Teddy Bear!

We have shown you, our readers, a few works of Pueblo art. You may have seen this one while walking or driving around downtown Pueblo, Colorado. It's a giant teddy bear holding a heart. The artistry on this is wonderful and intricate. You can stand in front of this wall for probably half an hour and not see everything that is at work here. It's definitely a friendly face when you are on your way somewhere!

Rawlings Library

Pueblo City County Library District (PCCLD) is a wonderful tool! On almost the same level as Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD), PCCLD has libraries throughout Pueblo, CO, as well as a few satellite libraries in nearby towns. The main library is the Rawlings Library on Abriendo Avenue. There is plenty of parking; a cafeteria; a Youth Services area complete with toys, kids' games, a storytime room and a puppet stage with puppets you can borrow; plenty of internet and catalog computers; a 3D printer and a 3D simulator; LOTS of nonfiction and fiction books for every age; really wonderful Hispanic resources, both for English-speakers learning Spanish and Spanish-speakers learning English; a floor devoted to genealogy and history; a news museum, movie theatre and gallery on the fourth floor; and lots of festivities, activities, events, classes and really nice librarians. For a bibliophile, what more could you want?

From the New City to the Edge of the Old

Let's begin our journey in Anywhere, USA.  You know what I mean.  This intersection, the junction of Pueblo Boulevard and Northern Avenue, is indistinguishable from any other intersection of its type in any suburban area in any city of the United States.  We see the "anchors" of the modern community:  Wal-Mart (or is it walmart now?), McDonald's, and so-on with a backdrop of asphalt and framed out nicely with a foreground of more asphalt. 

Our architectural legacy from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will consist of slabs of concrete and sewer pipes.  The above-ground portions are nothing more than inviting facades on giant sheds, constructed from materials that will be devoured by time and exist for future archaeologists as little more than rust stains on the concrete below.  Head east on Northern until you make it to Lake or Orman, and make your way north into Mesa Junction.  You can see the scenery slowly start to change as you leave the new areas and head into the heart of the old Three Cities.

Pueblo, Colorado of the olden days was built by master craftsmen and financed by people who intended to create utopia.  You can find modest apartments that have more architectural grace and lasting value than pretty much any architectural endeavor made in town in the last half-century.

Keep moving through, and you'll end up at the Rawlings library, which is actually an interesting piece to leave off on.  This building is an expression of....?

Where are we going with all of this?  Can we hope to revive the civic pride that created the old city for future generations?  What more than the motives of the commissioner of any building determine what is erected?  As we move toward the future, can we reconcile the profit motive with the drive to create a more beautiful, perfect world?

Creatures

Pueblo, CO has a large selection of Creatures' artwork, on different buildings throughout town. Here is a very new piece of art. We watched them working on it a few days in a row a couple weeks ago. This particular piece is right in the drive-thru parking lot of Mexi-Deli on Abriendo Ave, across the street from Rawlings Library.

Walking Along Northern Avenue

If you are trying to lose weight or if you are otherwise into jogging and fitness, a wonderful sidewalk to walk or run on in Pueblo, Colorado, is the sidewalk along Northern Ave between Cambridge Ave and Pueblo Blvd. As you can see from the picture, the entire thing is wiggly like a snake. For blocks. It adds at least a mile, I'm sure. And if you are the kind of person that walks everywhere as transportation, as I do, you might not need or even want that added mile. Therefore, when I walk between Pueblo Boulevard and the Colorado State Fair Grounds area, I ignore the presence of this sidewalk entirely. I walk a straight line, through the grass and across the sidewalk multiple times. The nice thing about ignoring the sidewalk is that you can get some intermittent shade from the trees and maybe even pick a few apples from the apple trees, if you can find some that are ripe without bugs in them. There are also some pleasant rosebushes and gardens along the way, so the walk can be kind of nice.

Find This Church! Pt. 2

What a beautiful church! It's actually very large, if you go around on the right side. It seems to be unoccupied, so I don't think you can go there for services, but if you take a walk kind of southwest of Pueblo's Rawlings Library, maybe you can find it and take a look at the building anyway. Pueblo, CO has a lot of beautiful buildings and, although a lot of the churches are not much to look at, some of them are.

Find This Steet Corner!

Marigolds and Cosmos make a lovely combination! Can you find this Pueblo Colorado street corner? Here's a hint: It's on the same street as the church shown in the last post! That is, a bit east of the Colorado State Fair Grounds.

Find This Church!

Where in Pueblo, Colorado is this church? Go for a walk and find it! Here's a clue: Somewhere on the diagonal blocks east of the Colorado State Fair Grounds.

One Stop on the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk - The Center for American Values Walk of Valor

To be perfectly honest with you, every time I take a walk lately, I forget my camera, so I'm digging through shit that's stored on my computer to bring you, the faithful reader, another installment of Exploring Pueblo, CO on foot.  Most of the pictures on my computer are of things that aren't in Pueblo, like this one:

See?  Don't worry, though, rabid Pueblophiles (not to be confused with you-know whats), I was digging through the computer today and I found some pictures that my wife took when she took my son to the Center for American Values Walk of Valor on the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk (quite the mouthful. who comes up with this shit, anyway?)  It is essentially a vault of about 50 or so portraits of dudes who have done crazier shit than you could probably ever imagine.  When you see crazy stunts on war movies, those actions are generally modeled after the things that these guys actually did.

As a parent and a self-proclaimed aficionado of human decency, I can't exactly encourage my son to go into the military, but I can still teach him to respect the people who have done so.  I'm not exactly sure that taking him to this place was the best move because he seemed a little bored, but in the sort of civilization that recognizes symbols of merit bequeathed by esteemed members of the current hierarchy more than the behaviors those symbols were awarded for, it's only right to show the boy how each of these men is wearing a little medal around his neck.

As you're headed south from Union Avenue on the west side of the Riverwalk, you'll notice a small, dungeonesque enclosure off to your right.  If you work up the courage to enter, you will have the chance to view the collected portraits of surviving Congressional Medal of Honor recipients from the years leading up to the construction of the memorial.

Hmm...

Is it a memorial if it is constructed in honor of people who are still alive?  I'm becoming a little concerned because I believe the term we've been using to generically refer to it when giving directions is "that memorial thingy."  While it may be said that this is an issue of semantics, it may also be said that semantics is nothing less than the development of clarity in both thought and communication.  Either way, this hall is chock-full of the portraits of these fine men, and if you are the sort of person who likes to check that type of thing out, it is not to be missed.  For the rest of us, it is shady and kept cool, and as long as you make your way through in an orderly, grocery store-type fashion, it's a way to get the kids some AC for a minute on a hot day without them asking you to buy anythings.

I've selected one such portrait because, well, because it showed up the best out of the batch.  Without any
disrespect intended for the man in the image, it really looks like he's posing behind the silhouette of a soldier bayoneting an unarmed civilian.  It also appears that the civilian is a child.  Merkin values?  You betcha!

Not Only Sun City - Sunflower City!

It feels like fall is coming a little early to Pueblo, CO this year.  Get out now!  It's not scorching anymore, and it's not freezing yet, so this is your chance.  You've got less than two months of big flowers to see this year, so get hunting while you still can.   We refuse to disclose the location of this beauty.  See if you can find it!

Go to Mineral Palace Gardens Before This Summer Ends

Seriously.  Mineral Palace Gardens, Pueblo, Colorado.

Sidelight - Gardening in Pueblo, CO - Yard Long Beans

Everything grows better in Pueblo.  OK, not everything, but what does well here does very well.  The Wet Mountains were the first part of the North American continent to emerge from the ocean.  The Arkansas River is an ancient, ancient river, and it has run at sizes incomparable to what we now call a river.  Its course has changed through countless channels in this area, and it has flooded the entire basin countless times over millions of years.

What the hell does this have to do with gardening?  In certain parts of town, Pueblo, Colorado is a plant's version of a super tasty layer cake, with the difference being that the plant can live off of it.  Ultra fine organic matter permeates the soil at depths of over 9 feet in some areas, layered with fine sand. Beans, chiles and corn, as well as squashes, pumpkins, tomatoes, melons, and even grapes are extraordinarily happy here.

As you walk around Pueblo, CO, you'll notice that about 1 out of every 100 houses has a vegetable garden somewhere in plain sight.  You can see the dramatic battles that people play out year after year against the heat, the dry air, the weeds, the birds and the bugs.  Some people are winning, and some people are losing, but certain plants just don't seem to fail no matter how well kept the garden is.

The Yard Long Bean is one such plant.  It is a resilient, heat-loving bastard of a vine that will stand up to a certain degree of neglect and thrive even in soil temperatures of over 150 degrees.  The leathery, dark leaves make no pretense of shading either the crown of the plant or the poles that it climbs.  They serve only to gather energy for producing the ridiculously long bean pods that are the plant's namesake.

The blossoms are quite large for bean flowers, and they are a lovely gradient from lavender purple to almost absolute white.  The bean pods are wonderful as green beans, with a flavor more reminiscent of bean than green.  Harvesting waves of flowers will produce subsequent waves of greater volume.  The ripe beans are black beans, suitable for all of the uses of a dried bean.

Keep your eyes open as you walk around Pueblo, Colorado, and you are sure to spot some.

Spring Flowers

Have you been walking around Pueblo, CO lately? We were down at the Union St shops the other day and we spotted lots of pretty flowers. Here are some samples!