St. Francis Xavier Statuary

This "Church Sunday", I show an improved foto of a detail from St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church on Bloomfield Avenue that I first showed here as the last foto of January 13th. I finally made it to that area during brite sunlite, which makes a huge difference in the clarity of the high relief figure under the cross atop the church.

Between the church and the avenue itself is a plaza in which stands a statue of Christopher Columbus. I showed a close view of the statue backed by stark, bare branches in the winter on October 2nd. Here's a wide view of the plaza with the U.S. and Italian flags backed by green leaves in early autumn. It's a little fuzzy because Bloomfield Avenue is so wide I had to zoom in beyond the optical zoom capacity of my camera, and I wasn't using a tripod (high zoom requires high stability).

Given that today is Columbus Day and I did get pix of the statue in warm weather, I am pleased to show them on the actual day Columbus landed in the New World. Well, it was new to him, anyway, and that discovery did lead to a new start for Europe. Interestingly, Wikipedia says that the date of that discovery was October 12th, 1492 in the Julian calendar of the time but October 21st in the Gregorian calendar that we use. 12 / 21 — same numbers, flipped. So perhaps it's not a big deal that Congress moved the official observance of Columbus Day to the nearest Monday.

I tried to get the two pieces of statuary in the same foto, but leaves got in the way of the high relief. I did manage, however, to include an airplane passing overhead. If only Columbus could see a jet and know that the trip that took him two months and three days takes modern travelers perhaps seven hours. But they wouldn't make that journey had he not established the tie between continents that changed history.