“Ah, #*@$, here we go again.”
Surprise! It is more “AI” stuff this week, just like I promised last week, but it isn’t my ill-advised diatribe yet! That will come… next week? Two weeks from now? I’ve got another long-ish post I’ve been thinking about, but it’s still in the works for now. Hopefully this smattering of more “AI” “art” that I generated for last week’s nightmare along with a generous helping of “here’s what I did this weekend” will tide you over! I also set myself a goal of trying to finish this blog in under one hour. Why? Well, way back when I started this thing in… oh no… 2018??!!1!1!!??, I had read somewhere that the key to blogging was to make your posts short, simple, and sweet; ideally, you could churn one out in an hour. I tried to take that to heart, I really did, but I’m only now just realizing that a) that advice is probably intended for daily posts, not weekly, and b) short writing isn’t my thing. I like wordy reading. I enjoyed reading Nathaniel Hawthorne in English class, something that my boss and I both joke about frequently. Plus, it might be good for everyone if I purposely try to keep this blog short. We all know how I get when I really get in a groove…
Anyway, let’s start in the reverse order of the title; with the generated images. These are also images that I created for last week’s post but didn’t quite have enough space to add. That post was already getting pretty long and, frankly, rather cursed. So I’ll share some extras here. We’ve got everything! We’ve got crying Yoshi and lady farquaad and the guy stealing my cheese at 4am, my standard batch of dyed Easter Eggs as they look up at me from the fridge, a very menacing bowling scene, the infamous taco bird, and the cage match between the 4th-dimension rhino and melted goose. The gang’s all here!
Now, generated images are all fun and games and whatnot, but how about we get into some real content? Continuing to go backwards from the order I laid out in the title, over the weekend I took a small sightseeing trip around St. Paul, Minnesota. Partially because I haven’t spent a ton of time over on that side of the Twin Cities and partially because I had one specific goal in mind; I wanted to see the James J. Hill house museum. I did get there, and those pictures will be on in a minute, but I also got to A Big Church. Otherwise known as not just “a” big church, but “the” big church of St. Paul. As in, the Cathedral of St. Paul. Now, I may not be religious anymore, but I was raised Catholic, so I know a big church when I spot one. And this is a big church. You can see the thing from across the Mississippi river, and from the James J. Hill house across the street, which is how I fortuitously wound up at the church in the first place.
I consider myself an appreciator of architecture, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that some of the world’s prettiest buildings are constructed for religious purposes (Notre Dame in Paris, Çamlıca Mosque in Istanbul, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Mitchell Corn Palace, you get the idea). So I tend to make it a habit to stop by some of the grand old cathedrals wherever I happen to be visiting. And boy am I glad I stopped by the Cathedral of St. Paul, because it is a stunning building.
Admittedly, I feel a bit odd using pictures of a religious space on this monetized blog post on my very non-religious blog, so I’ll refrain from making any (more) jokes at the expense of religion. Especially since people were actively worshipping while I was there. It wasn’t like there was a service or a mass or anything going on, but there were priests in the confessionals, and there were people waiting in line to lay bare their sins, and there were people lighting votive candles and kneeling to pray to specific saints or martyrs. But I took my time, walked around, appreciated the beauty of the place and the gaudy detail of it all, and I was pretty wowed by it all. If you’ve got an architectural bent, the Cathedral is definitely a place worth stopping at in the Twin Cities. There are a surprising number of pretty stone buildings all over the Twin Cities, far more than I’m typically used to seeing in places like the steel-and-glass megaopolis of, uh, suburban Chicago.
I did briefly consider entering the confessional booth and beginning a “Bless me, father, for I have sinned, it has been ten years since my last confession,” and then proceeding to spout the foulest sins I have committed over the last decade. There are several, and I’m sure it would have made for an interesting confession for the priest. But I decided against it. I didn’t have the time it would have taken, anyway.
And now we come to the first part of the title, the Train House! That is, of course, referring to the aforementioned James J. Hill house, otherwise known as the home of the Empire Builder, founder of the Great Northern Railway, or the home of the guy who helped crash the stock market several times, or the home of the guy who basically monopolized America’s entire rail system. Funny thing about that; by asking a guide one simple question about the year the railroad was built, I was treated to a fairly extensive story of how he bought out competitors and worked with J.P. Morgan and some other guy to strong-arm the industry into one massive conglomerate, until he and Teddy Roosevelt had a pissing match over the Sherman Anti-Trust act, but seven decades later they monopolized the railroad again to form BNSF rail, and they kind of suck at their job despite being, like almost all of the trains (moral is; if you need a short answer, don’t go to a historian). If you’re a capitalist, you can argue that the reason that rail travel is so utterly fucked in America is because of this guy and his efforts to monopolize the tracks instead of fostering healthy competition. And now we get nuclear Ohio. I would argue for a pretty different interpretation, but hey, I learned something in my AP US history class.
Really, the house itself stands as more of an example of what gilded age American wealth looked like as opposed to the story of the railroads and the millions and millions of lives James J. Hill’s railroad empire shaped/changed, decimated/constructed, preyed upon/exploited, or developed/destroyed. I mean, it’s really hard to overstate just how important this guy was to American history; he really had his hands in a lot of really, really big pies. He was definitely the richest man in Minnesota at some point and possibly one of the richest men to ever exist in America, even accounting for inflation. Obviously the wealth speaks for itself, but surprisingly, you might not get a sense of how critically important this guy was for, like, America’s entire trade network (for better or for worse) based on the exhibits alone. As someone who teaches history for a living, I was a tad bit disappointed by the way the space was interpreted. I didn’t feel there was much of a theme, a through-line, to the stand-alone rooms. Which is why it’s good that I took the tour, then!
Funny story, I technically wasn’t supposed to be on the tour. I got into the house right as one tour started, but they said it was full, so I could explore the house on my own or wait an hour for the next tour. Fuck that. I looked around, hung out on the outskirts of the tour introduction, and then as soon as they moved on to the next room, I sneakily inserted myself into the back of the tour group and plodded along, wide-eyed and grinning as if nothing was wrong. Since the tours were free and had no additional restrictions besides number of guests, and I was just one (1) guest of several, it was pretty easy to tag along unnoticed. It definitely made me feel like a little bit of a spy. This is not the first time I have illicitly infiltrated a historic site, and it likely won’t be the last.
I am glad that I ended up sneaking around on the group tour, because it ended up letting me see parts of the house that I wouldn’t have otherwise been allowed to see (without, you know, actually trespassing). I’ve got this thing for historic homes and historic mansions, specifically, and it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Not because I’m going to make the houses into omelets, but because I don’t know if I like historic houses because of my job or if I got into my job because I like historic houses. If you had asked me if a year ago, before I started my current job, if I liked history, I probably would have said, “eh, it’s alright.” I appreciated history, sure, I appreciated the way that you can understand modern conflicts by looking at the historical contexts surrounding them and the forces that drive countries and powerful people to make big decisions, and the way that those decisions impact the rest of the us, but I wouldn’t have said I “enjoyed” history. I like museums, yes, I like spending my free time learning, because I’m a big nerd, and I’ve been no stranger to historic sites, but it’s not specifically because they’re “historic,” it’s usually more because they look cool. But now? I don’t know what it is, but I have a newfound passion for history sites.
I kind of noticed it when I actively chose to visit the historic mansion in Duluth instead of going to the aquarium. I choose to see a big house instead of some cool fish? When did that happen? But it’s not necessarily something new; because of my job, I kind of had to get into history, or my duties would have been insufferable. But it turns out I really like it! So was all that blustering before about how history is “meh” just a front I put up for myself because it wasn’t “cool” or “useful” to like history? I always enjoyed my history classes in university and even in high school, and like I said, I tend to seek out museums anyway. But how deep does this rabbit hole go? As I write this, part of me is trying to think back to the other places I’ve been to in Minnesota, and why I was drawn to them, and if it’s history or not, and if I like history, and, and, and… eh, it’s not really worth the effort to figure out. I like historic mansions! I think they’re cool! I like to pretend that I’m a fancy person and I live in this totally-unnecessary extravagant space. It’s fun! I love the intricacies of design. Plus, now with my job, I get to look at the museum set-up and compare notes for my own site.
Like the fake food!
Oh, the fake food! There is this ongoing debate at the site I work at as to whether or not it’s useful, from an interpretive standpoint, to have fake food for some of our cultural programs as decoration. On the one hand, food is an important part of culture, and it lets us visually demonstrate cultural differences between immigrant groups in Minnesota. And it’s not really any different from having fake or replacement or “approximated” furniture and antiques to populate our houses. On the other hand, the fake food kind of looks gross, and it’s hard to teach someone about the history of kolacky as part of Czech Christmas when your sauerkraut is full of mouse turds (they’re little caraway seeds!) and the Swedish Christmas punch is a pungent mix of antifreeze and purple Gatorade. Any interpretive messages gained by fake food, the theory goes, are violently offset by the disgust people feel upon getting close to the fake food and realizing that, really, it’s just styrofoam peanuts and the most foul-looking collard greens you could imagine. I try not to pick a side in this argument, but it is relieving to know that the Minnesota Historical Society’s budget for fake food is apparently the same as my site’s, because I did feel the same uncanny repulsion upon getting close to their food as I get from my own fake food. It’s a history miracle! No one can get fake food right!
The pictures don’t do it justice; just trust me, that stuff looked upsetting. But maybe it only bothered me because I was looking for it. Who knows!
Other fun facts about James J. Hill! Despite being an incredibly successful railroad magnate who effectively turned a bankrupt industry into one of the most successful sources of wealth in gilded age America, his son, Louis Hill, was the guy who helped establish Glacier Park! I’ve been there! If you take the Empire Builder line from Minneapolis (or Chicago, I guess) to Glacier park, congratulations, you’re riding the James J. Hill express straight into his pockets. Louis Hill built the Glacier Park stations and several of the lodges that still stand in the park today. It’s what helped make Glacier a National Park in the first place! So that’s pretty cool. Unless, you know, you’re a member of the Blackfeet tribe who were summarily kicked out of Glacier. Less cool.
The Hills also had four or five other estates around the country, and the St. Paul house was considered their winter home (this guy did not fuck around). Their summer home was on Jekyll Island, Georgia, playground of the rich, where he hobnobbed with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, presumably the Carnegies, and probably others from America’s OG ultra-elite. The fun thing about that is I’ve been to Jekyll island, on a vacation there about six years ago. I climbed around in some ruins there! Who knows, maybe I even pissed in the James J. Hill Jekyll Island estate. Wouldn’t that be something. Actually, come to think of it, I think the ruins I climbed around/pissed in were on Cumberland island, just south of Jekyll. Ah, well. Dreams die young.
I also want to point out this particular exhibit, which I thought was very funny. It talks about how tough it was in the 1800’s to find good live-in servant staff, even though the jobs were indoors, often included room and board, and tended to pay better than factory jobs. However, despite all that, there was high turnover in the field and plenty of vacancies, and no one could quite figure out why. The rich complained about how they couldn’t find good staff, and there were lots of think pieces in newspapers about “the servant problem” and what caused this lack of “capable help.” Assumedly, the reasons given in the newspapers were something along the lines of “no one wants to work” or that their staff are being poached off by “easier” factory jobs. Of course, whenever someone finally thought to ask the actual workers, they invariably said that housework was unfair, often extreme, often unpaid or poorly compensated, and incredibly demoralizing. Being part of the house staff in these gilded age mansions was grueling, taxing labor. It was only ritzy and glamorous if you were rich. Staff were sometimes expected to work ten hours days for six days a week, and you break was an eight hour day on sundays. How generous!
I literally could not make this up. The more things change, the more they stay the same, apparently, and if I have to spell out to you the parallels to today, well, they’re right there. This is one of the reasons why I love reading history now, I think. The way these things come in cycles is both depressing but also really, really funny. History arms you with unexpected tools to fight for a better world. And it’s fun to read because of the wild-ass stories these people get into. Did you know nuns used to rollerskate in the basement of the James J. Hill house? Incredible.
Well, enough of my soapbox. That’s the end of my photobomb/instagram drop for today! And let’s see, it only took me… two hours! Almost exactly! Well, a little bit longer than I had anticipated, but that’s alright! It is a weekly post, after all. I can’t quite cram seven hours of content into here, but I can sure as well try.
