New and Old #101

Friday roundup and commentary

For the first link today, appropriately, I’d like to share my piece here from the archives on my favorite way to prepare corned beef: Corned Beef? Turn On the Oven:

What about the traditionally boiled veggies? You can still do that, of course—in fact, by using some of the salty water from the foil-wrapped stage of the brisket, you can boil corned-beef-infused veggies.

Instead of the traditional (or not traditional, depending on how you define it) one-pot boiled dinner for St. Patrick’s Day, I separate out each ingredient and cook it differently, which maximizes the flavor and quality of each one—in my opinion anyway!

St. Josaphat’s Catholic Basilica, 1897, Architecture of Faith

This very cool church in Milwaukee—the largest in the city—was modeled after St. Peter’s in Rome. So that’s one interesting thing about it. The other interesting thing about it is that it was constructed using a lot of salvaged materials, though that was originally not the intended design:

Father Grutza had all of the material shipped to Milwaukee, which required 500 railroad cars. Every piece of stone and other material was then numbered, measured, catalogued, and placed in a storage yard near the construction site. The architects then had to redesign the building to accommodate the newly acquired materials. For reasons of economy, they sought to use only the Chicago material to the extent possible, while cutting or reshaping as few of the individual stones as possible. The process was rather like constructing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with the added complication that the pieces had to be assembled to form a new and architecturally cohesive building rather than a reconstruction of the original Chicago post office.

Also this detail:

The doorknobs on the façade doors came from the dismantled Chicago Post Office and Customs House, and bear the insignia of the United States Department of the Treasury.

Fun, neat read.

Oyster Pirates in the San Francisco Bay, JSTOR Daily, Katrina Gulliver, February 13, 2023

In California, it was not just industrialization that was changing the culture of the tidelands. Mexican law and American law (standing on English legal traditions) differed on whether tidal areas were “commons” or could be privately owned. When California became part of the United States, the shift to private ownership of land along the waterfront criminalized traditional use and foraging of natural resources.

Interesting piece of history here. Gulliver also notes that the oyster industry in the Bay Area today is dead. The story feels distant now, but the themes are ever-present.

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And since today’s links are kind of quirky, rounding them out is this live camera of the major train station in Prague. It’s pleasantly and maybe strangely relaxing to watch this sort of hum of activity. Similarly, I like to sometimes stand in a parking lot when I’m near Dulles Airport and just watch and listen to planes fly over.

Anyway—happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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Related Reading:

New and Old #45

New and Old #46

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