Mentioned this week: Houston, Salt Lake City, Albany, Minneapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, and King Salmon, AK
The Drift’s late-summer travel guide
In the 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre, fictionalized versions of André Gregory and Wallace Shawn debate, among other things, the relative merits of traveling in search of novelty and enjoying the comforts of ordinary life. As an Issue Three Mention of the film by Michele Moses asked: “Is the world out there or in here?”
If you’re going in search of the world out there this August, consider spending the dog days of summer at one of the off-the-beaten-path locales that our Mentions contributors have reviewed over the years. If you prefer the interior world, or simply can’t make the trip to Alaska or Albany, you can still read about them. That’s its own novelty, after all.
— Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Mentions Editor
The Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern
TRAVEL
This 87,500-square-foot decommissioned reservoir, built in 1926, lies underneath Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, which offers walking trails alongside a mud-colored river and towering overpass supports. Forgotten for years, it reopened in 2016 as a tourist site and performance space called the “Cistern,” a name intended to evoke the monumental Byzantine ruins beneath Istanbul. But the Houston version involves more concrete and more tales of municipal corruption. You can take a guided tour to learn about the city’s history of dubious water sanitation infrastructure, including a memorable anecdote about a three-foot-long eel carcass clogging a downtown pipe. To demonstrate the facility’s seventeen-second echo, the guide encouraged us to scream into the musty darkness. “Leave it all inside the Cistern!” she yelled, as tourists from Dallas howled beside me.
Ariel Katz
Rio Tinto Kennecott Visitor Experience
TOURISM
Just south of Salt Lake City, you can ride a six-dollar company shuttle to the edge of the Bingham Canyon Mine, the largest open-pit excavation site in the world. (Signs along the way warn workers to “control the hazards.”) Like “Spiral Jetty,” the region’s more famous earthwork, the copper mine will leave you thinking about scale; from three Empire State Buildings up, ore-toting trucks appear planktonic. But even more mind-bending than the view is the experience of reading about Rio Tinto’s “environmental stewardship” on their website right after staring into an abyss that was once a mountain.
Colin Lodewick
The Egg
DESIGN
Enter any of the modernist megaliths that line Albany’s Empire State Plaza and it becomes nearly impossible to remember where you are, what time it is, and what the outside world looks like. But the Plaza’s many structural horrors pale beside The Egg, a performing arts center less ovoid than its name suggests. With the exterior of a UFO and the interior of a cavernous waiting room, The Egg lives up to its name only in its ability to reduce visitors to a state of fetal dependence.
Vivienne Schlemmer
Mill City Museum
GRAIN
Minneapolis is no longer the flour capital of the world, but its riverfront is still littered with tubular grain silos and washed-up relics of the mills that once dominated the city. One of these, the Washburn “A” Mill, is now a museum. It burned down in 1991, but the mill’s walls and foundations are displayed like the remains of excavated Roman ruins. Museum visitors follow the journey of a wheat kernel in great detail while sampling freshly made biscuits from a “Baking Lab” operated by a modern-day Betty Crocker look-alike. Slick wood-and-glass paneling sits alongside ominous warnings about mauled limbs and flour-dust explosions: industrial chic distilled to its essence. It’s not a big place, but there’s plenty to sift through.
Pradeep Niroula
King Salmon Lodge
TRAVEL
Since 2008, when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cashed in free offers for a luxury three-day Alaskan vacation from his super-rich benefactors Paul Singer and Robin Arkley, the King Salmon Lodge has become notably less exclusive. Arkley, then its owner, gave Alito a room, full facility access, and fishing and sightseeing trips on small seaplanes — a package that went for a little over $1,000 a day at the time. The bigger ticket item was a private flight to the nearby “King Salmon Airport” provided by hedge fund billionaire Singer, which would have cost the justice $100,000. Alito justified his failure to recuse himself from cases involving Singer by claiming ignorance. It seems the justice had not heard of Singer’s connection to Elliott Investment Management, which he founded and controls, and which has come before the court at least ten times in the past decade and a half. In one of those cases, Elliott earned a $2.4 billion payout. The Lodge’s motto seems apt: “FISH STORIES MADE HERE.”
Brian Jordan
Oudolf Garden Detroit
LANDSCAPING
If Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s medium is flora, his subject is time. His plantings on Manhattan’s High Line made him famous, but Detroit’s Belle Isle is better suited to his trademark swathes of North American perennials and grasses; on the open, three-acre site, flowers, foliage, and seed heads harmonize in various stages of decay and rebirth. Buoyant or gloomy depending on the season, the garden, which opened in 2021, is rich in what Oudolf calls the “emotion of nature,” wherein “you feel more than what you see.” Don’t tell the urban renewal prognosticators, lest the garden become yet another symbol of Detroit’s comeback.
Andrew Wickenden
City Museum, St. Louis
CURIOSITIES
This shoe factory, built to house the literal-minded company “International Shoe,” was reopened as a museum in 1997. Post-industrial detritus — commercial cookware among discarded oyster shells, a decommissioned school bus dangling from the roof — has never been put to better use.