Last week I visited the Sacramento History Museum, tucked neatly between the California State Railroad Museum and the Sacramento River at the top of Front Street. One part of the museum I wish I’d had more time to examine was a temporary exhibit called Place and Replace: The Making of Old Sacramento. While I was growing up in the eastern […]
The California Firefighters Memorial in Capitol Park consists of three parts — a Memorial Wall and two bronze statues. The wall contains the names of more than 13,000 firefighters who died in the line of duty since 1850, when California became a state. While the site was dedicated in 1995, it wasn’t until April 2002 that the memorial was finally unveiled. […]
In January 1986 I was lucky enough to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was an incredibly moving and humbling experience to me even though I had no names to search for. I grew up seeing coverage of the Vietnam War on the TV news every evening, but I was young enough that the conflict never touched […]
Maybe it’s partly to do with all the controversy over statues that’s been in the news lately, but I’ve been taking a closer look recently at the various sculptures I happen to pass along my way. Some are purely art, others serve as memorials and reminders of important people and events in our collective history. I was originally going to […]
Coit Tower is such a famous part of the San Francisco city skyline it’s hard to imagine it not being there atop Telegraph Hill. Yet as much as I love seeing the tower and climbing to the top for the amazing views of the city, it’s the murals in the lobby that I most wanted to contemplate on my recent […]
While in San Francisco last week I didn’t have time to visit the zoo or the natural history museum — and yet I seemed to notice animals almost everywhere I looked. Marina gull Justin Herman Plaza: I could be wrong, but when I looked at this building across the street from my hostel I saw three crabs: I didn’t even […]
