While doing my occasional search for things masonic, I found that Domy Books had a show called “As Above So Below: The Art of The Secret Society” at the Webb Gallery. The exhibition and Domy are now long gone.
An upcoming Dallas trip to might have me stopping by old Masonic Temple on Hardwood. I’ll see what the current owners did to it after they bought it from the Masons.
I’m looking forward to cooler days, this weekend was scorching. But the heat didn’t stop us from a little in-town sightseeing.
1940 Airline Terminal Museum – Houston, TX 2010 – a set on Flickr
I managed to parley my fondness of things Masonic into an article for 29-95.com. My most recent contribution?…
Masonic Texas pride and the Houston Heights Oddfellows Museum – “What you don’t know (and might never know) about Texas history.”
I wish I had come up with the tagline. I also wished I could have included a snarky comment about Dan Brown, but I couldn’t shoehorn anything worth saying in. And I wish I knew some Houston Masons to get some feedback from. Guess, I have more work to do.
Lastly, while trying to find Gallery 619 (too late to see the 1-day show, “Roadside Distractions” – YouTube Video), I instead found 620 W. 9th St. And liked what I saw, (what ever it was)…
Brother and sisterhoods in Vegas.
Freemasons. You know, the sneaky, conspiratorial architects of doom secretly plotting secret plots to take over the world the day after tomorrow. So sneaky, they have websites, public tours of lodges and extremely large memorials to previous brothers. How insidious.
Since the Masons started as a guild of skilled labor, many of their lodges are architecturally striking. I had been working on a map of such places in the US when some productive Googling over the holiday led to this discovery…
… a map of Masonics lodge in Texas. Complied by a brother Mason, this is a gold mine for me. With 1,400 locations listed, I don’t have a need to visit every small town lodge in rural Texas. However, it may lead me to some new intriguing places to visit, in hopes for finding some architectural treasure I would have been unaware of otherwise.
My wife walked up behind me as I was looking at the Texas Masonic map, and knowing my love of road trips and strange attractions, started hitting me on the head and saying, “No! No! Bad! Bad!” I reassured her that we wouldn’t have to visit every lodge in Texas. Just some of the more interesting ones, I thought silently.
I’d like to see the tattoos.
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
A couple weeks ago, I got my photo groove back on. After finishing a work-related trip downtown, I wandered the area. I visited the Art Deco city hall building and spent some time at the Houston Heritage Society Museum. After that, I drove down Montrose Ave. to get some pictures of the Masonic Temple.
Holland Lodge #1 is a beauty of a modernist building. It consists of two perpendicular intersecting rectangles; a brick, ground floor base and an upper, cantilevered, pale concrete one. The concrete one extends above the rear parking lot and houses the main hall. I’m not thrilled with the pictures, mainly due to a lack of sun and partially because I can’t capture the specific architectural aspects that I like with a single picture. While wandering around the back, I chanced upon a guy bringing a ladder into the building. Being a handyman, I guessed he didn’t have any authority in the building, and asked if there was someone there who could give me permission to take some interior photos. Moments later, out came a Brother Mason who said I could take all the pictures outside that I wanted, as they’d spent over 2 million on the streetside facade.
After asking if I was a mason (I’m not; my mom’s dad was) he proceeded to start a history lesson on Masons in America. I had my afternoon free so I was happy to be schooled on John Paul Jones, George Washington and others. When he saw I was still interested/not fleeing, he asked if I wanted to know a bit more about Texas and Masons. I said sure, he said “No pictures,” and we went inside.
The building dates from the 1950s and has a combination of clean modern lines with more decorative elements referencing the early European heritage of Freemasonry.
In one of the side rooms, there is a collection of famous Texan Masons, including but not limited to:
In the main hall, the modern, reserved design was most evident. Unlike the many Philadelphia lodge rooms (Flickr picture), this room was free of extraneous decoration; instead the wall were broad expanses of wood, with indirect lighting on the ceiling. It was a clean, modernist interpretation of a ceremonial lodge room. As I exited the room, I saw overhead two old slide projectors, and in the library there was a glass slide of a masonic image. It reminded me that many secret societies were influenced by theatrical design and some groups had members of various stage professions.
In the library, I was looking at a wall of black and white portraits. The Brother Mason said they had pictures of every master mason who had served, even the ones they kicked out. That piqued my curiosity and I asked what someone had to do to get the boot. Brother Mason paused a moment, then replied, “You know what a libertine is?” Having attended college, I said yes, and clarified, “So, it’s behavior unbecoming a mason? “Yes,” he said, and proceeded to detail and detailed the life of Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce and director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the years following the Great Depression. Under attack by those who would take over his position of power, my host cited Jones’ adherence to Masonic ideology as protection against accusations of corruption and embezzlement. Fellow masons in the Congress helped Jones draw attention to these attacks in public hearings and prevented his ouster from his positions of authority.
That pretty much ended my Freemasonry 101 class for the day, as I had to find something to eat. I had spent at least an hour at the lodge and I was getting hungry.
So the two lessons of the day were (in reverse order);
For detailed biographies of all the Masons mentioned, as well as anything else Texan – Texas State Historical Association – The Handbook of Texas Online
The future prospect of having a long-term house has me thinking about a long-term project. A kind of monument to personal things, travel and life. I got the idea from a 70 year-old monument in the Smokey Mountains.
The Great Smoky Mountains Masonic Monument was built in 1937. The main idea of it was expressed this way, “…we conceive the idea of a Masonic Marker as a true symbol of the universality of Masonry, and therefore have requested Masons of all countries and states to contribute stones to go therein. Interesting stones have come from five continents, the isles of the seven seas, and from historic spots of nearly every state in the Union.”
A downloadable PDF of the Masonic Shrine Catalogue of Stones in Marker has drawings of each side of the marker with entries of every stone that was added to the memorial.
Many of the included stones have simple description, but some have long, involved stories. This is but a short part of one of the stones’ entries, “275 Stone picked up at Sira Mountain, extinct volcano near Aden, Arabia, where according to Major H. Wilburforce Bell in his ‘Romances of Aden,’ the Queen of Sheba conferred with Solomon…” It goes on, but that bit is some pretty good stuff.
Since we travel a bit, I like the idea of some sort of marker somewhere in a yard with stones added and embedded in it. A physical scrapbook, a collection of places visited with something from each location brought back and incorporated into it. Now, I doubt it would look like the monument the Masons built so long ago. It could take just about any shape.
My only concern would be having to move it if we moved. But I already have an idea for that…
Neon Poisoning 