10 Winter Things To Do On Belle Isle

So you have relatives coming from out of town for the holidays? Or some free time on your hands? Looking for a fun family day? You could spend a whole day hanging out on Belle Isle, inside and outside.

1) Visit the Conservatory... it is warm, green, and heavenly on a cold day... think orchids, ferns, and cactus, poinsettias in December. Bring your camera. Open 10-5, Wednesday-Sunday. Free.

2) Bird and critter-watching from inside the Nature Zoo. There is a fireplace! And a lovely comfy sofa right in front of the window overlooking the bird feeders. And spiders and turtles and such for the kids to view. Open everyday 10-5 except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. Free.

3) The Dossin Great Lakes Museum has the pilot house of a Great Lakes freighter stuck on its backside. You can pretend that you are captain of the universe. Open Saturdays and Sundays 11-4. Free. (Closed Christmas and New Year's Day)

4) Be Dutch for a day... bring your ice skates and glide along the network of canals. Or be Canadian...set up a hockey rink on one of the shallower ponds.

5) Cross country ski over the river (well, creek) and through the woods. You will have the place mostly to yourself early in the morning, and the city will seem a hundred miles away. Great map of the island showing nature trails.

6) There's always the Ice Tree!

Last winter's tree

This year's model underway

7) Bring your dog for a walk... just be careful about the icy river and deeper ponds, please.
8) New Year's Eve Fun Run/Walk

9) New Year's Day Toast at the Detroit Boat Club ... had enough football? have you ever wondered about the lonely white building next to the bridge, above? want to see the inside of it? make new friends?

10) Come to the island while it is snowing...you will feel like you are on the inside of a snow globe. Bring  hot chocolate or coffee. Park where there is a good view of falling flakes. Ponder the meaning of the universe as expressed in snow angels and catching flurries on the tip of your tongue.

Links to these and many other interesting Belle Isle sights/sites can be found at the top right of this blog, in the section, "The Isle Itself". Any favorite winter memories of Belle Isle you'd like to share?

Comfort And Joy...A Fluffy And Smart Story

We haven't been to the island as much lately, Smart, Fluffy, and I. You may have noticed we deserted you for a month or so a while back. The smart one tore her second ACL this fall, which meant major limping and tiresome resting, followed by surgery to remove some lumps and bumps, followed by a huge sigh of relief when lumps and bumps were found to be no problem, followed by the go-ahead for leg repair, followed by a long, continuing period of not nearly as much prancing, sprinting, leaping, and squirrel hunting as Smart would like.

Thankfully, I can say she's on the mend, and we can go for short walks. After an entire morning of being mercilessly pursued around the house by a dog squeaking a giant yellow stuffed duck, I decided it was time for our triumphant return to Belle Isle. It was just the glorious, white Christmas-y kind of day that Smart loves best, even with half her fur shaved off from surgeries. (If you see her wearing an adorable plaid coat, feel free to make fun of me.)

This week is the third anniversary of the fluffy one joining the family. Last year at this time I told Fluffy's story. In honor of Fluffy's anniversary and Smart's good health, today I'll tell Smart's story.

I went to the "Meet Your Best Friend at the Zoo" event just planning to look. Riiiigghhhhtt. It was a week after my xxth birthday (a lady never tells, but it was a traumatic round number). My longtime boyfriend had just suddenly moved out, a few days after my elderly cat (my first pet ever) died. No lie.

I had never had a dog before. The only dog I had known well was my Grandma's German Shepherd, so I thought I wanted one of those. I wandered the aisles of the adoption event, surrounded by the cacophony of hundreds of barking, whining, yipping, growling dogs. I approached a few, but none seemed quite right, until I spied a small black shepherd sitting quietly in her crate. She sat confidently, not scared, or nervous, or frantic, but calmly and alertly looking around. I walked up to the crate. She was happy to see me, wagged her tail, sniffed. I liked her, but I reminded myself that I was just looking that day, and moved on. Ha.

As I walked around, I kept thinking of the black shepherd. She seemed about right. Youngish (7-8 mos), but not a puppy so no potty training. An energetic dog that would drag my lazy self off the sofa and into the great outdoors. The right size, big enough and tough-looking enough to be a single woman's best friend on night walks and when strangers came to the door. An intelligent look in her eyes ...when I was a little girl, my grandma's shepherd knew I wasn't allowed near the canal at the back of Grandma's yard and had been seen grabbing me by the back of my pants, pulling me away if I got too close. I thought I should go back and take a second look. Maybe if she wasn't adopted at the event, I would visit her again later in the week if she seemed promising. Uh-huh.

This time, when I walked up to her crate, a volunteer from the rescue group was nearby. I asked a few questions. Where did she come from? Did they know how she was with cats (two more at home)? The rescue worker said she didn't know about cats, but we could take the dog out on a leash and over by the cats to see. So, she leashed her and off we went. Not much of a reaction to the cats, more interested in sniffing and visiting.

The rescue worker started to tell me about how the dog had been out of the crate a couple of times that day to meet people but hadn't seemed to click with anybody. As she talked, I sat down on the ground cross-legged. The black shepherd walked over to me and sat on my lap, all thirty-five pounds of her. I looked up at the rescue worker and said, "Well, I guess this is my dog." "Yeah, it looks like she picked you" replied the woman.

So that's how I got my first dog. Or how Smart got her person. Either way, it's working out pretty well for both of us.

If you're interested, Fluffy's story is here.

I will be ever grateful to K9 Stray Rescue League of Michigan, who saved the smart one from a pound on the west side of the state. Large black dogs have a harder time getting adopted from shelters. Read more about the extra challenges they face finding a home here.





If you are considering adding a new family member for the holidays, there are incredible dogs (and cats) waiting for you at your neighborhood shelter. I recommend one that looks like Smart, or whichever one picks you.

Sunday Stroll: House Of Contemplation

I struggled with the snarks on this post title... Cathedral of St. Slow's*? New Testament Church of Declare Detroit? Our Lady Queen of Hipsters? In the end the snarks lost and my kinder, gentler self was won over by the Imagination Station itself and Catie Newell's work, Salvaged Landscape  (pictured above). The Imagination Station miniplex, while technically consisting of two abandoned houses, is really made of equal parts bravura marketing, sweat equity, and community organizing, with a dash of wild (and necessary) optimism and a pinch of insane genius.

Located facing Michigan Central Station, one of the houses ... empty, burnt out, and deconstructed, has been transformed into a gallery, art installation, and performance space. On a sunny, unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, it seemed full of metaphors and hidden meanings about the city itself. Some of them were obvious, like the rose window/stained glass effect of Newell's centerpiece (first photo).

A side chapel and makeshift stage is formed in an alcove of the Roosevelt hotel, below. The hotel, next to the Imagination Station, was recently purchased by Dennis Keffalinos, who owns the Russell Industrial Center. He also owns numerous rehabbed loft buildings around town, and even more numerous un-rehabbed vacant buildings, many of them historically significant. Some people think his buildings are somewhat, ahem, lightly maintained. Others argue that he is one of the few trying and successfully rehabbing buildings of this scale in the city. 

Below... is this a purposeful vignette on the state of Detroit's industry or just some retro-chic stuff on a ledge?

Other details....

From inside Salvaged Landscape, a vantage point to consider Roosevelt Park's possibilities

On this afternoon, the Imagination Station was quiet. The only sounds were from someone rummaging around in the empty Roosevelt Hotel, and in the distance, the power tools of a man working on the back of the Mercury Bar. Plenty of space and solitude for the hamster wheel in my head to turn.

That's two vacant houses being looked after. I can't help but think of the others with lower profiles ... neighbors who get no press and no thanks for boarding up the vacant houses on their street, for trying to keep trouble away, for calling police who hardly ever come. I see the train of thought... call attention to these two, bootstrap them into something that draws more resources, and make it easier to work on the next two, or two thousand.

*For out-of-towners, Slow's is a wildly popular, delicious, (deservedly) overexposed, BBQ restaurant whose owners are trying to lead a burgeoning revival of the neighborhood.

Letta Crapo Smith At Home And Abroad

We left Letta Crapo Smith in the early days of the Detroit Society of Women Painters. Letta was one of the founding members. She quickly became an officer of the group, and then in 1907 was elected President. She led the Society from 1907 till 1915. The painters rarely met in the summer....many of them, including Letta, summered in far away locales. Above, a still life floral by Letta, 1893

Starting in the 1890's, there are records of Letta's travels...to Paris, and the Academie Julian. A women's painting class from the that era, at the Rue de Berri studio where she likely studied....

Below, one of her teachers, Adolphe-William Bougereau, surrounded by his students, 1896. Both photos are from this blog, about an Englishwoman who studied at the Academie at the same time as Letta.

Painting of the ruins by Van Ruisdael, 1650, from The Art Institute of Chicago.

In the early 1900's, she spent her summers in Holland, first at Volendam, where she stayed at the Hotel Spaander, still a hotel after all this time.. and then at an art colony in Egmond. Egmond was famous as the site of a castle ruined when the Spanish were occupying Holland.

The artists' village in Egmond had been started by fellow Detroiter Gari Melchers and and another painter, George Hitchcock, in the 1880's. They taught a summer art school of sorts, often in the open air, encouraging large paintings. The artists made excursions to country churches, local farms, and the nearby sea and sand dunes (a landscape very similar to the dunes and small coastal towns of northern Michigan), painting the pastoral scenes that were the fashion of the day.

Girls at the Beach, L.C. Smith, date unknown

Letta rented a room and studio space in a small hotel that catered to artists run by a J. Kraakman. Summer days were spent antiquing, riding bicycles to the beach, walking the dunes, and painting under large umbrellas to shield the painters from the sun.

Back in Michigan for the winters, Letta worked hard, not only in her attic studio painting, but directing the activities of the DSOWP. She often suggested specific activities for the group's meetings, including themes for sketches to be brought in for review such as "blue and silver" or "a note of white- for a motif".

The Fourth Annual Exhibition, her first as President, was a great success... a newspaper review of the exhibit headlined "Where 100 Pictures Giving Evidence of Surprising Talent are Hung" states that "Miss Crapo-Smith's work stands out for its strength and beauty."

She also gave informal talks at the meetings, recounting her travels. About her trip to Japan:

Helen Hyde in her Tokyo studio

A print of Helen Hyde's from within a year or so of Letta's visit...

From the Library of Congress, Honorable Mr. Cat, 1903

In 1914, there are ominous tidings in the DSOWP's secretary's notebook...

The Clifton Springs Sanitarium was a famous, state-of-the art facility in its day. Part of its campus has been turned into an apartment building. Annette Stott, art historian and professor at the University of Denver, mentions that tuberculosis may have been the cause of Letta's illness. Whatever the cause of her ill health, in October 1915 Letta resigned from the Detroit Society of Women Painters.

I can find no further record of our intrepid painter, until her death in Boston, in 1921. I surmise she was out east visiting relatives. Her mother had died in Boston the previous year. They were so close, constant traveling companions. If her elderly mother Lucy had gone to Boston to be near Letta's uncle, William Wallace Crapo, one of Lucy's few surviving (of ten) siblings, Letta surely would have gone, too. William Wallace Crapo's home is now an oral surgeons' practice, but you can still see what a gracious home it must have been.

She is buried in the family plot in Glenwood Cemetery, Flint, Michigan.

photo by Lori War, from Find A Grave

If anyone out there has any further info on her last few years, I would love to hear more of her story. Other paintings by Letta Crapo Smith....

Next in her story:  The Lost Letters of Letta Crapo Smith

First Birthday, Flint Museum of Art, currently on loan to the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, her most well-known painting

Resources for this post:
My thanks to the librarians at the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library for their assistance, and to Maria Ketcham at the Detroit Institute of Art's research library. I also learned from the following publications:
Dutch Utopia:  American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914
  Telfair Museum of Art, 2009, by Annette Stott and Holly Koons McCullough
Artists of Michigan From the Nineteenth Century
  Muskegon Museum of Art, 1987
  Chapter on Letta Crapo Smith, by Annette Stott
History of the Detroit Society of Women Painters
  1953, by Julia Gatlin Moore
A Lark Ascends:  Florence Kate Upton
  1992, by Norma S. Davis
Rural Artists' Colonies In Europe, 1870-1910
  2001, by Nina Lubbren

Magical Creatures of Noel Night

In case you're not from these parts, or you haven't been to it yet, Noel Night is an annual event in Detroit's Cultural Center and Midtown neighborhood where basically everybody (museums, shops, schools, churches, etc.) opens their doors, welcomes you in, and shows you a good time. It's like the twelve days of Christmas all in one night. It is magical...even the unicorns attend.

...the alpacas wouldn't dream of missing it....

stories are told of Detroit's past.... 

.. and the holiday season is kicked off joyously, with song, dance, art, too many strollers, and the perfect amount of hot cider... 

...wishing you were all here to share it.

In case you were hoping for more of Letta Crapo Smith's story, it is still a work in progress.... the DIA library research was too successful. It may be another week or so before I can finish sorting and organizing, finding links and images to go with all the new info. Sorry for the delay, but hey, it's not like I get paid for this gig. In the meantime, the blog will go on with my regular travels. 

Letta And The Detroit Society Of Women Painters

Once in a while, "somewhere in time" isn't just the title of a schmaltz classic...it's how I spent my afternoon. Last weekend, I spent the better part of an afternoon with the notebook above, the secretary's notes for the early days of the Detroit Society of Women Painters. (The "and Sculptors" part was added in 1930.)

I was following an early star of the Detroit painting scene, Letta Crapo Smith, when a wonderful librarian at the Burton Historical Collection directed me to this notebook. Letta's beginnings are traced in the previous post...writing of her next adventures awaits an appointment at the DIA's research library this week.

For today, we'll take a peek inside this gathering of talented women artists. How did it begin? What did they hope to accomplish with their new group?

Although the group was meant for painters, an exception was made for Mary Chase Perry (as she signed in the notebook)...you know, that Pewabic pottery chick :)  She founded Pewabic Pottery in the same year this group began...

The ladies were pleased with themselves after their first year...

Their second exhibition seemed to go over well, too....

 

Although the ladies seemed to feel a bit unappreciated by DMA director Armand Griffiths, for this newspaper cartoon was included in the notebook right after the clipping about the 2nd exhibition. The cartoon could be referring to any number of controversies around museum funding or collections ... apparently political machinations and disagreements regarding these matters are as old as the concept of a museum itself. Many of the women in the group were from wealthy families, and were art collectors and prominent donors to the Detroit Museum of Art.

Who were these founding members?

An excerpt from "In Detroit Courage was the Fashion; The Contribution of Women to the Development of Detroit From 1701 to 1951"....

That women should so ably have arranged the loan exhibit 
that led to the Art Museum was not surprising, for the turn of 
the century produced some very fine women painters. It was not 
expected at that time that girls whose fathers could support them 
would work for pay. Girls who needed money or strong minded 
girls bent on a career took positions or went into a profession. 
Some of the others sat at home hoping soon to be married. In-
between were many young women whose talent and ability needed 
an outlet. For some, volunteer philanthropy was the answer. For 
those talented in music and art European study beckoned. There 
were many men in Detroit at that time with money to send their 
daughters to Paris, London or Rome, and many did. The result 
was a flowering of genuine artistic ability. 

In 1903 Lillian Burk Meeser, wife of Dr. Spencer Meeser, 
minister of the Woodward Avenue Baptist Church, called to- 
gether fifteen friends to suggest an art society that would stimu- 
late and at the same time promote recognition of their work. 
This was the genesis of the Detroit Society of Women Painters, 
the oldest organized art group in Michigan. During the fifty 
years since then most of the Detroit women seriously engaged in 
painting have belonged to this group. In 1930 its name was 
changed to include sculptors also. The early members gave a 
great deal of time to painting. Many of them had their own 
studios: Mariam and Eleanor Candler, Lillie and Delia Garret- 
son, Katherine and Alexandrine McEwen, Isabelle Lothrop (Mrs. 
Charles Lothrop) and others. These they opened for small classes 
and private exhibitions. Seldom were all the members on hand for an 

exhibit, for many of them went abroad frequently.   

Their individual stories are fascinating, from the fragments gleaned from husbands' and fathers' biographies, the images left in the American Archives of Art, the Cranbrook photo archives, various other places, and the few images of their artworks that roam the internet... I'm sure once I have finished Letta's story I will have a few more to tell. 

Next in her story: Letta Crapo Smith at Home and Abroad                              

Loving Elleisle Blogspot- The One Year Anniversary

No, this isn't going to be about a new detroit lesbian vacation destination. In spite of how it sounds. It's about how grateful I am that someone googled my blog with what they could remember of it, albeit somewhat garbled but somehow right on. And how grateful I am that through writing about Belle Isle and Detroit this past year, I have gotten to know so many amazing people and places.

I know that for many of the people who read this blog, I am preaching to the choir about the city.

I know that for some of you, I am just another Pollyanna with a point-and-shoot, cherrypicking the same old bright spots, and ignoring the very real and overwhelming problems we have, representing the carpetbagger tourista invader faction. Welcome Hot Fudge Detroiters. Churl away.

Some of you have just plain given up and disowned your city. You're not from Detroit. You're from Livonington. Or Broyingchester.  Or St. Harper Heights. For you, I borrow Lyle Lovett's words, "But what would you be if you didn't even try? You have to try." Unless you don't care if you, or your kids, or your grandkids can get jobs. Or have to move away to get them. "Make it a cheeseburger, please" indeed.

But enough about lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. Today I celebrate the "loving elleisle blogspot" one year anniversary by thanking you for visiting, being open to learning more, seeing for yourselves, and finding a way, your own big or small way, to be part of "speramus meliora; resurget cineribus".

From October's Access Arts exhibit, Michael Jacobs at work reinterpreting Detroit's skyline.

"We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes".  Happy belated Thanksgiving from Detroit. And from me, smart, and fluffy.

The smart one and the fluffy one leading the way through the woods on Belle Isle....