Detroit's Water Park Gate

Hurlbut Memorial Gate at Water Works Park, Detroit

By virtually any measure, the bankruptcy of Detroit, Michigan, is a sorry shame.

And we're talking bankruptcy in more than the financial sense of the term.

But speaking of its finances:  Detroit's are the worst of any city in the country.  Theirs is the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, affecting a city that's probably lost more of its population than any other in the country.  The industry for which it's been celebrated the world over now employs less than 20,000 people within Detroit proper, roughly ten percent of its peak.  Half of those jobs are at two small factories, and 6,000 at downtown's Renaissance Center, where General Motors retrenched its office staff in a bid to keep the city's central business district from completely emptying out.

One of the stipulations in its 2009 bailout was that GM keep its headquarters in the city.  So it's continued presence in town represents no bellwether regarding the city's economic viability.  Ford's headquarters never were in Detroit, but in Dearborn.  And Chrysler's headquarters bailed from Motor City for its suburbs in 1992.

Left behind, after all of the white flight, the exodus of over a quarter-million manufacturing jobs, and even a sizable chunk of its black middle class, are the relics of a bygone era.  Relics from when Detroit was a great American boom town.  These relics aren't just what's become "urban porn:"  the empty hulks of abandoned factories and office skyscrapers, or boarded-up church buildings and banks and shopping centers, or block after block of crumbling houses and vacant lots, where generations of the city's families used to live.

Amongst all of that rubble are relics of a different sort.  Detroit is still home to some fabulous architecture in the form of Art Deco office buildings, some of which Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert has been snapping up in the hopes that Motown will find a new corporate groove.  There are also rows of opulent mansions that have survived in leafy neighborhoods with names like Indian Village and Sherwood Forest, built by the first waves of auto executives and manufacturing moguls to earn their wealth in the once-powerful metropolis.

And then there is the grand public art, the stuff with which old cities can remind newer residents and visitors of the glory they used to claim.  There's Campus Martius and Grand Circus parks, the downtown plazas from which several of the city's major streets radiate.  There's Belle Isle, in the middle of the Detroit River, that despite the city's dysfunction, continues to hold glimmers of its idyllic past.  And there are smaller, less prominent artifacts from better days, tucked into the city's now-decayed fabric.  Artifacts such as the Hurlbut Memorial Gate.

A gate, you say?

Ahh, but this isn't just any gate.

Celebrating Transitions as Public Art

Back in the 1800's, America's cities were dirty, noisy, and unlovely places.  Comparatively speaking, even today's Detroit is paradise, at least in terms of its paved streets and sidewalks, without all of the mud and piles of horse manure.  Can you imagine?

One of the popular ways Nineteenth Century cities sought to make life a little more aesthetically pleasing for their residents was by gracing their public spaces with ornamental pedestrian attractions.

Remember, this was before automobiles, trucks, and city buses, when traffic consisted of horse-drawn buggies and good ol' walking.  Creating a feeling of space and arrival could be done in ways with which people could personally engage.  There was no sheetmetal or tinted glass creating a motorized cocoon for commuters, insulating them from the streetscape.  These ornamental attractions were tactile, accessible, and functional, borrowing European design ideals while applying a New World sensibility.

Green-Wood Cemetery's gates in Brooklyn. Photo by Jason Dovey

But they could still be quite monumental in scope, such as the soaring Gothic Revival triumph of the main entrance gates at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.  Walking through them, with their flying buttresses and filigreed spires, the transition between a comparatively profane streetscape and the sacred reverence of a burial ground is unmistakable.

And, on a smaller scale, the Hurlbut Memorial Gate in Detroit accomplished a similar feat, standing between the commercial boulevard of Jefferson Avenue and a sprawling city park stretching down to the river.

A smaller scale than Green-Wood's, yes, but the Hurlbut gate is still quite impressive, with its Beaux Arts opulence commanding three tiers of limestone, topped with a triumphant American eagle.  When it was built in 1894, it served as the actual gate to Water Works Park, one of the largest facilities of its kind in the world at that time.  Carriageways for entering and exiting the park flanked either side of the Hurlbut gate, and a pedestrian gatehouse, plus two water troughs for horses, anchored its base.  On the opposite side, facing the park, two ceremonial staircases reach down, welcoming visitors to the gate's terrace level featuring a pedastal that used to hold a bust of the gate's namesake, Chauncey Hurlbut.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the bust was stolen as the neighborhood faltered.  Why somebody thought they needed it remains a mystery, but perhaps being marked by such modern antisocial behavior is apropos, considering this is Detroit.

Industrialization Needed Lots of Water, and Detroit Obliged

For its part, Water Works Park was begun in 1868 to supply the city of Detroit with drinkable water.  It straddles the riverbank north of downtown, near Belle Isle, and for decades after its initial construction, was open to the public.  Water Works Park represented the rampant civic enthusiasm of Detroit's heady days, when the threat of fire on wooden construction couldn't contain the city's rapid growth.  In 1852, an agency had been created in partnership with both the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan to manage the growing city's water needs, and in 1879, Water Works Park opened as the agency's first project.

Today, that agency, now called the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, serves 40 percent of Michigan's population, and a much-modernized Water Works Park is still one of the department's signature operations.  The whole department is owned by the city, and is well-managed and profitable, which is rare in modern Detroit.  In fact, experts following Detroit's current bankruptcy proceedings have mentioned it as one of the assets the city could sell to help pay off debts.

Water Works Park was closed to the public long ago over fears that somebody could contaminate the city's water supply by taking advantage of what had been relatively unlimited access to its acreage.  There used to be walking paths, ponds, manicured lawns and shrubbery, a towering turret almost as high as the Eiffel Tower, a library, and a children's play area.  But all of that is gone today, while underneath its vast acreage, now cleared of trees and ponds, hides a concrete catacomb of cavernous water processing bunkers.  The Hurlbut Gate has nothing to welcome guests into, and the city has even gated off the gate, running a wrought-iron fence right across its entrance, and plopping a traffic signal control box in front of it.

When the gate was remodeled in 2007, some city residents complained that sprucing up a frivolous stone bauble from Detroit's past was a waste of money.  Actually, the money to construct the gate in the first place came from Hurlbut's estate, which is why it's named after him.  Plus, his estate included funds for its care.

Unfortunately, the quarter-million-dollars or so that Hurlbut left behind may have been a lot of money in his day.  It was enough to prompt angry relatives in New York to contest his will, since they didn't want what they considered their inheritance squandered on a silly gate in Michigan.  Nevertheless, even with compounded interest, those funds likely proved insufficient to pay for a complete overhaul more than a century after Hurlbut's death.  The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, custodians of his estate, likely had to find more money from other parts of their budget to cover all of the costs.

Whether it should have been simply relocated, of course, is another debate altogether.

If You've Ever Navigated on the Erie Canal

So, who was Chauncey Hurlbut? And why did he have this thing about ornamental gates?  In front of water treatment plants?

Hurlbut was born in 1803 in Oneida, New York, which is situated on the Erie Canal.  In 1825, when the Erie Canal opened, linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, Hurlbut left Oneida to seek his fortune out west in Michigan's frontier.  His first job was as a harness maker, but after he married, he and his brother-in-law opened a grocery business, and, riding on the coattails of Detroit's surging prosperity, he became a wealthy wholesale grocer.

In those days, entrepreneurs and the moneyed elite didn't leave prominent municipal jobs to civil servants.  Instead, they volunteered the credentials and expertise that earned them their money and prestige in the first place to the business of running various departments in the cities where they lived.  For Hurlbut, he had a thing for the fire department, so he made himself available to be fire commissioner.

And what do fire departments use to fight fires?  Water, of course.  So Hurlbut next served on the water commission board, first during the Civil War, and then from 1868 to 1884, when for twelve years, he was its president.  At first, city leaders wanted to name their sprawling facility on Jefferson Avenue in his honor, but the "Hurlbut" name never resonated with the public.  Instead, popular vernacular insisted on calling it Water Works Park.  Apparently, that didn't bother Hurlbut, who died in 1885, never seeing his gate, which wouldn't be built for another nine years.

Still, he wanted his legacy to be something the people of his adopted hometown could enjoy and claim with pride.  Little is known of what happened to his business, or his family, but his record of volunteer service exists today as a hallmark of one of Detroit's prized civic assets, and we're not simply talking about his gate, but both Water Works Park and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department.

Today, many wealthy Americans would scoff at immortalizing themselves in a gaudy gate, although some will lend their names to prestigious institutions like universities, hospitals, or libraries.  And times have changed for city boards, too, where professionals with advanced degrees in the disciplines over which they're responsible make decisions and guide planning for things like water purification systems and public safety departments.  Mostly, this evolution makes sense, since even in Detroit's case, their water board was constantly struggling to keep up with advancing technologies, the demands of a rapidly-growing economy, and new scientific and public health discoveries.

Gateway to Symbolism

Perhaps what makes the Hurlbut Gate notable today isn't just its elaborate architecture, although its design alone makes it worthy of preservation.  In addition to that, however, is the dedication to the public good and the service to one's community that it represents.  Hurlbut's gate symbolizes his desire to give something back to the city where he made his fortune, and he apparently didn't begrudge Detroit the taxes it was levying for the construction of its ever-more-sophisticated water treatment facilities.  In fact, this self-motivated, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps entrepreneur celebrated the civic spirit, and the things governments can do when the public good is its end result.

Of course, this is one reason why many wealthy Americans today don't willingly give their money for civic projects, since we've come to learn how wasteful and autocratic government agencies can be.  Not everybody in civic life today cares very deeply about the public good.  In fact, judging by the many reasons why Detroit is facing its perilous bankruptcy today - indeed, its first trial in the process started yesterday - a lot of people who were supposed to be serving the public good of their fellow Detroiters cared only about themselves and their self-aggrandizement.

People like former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who just got slammed with a 28-year prison sentence for corruption in a federal probe that convicted another 32 Detroiters.  People like attorney Ronald Zajac and trustee Paul Stewart of Detroit's pension funds, who were indicted this past March for corruption.  And this is just the list within the past several years.  Detroit's history in the latter part of the last century is littered with city council members who either intentionally ignored the city's growing crisis, or refused to admit they were unqualified to address it.  To be sure, corruption and incompetence are not the only factors contributing to Detroit's current state of affairs, but they - and the people who committed them - play prominent roles.

So it's not simply that the Hurlbut Gate today represents the altruism of a forgotten generation of American wealth-builders.  It also represents the way powerful Detroiters used to give of themselves to their city, instead of being so concerned about whatever they could get for themselves.

Maybe there's no practical place for people like Chauncey Hurlbut in administrating today's municipalities.  But there shouldn't have been any room for the people who acted most unlike Hurlbut during these past several decades of the city's stunning decline.

The fact that, today, the Hurlbut Gate is completely fenced off, voiding its practicality, simply provides another bitter bite of irony for the city it was built to serve.

Calvary's the Buckle in NYC's Billionaire Belt

Suppose you attended this church.

Maybe you were even its pastor.  Or one of its elders.

This church is historic, and enjoys a high-profile location in its town, on a busy street.  It is known for preaching the Gospel, which means that while a lot of townspeople may respect its right to hold unpopular positions on various issues, that unpopularity unfortunately extends to their lack of enthusiasm for visiting your church.  The people who do attend your church, however, represent a broad spectrum of incomes, ethnicities, and races from all over town, and even nearby communities.

All of a sudden, you find that the neighborhood around your church is being inundated with billionaires.  Dozens of them.  Spectacular new homes are being built for them, just down the street from your church, and some practically next door.  These billionaires are so rich, they're beyond celebrities; you don't know their names.  You're not even sure what they do for a living.  But they're buying up property like crazy, and paying crazy prices in the process.

Technically, it's not just billionaires buying these homes.  Billionaires are buying, but so are people "only" worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  All of this wealth, and it's literally next door to your church.

Sound utterly absurd?  Well, it's happening right now, even as you read this.

The church is Calvary Baptist, and the neighborhood is Midtown Manhattan, in New York City.  57th Street, to be precise; what author Michael Gross has dubbed the "billionaire's belt."

And Calvary is its geographic buckle!  Smack-dab between Sixth and Seventh avenues, two blocks south of Central Park, and being rapidly surrounded by some of the priciest homes on the planet.

Do you remember, back during Superstorm Sandy last fall, the news about a construction crane that high winds twisted from its moorings atop an uber-luxury residential tower in Manhattan?  Well, that uber-luxury tower, called One57, is a couple of doors down from Calvary Baptist.  It's a building where two condos - that aren't even completed - have already sold for a reputed $95 million each.

Ninety-five.  Million.  Dollars.

Each!

And One57 is just the beginning.  Today, there are no fewer than seven super-luxury high-rise residential towers planned within a few blocks surrounding Calvary and 57th Street.  Towers where apartments are commanding prices in the tens of millions of dollars apiece.  Currently, the average price of these apartments is $20 million, with at least one listed for $115 million, but bidding wars may force prices even higher.  That's why everyone assumes it's only billionaires who can afford these places.  For billionaires, real estate in the world's most elite cities has become one of their safest investments, and New York - and Manhattan in particular - is one of those elite cities.  The others are Singapore, Hong Kong, and London, where similar trophy apartments at similar prices are already being snapped up.

You and I might expect at least a couple of trees and a manicured lawn for $20 million, let alone $115 million, but these homes in Manhattan's billionaire belt are all about the two V's:  verticality and views.  Prices go up the higher the apartment is, and the better its views are.  Trees are for Central Park, views of which are New York's most coveted.  And manicured lawn space can be found in one of the other exclusive properties most of these wealthy homeowners maintain in other parts of the world.  After all, it's not likely that many of these super-luxury apartments will actually serve as their owner's family home.  These will be extravagant crash pads when family members visit the city on business or pleasure.  Something to brag about to the little people back in the Mother Country, or the yacht club in the south of France, or one's clients - or competitors.

Indeed, while developers, real estate agents, and their clients claim all of this is about careful investing, it's as much about conquering the aspirations of others as it is sound portfolio management.

As far as verticality is concerned, One57 has topped out at 90 stories, and while some towers in the billionaire's belt will being shorter, others will be even taller, although their floor count may be less.  How can that be?  Because the ceiling height per floor in some of these buildings could range from ten to 15 feet or more per floor.  And, as New York's building frenzy has developed over the years, incorporating things such as hotels and department stores into lower portions of these skyscrapers, the methods builders use to number their floors has become a laughably imprecise science, with hubris and marketing accounting for curiously inflated floor counts.  Remember, the higher the floor, the higher the rent.

Gimmicks abound in all housing price points, even at the tippy-top.

After 9/11, skyscraper planners worried that people wouldn't want to live or work in tall buildings any more, and briefly, rents for lower floor spaces actually increased.  But that's all ancient history now.

This is a new level of luxury, folks, in every way.  And the market for these trophy homes is known to exist, because the first tower of its kind, a marble bauble nearby at 15 Central Park West designed by Robert A.M. Stern, recently saw an apartment sell for the then-record amount of $88 million to a Russian oligarch.

Which helps explain where all of the people to buy these stratospherically-priced homes are coming from.  Most of them are not Americans.  For one project, over on Park Avenue, where listings are going for $80 million even though half of the building doesn't yet exist, marketing material is available in Russian, Chinese, and even Portuguese, for wealthy Brazilians.

It's not that New York City isn't home to its own bevy of billionaires, but they're not as used to thinking of trophy residential real estate outside of discreet enclaves in the Upper East Side like Sutton Place, or maybe facing the park along Fifth Avenue.

Yes, West 57th Street is a prominent boulevard, but with the billionaire's belt being centered more towards Seventh Avenue than Park, it's a bit of a paradigm shift for traditionalists.  When, really, it shouldn't be.  Manhattan's money has been spreading out for generations now.

Even Calvary Baptist's history helps chart Manhattan's evolution.  For example, Calvary's move from its previous location on 23rd Street to its present spot on 57th occurred in 1883, shortly before the city's elite began their own transition from individual family mansions to luxury apartment buildings.  It was a transition that began to stall around Calvary's neighborhood, which sat between the city's wealthy East Side and historically less-affluent West Side.

Today, however, the high rents being asked - and paid - in even formerly-notorious Hell's Kitchen would make protagonists from theater's West Side Story gag with incredulity.

Not that, frankly, things will probably change much at Calvary itself, even as it becomes the buckle in the city's Billionaire's Belt.  It's been generations since the church, as a Bible-preaching, evangelical outpost in an increasingly pluralistic and hedonistic city, has attracted a lot of its pedigreed neighbors.  Interestingly, it probably has more respectability among members of its local business association as one of the district's legacy establishments.  After all, there aren't many things older than Calvary on the block.

Well, older than the congregation, anyway.  Their church facility is relatively new, by New York's antiquity standards.  Its sanctuary is actually carved out of the first four floors of a 16-story hotel owned by the church.  In 1929, when the city widened 57th Street, all of the buildings on the north side of the street - Calvary's side - were demolished for the project, so the congregation's Gothic structure from 1883 was replaced with a facility that could host missionaries coming through New York's bustling harbor on their way to and from foreign countries.  A neat idea, huh?  These days, the hotel is managed by a third party and charges market rates, of which the church receives a percentage.

Several years ago, a developer approached Calvary with an offer to buy their unique structure and replace it with a luxury residential skyscraper, similar to what's being built at One57.  He'd even re-build a sanctuary and office space for the church in the bowels of his new project, similar to Calvary's current set-up.  However, the idea proved too unconventional for the congregation, and they passed up the offer.  With their current sanctuary, the motto "We preach Christ crucified, risen, and coming again" is etched in stone over the doorway facing 57th Street.  What kind of identity would the church be allowed to have as just another tenant in an exclusive apartment tower?

So... suppose you attended Calvary Baptist.  How would you react to this invasion of your church's neighborhood?

Usually, churches worry about their neighborhood going bad with crime and deteriorating property values.  This is a whole 'nother ballgame.  Would you scramble to figure out what really, really, really rich people like in their church services?  Would you revamp your programming to attract people who probably only view the time they'll be spending in your church's neighborhood as a lark, or part of a high-intensity economic transaction?

Or would you hope that Calvary continues to worship the Lord, preach His Word, pray for the city, commission cross-cultural missionaries, minister to the poor, administer the sacraments, and keep the lights lit over their doorway with its "We preach Christ crucified, risen, and coming again" motto?

Yes, I hope Calvary does the latter, two.  In a way, it's a buckle for much more than today's billionaire belt.

Calvary Baptist's sanctuary entrance on W. 57th. St.

Needs, Wants, Faith, and Christ

All you need is love.

Believe in Christ, and you will be saved.

Simple enough, huh?

Yes, the basic Gospel is, technically, all we need.  However, if that's all you want, then you probably don't have what you need.

If you love Christ, won't you love what He says?  Maybe it won't come naturally or easily all of the time, and we'll rely on the Holy Spirit to guide and encourage us in His ways.  But He instructs us to love Him, and that there is nothing we can do to earn His love.  So you think that's a pretty cool proposition:  we love Him because He first loved us.  Period.

Rock on, dude.  I've got my fire insurance, and I still pretty much get to go do whatever I want.  Grace is awesome!

Which, of course, isn't the correct take-away from receiving salvation.  We know there are those decrees like the Ten Commandments, and the sins like getting drunk, and the do-unto-others stuff.  But we can agree that those rules are for our reciprocal benefit, and it's not like we don't have a lot of leeway in how we live the other parts of our life.

Which, if you think about it, may be the clue to tell you that you don't quite have what you need.  Because... Whose life is it now?  Who purchased your life?

If it strikes you as negative, or punitive, or fundamentalist, or legalistic, or flat-out wrong to consider the idea that Christ expects certain things from His followers, then do you understand what belief in Christ is?

Besides, if you don't do things simply because they're on a list in the Bible, how is that indicative of a loving relationship?  And if we do things because we think we're supposed to do them, how is that any better when it comes to sustaining a loving relationship?  Shouldn't the motivation for why we do or don't do certain things come from more than some holy decree?

There's a term called "lordship salvation" that some Christians use to describe the role that Christ expects to have in the lives of each of His believers.  Basically, when He claims us for Himself, we are to make Him lord of our life.  It's a concept against which many of us Americans particularly struggle, since our culture is so self-focused, performance-based, rewards-driven, and independence-minded.  Control is our goal, which makes charity something we dispense on our terms.

Frankly, it's one reason many evangelicals are struggling with the political situation in our country these days, just like left-wing liberals are.  It's not just that evil is making itself particularly obvious in many areas of society.  We mistakenly tend see the enemy as being in the form of opposite political parties, opposite lifestyles, and opposite belief systems.  We determine progress based on what we can achieve, how much control we have over policy, and how little we have to give up in order to get what we want.  We may not care about what other people think, or how many people support us, but belligerently acting on our morality doesn't necessarily mean we're being moral.

Especially if we're to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  And still love God even more.

If Christ is the Lord of my life, then how tightly should I hold my life?  Through Whose perspective should I be interested in seeing the world?  With what document should I be basing decisions and advocating for good?  Who gets to decide what is good, anyway?

We're to "seek first" Christ's Kingdom - and His is a monarchy, by the way, not a democratic republic.  Sometimes we forget that.  Not that we shouldn't advocate for righteousness in our society and at the ballot box.  It's just that sometimes, Christ's righteousness can be different than our definition of it.  If, in our lives, efforts, desires, objectives, votes, prayers, and devotion, God is not the Purpose for, Method through which, and Recipient of commendation, then what is He?

Well, He's still love, no matter what we do or think.  But to the extent His love does not shine through us, how indicative might that be regarding our trust in Him?

Leaves Left to Peak Upstate

They've peaked.

Those iconic autumn leaves in New York state's famous Adirondack region have finished displaying the best of their de-chlorophylled splendor.  Already.

Nature's green began fading last month, along with summer's sun and heat, revealing a palette that botanists tell us was in the leaves all summer long, but simply hidden by chlorophyll's green dominance.  Indeed, to everything there is a season.  According to the visitor center in Old Forge, one of the Adirondacks' more popular tourist villages, fall's seasonal reds, golds, and oranges are still "brilliant."  Today, however, local experts are saying that the best days to experience them, like the leaves themselves, are fading.

It's never a precise science, of course, predicting when fall's leaves will peak, and across New England, from northern Maine to southern Connecticut, and even out west in Colorado, the schedule is never the same.  Besides, the brilliance of the colors can vary depending on the amount of rainfall and warm temperatures their trees experienced during the past several months.  Some years are better for color than others, and like many things in life, what makes for a good autumn leaf season is beyond the control of any tree.

Which makes the good leaf seasons that much more special.

Back when my family lived in Upstate New York, north of Syracuse, and about an hour's drive south of the Adirondacks, we could expect an autumn visit by folks from an advertising firm contracted by Airstream, the company that builds those all-aluminum travel trailers.  They'd prowl the state's north country, scouting for prototypical fall settings for photo shoots with three or four shiny silver campers, towed by brand-new pickup trucks and Chevy Suburbans.  And the requisite fashion models, of course, dressed to the nines in tailored hunting clothes and casual wear, who'd pose alongside the Airstreams.

You see, the rural road on which we lived was lined with massive old trees whose branches draped themselves like umbrellas over the pavement, and when the leaves turned color, the effect was quite dazzling.  I remember the reds and golds, but also deep purples, and orange like fire.  We had a smattering of white-barked birch trees, and trees with oval-shaped leaves that turned a translucent yellowish-green and fluttered in the breeze like ornamental paper.  Our house was hidden behind sprawling pine trees, and even they were different shades, from dark green to a silvery blue, although they were still evergreens.  And down along the road sat a long, old, rambling stone wall.  The whole tableau oozed a bucolic charm, even if, as a kid, I found it rather boring.

Apparently, the advertising firm had stumbled upon our stretch of country roadway with its tunnels of multi-colored leaves, and admired it as much as my parents had when they bought our home.  Some fall Saturday, we'd just look down our long front driveway to see the campers lining up along the side of the road, with photographers setting up tripods for their cameras.  I remember wondering to myself what made our stretch of roadway so special.  Why was this particular spot so beautiful, that these beautiful people would drive these shiny things out to the middle of nowhere and photograph them?

Indeed, back then, I was not only too young to appreciate nature, but, living year-round in that quaint, four-season environment, I was used to the leaves and the towering trees from which they fell.  It's been said that "youth is wasted on the young," and indeed, if I knew then what I know now about appreciating beauty, I wouldn't have taken the autumns Upstate for granted like I did.

Here in Texas, we have a couple of weeks after the end of October when the leaves change from green to a muted yellow, and then a boring brown. Actually, fall is my favorite season here, but not because of the leaves.  Our temperatures fall in autumn, and in Texas, falling temperatures trump falling leaves, especially after our scorching summers!

Depending on their variety, some Texas trees manage shades of orange, and even some reds, but if you don't like yellow, you're going to be disappointed.  I've heard that in far east Texas, which gets more rain than we do, if you squint really hard during autumn, you can see more colors from the leaves.  Still, it's not likely anything that would impress Airstream's advertising firm.

Meanwhile, this year's colors have peaked up in the Adirondacks.  Time truly flies, and soon, so will the leaves.  In another month, they will be on the ground, creating a new carpet for the coming snows that will blanket the region until next April.

You know, come to think of it, if monochromatic autumn leaves are the price we Texans pay for avoiding months on end of bitter, snowy weather, then I'm content to live with early memories from my youth!