Ranch House Research Articles

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

The Tropical Ranch: Examining the Ranch Style (1948–1970) on Everglades Island, Palm Beach, Florida

ABSTRACT: Palm Beach is known for its grand Mediterranean Revival estates. During the postwar period, the architecture of Palm Beach changed, which was especially evident on Everglades Island—a small island connected to Palm Beach. In the mid-twentieth century, ranch homes dominated the island’s architecture. This note chronicles the work of three Palm Beach architects: Marion Sims Wyeth (1889–1982), John L. Volk (1901–1984), and Henry Harding (1904–1984). These three architects designed fifteen residences on Everglades Island from 1948–1970. Their architectural records are archived at the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach. This note demonstrates how architects of the ranch houses in Palm Beach incorporated Bermudian and Hawaiian influences. Numerous houses from this time period were eventually either altered or demolished due to the demand for larger more ostentatious residences, especially on Everglades Island where few of the original houses are extant.

Review: The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture

Review: <i>The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture</i>

The Physician as Patient: Medicine after COVID-19

The Physician as PatientMedicine after COVID-19 Laura Kolbe (bio) when i was a child, four nuns worked in my Catholic grade school and lived in the "convent," a small, plain ranch house on the property. Three taught while one ran the business of the parish. Their short gray curly hair, their coordinating brown clothing, and the appellation "Sister" gave me the confused notion that they were related. This prompted the further extrapolation that all teachers must belong to some vast yet exclusive family, set apart from the rowdy tribe of non-teachers that my own family belonged to. Two of my aunts claimed they were teachers. I didn't believe them; both had houses, and one even went on dates. I think that on some level adults have the same notion of physicians. I certainly do when I'm the patient, even though I am a physician, even though my own primary care doctor is a colleague [End Page 5] whom I've glimpsed attending to the many nonclinical parts of her life on her phone during the duller parts of faculty meetings. There is, you'll be sorry to learn, something called #medtwitter (one part gripes, two parts preachy threads, with a dash of haphazardly edited vacation and postpartum photos), which might initially seem to recontextualize doctors back into the yowling Family of Man but in fact often renders us ever more generic and implausible as individuals. The genre conventions of the format fit our self-expression into a few flat archetypes—the pedantic explainer, the griper, the eternally grateful and blessed—as non-native to true human reality as those classical sculptures of Hippocrates that turn him into a hypertrophied megalith of brawn. But then came COVID-19. Many doctors—along with all kinds of other health care and frontline workers—had the chance to render their idiosyncratic experience on the page and screen, and the public was listening. We each had particular things to be angry and sad about. We watched irreplaceable patients die under our care; we each had our own unique recurring nightmares; our marriages and family structures and friendships were disintegrating, or marvelously holding up, in an explosive variety of particulars for everyone to see. Doctors became people. At my annual visit in 2021, emboldened by the novel thought that my primary care doctor was a person, no more and no less, I told her the truth about how much I drink and how often I exercise—some 80 percent of people are not entirely truthful with their physicians about their health habits, myself very much among them—and the exam table did not collapse in flames. The downside of doctors becoming widely recognized as people is that people are also people, and so now we're on undeniably equal footing: the clinicians and the "everyone else" from whom doctors have long stood carefully apart. In this newly vulnerable moment, my medical uncertainty takes on a different character. Whereas my occasional uncertainty as a doctor once had a numinous sheen, at least to my eye, it is now exposed as the ordinary not-knowing that it always was. (That my not-knowing is often [End Page 6] laced with data and probabilities does not completely change the fundamental head-scratch.) There have always been times when I know that I don't know best, though I also know that my honest counsel is important. It is up to me to tell a patient who wants to leave the hospital prematurely, or decline an important procedure or medication, exactly why I think that's dangerous and imprudent—and then to do my utmost to trust, to teach, and to support if that patient continues to reason otherwise. Within the boundaries of safety and good practice, I take patients at their word about the physical pain they report to me, though that pain is sometimes hard for me to understand or imaginatively inhabit. This becomes complicated when many of the medications that treat pain are also dangerous or potentially addictive, but that very complication means that I need to listen harder, not less. The stakes are too high not to. Even when a patient...

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature

The 2016 Nine Mile Ranch Earthquakes: Hazard and Tectonic Implications of Orthogonal Conjugate Faulting in the Walker Lane

ABSTRACTThe Nine Mile Ranch (NMR) sequence began with three Mw 5.4–5.6 earthquakes within one hour of each other in December 2016 in the remote area of Fletcher Valley, Nevada; only 4 min separated the first and second events. We analyze this complex earthquake sequence in the Walker Lane to determine the geometry and driving mechanism(s), and to improve understanding of deformation and seismic hazard in this region. Field reconnaissance found that these earthquakes caused significant damage to the Nine Mile ranch house but no surface rupture. We precisely relocate 6000+ earthquakes to reveal activated planar structures, unmapped at the surface, including two large, orthogonal, conjugate faults. Moment tensor solutions, focal mechanisms, and relocations show the two conjugate faults to be a vertical, northeast-trending left-lateral strike-slip fault, and a northwest-trending right-lateral strike-slip fault that dips ∼60° to the northeast. The three main events lie at the intersection of both the faults, but the locations and orientations are most consistent with the first (Mw 5.6) and third (Mw 5.5) events rupturing the left-lateral northeast-trending fault plane; the second event (Mw 5.4) ruptured the right-lateral northwest-trending fault plane. Calculated static stress changes support this interpretation. Smaller events and structures show predominantly strike-slip and normal faulting. We calculate the local interseismic strain rate tensor and coseismic displacements using Global Positioning System data to determine whether nearby volcanic centers played a role in causing the fault geometry. Our results, combined with the spatiotemporal development of the sequence and the moment tensor solutions, indicate that regional scale tectonic forces are the dominant driving factors of this sequence. The NMR sequence adds to the documented variety of spatiotemporal patterns and driving mechanisms of earthquake sequences and swarms within the Walker Lane, providing further information and constraints on seismic hazard in this active region.

“A Uniquely American Display of Excellence”: Lyndon Johnson and Presidential Cultural Diplomacy

In November 1964, U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife Lady Bird hosted the president-elect of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, at their Ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River in the Texas Hill Country, not far from Austin. National flags lined the path to the Ranch house, and welcoming banners hung from the porch. Guests were served Texas barbecue featuring ribs, brisket, and sausages, accompanied by beans, biscuits, potato salad, and fried apple pies, all eaten on the gently sloping banks of the river under live oaks decorated with colorful piñatas. The entertainment featured a former Miss Texas performing Spanish dances, a marimba band that played a version of Johnson’s campaign song “Hello Lyndon” with a “Latin beat,” popular singer Eddie Fisher, and, finally, a sheepdog demonstration from handler Clint Harlow, whose act was “climaxed by a cowboy clad monkey riding a dog, herding sheep.”1 The Diaz...

Breeding Ecology of Southern Caracaras (Caracara plancus) in Southern Continental Patagonia, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina

We searched for nests and studied aspects of the breeding biology of Southern Caracaras (Caracara plancus) in the Patagonian grasslands biome of southern Santa Cruz province, Patagonia, Argentina, at the southern limit of the species' continental distribution. In this open, mostly flat landscape where potential nest substrates are rare and isolated yet conspicuous, caracaras nested in native Magellan barberry shrubs (Berberis microphylla), exotic trees associated with ranch houses and other buildings, on coastal cliffs, and on human-made structures associated with petroleum and gas extraction plants. These extraction activities, which began only in the past three decades in this region have provided new nesting opportunities for this species. Nest characteristics, brood size, and productivity recorded in our study area were similar to what has been previously reported for the Southern Caracara nesting across its broad latitudinal range. In our study area, average productivity in both years combined (2010–2011) was 2.1 fledglings per successful pair (n = 27). The nesting season for this caracara population apparently extends from September through January, phenology that is similar to that reported for caracaras nesting at a similar latitude in Chile and for other raptor species in Santa Cruz province. However, the nesting season seems to be shorter than for caracara populations nesting at northern latitudes in Argentina. In this vast, open landscape, nest substrates provided by human-made structures may be an important determinant of the spatial distribution of Southern Caracara nests.

Reclamation

Reclamation Devin Murphy (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Laszlo Ilyes [End Page 48] My whole life I've had this feeling at my core that people wouldn't remember me from one meeting to the next and was surprised, even touched, if they did. Looking back, I kept clear of people because of this and spent much of my youth in solitary endeavors. I hunted fossils and [End Page 49] Iroquois arrowheads along the shores of Lake Erie, framed my own kites from balsa and tarps, and started my own fish tank to breed tropical lionfish. All this to say, I was a lonely boy. So to have had a friend—any friend, when younger—perhaps bound me to give over part of myself and follow wherever they led. At the Boys & Girls Club during a pickup basketball game, Horby, who played with anger and grace, was on my team. He was confident in his movements and thus his body, unafraid to play skins, whereas I hated having to reveal my pudgy belly that would ride me all of my days. During our game, a kid named Kenneth York called me "a bucket of love butter" and slapped my bare stomach so hard it left a deep purple handprint blooming across my navel. Horby for some reason stood up for me, and in the ensuing scuffle, Kenneth lost a bucket of blood from his chin. Horby got suspended from the club for two months but left with my undying gratitude. From then on, I became his willing lackey, a lieutenant in all his headlong, half-cocked efforts to remold his world to the one he felt he was due. After leaving the club, we ended up at Horby's. He lived in a small ranch house outside town on the downslope running to the lake, which is sixty feet deep but churns up thirty-foot swells on foul nights. At the high end of the hill, Interstate 90 made a deep oxbow between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York. A vineyard surrounded the home. Neat rows of hardy vines clung to the sand-and-gravel soil and grew despite the winds and winters. He and his older brothers, Ronny and Micah, were being raised by his Uncle Jeremy, who lived on VA disability checks and random roofing jobs. He sold rocks he painted in different patterns at a monthly farmers market but once in a while sort of lost his mind and tossed those rocks through neighborhood windows until the police came and arrested him. I never had the courage to ask why they lived with their uncle. Uncle Jeremy barbecued us hamburgers on a rusty grill on my first visit. He opened the screen door and yelled inside, "Boys. Tammy. Dinner." The two brothers and a woman in a long T-shirt covering her underwear came out to join us. It was almost six at night, but she'd been sleeping. There was a scar on her thigh that looked like fire tongs, and she'd had a hot coal tattooed between the prongs. We all sat around the patio on folding chairs and ate as the sunlight pulled back from the vineyard, [End Page 50] which struck me as somehow both wild and tamed. I ate my burger in silence but kept peeking at Tammy's tattoo. We finished eating, and Horby took me to his room and let me in on his scheme to make money selling puppies. I had made some money from my paper route and seeded it to adopt an all-white female boxer he'd seen at the local kennel. The next time I went to the house, a small white female boxer whimpered in a dog cage. Micah drove up with a second dog, another white boxer. This one a male. "We'll mate 'em," Horby said. At first the dogs snarled at each other, but soon, after snipping, the male mounted the female. It was over fast, but they got stuck together and somehow ended up ass to ass with both of them howling, as if one was being birthed from the other. "Is this part...

All the Castles Burned by Michael Nye

Reviewed by: All the Castles Burned by Michael Nye Bayard Godsave (bio) Michael Nye. All the Castles Burned. Turner Publishing Company, 2018. Michael Nye's debut novel opens with a description of Rockcastle Preparatory Academy, an elite Cincinnati boys' school. From afar, the school appears elegant, bucolic, "shining triumphantly in the morning light," but inside the old buildings are run-down and drafty. That play of appearance, of what is presented to the world outside and what is hidden, or ignored, is a theme that will carry through the whole of the book. The novel's central character and narrator, Owen Webb, is a working-class kid who has found himself at Rockcastle, thanks in part to his talent on the basketball court, where he meets an older boy, Carson Bly. Carson, unlike Owen, belongs at Rockcastle. He comes from money, groomed for the Ivy League, but even from his first appearance it is clear that there is something beneath the surface: a brooding anger, a darkness. Owen and Carson's friendship develops on the basketball court. Older, worldly, Carson takes the younger boy (Owen is a freshman at this point) under his wing. He helps him navigate the politics of the school, introduces him to alcohol. The two have a standing engagement to play one-on-one during free period in a run-down, nearly forgotten gym in an older part of the school. Under Carson's tutelage Owen begins to blossom, but it is at this point that Carson's dark side is revealed. Another boy, Owen discovers, who was once Carson's protégé, suffered a mysterious break-down. Despite this, or because of it, Owen is drawn to Carson Bly. But Owen has his secrets too, some even that, as the novel opens, he does not yet know he has. Owen lives far from the school, in a little ranch house that stands in stark contrast to the spacious mansions of his classmates. He relies on his mom for a ride, while so many of the other Rockcastle boys drive their own cars—of course, his dependence on his mother is due in part to his age, but he cannot help seeing this as another marker of difference between him and everyone else. At home, Owen has to deal with an overbearing father, a mother who loves him but who is exhausted and often distant. Midway through the book, it is revealed, rather publicly, that Owen's father is hiding a criminal secret. Ironically, it's this revelation, though it tears apart his home, that seems to make him finally feel he belongs at Rockcastle. On the day after the news has broken about his father, Owen dreads going to school, anticipating cruel words, stony looks, but instead he is treated as though nothing happened. In the year or so he'd been there, he'd learned, in part because of Carson, of the sordid family histories of all these well-to-do boys, everyone knew everyone else's secrets, but no one ever said a word, not in the open anyway. Now it's Owen's turn: they all surely know what his father has done, but they act as if they don't. He's become one of them. Michael Nye is an insightful writer and his novel gets a lot of things right. His depictions of Cincinnati, where he grew up, through the eyes of Owen, are spot-on, capturing the way that many who live in the Rust Belt can have an intimate attachment to infinitely replicable spaces like freeway interchanges and supermarkets. The moments when Owen and his mother share the page are striking for their subtlety and grace. Much of the book is about power, either writ-large in the class relationships it explores, or on a more intimate level where it probes the power dynamics between characters. And [End Page 224] the book always approaches its relationships knowing just that: that power is a dynamic, not a one-way thing. Whether it's with his mother, his father, or Carson—or the principal of the boys' school, or any number of other characters he encounters—Owen is always the...

One Day the Emails Will End.

One Day the Emails Will End.

Coach Schwartz

Coach Schwartz Andrew De Silva (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Rò [End Page 164] He'd put on a little weight, yes, but this was always going to be a sugar-cereal household. Any single-uncle guardian who didn't stock the cabinets with unhealthy shit was a Puritan and didn't understand his circumstances. [End Page 165] Ryan scooped the milk from the bottom of his bowl, an odd sodden fragment of Frosted Flake floating across the spoon. Thump stayed evergreen skinny anyway. Like sometimes he worried that people would call the authorities on him. "Why are those bushes out front?" Thump said, working on her Fruit Loops. "Beautify the yard," he said. "The pursuit of beauty." "Don't think it'll help." True, wise, cheeky preteen. The yard was doomed. But this was a ranch house in a neighborhood. This is what people did, what people were supposed to do with the yards in front of their ranch houses in late March if they wanted to look the part. When he'd checked online, there had been twelve nursery and/or landscape supply pins besieging his map in the little Yelp window. "You gonna delay the match for me?" she asked. She hated missing the beginnings. "It's forty-seven degrees," he said. "Cold arms, double faults, boring tennis early." Skinny Thump finished her Loops, dubious but resigned. She could give a look just like Dan. That's how genes worked, he figured, but it was still unsettling to see the father in the daughter so clearly. A vector so easy to trace. In the next ten minutes she cleared and rinsed her bowl, brushed her teeth, and pedaled to fifth grade like a good niece. ________ By 9:30 am all the elementary kids had cleared and commuters were gone from their driveways and Ryan Schwartz, unpaid assistant boys' tennis coach at North Arlington High School, walked three blocks to Kelly Thurman's house to carry out their lazy-ass affair. Today it commenced on her dining room table, which he never liked because it was flat and hard and bruised the knobs of his hips. Kelly and the husband were separated, so it wasn't real adultery and Ryan wasn't a real home-wrecker; they went through the motions of being torrid but he suspected they would both prefer the safe old bed. When it was over, they microwaved pizza rolls from the freezer, dosed two 5-mg Percocets each, and washed them down with merlot. From deep within the sofa, they watched YouTube videos for hours. Thump never got As and had behavioral problems. She'd already had two cavities. Their yard was ugly, and all the neighbors whispered. [End Page 166] He left Kelly's house sometime before 2, jogged home, and showered himself back into the active world. When he'd done his brother right and reclaimed Thump and it became clear his guardian duties would outlive the month, he'd withdrawn some prize money to buy a used pickup. Nothing jacked or fancy, just a little Dodge Dakota. He tossed his gear bag into the bed—he liked to coach with a racquet in his hand, like he could be called up to play in a jam—and sped to the high school. The pills were still in his system and he felt at peace. Relaxed. A leaf floating on a goodwill breeze. It was the only way he could coach; otherwise he was relentless and pacing, wearing a rut along the courts' fence like a bull elephant in captivity that had gone mad with the limitations of its space. He made the kids nervous, Coach T. said. Take it down a notch, Coach T. said, his puffy, freckled ankles casually dead-ending in his boat shoes. In the athletic shed, Ryan dug out two hoppers of balls for warm-ups and six new cans for the matches. The courts were built on a berm that rose six feet above the parking lot. He climbed the berm's yellow, winter-dead grass and swept the courts and squeegeed the damp patches left by Sunday's...

Kimmo in the Pisgah

Kimmo in the Pisgah Sara Read (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 26] The man we called Great-Uncle Kimmy lived three-quarters of his life alone in a cabin perched on a mountainside so steep that if you stepped wrong in anger or in drink [End Page 27] you'd wind up in the creek bed deep at the bottom of the holler. There lay the remains (he said) of a Model A Ford, a hundred-year-old still, and two commercial-grade highway lawn mowers. If you wound up down there, you'd never be found, but it wouldn't matter because you'd be dead. No one and nothing (he said) ever went down into the bottom of that holler besides the things meant to by nature, and nothing not meant to go there by nature ever came out. The man we called Great-Uncle Kimmy was also the difference between what became of me and what became of Kate, forget what anybody else says. In October, a month after I turned fifteen, my grandmother dragged me by the shirt from the juvenile courthouse. I only ever called my grandmother "Grandmother," and not because she was kindly and lavender-smelling. She was a scrawny old witch who didn't deserve to be called anything nicer. My nose was broken and throbbing (never, goddamnit, never fall asleep in a girl's bedroom), and Grandmother kept her claws in me as she made a call from the pay phone in the hall. Her conversation was shorter, I think, than she expected it to be. "Hell, no," she said, "I'm not going to bring a blanket. We're coming out there now. You can figure out about a damn blanket. If I have to look at his smart-ass face one more minute, I think I'm going to just kill him and get it done with." Then she hauled me out to her crappy sedan and drove south and west through two or three small towns, past the last Walmart and the last ranch houses and up the mountain. Up the winding road along the crest where the day-trippers brought their motorcycles and expensive cars, up where the overlooks got higher and higher and the views got wider and wider and you couldn't see another road for miles. About two miles and three forks down a steep gravel road was where Kimmy parked his late-model white F150 all-wheel drive. Nice truck, I was thinking when Grandmother stopped and told me to get out. Just like that, with the clothes on my back and a few bucks in my pocket. "You got to walk from here," she said. "Walk where?" "You'll figure it out. Or wait until Kimmy comes down to get you." "What?" She pulled an angry three-point turn and took off. "Fuck you," I muttered. [End Page 28] Someone had put up one of those numbers so the 9-1-1 people can find you, and I figured that must be the way to Kimmy's. I huffed up the path, craving a smoke. I had half a pack in my back pocket that Grandmother hadn't known or cared about—least of my problems at the time, the cigs—and after a few minutes I sat on the ground and lit one. It didn't agree with my lungs, which were heaving to pull some damn oxygen out of the mountain air. I saved the butt, though, because who freaking knew when I'd get to buy another pack. The path forked, and I called out, "Uncle Kimmy?"—but I didn't hear anything besides a kind of dull roar. I followed the roar, and when the path forked two more times, I followed it two more times. Then, where you abso-fucking-lutely could not imagine would be a cabin, there was a cabin. A tight, square-looking two-room cabin with a couple of windows and a stone chimney, set back against a high outcropping of rock. "Anybody home?" I yelled and got a clanging from around back in answer. A shed roof extended...

Parrot on a Stone Plinth

Parrot on a Stone Plinth Jennifer Stock (bio) I An artist arranges five shells on a shelf. The shelf hovers in midair, juts out from a milky, dark background. Whorls, crenellations, spirals, speckles, and striations glow softly under an unseen light source. An austere color palette sharpens our sense of scale and shape. A small, peach shell lies like a recumbent amphora; a large, chalky one balances on a series of fang-like spikes. Three are oriented with their apertures toward us. We glimpse their inner voids; this shelf might be floating in outer space. An adage of my mother's returns: odd numbers work best for arrangements. The Dutch artist Adriaen Coorte will complete Shells on a Stone Plinth in 1698. At the time that he places the shells on the shelf to paint them, they are highly prized by collectors. Carried long distances to the Netherlands from Dutch colonies, the shells are part of the vast circulation of resources that will swell capital in the Western world. That the shells have been taken from a country from which much will be taken is not apparent. Their striking pose against darkness shows them to advantage but also erases their context. Coercion and beauty exist in their willful grouping against a blank background; they are at once collector's items and colonized objects. And as viewers, we are invited to savor their exoticism rather than imagine their plunder. II In 2008 I purchase a yellow-crowned Amazon parrot named Aria on Craigslist. I'm trying to improve the end of my mother's life. In pursuit of this goal, I drive to a suburban development tucked within the cancerous sprawl around Indianapolis to pick up the parrot. I know nothing about parrots, but my mother has recently said she would like one. She thinks a talking animal will make her less lonely. My parents already have a cat and two rambunctious dogs, and my mom's illness, combined with my father's dementia, puts caring for pets on an increasingly long list of things neither of them should be doing. But I'm on a mission to fulfill wishes while I can, so I pull over at a nondescript ranch house and fork over six hundred dollars. The small house is filled with birds; the people tell me that Aria was the pet of a friend who can no longer take care of her after having a baby. I gaze around at the cages lining the living room wall, the bird toys tossed across the tan shag carpet, the parrots walking around [End Page 10] everywhere, and realize that something's probably off. But soon I'm driving home with a shiny green creature crowned with a yellow lick of flame, her head cocked curiously, her eyes reptilian, flashing, inscrutable. III At the time of its construction in 1840, the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth House is the largest glass building in England. Broad translucent walls and a soaring, sixty-foot ceiling warm a collection of exotic plants: palms, moss, ferns, and aquatic lilies. Two carriages can drive within the jungle of the Conservatory side by side, allowing women in silks to gaze with an air of unfocused triumph on the spoils of imperial plant hunting in the dead of winter. Conservatory architect and Chatsworth House head gardener Joseph Paxton has created a protective environment for his transplants. He is a virtuoso at enabling plants to thrive in glass cages. He becomes the first person in England to bring the giant Amazonian lily to flower, which he accomplishes in a smaller glass house with a special tank to accommodate five-foot lily pads strong enough to sustain the weight of his young daughter Annie. His glass houses exemplify the careful control and culture that support conquest; they are an étude of the artificial. Sunlight alone does not allow plants like water lilies and lotus to survive the cold in England. So tunnels are dug under the Great Conservatory. Wagons run on subterranean rails and cart three hundred tons of coal to eight underground boilers over the course of one winter. These coal fires warm seven miles of hot water...

Twenty-Five Years of Monitoring a Townsend's Big-Eared Bat (Corynorhinus townsendii) Maternity Roost

A Corynorhinus townsendii maternity roost located in an abandoned ranch house in central California was monitored for 25 y. Prior to the discovery of the bats in 1987, the house was broken into regularly and disturbance levels were quite high. Upon discovery of the roost, the house was fortified and vandalism was greatly reduced. The number of females and the number of volant young greatly increased during our study and was directly correlated with the decline in vandalism. Bats emerged from the house 43.6 (± 10.9 SD) min after local sunset. Bats emerged later in the evening during spring and fall, when it was warmer, and when it was windier. We also evaluated duration of emergence (47.11 [45.0–49.7] min), and seasonal patterns of re-entry into the roost. Several factors suggested that potential predation, most likely by owls, influenced both the timing and duration of evening emergences.

Making Theatre Art: David Levine's Habit

David Levine's 2012 production of Habit is a theatrical installation of Jason Grote's The Children of Kings. Performed on repeat for eight hours a day and staged inside an enclosed set built to look like the interior of a suburban ranch house, it challenges the boundaries of what viewers perceive to be theatre.

Review: Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s and Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s

Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 2 October 2010–10 July 2011 Museum of the City of New York, New York 5 December 2012–31 March 2013 A rich selection of images greeted visitors to the Museum of the City of New York from 5 December 2012 to 31 March 2013. Hints of American fairs’ modernist glamor shown in scenic renderings in the entrance hall forecast more pictures in the main display room. On the perimeter walls of a large gallery, black-and-white photographs illustrated American fairs of the 1930s: Chicago’s Century of Progress (1934–34), San Diego’s California Pacific International Exposition (1935–36), Dallas’s Texas Centennial Exposition (1936), Cleveland’s Great Lakes Exposition (1936–37), San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition, and New York City’s World of Tomorrow (both 1939–40). On intermediate partitions, visitors saw renderings of vistas and individual pavilions, objects displayed at the fairs, and advertisements for sponsors’ products. Here and there, they paused to see short news and commercial films, although in the well-filled room, no seats could be provided. Souvenir brochures, booklets, catalogs, and commemorative trinkets appeared near the entrance and in vitrines. Captions to the photographs and short wall-mounted essays offered explanatory information. Crowded captions and pictures made the former sometimes hard to read, dissuading many visitors from learning more about the content of some of the images. The fraternal twin exhibitions in Washington and New York gave a coordinated overview of the fairs, almost as if they were one fair with varied sections. Laura Schiavo and Deborah Sorensen curated the initial and somewhat larger exhibition at the National Building Museum; Jessica Lautin played the same role in New York City. This later version included additional locally pertinent material. A well-illustrated catalogue contained essays on various topics; those not mentioned later in this review are the introduction by Robert W. Rydell; “ ‘Industry Applies’: Corporate Marketing at A Century of Progress,” by Lisa D. Schrenk; a photo-essay by Laura Burd Schiavo titled “Modern Design Goes Public”; Kristina …

Looking at Landscapes of War

Looking at Landscapes of War Megan Kate Nelson (bio) As I drove slowly through a suburban subdivision I thought, “This can’t be right.” I pulled over and looked at the map of the park. Then I checked my iPhone map. Yep, it was right. Battlefield Park Road, off Route 5. I pulled back out onto the road, feeling a bit like a thief casing the neighborhood. And then, suddenly, there they were, tucked between the tri-levels and the ranch houses: cresting waves of grass and dirt, covered with leaves and shady in the midmorning sun. Earthworks, heaved up by Confederate soldiers and overrun by Federals between 1862 and 1865. Erosion and souvenir hunting have taken their toll, but the works are still here; they are the ghost marks of war.1 Some visitors to Battlefield Park Road will tell you that by being there, they have direct access to the past; they stand on (or near) hallowed ground and let its history seep up through the layers of clay, dirt, and topsoil. Most historians are somewhat skeptical of this assertion, the idea that one could travel through time by standing in place. However, most do believe in the value of preserving Civil War landscapes (battlefields in particular), and many write with a sense of place, of topography and hydrology, and argue for the ways the environment shaped battles and campaigns. But most historians have not, until very recently, looked—really looked—at the landscape of war: the natural and built environments that were destroyed, created, and reshaped over four years of violent conflict. As the landscape historian John Stilgoe has urged, we need to “go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around.” When we do this, we find that a “concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people … the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted—all of it is free for the taking, and taking in.”2 This “deliberate movement” of looking around tells Civil War historians about not only the dynamics of the war’s military histories but also the experiences of soldiers as they changed the land by marching, camping, and fighting through it. Both Union and Confederate soldiers used landscapes of war to articulate their experiences; when we [End Page 439] look more closely at the words and images in their letters and diaries, we see more clearly the ways they sought to exert control over their lives by explaining the world around them to themselves and their loved ones. When we really look at Richmond’s earthworks, what do we see? We see, in part, the nature of Civil War battles. Men on both sides spent most of their time camping and marching, but when they reached a place that was about to become a battlefield—or had already become a battlefield, moments before—they set to work. Sometimes they only had time to dig up small mounds of dirt to protect themselves from the minié balls, shot, and shell that came whistling through the air and into their lines. But other times, as multiday battles and urban siege campaigns became more common in 1863 and after, soldiers and pioneer corps changed the land under their feet into a protective landscape of war, building larger and more complex structures, “forts” consisting of interlocking trenches and pitched dirt walls, anchored in place with bundles of twigs and tree limbs culled from nearby woodlands. We see in these earthworks the advances in killing technologies, and campaign strategies and battle tactics that relied on massed charges against defensive positions. We see the initiative that soldiers took, responding to this disastrous combination of mismatched technology and tactics by building their own landscape of protection and giving themselves the best chances of survival. As we stand beside our cars and look, then take some photographs, then look again, we also see the houses nearby, the abandoned bikes in the yard, the other tourists checking maps and saying, “This can’t be right.” There is a sense of disjunction, of both time and place. You can imagine the armies withdrawing, civilians...

Tea with Juan Quezada: An Afternoon at Rancho Barro Blanco

It’s spring, and the Palanganas River flows leisurely and low. Juan Quezada, at the wheel of his pickup, shepherds a group of American women up the rocky riverbank toward his ranch house overlooking Mata Ortiz. One of the women, a Romance language teacher named Kay, sits next to Juan. She’s carrying on a lively conversation with him in Spanish. Cathleen rides next to Kay, easily joining in the discussion. Like Kay, Cathleen is fluent in Spanish, in her case from years of work in agribusiness. The rest of us—Nora, Patricia, Remedios, and myself—are far less proficient in Juan’s native language. We’re relegated to the truck bed. From that hot, dusty vantage point we enjoy a majestic panorama that stretches from El Indio Peak down to Mata Ortiz and west to the Sierra Madre range that marks the boundary between the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. Through the gritty windshield, Kay and Cathleen take in the view of Rancho Barro Blanco, Juan’s White Clay Ranch. “No,” Juan tells them, “I didn’t first find white clay here on the ranch. The name ‘Barro Blanco’ is to honor the pottery.” After all, it is his pottery that affords Juan this second home a mere ten minutes from his house in Mata Ortiz. Rancho Barro Blanco is populated, we see, with a wild variety of exotic cattle, goats, sheep, and fowl, including a teeming flock of chickens and their hatchling pollitos. The barnyard is immaculate and the outbuildings well kept. “Those fences are coyote-proof,” Juan says, gesturing to the metal netting that safeguards the fowl. “I lost a baby ostrich, and then another, to the coyotes. So I put up this special fencing to protect all the rest.” A congenial javelina trots over to greet us as Juan brings the pickup to a stop and swings his cowboy-booted feet out of the cab. Although well into his sixties, Juan strides to the back of the truck with the clip and grace of a young man, and helps us over the tailgate. He tentatively N A N c y A N d r e w s wrote the award-winning children’s book, The Pot That Juan Built.