A WALK THRU FORT LOGAN: Permit me to begin with this business of smells sometimes invoking vivid memories –often from a long time ago. The white lab-coat guys say this is because the part of the brain that sorts out smells is right next to the part that stores memories –in some kind of way. I find there are times when a place invokes memories of another place –often just a vividly and just as enjoyably. Pretty good stand-alone argument for travel -or taking walks anyway. Then I take up architecture yet again, but military architecture this time. Form follows function & all, and as a tax-payer, I’m all for efficiency and economy when our g’munt spends money. Consider the Quonset hut* -ugly to the nth degree but what marvels of something that does what it’s designed to do very well indeed, meets a long list of specifications, was cheap, and is still around and useful 70+ years after it first came out. Other examples of military-ugly include most barracks I’ve ever seen –even the non Quonset variety, every damn space-age building the Air Force ever built, (Who remembers the exterior shots from TV’s I DREAM OF GENIE?), and last but not least, the pentagon. But it is not universally so. Today’s walk –a bike ride actually –I like walking better but there’s more exercise on two wheels- is proof of this exception. Mostly. Fort Logan is in an ‘up-and-coming’ town named Sheridan on the edge of Denver. I really need some footnotes about now –but they are annoying to the reader and hard to do on Facebook, so I’m going to see if I can’t wade thru economics, history, and urban development all at once a pull it together. Fort Logan got itself started in 1887 by General Sheridan, who preferred to lend his name to another fort outside of Chicago –but the town that eventually grew up surrounding Fort Logan would come to be named Sheridan. Fort Logan was named to honor the Yankee General John Alexander Logan of Civil War fame, who –as far as I have been able to figure- never set foot in Colorado. Indians were not much of a problem by then, so the army was all set to shut down what was little more than tent city commonly referred to as “The Camp Near Denver,” till rich merchants in Denver wishing to be richer donated the land to the army to keep them there so they could sell them stuff. Seemed to work. They built beautiful –or handsome as the case may be- two and three story red brick buildings with grey slate hip-roofs, wide white trim of a most pleasing aspect, and round-top windows on extended vestibules, all with perfect symmetry. Built the barracks in tidy rows, and the larger more elaborate officer’s quarters & administrative buildings in a sweeping arc around the parade grounds. Between 1897 and its closure in 1946 the fort served variously, (and loosely chronologically), for the Wyoming Calvary (?), a source for South Dakota Indian fighters, Pulman Strike putter-downers, Spanish American warriors, an engineering center, (and the engineers made major updates during the depression), as a training ground for clerks and such for that new-fangled Army Air Corps, a recruiting depot, and a POW camp during WW II. Two final purposes need mention; one was a cemetery, and the other was as a training facility for wounded soldiers on their way back to civilian life. The cemetery is still there –perhaps no great surprise as such-like rarely move, but it is no longer accepting applicants. The training function is also still there, but in a much modified form as we shall see. When the army shut Fort Logan down a lot of good reliable middle-class jobs went away too. The town of Sheridan suffered and to this day is not exactly high-rent, but nor is a good bit of south west Denver and suburbs for that matter. This is not to say it is not without charm. Did I mention part of the purpose to my driving across town was to look for a cheep home with shop space if I don’t end up in North Dakota? I like Sheridan: loose zoning regulations, funky houses with wind-chimes on the front porch & what I presume to be old hippies living there-in, and small well-cared-for houses with what I presume to be young hard-working families. But to the keenly discerning eye can be seen the early signs of gentrification. Problematic as to weather or not I live long enough to see the wind-chimes and mini-vans replaced by rainbow flags and Volts, but fun to watch even so. The State of Colorado got a hold of most of the land and in 1961 admitted the first patient to its mental health center. And they put these poor souls not in beautiful old Federalist buildings, but this hideous complex of modern, (for the time), buildings smack in the middle of the old buildings. I don’t know if the training done in the military era somehow lead to the training of the current day, but it seems likely. The Colorado Department of Human Services occupies some of the ugliest of these buildings and judging by the PC’ly worded signs outside these buildings, they don’t so much service humans, as they train them what gets paid to further the ends of the CDHS –whatever these might be. The beautiful buildings still surrounding the ugly ones are occupied by ARTS. This intrigued me till I found out that ARTS stands for Addiction Research and Treatment Services –a part of Colorado University Medical Center. Presumably training goes on here too. (They also teach GED, so I plan to be on the phone with someone there first thing Monday.) Here is where I bring it full circle. Today was a warm day and most of last night’s snow had melted. The trees were bare and the grass was winter dull, but some springtime it will be a beautiful place. Perhaps not quite as beautiful as the Presidio in San Francisco. And here is where I get to that business of locations invoking vivid memories of other locations. For my readers who have the misfortune not to have lived in San Francisco, the Presidio is one of the most beautiful parts of a city chalk-full of beautiful parts. It goes way back to the time when it was a Spanish military base at the north end of the city, (alongside the bay and just east of the Golden Gate today.) The architecture is all over the map, but it works and works very well. (For an easy and excellent education if American architecture, check out nps.gov/prsf/historyculture/architecture.htm. The National park Services seems to do a much better than average job of letting the public learn what it’s doing with taxpayer’s money.) It’s now a park and as such has grass and trees –and they are always green –at least in in my vivid memory. Rolling hills to the north, and some steepish hills to the south. All divided up in some military order I don’t pretend to understand, but each with its own style and I am pretty sure in a military form-follows-function manner. Indeed, a reading of what was done in the Presidio reads much like that of Fort Logan –but it’s considerably longer. To wrap it up, I want to make a pitiful attempt at describing light. Renoir, Manet, Monet, and all ‘em impressionist painters tried to describe light and they got to use paint. Words are a pretty poor substitute, but here goes. Light on a clear winter’s day in Colorado -and if it’s not snowing, it’s clear in Colorado- is harsh. It comes from the sun –not profound I suppose- but also a little from a lot of blue sky. But mostly from the sun and with 5280 fewer feet of atmosphere to filter it. Colorado sun –Colorado light- is no-nonsense light. Make things perfectly clear and accurate. Colorado light is for engineers, not artists. The light I remember from that walk thru the Presidio some years back was a kinder gentler light. If I had to try to explain this so as not to seem a tad goofy to my engineer-type friends, I’d theorize that it had to do with just the right amount of moisture coming off the bay. Certainly not fog, not even haze, but just enough of something to make everything look like some cosmic artist had arranged it just so. * I have to do some ancilary history. The Quonset Hut was copied from the British Nisson Hut from WW I for the US Navy. The first Quonset hut was built at Quonset Point, Rhode Island in 1941. The original design was 16 x 36 feet, but they were quickly upgraded to 20 x 48 feet, and some warehouse designs were built, (‘built’ is misleading –they were manufactured, shipped, and assembled by unskilled labor is about an hour or less.), as large as 40 x 100 feet. Something between 160,000 and 170,000 were made to keep WW II warm and dry -or at least dry.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 05:51:43 +0000
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