DryStoneGarden

Misión San Ignacio Kadakaamán

Mission San Ignacio de Kadakaaman was founded by the Jesuits, but the actual church was built by the Dominicans (completed in 1786), and it’s quite different from the other missions as a result. The door is more moorish in style than the other mission doors, and none of the other missions have big crests flanking the doors. Close ups of the crests and a few other photos are below. (more…)

The Bell

Along with the plants of Baja, we checked out the missions down there. Pretty interesting, with more varied stonework than I expected.

My knowledge of California missions is mostly based on some half-remembered grade school field trips, but the basic outline is this: the Jesuits established most of the Baja missions, starting in 1697 at Loreto. They were expelled by the king of Spain in 1768, and the Franciscans briefly took over, but then the Franciscans were sent up into Alta California to found the missions up here, and the Dominicans took over the Baja missions. The indigenous people of Baja took a massive hit during the missionary age, with 90% of the population or more dying from European diseases, so there weren’t enough people to keep many of them going, and most were abandoned in the early to mid 1800’s, with the rest taken over by the main Catholic church. A lot of them are in ruins; a few are in use.

The La Paz mission is one of the ones still in use, though it’s not the original building. It was established in 1720 and closed in 1749, and the current building was built much more recently. Surfing the Spanish google, I found a video with photos of the towers (with Edelweiss as the soundtrack) under construction in the 1920’s, so that might be an approximate construction date. There was an outdoor mass underway when I visited and I got a chance to climb up to the top of one of the towers. Nice views of the town. I resisted the temptation to ring the bell, which was good, because one of the church officials eventually noticed the gringo up in the bell tower and was somewhat horrified I had been let up there.

Misión de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de La Paz Airapi

We also checked out the missions at Mulege, Loreto, and San Ignacio. I started to upload photos from them, but decided to put them in separate posts which I should have up shortly. Photos of another historic building in La Paz and the mission in San Jose del Cabo (built in 1940) are below.

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Manzanar Cemetery Monument

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but I wanted to first reread Farewell to Manzanar, Jeane Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of her childhood in the internment camp. I hadn’t really thought about that book since reading it back in eighth grade, but while I was out on the east side I visited Manzanar, an interesting place to visit despite the fact that there’s not a lot there any more. Whether for practical or more guilt-oriented reasons, the site was almost completely erased after it closed in 1945. All of the buildings were dismantled and hauled away, leaving only some concrete foundations, the large auditorium, two stone sentry posts built by a stonemason internee Ryozo Kado, the cemetery with its concrete monument (also built by Kado), and the remains of a few gardens built by the internees. Now, the place feels barren and desolate, which is, I guess, appropriate.

The park service has done a lot of work to put together a visitor center that gives a sense of what life might have been like in the camp. Their website says they will have a virtual tour online in the future, but for now the wikipedia page or this article in Lost Magazine have the most info and links that I could find on the web. Farewell to Manzanar, though, is the best source. I don’t remember the book making much of an impression when I was young, but this time I found it quite compelling, perhaps because the story is relevant to our country’s recent history.

Entry Pillar

Kado’s work is all very meticulous for someone who was essentially a prisoner. He created almost everything that remains at the site, which may I guess have been a motivation. There’s a saying: If you want it to last, build it with stone. His stonework makes this memorial possible.

Military Police Sentry Post at Manzanar

The lintels are made of concrete finished to look like wood, apparently a signature of Kado’s work.

Concrete with Faux-Wood Finish

The posts at the sentry station resemble a tree trunk, while the ones in the cemetery have a smooth finish as if they were scoured by sand or water.

Manzanar Cemetery Monument with Posts

Manzanar Block 34 Garden

There are the remnants of several traditional Japanese gardens built by the internees. I don’t know of any photos that show the gardens in their prime, but they look like they were quite complex, involving water features, landscape boulders, and masonry. Kado was one of the main creators, and some of the concrete ponds were lined with more of his faux-wood masonry. This article talks about the park service’s archeological efforts with the gardens, including more details about Kado and a number of photos of the garden ruins. In person, the effect is quite powerful, especially for someone like myself who creates gardens for a living.

Garden at Manzanar

Houston talks about the gardens in her chapter about revisiting the ruins of Manzanar.

‘It is so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human. These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.’

Photos #5 and #6 from Wiki user Mav.

Update — 99% Invisible has a podcast telling the story of the establishment of Manzanar National Historic Site, as well as some great photos by Ansel Adams and Dorthea Lange and creator of the podcast. It looks like the park service has done a lot of work developing the historic site in the eight or so years since I was there.

I recently netflixed Standing with Stones, a travelogue overview of the megaliths, henges, and stone circles of Great Britain. It’s good stuff, put together by just two guys, the filmmaker and the narrator. My favorite parts were probably the segment on Men-an-Tol and a short rant about some misguided preservationists who “restored” Newgrange using Portland cement. There is maybe a bit much of “…and we have no idea what it was for!” but I suppose that’s a reflection of how ancient these stone sites are and not really the fault of the filmmakers. Personally, I had no idea there were so many sites and that they were so old. Those early Brits really liked to move rocks.

A playlist with 15 segments can be found on Youtube. The filmmakers have an interview up on Youtube and an interesting blog.