As I was out for my morning bike ride today, circling through Baltimore's Druid Hill Park (part of Baltimore's legacy from Frederick Law Olmstead and his sons)
,   I paused briefly to adjust my biking gear below the statue of
William Wallace that looks out over the reservoir on the southeast edge
of the park.  The leaves of the trees behind the statue almost
seemed to swirl around it;  I snapped a photo with the Handspring's eyemodule
(I keep the Handspring in the pocket under my seat, along with my
cellphone, just so the office is that much closer if I need it to
be).  It's a crappy photo from a crappy camera plugged into an
obsolete handheld, but sometimes I get interesting effects out of it.

Anyway, Wallace is about halfway through my morning ride, about a
half-mile from the Baltimore Zoo and my last major uphill climb of the
morning.   So I stopped, and looked up at him, and wondered
what he would think of a statue of himself proclaiming his heroism and
martyrdom some 700 years ago (when he was about 4 years younger than I
am today), erected some hundred years ago or so by a bunch of 
Scottish Rite masons in an industrial city in America, overlooking an
artificial lake and what now amounts to a blighted urban neighborhood
where there ain't so much as a Scot within spitting distance. 
Just around the bend from him, Cristoforo Colombo stands looking over the same lake, facing generally toward Little Italy downtown but seeming no less out of place.

So much of Druid Hill seems to be a mishmash of the mundane, the
archaic, and the bizarrre. Yes, there's the pool,  and the tennis
courts and the playgrounds and the Baltimore Zoo.  But then
theres' “Safety City” (an inexplicable traffic safety themed facility
that's locked up almost all the time); the ramshackle giant pavillions
that could use new paint, new shingles, new everything; the vast swath
of  gardens and water and truly iconic park architecture that
remain locked away behind the fences of the Zoo (the zoo rents this
part of the park out for parties, apparently); the Disc Golf Course
that wraps around the  cemetary of the family that once owned the
estate that the park was created from; the closed roads, littered with
fallen tree boughs, that weave through the hills that overlook the
Jones Falls.
Some of the footpaths in Druid Hill haven't been resurfaced in decades, so they make the ride a bit more challenging.

It's sad that this beautiful, odd, eccentric, huge public space has fallen into such a state of dilapidation.  Sure, the Conservatory
(Baltimore's historic greenhouse) is being expanded and repaired in
grand Victorian style–but only 5000 people a year bother to visit
it.  The Zoo gets a lot of
traffic, and is  gradually updating its infrastructure, but it's
still a monument to a less romantic part of the Victorian era (with
small black iron cages in the main valley of the zoo that ache to be
replaced with something a bit more humane).   And because of
its location, atop a hill away from the city center and bordered by
some of Baltimore's more sketchy neighborhoods,  there's not much
going on (aside from the occasional athletic pursuit) to draw people to
this huge public space (which may be a good thing, because it's ready
to fall apart).  But that's also part of its appeal to me–the
park is a cross between the Japanese sensibilities of  wabi-sabi  and a reflection of the soul of Baltimore itself–like Divine dressed up for church on Sunday.