Your view is of a portion of Lake Lucerne, or as it's called in Switzerland, the Vierwaldstaettersee: the Four-Forest-States-Lake, or Lake of the Four Cantons. I was visiting my architect friend Heinz Oeschger, after seeing Paris and London with my mother and sister and before going on to Turkey with an American friend from Northwestern. Everything went very well on this 1974 trip until the morning of our arrival in Istanbul, when plans were abruptly curtailed.
Seeing Paris with Mom and Ellen, who were there for the first time, was hugely enjoyable. I still remember that we stayed at the Hotel Turenne, near the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire. (It's now the Hotel Eiffel Turenne, and currently, at a time of restricted travel, has rooms @$62 plus taxes.) I took very few photos, however--I suppose because I had been there before (cf. BOXES 38-39, 77-79). But I couldn't resist another shot of the inexhaustibly photogenic Notre Dame; and Les Invalides makes its first appearance among these slides, on our way to see Napoleon's tomb.
But I haven't been able to identify the location of this sphinx in front of an elegant maison:
The only other Paris photos I took were in the sculpture garden of the Musee Rodin. As you can see, I was most struck by the group The Burghers of Calais, even in the way they stood out against the urban background :
In London I took a total of two photos! One site I can't identify, though it might be a corner of the Victoria and Albert Museum--maybe you can make an ID. The other is the steeple of St Bride's Church, another brilliant Wren design.
I did take some photos during a day trip on my own. My Columbia friend Lyndall Gordon was teaching at St Hilda's College (if I recall correctly), part of Oxford University, and I took a train to visit her one day. We walked from her residence to the center of the town and to some of the famous buildings of the various colleges, passing by a deer park . . .
. . . and a classic view of a collegiate building (the Great Tower of Magdalen College) in a very bucolic setting:
The next photos are glimpses of another college, Christ Church. First is the distinctive Tom Tower, while in the second shot you see Christ Church Cathedral on the left, with perhaps the entrance gate to another college on the right.
When I left London, Mom and Ellen took a longer side trip of their own, up to Edinburgh, while I was off to see Heinz in Zurich. My first photo of that city is, I suppose, a pretty standard one, of the famous clock tower--the largest clock face in Europe--of St Peter's Church, dominating one of the oldest parts of town.
My second photo is a no less iconic view: of Lake Zurich, at the "bottom" of the city, i.e., where the Bahnhofstrasse leads directly from the main train station to the lake:
Next you see the River Limmat, which roughly parallels the Bahnhofstrasse and empties into the lake. Across the river is another prominent Zurich landmark, the Grossmunster Church:
At the edge of a park on one side of Lake Zurich is a pavilion for art exhibits designed by Le Corbusier, one of his last works, completed posthumously in 1967.
On another day Heinz and I, with a friend of his, took a trip to Luzern/Lucerne, less than an hour's drive south of Zurich. The Chapel Bridge across the River Reuss is undoubtedly that city's most famous landmark (unless the lake counts as such). It was first built in 1333 (but I will resist giving a travel-book history that you can easily look up on your own):
Here's a closer view of the even older Water Tower at the center of the bridge:
(It was a drizzly day, hence the twilight look of the slides from the Instamatic.) We took a stroll around parts of the town; here are two views, followed by two lakeside photos from our drive along the shore to the village of Brunnen, where we took a cable car up the Umliberg.
Here is a photo of the cable car--I assume just after we exited it at the top. Next is another view from the landing point:
There was a terrace-café at the top; that's Heinz on the left, as you may recall from my New York photos, and his friend on the right.
The next photo must have been taken as we began our descent:
We drove back to Zurich indirectly, stopping at Schwyz, notable for its Rathaus (City Hall) with its splendid painted walls, and St Martin's Church, which I remember had a fine baroque interior, though as usual my Instamatic couldn't capture it.
And you have now seen the last photo from my Instamatic that I have in my possession, and read my last complaint about its limitations. I did take more pictures during my Switzerland visit--for example, at the abbey at Einsiedeln--but my camera was stolen on the Orient Express: not the current luxury train from Paris to Venice but the more ordinary but still celebrated train that used to cut through Austria and the Balkans to Istanbul.
After leaving Zurich I was able to meet up with my friend Steve Willett on the Orient Express, as planned. (He had boarded in Frankfurt, I think, and I connected to the train at a whistlestop somewhere in Austria.) But at some point I left my camera on the seat by mistake, and when I remembered it, there were other people sitting in my compartment who, they said, knew nothing about a camera. So I have no photos of Istanbul either. It would take a long photo-less essay to explain why I spent only 24 hours in Istanbul (it had to do with hostilities between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus) and to describe the wonders of Istanbul I did see. I'll be glad to tell all about it in person, but meanwhile the photos in my next post, back in Evanston, will have been taken with my replacement camera, a 'serious' Nikon SLR with zoom attachment.
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