that approximately 85% of the original machine was recovered and 60% to 80% was used in the reconstruction. Many of the original pieces that were not made part of the plane were used in making replacements. Some of these are displayed nearby. A placard with the plane’s specifications stands by one of its wings. 

Carillon Christmas

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For the fourth time, the giant bell tower that gives Dayton’s Carillon Historical Park its name has been turned into a tree of light rising 200 feet above the park. The tree is quite visible from I-75, and I’ve seen it every year as I drove through the city, but this is the first time I’ve stopped for a closer look. The 20,000 bulb tree is merely the biggest feature of a month long celebration involving the entire park.

I obviously knew about the big tree but I encountered the rest of the party more or less by accident. I entered the park to enjoy some of its historical aspects and took a few pictures during regular hours. Regular hours means before 5:00 PM when the park normally closes.

I finished up my daytime stroll a little after 4:00 and headed to Carillon Brewing for some ale made the old fashioned way and one of the biggest mettwursts I’ve ever seen. When I entered the brewery, the crowd was sparse. When I left, the place was completely full with a line at the door. The parking lot, which had been nearly empty at 4:30, was packed an hour later. Sunset was at 5:14. The Christmas related activities begin and all the lights go on at 5:00. I took the picture at the start of this article just before I reentered the park roughly half an hour after sunset.

During my daytime walkabout, I’d noticed smoke coming from the kitchen behind the bakery, and paused to visit with the lady stirring up gingerbread cookie batter. I now stopped in to wash down one of the  cookies baked in the wood heated brick oven with cider heated over an open fire.

Every building, bridge, and other structure in the park was decorated for the occasion. A small train took passengers, including me, on a tour of the large open and decorated area behind the buildings. This tiny engine pulled over a dozen passengers, more than half of whom were full sized adults, through the arches and past the trees without even a hint of struggle. I was impressed.

Other activities included a puppet show, Christmas cards being printed on a 1930s era press, a place to write and mail letters to Santa Claus, and a place to talk to the jolly gent in person. I paused inside the main building to warm up and listen to these talented carolers before leaving the park.

I snapped the first of these three pictures when I arrived at the park around 2:30. The second one was taken about a quarter hour after sunset at 5:38. I didn’t actually see it, but my understanding is that those 20,000 white lights came on at approximately 5:00. The sun had been gone a long time when I took the third picture about 7:15. The carillon rang out Christmas songs throughout the evening. It had been completed in 1942 and the first official concert took place on Easter Sunday of that year. That was not, however, the first time the bells were heard. Although work remained, construction of the carillon was nearly complete by the winter of 1941 and Dayton was treated to an impromptu concert on Christmas Eve 1941; Just 17 days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

A Carillon Christmas continues through December 30. 5:00 to 9:00 Sun-Thu, 5:00 to 10:00 Fri-Sat.

National Veterans Memorial and Museum

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Ohio has a new museum. The National Veterans Memorial and Museum opened on October 27. I visited on November 30 and confess to being drawn more by the building than anything else. Pictures I’d seen made the circular structure look both beautiful and unusual. I was also intrigued by what might be inside. I’d skimmed pieces of the Museum’s website and noted what I thought was a slogan. “A national museum where veterans, not war, come first,” turned out to be the headline of a CNN report on the museum rather than a slogan. Before I read the report and while I thought the phrase a slogan, I wondered just how much could veterans be separated from war?.

Before I went inside to answer my question, I explored a bit of the museum’s exterior. The Allied Works Architecture designed building sits on the banks of the Scioto River near downtown Columbus. Despite its nearness to the city’s tallest buildings, it is surrounded by open space nicely landscaped by OLIN. Columbus has done a nice job of keeping the river banks open and green. Directly across the river from the museum is the field where I watched fireworks in July. The Rooftop Sanctuary is accessed by a ramp curving along the side of the building and offering views of the city and river. After soaking up the views from the top, I headed back down the ramp to the main entrance.

When the subject is military veterans, avoiding war references is impossible. The museum does not push details of our various wars, but those wars are major markers in our historic timeline. The focus is on people. One of the displays encountered early on talks about taking the oath that separates a person’s civilian existence from the military one. An oath signed by Alexander Hamilton in 1778 is featured in the display on evolving oaths.

There are several interactive exhibits in the museum and here’s one I found a little troubling. The touchscreen allows a slider to be moved from 1950, when the U.S. military was present in 74 countries, to 2018, when that number is 154. The Peace Corp is currently active in 65 countries.

There are several videos as well. Some are “on demand” while others, like this one about coming home, run continuously. The first picture is a screenshot showing a celebration at the end of World War II. The second is a much more recent scene of soldiers returning from the middle east. In between are images of many other homecomings including Vietnam where a soldier tells of leaving his uniform in an airport restroom to avoid “greetings” from protesters. A friend of mine tells an identical story. As we continue to get involved in wars even less popular and more poorly justified, we have at least learned to distinguish those promoting war from those caught up in it. I am not a veteran myself and have no homecoming experience of my own. Of the two veterans closest to me, I missed out on my Dad getting home from World War II but I was there when my son got home from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Many of the stories presented at the museum involve the struggles and accomplishments of veterans after their discharge. Some, like Tammy Duckworth and John McCain, are well known but there are plenty of unknowns who overcame just as much and made equally valuable contributions to society.

I was somewhat conflicted about this museum from the moment I first heard of it. Part of that was due to the obvious difficulty in celebrating the warrior without celebrating the war. That has been handled fairly well. Another part came from questioning the appropriateness of spending large amounts of money on the building when so many of the people it sets out to honor are in need of shelter, food, counseling, and more. The museum does promote various veteran organizations and its conference rooms and Rooftop Sanctuary will no doubt host many discussions and gatherings, but whether or not that was the best use of the money remains a valid question. I’m also not entirely comfortable with this sign on the wall of the museum’s third level. There’s not a whole lot there other than some space for contemplation, and I’m sure it’s tough to organize anything related to the military without someone bringing up the lives that have been lost, but many Americans seem to have a really tough time distinguishing between Memorial Day and Veterans Day and this probably won’t help.

I began this post by noting that it was primarily the stunning building that attracted me. I think I like it even more after seeing it in person. The building and grounds are a beautiful addition to downtown Columbus. The museum may also turn out to be a beautiful addition to the lives of veterans. Time will tell.

Our Terminal Returns

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Back in July of 2016 much of the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal shut down for a major renovation of the 85 year old building. On the building’s lower level, the Children’s Museum stayed open through most — but not all — of the work and some traveling exhibits were presented, but the rest of the building was essentially closed while $228 million in renovations took place. That ended yesterday when the building officially opened to the public. In the days preceding the grand opening, some special receptions and other sneak peeks occurred. A biggie was Friday’s Members Only Preview which is when these photos were taken.

The renovation of the building is more or less complete but reestablishing the museum displays and other features is still in progress. The technically open Natural History Museum is just a skeleton of what it once was and will eventually be again. But it’s a really nice skeleton! Dinosaur Hall, the main display in the museum space currently, is brand new which is one reason it gets a jump on the return of some older exhibits. A crowd favorite, the artificial limestone cave, is scheduled to return in the spring.

Next stop was Holiday Junction where the Duke Energy Holiday Trains are in operation. The last photo is of a 1904 Carlisle & Fitch street car. The Cincinnati company introduced toy electric trains to the world in 1896.

Although the Cincinnati History Museum will not actually be open until April, there is a connection to its Public Landing area from Holiday Junction. Before the closing, a painter sat on top of that scaffolding perpetually engaged in completing the sign for my hotel. He’s apparently been given some time off during the renovation but I expect him to be back at work when the museum officially opens. Scheuman’s Bierhalle is a new addition that recognizes Cincinnati’s big time brewing history and fits in with the current resurgence of brewing in the city and across the nation.

Two traveling exhibits are currently active at the museum center and I was presented with a 2-for-1 offer when I registered for the preview. One I was rather anxious to see but the other hadn’t really stoked my interest. This, Chocolate, is “the other”. I guess I expected a bunch of frilly boxes and bonbon praising placards. What I got was the interesting history of this product of the cacao tree as it spread from Central America to the world and went from being the drink of kings to an affordable, though sometimes guilty, pleasure for everyone. I was pleasantly surprised though I should have realized that you never know what you’re gonna get with a room of chocolate.

I had rather high expectations for the Guitar exhibit but I was pleasantly surprised again. The history of the instrument was presented and there were several interactive displays on some of its technical aspects. There were also plenty of examples of its current role as the face of rock and roll and a popular symbol of music in general. Of course, one such example is the first generation Les Paul in the third picture and it’s not alone. There’s more Les here. I could fill much more than one panel with pictures from this exhibit but I’ll stop with two more. One is this industrial grade Rostov Stella from the USSR that I’ve never seen before. The other is an all in one rock star kit that I (and just about every dreamer of a certain age) have seen plenty of. By the way, that 43 foot Flying V in the first picture is the Guinness certified largest playable guitar in the world.

After the two traveling exhibits, I took part in two tours. The first was through the space where the Holocaust and Humanity Center will be moving in January. Despite its current location being only about five miles from my home and on my radar for some time, I’ve yet to visit the Center. Seems like something I ought to do before they start carrying stuff out. In the last picture, we’re getting a peek at a corner of a mural that wraps around the entire room and will be unveiled at the Center’s reopening on January 27, the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

As I waited for my Rotunda Tour, I snapped a picture of another tour group as the crossed the walkway high above the floor. The pictures of the murals were taken from about where that group is standing. This tour was somewhat abbreviated from Rotunda Tours I’ve taken in the past since some areas, like the offices, are not quite ready. Those areas will eventually be added back into the tours but even without them the tour is certainly worthwhile for the views of cleaned and repaired features and inside information passed on by the guide.

The Winold Reiss murals in the half dome had been cleaned at least once before; The two in the hallway behind it: never. Our guide mentioned that she always thought the brown suit in the mural on the south side was one of the most unattractive she’d ever seen. Now, all cleaned up, it looks pretty good. She then pointed out some small figures in the background of the mural on the other wall. I’d never noticed them at all before and I guess they were nearly impossible to see before the cleaning. I believe she said there were a total of seven. I had no trouble finding the four in this section. I’d also never seen the Pierre Bourdelle murals in the dining room before. The twenty-two canvas murals have been in storage since the late 1980s and have just been cleaned and restored. I guess I’ve probably never seen the actual floor of the dining room either. When this was an operating terminal, a serpentine counter filled the room. The counter was gone when the museums moved in and the area where it once stood was three inches lower than the room’s terrazzo floor. The depression was filled with concrete and the whole thing covered with carpet. Now green terrazzo marks where the counter once stood.

The terminal looks fantastic. This was no hurried patch job. Much of the building was more or less disassembled then put back together. Huge steel beams and other major components were replaced. The next several months, as the museums populate their areas, the Holocaust and Humanity Center moves in, the Historical Society Library returns, and the theater reopens with the latest digital technology, are going to be exciting. After the tours, I relaxed in the rotunda for a bit preparing myself for what I planned on being a cold but quick walk to the car. It wasn’t very quick.

The biggest surprise of the day waited outside. I clearly had not been paying enough attention to plans for the reopening. A projection mapping display, the technology used in the city’s Lumenocity and Blink events, covered the front of the terminal. This was the sixth and final show leading up to Saturday’s official reopening. Each night featured a different theme in a fifteen minute loop. Tonight’s theme was “Thanks Cincy!” Every scene in the loop was incredible but I’ve held myself to the “Thank You” display and two of my favorites. I guess I was most impressed with the 3D aspects of the display. The perfect shadowing made the moving dinosaur skeletons appear to be several feet in front of the terminal. The moving satellite in the Saturn scene also appears to be some distance from the building. The walk to my car was about twenty minutes longer than I’d planned but I’ve got absolutely no complaints.