December 6, 2013 · 10:55 am

New Life for an Old Beverage: The Reemergence of Sherry

With a nod to my friend Neal Dewing, who writes great stuff about cocktails over at this place, I wanted to share with you a bit about my love for a particular type of tipple: the Spanish fortified wine known as “jerez”, or “sherry”, named for the town in Andalucia from whence most sherry originates.  For those of you who are aware of sherry at all, you probably think of it as something incredibly salty and foul which you buy in the supermarket to cook with, or as a sickeningly sweet drink which your great-aunt liked to have after Christmas dinner.  Yet the former has nothing to do with the real thing, and the latter is only one type of sherry among many.

An article in today’s Torygraph pointed out that sherry is becoming increasingly popular among the hipsteratti, particularly because of the significant influence of Spain in the food and restaurant world at present.  This is something which, as a (half) Catalan, seems a bit odd, since when I was growing up it was just part of the expected cultural equipment around the house, like gin in an English home or sake in a Japanese home.  My parents cooked with sherry for special occasions, but never used the kind you would get in an American grocery store. Instead, they would use one of the varieties from Spain which they liked to drink, so that some would go into what they were cooking, and some would go into themselves.  And when we would visit family in Barcelona or Madrid, sherry was often offered as a matter of course: it was simply what one did.

The fact that now more restaurants and bars are increasing their listings of sherry, after many years of declining sales and availability, is both surprising and gratifying.  Just last week I had dinner at a new tapas restaurant here in D.C., which is so popular at the moment that they do not take reservations, despite it being quite a large space.  As my dining companion and I were ordering drinks before mulling over the menu, I was very pleased to notice that they had my favorite sherry – Tio Pepe Extra Dry  - on their drinks menu, along with several other good sherries I was already familiar with, as well as a few I had never heard of.  Sherry is exactly the right accompaniment to tapas, because neither the food portion nor the alcohol portion is very large; moreover a dry sherry helps with the appetite, particularly with savory, strongly flavored foods like one finds in Spain.

Even more widely, sherry used to be used as a base for a wide variety of cocktails back in our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ day, and a number of these are starting to make a return to bar menus.  Because there are so many types one can find, from dessert-like sweetness to mouth-puckering dryness, many different flavor combinations are possible.  This summer for example, for a party I threw at the manse, I made up a large pitcher of “rebujitos”, a Spanish warm weather cocktail made of sherry, soda, lemons, limes, and mint, poured over lots of ice. I had made it as a sort of back-up to two pitchers of sangria, in case someone did not want red wine, but I assumed that I would probably be the only one drinking the sherry concoction.  In the end I should have made more of it, because the sherry cocktail began disappearing almost immediately.

While I realize that the “hipster” element may scare away some of my readers from trying it, I assure you that it is worth your time to explore this area of human horticultural endeavor.  Whether it is the characters on a television show looking to the past like Downtown Abbey, or mixologists reviving old cocktail recipes involving sherry and non-traditional ingredients, the spirit is in the air, as it were.  There is a reason one can look at old films, or read works of literature from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, and observe stylish people enjoying different types of sherry, not because it is being promoted by some celebrity or musician. Rather,  it is simply something both very civilized and very enjoyable to drink.

"The Grape Harvesters of Jerez" by Joaquin Sorolla (1914) Casa Museo de Sorolla, Madrid

“The Grape Harvesters of Jerez” by Joaquin Sorolla (1914)
Casa Museo de Sorolla, Madrid

Leave a Comment

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , ,

December 5, 2013 · 11:15 am

Looking at Loss with Sculptor Kevin Francis Gray

The 19th century loved sorrow and the macabre.  Perhaps it was triggered by the death of Prince Albert, which plunged the British Empire into socially-enforced mourning for decades.  Or perhaps it was brought about through the exploration of dark stories by Romantic authors and composers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Hector Berlioz.  However it came about, there is a discernible fascination with isolation and death which permeates Western cultural output in the 19th century.

This undercurrent continues to fascinate popular culture today, as can be evidenced by successful television series like “The Walking Dead”, but also in high culture, such as in the work of Irish sculptor Kevin Francis Gray. Born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and now working in London, Mr. Gray’s work is evocative of both the 19th century academic tradition in sculpture, and the 19th century fascination with loss.  At the same time, he is looking at our own society and realizing how very sad and disconnected we often are in our relationships with each other.

The Academic tradition which dominated the artistic establishment in the West throughout the 19th century pursued realism, using the study of the Classical tradition from Greece and Rome as the basis by which to achieve it.  In his execution, and in his understanding of the possibilities of materials such as bronze and marble, Mr. Gray could be seen as the product of this tradition.  However when the viewer takes a closer look, he realizes that despite the surface polish and perfection, there is something else going on in Mr. Gray’s work.

One perfect example of this is Mr. Gray’s series of sculptures of standing figures sporting extraordinary beaded veils, which come down across the face and hang all the way to the floor.  At a distance, they appear to be straightforward, realistic sculptures of people, who just so happen to be wearing an odd curtain over their face.  However draw a bit closer to the white marble statue of a girl in a tank dress, and one can see that beneath the veil the face is that of a skeleton.  It is a shock worthy not only of the 19th century masters of the macabre, but more importantly a look back to the Middle Ages and to Baroque Spain and Italy of the “Memento Mori”, seen everywhere in the 16th and 17th centuries from tombs of Popes to still lives of game and rotting fruit.

Another example of Mr. Gray’s unexpected combination of interests is his 2013 “Twelve Chambers”, recently unveiled at Pace London.  It features twelve life-size, bronze figures, modeled from people whom the artist met around his London studio.  The grouping is not uniform, in that the figures seem to be moving in different directions; all are experiencing different emotions, many quite somber and sad.  While no doubt not the artist’s intention, if you want to get some idea of what the Catholic concept of Purgatory is like, where we must wait around and reflect on how we have failed God and our fellow man by not loving either enough, this may be as good a contemporary visualization as any you will find.

And then there is Mr. Gray’s extraordinarily sensitive, luxurious draping, particularly when used as a veil.  We can find in art history several examples of sculptors who were able to capture the look of fabric stretched across a human face, but this was so hard to do that few actually managed to achieve it with any level of plausibility.  Yet in his marble “Ballerina” from 2012,  just one example among many of his technical prowess, Mr. Gray not only manages to veil the face of his model in a realistic way, but covers much of her upper body in the same diaphanous fabric.  It stretches across and pools behind her, leaving her pretty dancers’ legs and pointed feet exposed, thus giving us a clue to her profession.

It is a joy to see someone who has studied and learned from the artistic tradition that came before him, who is at the same time able to interpret it in a way that speaks to living in the 21st century.  Mr. Gray’s figures put us in mind of how distanced we have become not only from the reality of how short this life is, something the Victorians understood all too well, but also from each other.  We so often hide ourselves in different personae on social media, rather than forming real relationships, or we live rather paradoxically in virtual isolation inside a multi-story apartment building full of people whom we never speak to.  We are all of us, in some way, veiled to one another, not allowing reality to penetrate, perhaps because we fear suffering and death as much as we fear each other.

Art like Mr. Gray’s makes you think, reflect on your own life, and ask yourself what exactly you are doing with that gift of life you have been given.  His particular genius is being able to do so while still bringing us the aesthetic pleasure of admiring his craft.  It is why work such as this can still move us, even in our very jaded and self-centered age.

Gray

Irish sculptor Kevin Francis Gray with “Twelve Chambers” (2013) in the background

5 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , ,

December 3, 2013 · 10:45 am

Carl Schmitt: The Vision of Beauty

Much of the culture world today is talking about this year’s winner of the Turner Prize for contemporary art.  Having read about and seen the work of the winner of this ever-dubious distinction, the less that I say about her the better.  So instead, let’s look at someone who produced interesting art, instead of assemblages of detritus, and see what we can learn from him.

The work of American painter Carl Schmitt (1889-1989) is a bit difficult to categorize, as his son Carl B. Schmitt, Jr. explained to us last night in a presentation at the Catholic Information Center here in Washington.  The talk was timed to the launch of a new book on his father’s work entitled “Carl Schmitt: The Vision of Beauty”.  Mr. Schmitt is the President of the Carl Schmitt Foundation, which is dedicated to the study and appreciation of his late father’s work.

Over the course of his very long career, Schmitt worked in a number of different styles, to the point where one  cannot characterize his having a single style at all.  He made a concerted effort to insert the view of the modern artist into the study of traditional art, as his son explained.  While Schmitt was significantly influenced by some of the ideas of Cézanne and other Post-Impressionist painters, particularly with regard to the mixing of the solidity of traditional Western academic painting with the understanding of color and light developed by the Impressionists, the slides we were shown of his work represented a broad output one could not easily categorize.

In Schmitt’s work the viewer can perceive a range of artistic echoes from the past, such as the Tenebrism and  ”bodegones” popular in 17th century Spain, or the work of Franco-Flemish Medieval manuscript illuminators and Elizabethan miniaturists.  Yet the resulting paintings are Schmitt’s alone, from his own day and time.  He was not a 15th century artist, but a 20th century one.  And he saw his world though the lens of his own experiences as an artist, a husband, a father, and a Catholic in the previous century.

The artist’s son noted that a very perceptible problem in contemporary art could be characterized as one of a failure to study.  ”There are no Old Master painters today,” he observed, “because there are no young disciples.”  When anything can be art, as the Turner Prize repeatedly informs us, what we get more often than not is art lacking in actual art: there is no craft, or study, or mastery of technique, just an insistence that the viewer pay attention.

The quiet, often intense family portraits and still life paintings by Schmitt are the antithesis of this kind of tantrum-as-spectacle.  They do not shout at you, but invite you to linger, and to reflect.  While Schmitt is perhaps best known in Catholic circles for his religious works, I was particularly drawn to the very personal images of his wife, his children, and himself, as well as to the often deceptively simple still lives of bottles combined with objects such as eggs, garlic bulbs, and oranges, which allowed the artist to look more closely into problems of representing light and hue.  These last in particular form a body of work all the more remarkable, given how often Schmitt limited himself to a palette of only the three primary colors.

A self-confident artist who appreciates the need to treat his subject with strength and respect is someone whose work is always going to appeal to the viewer.  This type of work can be appreciated on many levels, whether for its beauty, or in the demonstration of technical skill on the part of its creator.  One can even go further and choose to try to read something more into it, yet in some cases, to paraphrase Freud, a painting is just a painting.  Schmitt’s son remarked that once, when he tried to get into a discussion with his father about one of his still life paintings, his father observed: “Don’t make up stupid theories. Just look at it.”  That was good advice then, and it is still good advice today.

To view images of Carl Schmitt’s work, or to order a copy of “Carl Schmitt: The Vision of Beauty”, please visit the Schmitt Foundation’s website by following this link.

Cover

Leave a Comment

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

December 2, 2013 · 11:23 am

Thanks for All the Fish: Some Reflections on Podcasting

This Saturday we recorded our 200th episode of the Catholic Weekend show on SQPN, featuring clips of memorable moments from the show over the last four years.  You can watch the recording of the episode, or download the podcast by following this link.  We recorded the episode on a rather large Google Hangout featuring all of our regulars and our CEO Father Roderick, as well as several guests who have been on the show before; we also played audio feedback and read email feedback from a number of our listeners.  And of course, we laughed a lot.

It also gave me a chance to reflect on podcasting itself, now that I have been involved in it for nearly two years.  I won’t pretend to be an expert in journalism or broadcasting, but I hope I have learned a little bit from my experience so far.  And I think podcasting can be seen as a hearkening to the past, a radical departure from the present, and a promise for the future.

Podcasting speaks to the past, first of all, in that it reminds us of the early days of radio programming, with people setting up radio stations in their basements.  They talked about whatever interested them, played whatever music they liked, and oftentimes never knew how many people were really listening, but still kept trying to hold true to good standards of quality and content.  However podcasting can also at times remind one a bit of community access programming on cable, which still exists in a number of places, including here in D.C.  I remember during law school, I was fascinated by a local community cable show in South Bend run by a couple of teenagers, who filmed very complex adventure stories which seemed to have no point or resolution whatsoever.  It was not great art, but it was certainly different.

Podcasting is also a radical departure from the present pre-packaged, pre-determined type of media we have become so used to consuming.  For example, a news program owned by an entertainment conglomerate will just so happen to find nice things to say in their reporting about a new film being produced by that entertainment company, even if it is not very good at all.  They will also run advertisements with tie-ins to products related to some other aspect of that film or another product from that media empire, or by one of its affiliate companies or major shareholders.  And of course, most of us never really stop to think about these things, or analyze the relationships between the various content providers and advertisers.

Another, related reason as to why podcast discussions of events are often so much more interesting than what one hears or watches in today’s media environment, i.e. why there are fewer lengthy discussions and more curt sound bytes, is that those who put out the content we see on the major networks and the 24-hour-news channels have ad revenues to think about, and a short window of time in which to make their sales.  By contrast, as most podcasters will tell you, you are not going to become wealthy putting out a podcast.  In fact, in most cases you won’t even be able to make any money off of it all, whether for yourself or for anyone else.

However there is that question of promise, because today’s podcaster, doing something they love in their spare time, may find their career taking quite a new turn.  Recently a friend of mine who has been podcasting for quite awhile on a historical-business subject he loves, suddenly found himself negotiating a book deal from a major international publishing house; they had become aware of his work through his podcast.  What is particularly interesting about this step up in visibility is how it creates not only a larger audience for his work, but it also adds him to an increasing pool of new talent which more people can dip into when they are seeking information.  There are many smart, talented, and interesting people we might not otherwise have heard of, who are passionate about the subjects they follow, and who are getting their chance to become known to more and more people through podcasting.

Not everyone should be podcasting of course, any more than everyone should be blogging: some people are better writers than they are speakers, or vice versa.  Some people are not good at either activity, and are happy to be content consumers rather than content generators.  However I can say from my own experience of doing both, there is a spontaneity to podcasting that I quite enjoy for its uncertainty.  It’s a bit like putting on a play or even arguing in court, where even if you think you know what your part is and what is going to happen, you can never be completely certain that everything is going to go to script.

However much longer I am permitted to be on the Catholic Weekend show then, I want to say to both SQPN and all the listeners, to quote one of our co-hosts quoting another: thanks for all the fish!

Pesc

Leave a Comment

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , ,

November 29, 2013 · 10:09 am

Tomorrow: Celebrate SQPN’s Catholic Weekend Episode 200!

Tomorrow, Saturday November 30th, beginning around 10am Eastern, we will be recording the 200th episode of the Catholic Weekend show on SQPN, and I hope you can join us!

Catholic Weekend is a community-based show, in which we regulars and our guests discuss what is going on around the world and at home, with a lot of laughter and humor interspersed with our more serious discussions.  During the recording of the program our viewers/listeners get to watch us recording on the Catholic Weekend homepage via livestream video feed.  They can also participate with us and other listeners in a dedicated chatroom on the site, which we often check and refer to during the broadcast.

To mark the occasion, we are asking our listeners and past guests to send in feedback recalling some of their favorite memories of the show over the past 200 episodes.  You can do so in the form of audio files, voicemail, or email:

Audio Files/Email: CatholicWeekend@SQPN.com

Voicemail Feedback Line: (862) 200-SQPN

If you have never caught an episode of Catholic Weekend before, tomorrow would be a great time to drop by.  Even if you are not Catholic, over the last few years there have been a number of very memorable moments on the show, in terms of guests, stories, and even just plain silliness, which you may enjoy listening to.  This anniversary episode will give a great overview of what we try to do at SQPN to create an online community, particularly through this program where listeners and viewers can join in regularly, or just dip into when they have time.  Even if you can’t stay for the whole show, video of the episode will be uploaded to the Catholic Weekend YouTube page so you can watch it later, and the edited audio of the podcast will be made available in iTunes.

I have been tremendously grateful for the opportunity to co-host Catholic Weekend for nearly two years now, as it has given me the chance to meet many smart, fascinating people, who do their best to integrate their Catholic faith into their daily lives.  It’s hard for me to believe it’s been that long already, particularly since I started out just as a listener downloading the podcast and periodically sending in feedback.  I certainly never intended to get involved in putting out a weekly show, but obviously Someone Upstairs had other plans.

So this is a good time for me to take a moment to thank Father Roderick Vonhögen, our CEO at SQPN, and my co-hosts Jeff Nielsen, Maria Johnson, Steve Nelson, and Angela Sealana, for not only becoming my friends, but continuing to prove themselves wonderful resources for fun, inspiration, encouragement, and growth.  It is not easy to be a Catholic in the present age, when practicing the Christian faith is something so much of the world does not like or understand.  Yet knowing there are good people doing their best to struggle along with you, makes this show and the relationships which have grown out of it very special to me indeed.

Thank you all, for the great experiences we’ve shared so far, and Happy 200th to Catholic Weekend!

coverart_catholicweekendd_600x600

Leave a Comment

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

November 27, 2013 · 1:03 pm

Denver Diary: Darkness and Light

Concluding my brief series of posts on my recent trip to Denver, I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to two very different, but very beautiful buildings there, which told me a great deal about the people of that city.

The reader will recall that I was out in Colorado for a wedding, which took place at Holy Ghost Church in downtown Denver on Saturday night.  Because it was an evening event and I was serving as an usher, there was not a great deal of time nor any daylight available for me to wander around the church and pick up on the subtle details of the architecture, which this building has in spades.  I was told by those who had been there during the day that because the windows are not very large, there was not much more I could have seen, but nevertheless any building looks different depending on when you visit.  The play of darkness and light changes as the hours progress.

The present Holy Ghost Church was built between 1923-1943, with the long period of construction explained by the bane of many large and sumptuously decorated churches, insufficient funding.  It is an idiosyncratic mixture of both early Italian Renaissance and Spanish Plateresque elements, though the net effect put me more in mind of something Tolkien might have imagined, rather than the hill towns of Tuscany or the plains of Castile.  The mixture of different shades of beige and pink marble is very pleasing, and particularly for an evening wedding there was a glimmer and shine about the sanctuary which added to the formality of the occasion.

If I was to pick a single notable feature of the building to draw the visitor’s attention to however, it would be the arcade located in the narthex.  Two rows of short columns flank the main doors which give entrance to the nave, so that even before one enters and has to bless oneself, the high altar with its huge monstrance can be seen.  The arcade itself is very beautifully proportioned, but what I found particularly unusual was a series of geometrically carved oak panels between them, which are set into a kind of soffit hidden above the arcade.

These panels can be pulled down almost like overhead garage doors, to close the spaces between the columns.  Presumably these were designed for the environmental purpose of helping to keep out the chill of winter from the nave.  However for the wedding they worked perfectly as a kind of screen, to let people know that the bride and her attendants had arrived, since the panels were pulled down to keep the ladies of the wedding party hidden until that moment when the doors into the nave were opened and the procession began.

If Holy Ghost is a somewhat dark building referencing the 15th-16th centuries in Italy and Spain, Denver’s Cathedral-Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is a structure completely flooded with light, recalling the glories of 13th-14th century architecture in France.  Built between 1902-1911 and just a block away from the Colorado State Capitol, this is a very grand church, tall and wide but not particularly deep, put up in a remarkably speedy period of time for a prosperous and growing city.  Unlike Holy Ghost, the Cathedral obviously suffered a bit at the hands of the tambourine and felt banner crowd after Vatican II,  but the damage is not completely horrid nor ultimately irreparable.

The visitor is struck by two distinct yet related elements of the Cathedral upon entering the nave.  The first is the sense of height, particularly at the crossing, which is only accentuated by the many, enormously tall stained-glass windows from Munich that surround the space.  Second, the interior is almost blindingly white stone and marble, with very little color employed in either the architecture itself or in the furnishings and statuary.  Even the aforementioned windows, while featuring the rich colors typical of the Neo-Gothic movement in the figures themselves, are dominated by white stained glass forming the framework for the scenes.  It is surely appropriate for the Cathedral of the Mile High City to be not only a lofty structure, but one which calls to mind the snow-covered Rockies.

I attended Sunday mass at the Cathedral the morning after the wedding with several friends, both fellow wedding guests and some Denver tweeps (i.e. Twitter followers, for those of you not using Twitter) whom I had known for years but was finally able to meet for the first time.  Denver’s Archbishop Samuel Aquila was the celebrant and yes, I got to kiss his ring and chat with him briefly after mass.  However the thing I will remember most about this church was something rather simple.

In a corner over to the right of the sanctuary in the Cathedral hangs a reproduction of the famous Polish icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, so dear to the late Blessed Pope John Paul II.  The reader may recall that JPII came to Denver in 1993 for World Youth Day, and during his stay celebrated mass at the Cathedral.  Hence the presence of a rather attractive and dynamic statue of him in the grounds of the Cathedral, and also of this icon inside the church itself.  The unexpected success of the Denver WYD had a tremendous impact on many young Catholics, particularly in this country, and one cannot underestimate its lasting influence on those collectively known as the “JPII Generation“, i.e., those of us who grew up knowing no other pope than John Paul II due to the length of his pontificate.

I left some flowers before the icon of the Blessed Mother and her Divine Son, and took a moment to pray for a couple of special intentions, as well as to reflect briefly on my trip to Denver – a place which in all honesty I had never planned to visit in my life.  Certainly now, following this experience, I would not say no to a return visit sometime, so that I could hang out with Greg and Jennifer Willits a bit longer, for example.  And a repeat stay at the Brown Palace Hotel would certainly be most welcome.

On a spiritual level, it was good to be able to visit these two very different, but very beautiful churches in the Mile High City, and see how much the Catholic community there cares about the Real Presence of Our Lord.  Both in the darkness of Holy Ghost Church, with its enormous gilded monstrance above the high altar, and in the light of Denver’s Cathedral, its high altar surrounded by gleaming white marble, candles, and flowers, the Divine was there, waiting for us to visit Him.  That Presence remains regardless of the contrast between darkness and light paralleled in our own lives, where just as in these two buildings, Christ is there in our dark moments and in our bright ones as well.

IMG_20131124_102729

Icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa,
Cathedral-Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Denver

3 Comments

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

November 26, 2013 · 10:03 am

Denver Diary: Water, Water, Nowhere

For part two of my Denver Diary, reflecting on some of my experiences in that city over this past weekend, I want to share a bit with you about something rather basic which many of us may not think about, until we find ourselves in a dry climate.  For Denver is very, very, very dry.  Not in the Prohibition sense thank goodness, but rather the air has a strange sort of moisture-wicking quality.  If UnderArmour could somehow bottle it into a line of toiletries, they’d make a fortune.

Flying over Colorado on Friday I was struck by how the landscape appeared almost lunar as one got closer to the Rocky Mountains.  There were hardly any trees, and a storm had recently come through, coating the dark gray earth in drifts of gleaming white snow.  The effect was heightened by the unusual, large circles one could see in the cleared fields, so different from the fields one sees on the East Coast.  They looked like impact craters interspersed with valleys and ridges.

All weekend I had a strange feeling as though my lips were about to crack into a million pieces, while other East Coast sojourners told me that their eyes felt completely bloodshot and dried out.  Because of the high altitude, I was expecting shortness of breath, or feeling faint, that sort of thing.  Instead, apart from some weird foot swelling when I got off the plane at Denver airport, the only environmental factor I found somewhat difficult to adjust to was the persistent dryness.

The solution, I was repeatedly told, was to drink lots of water; fortunately the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa, where I was staying, had plenty of it.  In fact they have their own artesianal well which, although not technically holding mineral water, did have a pleasing, slightly mineral taste.  It was a bit like room-temperature Evian, and certainly not like the overly-chlorinated tap water one finds in many East Coast cities.  It also made taking a shower a particularly enjoyable experience, since not only was there a combination of rather large showerheads to stand under, but the scent of the water itself was simultaneously relaxing and invigorating, if that is not too paradoxical a statement.

If you live in an area where there is plenty of water, as is the case here on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, you tend to take it for granted.  For example, here in Washington not only do we have the Potomac, a large river with a number of local tributaries running through the heart of the city, but that river empties into the Chesapeake Bay, which in turn empties into the Atlantic Ocean.  Whether you are in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc., you are so accustomed to having water readily to hand, that the experience of being in such a dry environment as Colorado takes some getting used to.

I suspect that many of us rarely think about the fact that in the Western world today, all we have to do is turn on a tap, and we get plenty of potable water for drinking, bathing, cooking, etc.  Imagine how difficult it was for those pioneers who arrived in dry places like Denver during the great Westward Expansion, who had to try to locate and secure water just for basic survival needs.  And then having to find enough water to go on to build things like businesses and infrastructure projects, which cities need in order to be able to attract more residents.

The builders of the Brown Palace Hotel itself were certainly well-aware of the fact that water is a highly precious commodity in Denver.  At the time it was built in 1892, the hotel had running water in all of the guest rooms, which was practically unheard of at the time in the West due to the scarcity of that resource.  Recognizing not only how important water is, but also the famous silver mines of Colorado which helped lead to the development of Denver itself, the hotel has a pair of silver drinking fountains in the lobby, drawing from that same artesianal well atop which the hotel sits.  It certainly made me think, whenever I stopped to take a sip from one of them, about how much of civilization is dependent on good sources of water, and how often we forget that fact today.

Tomorrow in part three of my Denver Diary, I’ll be telling you about two beautiful, historic buildings in Denver which would not have been possible without the water which increased the population of the city, and the subsequent wealth which helped finance their construction: the dark but magnificently detailed Church of the Holy Spirit, and the almost blindingly snow-white Cathedral-Basilica of the Assumption where yes, good Catholic boy that I am, I got to kiss the Archbishop’s ring.  More on that anon.

font

Silver water fountain in the atrium of the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa, Denver

Leave a Comment

Filed under culture

Tagged as , , , , , ,