A visit to a friend in Mexico City led us to discover its collection of Art Deco treasures Last week Stew and I visited a friend in Mexico City who's just starting the renovation of a 1929 Art Deco building, in the Roma Sur neighborhood, a project that's both exciting and intimidating. Restoration or renovation …
When we arrived in Las Vegas, our second eyeful looked like a Potemkin skyline featuring the Chrysler, Empire State and United Nations buildings, along with Grand Central Station, the main building at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, among other New York City landmarks.Except these were for-real buildings, albeit one-third or so the size …
Poking from the manicured colonial skyline of San Miguel, with its weathered domes and steeples, we now have a new, shiny and fairly gigantic goose.At first it looks like one of those inflatable creatures car dealers rent to promote a sale, made of fabric and kept constantly wobbling by a fan underneath.But from the high …
Given that the last time I saw the southern port city Cienfuegos was fifty-one years ago, when I was thirteen years old, my memories of it proved to be amazingly vivid. I recalled that my maternal grandmother and my spinster aunt lived in a traditional home near El Prado, the town's main boulevard, and around the corner from …
With the universal warning from friends still resonating in our heads--"be sure to check on the construction every day"--we came back to San Miguel from a two-week trip feeling a bit apprehensive, almost expecting to find some disaster. There were three surprises. During our absence the architect had fired the maestro Bonifacio and his entire …
It looked and felt like an apparition. After almost three years of watching our house plans stumble over endless obstacles and delays--architects, legal problems, squabbling neighbors, plus the occasional waffling and changes of mind on our part--on February 10 we actually broke ground. We showed up at the land early in the morning and a …
El Rancho Santa Clara 