RMW Ramblings

  The Tub Around 1950 The Tub, an laundromat opened at 8th & Union Sts in Wilmington  The building was modeled on the then new Bendix washing machine  I think the architect was Ellis Preston, My brst association is with the Cantina,  from here a menu image. Other restaurants have come and gone.   .  

  Campaniles A campanile is a free-standing bell tower.  The most famous is St Mark's Campanile in Venice, towering over the square at 325 feet.  The centerpiece of the campus of my graduate school, University of California at Berkeley is Sather Tower, usually called simply the Campanile, stands at 307 feet. But we have a campanile of our own here by Wilmington, the DuPont Carillon at Nemours, at 210 feet. Here's a sketch comparing all three...     Construction of St Mark's Campanile was begun in about 940, but continued slowly over a long period.  It was extended, modified, and repaired several ties over the centuries.  It finally succumbed to gravity and collapsed in 1902.  It was rebuilt, completed in 1912. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark%27s_Campanile] St Mark's Campanile appears as a small detail in a panoramic painting I did of the Venice Canale Grande that serves as a crest over a doorway at our cottage.       ...

  Bridges of the Brandywine In my posting last month, The Three Bridges ( https://rmw-ramblings.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-three-bridges.html),  I mentioned that that project lead me to investigating all of the other bridges over the Brandywine in the Delaware section.  I visited and photographed all of them and researched their historic predecessors in the photo collections at the Delaware Historic Society and the Hagley Museum Library.  I painted watercolor views of each of them, then using scans of the individual paintings created a pictorial map of the Brandywine.  I had 18 x 24 inch prints of  Bridges of the Brandywine produced.   The border of the print is modeled on the truss work of some of these bridges.  The legend is modeled on Delaware historic markers.  For display I built a frame overlaid with truss-like metalwork built from pieces of an old Erector set. I have some copies of this print/poster still available.

  Sentinels These three storey buildings mark the beginning at Union St. of the W 17th St. climb up the hill to its terminus at Rising Sun Lane.  They are no longer near-mirror images, as the building on the east side of the intersection, right side of the painting, has been significantly altered in appearance.  I have painted Sentinels as they, in my imagination, might have appeared in the 1920s.  The current number 10 bus line was then a trolley line. I have taken some liberties with some of the architectural details and have omitted some visual clutter.  My starting reference was a cellphone panned photo taken from the south side of Union St.  Wilmington's Public School 13 faced up 17th St. from this spot in the 1920s, long since replaced by Highlands Elementary School, recently renamed in honor of Joseph E. Johnson, Jr.  The old No. 13 school survives in much modified form as offices of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington's Dialog   I believe...

  The Three Bridges Recent posts took us to two of the three 24 x 18 watercolor paintings I did for Nick Vouras in 2004.  Nick left the choice of three Wilmington scenes up to me.  The original Kozy Korner location at Delaware Ave and Washington St and Holy Trinity church were obvious choices. For the third painting I went to a more widely known Wilmington scene, the three bridges crossing the Brandywine at the north end of Brandywine Park. The rear bridge, the Augustine Bridge, was built in 1883-85 by the Baltimore And Ohio railroad.  It eventually became inadequate for the heavier trains that the B&O had moved to, so the stone arch bridge in the center of our painting was built, opening in 1910.  In 1920 the abandoned B&O metal truss bridge was converted to a vehicular bridge.  The former B&O railroad has since become a component of the CSX rail line. In the foreground is the pedestrian Swinging Bridge.  This bridge was built in 1910 by t...

  Holy Trinity, 2 A print of my painting Holy Trinity , which was the subject of my last posting, was on display at a show I had in 2006.  I was asked by an attendee if I would do a similar painting of Wilmington's Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church for him.  I didn't want to do a near-duplicate painting, so I chose a different view of the church and did some rethinking of my encircling Greek folk dancers.  This time I used a combination of aqueous media, both watercolor and acrylic.  This enabled me to introduce metallic pigmented elements. The folk dancers are no longer circling the church, but are entering from the right on a gold background on an uncoiling scroll .  Approaching them from the left are ancient Greek dancers and musicians  By 2006 the metallic cladding was in place on the dome of Holy Trinity Now I could paint the dome in its finished state.  Blue and white pennants announce the annual Holy Trinity Greek festival with festival v...

  Holy Trinity 1 A Movie and a Coke , the subject of my August 31 post, was the first of three 24 x 18 watercolor paintings I did as a commission from Nick Vouras.  The original Kozy Korner restaurant was an obvious choice for this painting.  The subject for the second painting was equally obvious.  Nick had long been active at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church on Wilmington's N Broom St. Since Nick had chaired the annual Greek Festival there several times, I chose to depict the church with festival dancers circling around the church. At the time I did this painting  the church's dome was in an incomplete stage of repair, covered with a black rubber membrane and its future was not then settled.  I presented the dome ambiguously, subject to the viewer's interpretation.  Holy Trinity was built in the late 1940s on the site of the former  Coleman DuPont residence at 808 N Broom St   At the time Mary was living on W 8th St with a backyard ...

  Another Wilmington Relocated Statue Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont President James Garfield is not the only personage whose statue was relocated in Wilmington.  In 1884 Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont (his spelling) was memorialized by the dedication of statue in Washington, DC.  The statue, by sculptor Launt Thompson, was erected in Washington's Pacific Circle, renamed Dupont Circle (the official DC spelling). Here it is in 1900 [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Dupont_Circle_1900.png]. A Washington Post column from 2015 gives more of the story. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/before-there-was-a-fountain-in-dupont-circle-there-was-a-statue-an-ugly-one/2015/12/12/cbf0d08c-a04a-11e5-8728-1af6af208198_story.html In 1917 the statue was removed and transported to Wilmington, replaced by the more imposing fountain also commemorating Admiral Du Pont, designed by Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon. The statue now is a neighbor of mine.  It marks the Tower...

Delaware Ave and Washington St A Changing Scene In our last post, you saw the intersection of Delaware Ave and Washington St as it looked in the 1950s. The Atlantic gas station dates to the 1920s.  The classical Greek style "pavilion," the original facility, was probably designed by the architect Joseph F Kunz, who did many service station designs for Atlantic Refining Co., many in this classical style, as told in a blog no longer available on-line.   The utilitarian vitreous enameled panel structure was a later addition.  In my memory, in the 1950s the Greek pavilion housed the restrooms.  When the gas station was razed in 1964, the Greek pavilion was acquired by Chick Laird, a well-known local philanthropist, and donated to Tatnall School on Barley Mill Road, near the now-residence of President Joe Biden. It was repurposed as an open air structure and still stands on the grounds of the Tatnall School campus. The intersection has even more recently been rebuilt and...

  Performing Arts A few days ago I was revisiting a small painting that occasionally hangs in my library,  Performing Arts shows a titmouse "performing" in front of the Ursuline Academy Performing Arts Center.   The classical building was originally the First Church of Christ Scientist, designed by Solon S. Beman in 1912.  Beman was Mary Baker Eddy's "go to" architect as she expanded the church she founded.  I painted the picture in 2010 and was now curious what Ursuline has done with it since. I found that UA had just announced plans for renovating the building and grounds.  https://delawarelive.com/ursuline-plans-performing-arts-community-space/ The project will need about eight to ten million dollars, presenting "naming opportunities" for donors.  The imposing structure stands at the edge of Cool Springs Park at the head of Park Place.  It is one of Wilmington's architectural gems.  

The Dining Room Stencil   Here's the dining room window in the process of being converted to a display niche in 1966. When the old wallpaper was stripped we found the remains of an old stencilled border from the days this room was a kitchen, late 1800s.   Here's a detail of the stencil.  I have since used that pattern in other projects.     When we replaced the hood over our kitchen cook-top the new hood left a four inch gap over the Corian backsplash. I filled this gap with a metal-faced panel I made, stenciled with a scaled down version of the old border. A nod to the history of our house.