Quisling Terrace



On Gorham Street, this modest apartment building catches the eye, especially on a clear, sunny day like this.

Looking northwest across Gorham Street from the parking lot at Bethel Lutheran Church. The retro look is popular now; I wonder if the Quisling is popular by inference, or because the rents are low?

The Quisling comes from the Jetson-ish era when architecture featured fins, and lots of them.

The office entrance features this wrap-around concrete hood, punched through with futuristic holes. Steel grilles trim the windows and match the rail by the door.

The AT&T Building



From the visually creative Quisling, we shift to the blank and massive AT&T building on West Mifflin Street, four towering stories of oppressively drab, undressed concrete squatting like a Jawa sandcrawler on the south corner across Henry Street from the library.

For Sale At Auction

We've just returned from an estate sale. I believe there is almost nothing you can't find at these auctions. Case in point: Can you imagine anyone having this in the front hall? We have found all the typical Americana on sale, from beer signs to quilts to smut collections and every kind of furniture, but this five-foot-tall religious icon cast in plaster is a first.

Le Penseur ponders his muse.

We all have our price. What is The Thinker worth? I didn't stick around to find out.

A bit of Madison ephemera — a crate, sadly empty, from the Fauerbach brewery. Jim guessed it would go for quite a bit of cash, so I didn't stick around to find out. I had other fish to fry.

Jackpot! Five different treatments of the poker-playing dogs (the fifth was cropped out of the shot). They were only glossies clipped from the pages of a magazine, so I had high hopes of snagging the entire set for five or six bucks, but someone more exhuberant than I ran the bid up to eight dollars apiece. I'm pretty sure the frames weren't worth that much.

I've no idea what the strange mechanisms in this box were. If I had been strapped to a chair in a tiny cell with bright lights all around me and a grinning man in a lab coat opened this box in front of me, I would have been scared enough to sign any papers or tell him anything he wanted to know.

The dovetailed wooden box was very, very cool, though; I wanted it badly enough to stick around until it went on the block. They sold it and its weird contents for sixty-five dollars, much more than we had budgeted for that day.

Somebody liked owls.

A lot.

Quivey's Grove



A small, some would even say 'intimate' setting to enjoy a simple lunch. The venue was an old stone outbuilding in times past, but with the proper attention and this lovely addition they've added it's quite a cozy place.

Quivey's grove again, looking across the same room in the other direction. The weather-worn timbers, no doubt salvaged from a nearby dairy barn gone derilect, are all just for effect, but it's a very pleasant effect indeed.
The original stone outbuilding, seen in the background, is finished in the same way.

There was music playing but not too loudly to drown conversation, thank you.

The food's delicious, by the way. Simple, as the ketchup bottle on the table will testify, but tasty. I had the ruben. There just aren't enough dishes on anybody's lunchtime menu with sauerkraut, so I take it when I can get it (what the hell, it's a harmless passion and the only woman who'll kiss me doesn't seem to mind). Unfortunately, their ruben wasn't dressed with sauerkraut, but a pickled substitute. I liked it anyway.