CHICAGO - THE CITY

Like any other US city Chicago has its share of problems, anonymous corporate parks, blighted areas, and panhandlers.  But thanks to a certain (probably mythical) cow, it also has one of the strongest planned downtowns of any city in America.  The Great Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed nearly two thirds of the then-existing city, and the city fathers took this as an opportunity to establish a plan.  There are evidences of this planning everywhere.  Michigan Avenue, humbly known in the downtown area as the Magnificent Mile, is one of the best examples.  Not because it’s a strip of all the best names in retail.  New York’s 5^th avenue has the same list of pricey tenants, and both are festooned with flowers.  It’s because it’s elevated!  Like other areas in Chicago, there is an upper and a lower Michigan avenue.  This is an absolutely brilliant idea!  Not only are the trucks kept below the people walkways, but the side streets are free of the kind of congestion you see in New York, leaving them free to also be flower-lined beauties.  Here are some examples of the flower beds along Michigan Avenue and its side streets, including a very inventive use of old picture frames in a garden.

 

 

All the loading and unloading takes place out of sight.  The lower levels are not free of people, of course.  There are shortcuts the locals know in this dim underworld that are not on the maps, which show the surface streets.  There are also upper levels in the condominium developments south of the river that are also not on the map.  They tripped me up a couple of times coming north from Millennium Park.  It is, however, a great walking city, and I logged over fifteen miles during my stay (some of it, as I say, inadvertently).

Chicago is justly famous for its wide range of architectural styles, so much so that there are dozens of boat tours on the Chicago River on which volunteers from the Architectural Institute deliver talks about the many examples visible from the river. I’ve included a numbers of examples below, both from the boat tour (I took the First Lady of Chicago boat seen below, but there are many others) and from my walks.  Of course I can’t tell you I remember the various style descriptions or the architects involved, but I think the pictures speak for themselves.

 Chicagoans are very passionate when it comes to their buildings, even to the point of taking on Donald Trump.  Trump had hired the principal Chicago architectural firm for a design.  When it was ready they actually published the design in the newspaper since it would be going in the heart of downtown.  The public hated it and the developer actually had to redraw the design from scratch.

I wanted to highlight one building in particular from the tour, called 300 Riverside.  It is a strikingly curved design as you see as I captured it from the river, but it’s never more striking than when viewed from above from the observation deck of the Willis Tower with the Chicago River reflecting off its curved face.

Chicago is a city that keeps its beautiful buildings.  Here, for example, is Union Station, which is what New York’s Pennsylvania Station would look like if New Yorkers hadn’t torn it down to build Madison Square Garden.

And finally, this Mosque-like structure was actually next to my hotel.  Turns out it was a Shriner’s Temple built in the early 1900’s, which has now been repurposed into a Bloomingdales.

 

There are a large selection of trains available to get you around the city, and some are the famous elevated trains.  They are identified by color, rather than using letters or numbers, and four of them pass around the ‘loop’.  Literally an elevated oval that makes it easy to quickly get across the business area.  I used the red, pink, green and brown lines at various times.  Here is a link to the route map and a shot of one of the streets under the El.

 http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/maps/ctatrainmap.png