This is the other, northern entrance to the Model Railroad Garden. Though she suggested modestly I didn't want her in the photo, I did want the lady for human scale and for the train passing over her head.
The photo above actually looks back at the northern entrance, but it's mainly to show five bridges at once, top to bottom (a nod to Iowa's Madison County covered bridges?), with a waterfall out of the shaggy cedar trunk sections. The lower Union Pacific train is headed for the only tunnel longer than an arm's length (the general size for ease of cleaning), also the one a raccoon favored.
I presumed the Model Railroad Garden would be closed as advertised this past weekend, but it was open yet with some caretaker grandfathers showing their grandchildren, giving me a chance to take some close-ups to show the natural materials I was quoting from the brochure in the last entry. This is the Rose Theater, with the gourds clearly evident for the Oriental domes and the intricate twig work on this Moorish facade.
I have the photo below vertical in my file, but Movable Type apparently prefers the in-camera original of the Stanford White Omaha Building from 1888, our first skyscraper and the present home of the huge Kutak Rock law firm (and others). The close-up is again for the natural materials described in the previous entry, down to the eagle above the entrance. With the recent autumn frost, more light and less foliage helped these close-ups.
Finally, for this time, is Central High School, which site is that of the original Nebraska territorial capitol before Lincoln took that away. This is "Omaha's oldest active high school," the only one downtown, just east of Joslyn Art Museum and south of Creighton University. Its alumni include Henry Fonda, Warren Buffett's children, two Nobel Prize winners, several sports notables, including Gayle Sayers and Ahman Green of football fame, illustrating its brainiac and sports reputations. Among the other materials, the "ornamental figures [are] of lichens, nuts, bamboo, straw and corn shucks, and book ornamentation of birch bark and tree fern stem in cross-section."
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