Late summer 2019, northwest suburbs.
Might as well be late summer, 2022. Except for everything that’s happened since then.
Category Archives: Been There
Lincoln Park Zoo ’22
Back in 1984, I took a trip to Chicago from Nashville for the Labor Day weekend. That was the first place I ever went after getting a full-time job. I stayed with my friend Rich, whose apartment was in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, where one could live comfortably just out of college.
That’s how long ago it was. Lincoln Park was then emerging from decades as — not full-blown slum, but maybe the St. Charles Place-States Avenue-Virginia Avenue of Chicago, so rents were still relatively affordable. Those days are long over.
During that visit, Rich suggested we go to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which we did. I’ve visited periodically over the decades since then, and always like it. Zoos can be much more than places to take your kids, though they are that too.
The animals, of course, are the prime attraction. Such as the great apes. This one’s a little hard to spot.
Another of his troop was indoors. He was easier to see. Well, if you were up front.
Some Père David’s deer. Native to China, they just barely escaped extinction by being bred in European zoos.
Flamingos. Lots of flamingos. Some sources say the collective is a flamboyance of flamingos, others say a stand.
I also like some of the zoo buildings, such the Kovler Lion House, outside and in.
No lions were to be seen that morning, however. Guess they were taking cat naps out of sight.
A concession stand.
But it’s got style.
Nature Boardwalk
Toward the south end of Lincoln Park is the fittingly named South Pond, flush with floral glory last Saturday.
That, and U.S. Grant off in the distance.
The pond is mostly ringed by a feature called Nature Boardwalk, which is an extension, without large animal habitats, of the Lincoln Park Zoo. It’s called that pending a really generous gift, most likely.
I didn’t need any more prompting than that to take a walk along most of the raised walkway.
From one vantage, the handsome Café Brauer building is visible.
The building has a history as home to a successful Chicago restaurant in the first decades of the 20th century. Developed in 1908 with a design by Prairie School notable Dwight Perkins.
The life of the building continues as a wedding venue. A nicely written description — though at heart ad copy for the place — is at The Knot, which specializes in articles and other tools for wedding planning:
Café Brauer overlooks the zoo’s Nature Boardwalk, a lively pond ecosystem. Thanks to the event space’s terrace, couples and their guests can easily admire the setting’s beautiful biodiversity as they celebrate. From this vantage point, a clear view of the surrounding park and city skyline is also visible.
Inside, the… historic Chicago landmark features eye-catching ceilings supported by exposed green-colored beams, with Tiffany-style chandeliers and warm uplighting. Thanks to its stained-glass windows, natural light can flood the interior as guests dine, dance, and mingle.
And what was this?
That must have been there the last time I came this way, but I didn’t remember it.
I walked the path, and over a stone bridge, to the other bank of the pond.
Closer.
Inside.
The Peoples Gas Education Pavilion, it is. I’ll assume the natural gas company of that name had something to do with paying at least part of the construction tab for the structure.
“It was completed in 2010 by Studio Gang, the world-renowned Chicago architecture firm led by Jeanne Gang. It is built from prefabricated glue-laminated timber ‘ribs’ and fiberglass domes,” writes Chicago area photographer Lauri Novak.
Novak lauds the spot as a good one for taking photos. Is it ever.
Farmers’ Market Near an Abandoned Shoreline
Still warm and sunny here, though punctuated by thunderstorms. I don’t think I saw them forecast — one Sunday evening, another this evening. They rolled through quickly, and didn’t even interfere with evening dog-walking.
On Saturday, I noticed this plaque in Lincoln Park. I didn’t remember seeing it before.
It’s in a good location. The ridge is very much visible from that spot.
Clark Street is to the right, beyond the edge of my image. At that point it’s the western edge of the park, but mostly it’s a non-grid North Side street, one I knew pretty well in my city-dwelling days. It was near my first apartment, and sometimes I took the No. 22 Clark Street bus places (occasionally all the way from downtown, but the El was faster).
In Chicago, non-grid usually means the street follows an Indian trace, and so it is with Clark, at least north of Chicago Ave. Other one-time Indian traces coursing through the North Side include Lincoln, Elston and Milwaukee Aves. The South Side has them, too, such as Ogden and Archer Aves.
In the Loop, Clark is park of the grid, and has been there a long time. Wonder how many people realize that it’s named for George Rogers Clark, whose sizable monument is pretty far away from Chicago?
Not far from Clark on the western edge of Lincoln Park, I happened across Green City Market, a large farmer’s market, in progress. It’s held on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the warmer parts of the year. It was busy.
Lots of tents.
Some wonderful-looking produce.
I don’t begrudge the farmers their direct-to-consumer sales, but the emphasis on “organic” and “pasture raised” and — I saw this — “regenerative agriculture” — got to be a little much. At least I didn’t see anything advertised as “curated.” It can’t be as simple as “fresh produce,” can it?
But that didn’t bother me too much. I enjoyed the band.
The tip in their bucket was the only money I spent in the park that day.
A Summery September Saturday in Lincoln Park
I can’t let International Talk Like A Pirate Day pass without a mention, as I have for so many years. Somehow, that would be wrong. There’s a place in the world for silly days. So here’s a public domain image for the occasion.
“The Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard, 1718” by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1920). He’s an American artist I wasn’t familiar with until recently. He’s been mostly forgotten, his style considered outdated.
Summer in its mildest form lingers here in northern Illinois: bright days, little wind, puffy clouds, temps that let you forget whether the air is hot or cold. Good for going out for a long walk (Saturday) or staying at home and sleeping late and then lounging on the deck (Sunday) and reading and watching various bits of visual entertainment.
The Saturday walk was through Lincoln Park in Chicago, from the southern edge northward, along the boardwalk and into the zoo, and back again along the ridge that used to be the lakeshore. I also passed through a crowd at a farmers’ market.
Been a while since my last visit. That too was a late summer stroll.
This time, Yuriko was at her cake class making this —
— which is every bit as good as it looks.
Meanwhile, I took a bus east to Lincoln Park, crown jewel of the Chicago Park District and home to fields and paths and trees and shrubs.
But there’s no forgetting the surrounding city.
I didn’t seek out monuments this visit. The park is dotted with them, as much in the background as the tree canopy or bushy undergrowth for most people, who are missing messages in bottles from the past.
I did pause at Hans Christian Andersen, whose bronze dates from 1896. It gave the impression that he was enjoying the shade.
“The Hans Christian Andersen Monument Association [local Danes] commissioned John Gelert to produce the sculpture,” park district says. “A Danish immigrant, John Gelert (1852–1923) arrived in Chicago in 1887, receiving his first commission for the Haymarket Riot Monument two years later.
“Gelert portrayed the children’s author sitting with a book in hand and a swan at his feet, alluding to his world-famous story, ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ The artist explained that ‘he had the advantage of studying several good photographs of Andersen taken at various times in his life.’
“Gelert displayed the Hans Christian Andersen Monument along with his now-missing Beethoven Portrait Bust at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. (Installed in Lincoln Park in 1897, the Beethoven bust was stolen in 1970.)”
Elsewhere, in the shade of the Schiller statue, in fact, a small brass band did some tunes al fresco.
On the whole, the walk was good.
As I saw printed on the side of a truck parked on a street running through the park.
Sculpture Milwaukee, 2019
Doors Open Milwaukee is next weekend, and I’m planning for it.
During the 2019 event, we happened across another public art event, one not confined to a particular weekend, but rather a particular year: Sculpture Milwaukee.
“Sculpture Milwaukee is a non-profit organization transforming downtown Milwaukee’s cultural landscape every year with an outdoor exhibition of world-renowned sculpture that serves as a catalyst for community engagement, economic development, and creative placemaking,” is how the organization’s web site puts it.
I don’t know about “community engagement” or “creative placemaking.” I would just say the org puts up different interesting sculptures to look at every year, but maybe that’s my editorial instinct for jettisoning publicist puffery coming into play.
Anyway, that year we saw works on E. Wisconsin Ave., including “Seraphine-cherubin” from “Teaching Staff for a School of Murderers” by Max Ernst (1967).
I’ve forgotten most of whatever I once knew about Dada, and had to look him up to make sure he wasn’t the one who peed on a pile of books in public. I don’t think he was. Who was that? I know I heard that story in college. I don’t think I want to feed verbiage along those lines into Google, however.
“Pensive” by Radcliffe Bailey.
The thinker depicted is W.E.B. Du Bois, according to the sign near the work.
One more: “Magical Thinking,” a work by Actual Sized Artworks (Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades) (2019).
That sounded familiar. I have run across their art before, specifically in Evanston.
That was in the early spring of 2010 on a short family outing.
Tempus fugit.
Bob Chinn’s Crab House
Sunday did not, it turned out, represent the top of a long steady slide into the miseries of winter. Still too early for that. Monday was cool, today warmer, and 80s are predicted for the coming days. Many of our meals are still being taken on the deck.
Except for the late lunch-early dinner (linner?) we had recently in honor of Yuriko’s birthday. We went to Bob Chinn’s Crab House in Wheeling and had delightful plates of fish, but no crab.
This is just one room of the enormous Chinn’s, which has 736 seats and claims to feed a million patrons a year. We arrived before it got too busy, which I hear is often.
Volume, for sure, but high-quality food as well, and a solicitous wait staff. That will keep you in business for 40 years.
I had the opakapaka, an Hawaiian snapper. Those are potatoes, not apples, on the side.
Yuriko had the macadamia sauteed basa, a fish native to Southeast Asia. We opted for a dessert that the menu called “Bob’s Slice of Heaven,” made from purple Okinawan sweet potatoes. Oh, yes.
I learned while at the restaurant that old Bob Chinn died in April at 99. Born in 1923 in Duluth to Chinese immigrants, he’d been in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, founding Bob Chinn’s in 1982. A daughter and granddaughter run it now.
“The Crab House was modeled, according to various sources, either after fresh seafood restaurants in Hong Kong or Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, which Chinn had long admired,” the Chicago Eater says.
“But unlike Hong Kong or Miami, Chicago had no access to fresh seafood. Chinn solved that problem by getting up early every morning and driving to O’Hare to pick up shipments that had been flown in from the coasts, some of which were still alive. (He invested in special tanks in the restaurant basement to hold the crabs and lobsters.)
“He kept costs low by buying in volume from wholesalers — he had a separate business in Honolulu to scout the fish markets — and by using only the cheapest dishes and silverware.”
Bob Chinn’s isn’t precisely cheap, but I did get the sense that we would have paid more for the same in other high-end fish houses. Good for you, Bob. RIP.
Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir
Heavy rains started around daybreak on Sunday, continuing through until mid-afternoon, at least around here. Some parts of Chicago suffered flooding.
Just before sunset the same day, we walked the dog and noticed very little in the way of puddles, even in the low ground of the park behind our house. Odd, I thought, considering the heavy volume of water, but then it occurred to me that it’s been a warm two weeks since the last rain. The ground just soaked it up.
Saturday was one of those warm, sunny days. About an hour before sunset that day, we went back to Wood Dale, but this time walked around Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir.
The water is visibly the haunt of birds, including some herons, and probably fish that can’t be seen. The level looked low, which is reasonable, considering there hadn’t been any rain lately.
The trail goes more than a mile all the way around, not always with views of the water.
O’Hare isn’t that far away.
As the name says, the point of the basin is to catch floodwater, rather than have it damage the surrounding suburbs. The facility was completed in 2002.
“Floodwater enters the pump evacuated reservoir through a diversion weir made up of series of four sluice gates located at the end of School Street in Wood Dale,” says Du Page County.
“During flood events the sluice gates are opened, allowing stormwater to flow down the spillway into the reservoir. The stormwater is temporarily stored until flood levels along Salt Creek have receded. Stormwater is then pumped back to Salt Creek through a pump station and discharge channel.”
There’s a short bridge over the spillway.
That got me thinking about the origin of “sluice,” which I didn’t know. So I looked it up later. Mirriam Webster: “Middle English sluse, alteration of scluse, from Anglo-French escluse, from Late Latin exclusa, from Latin, feminine of exclusus, past participle of excludere to exclude.”
Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve, Again
On Monday, which was like a Sunday in terms of work schedules, we took a walk at the Palatine Prairie Nature Preserve in Palatine, a not-too-far-away suburb.
We’ve been here before, I told Yuriko.
We have?
I couldn’t remember exactly when (till I looked it up), but I knew that we had — and we’d seen guys playing Frisbee golf there. Besides a walking trail, the preserve includes a disc golf course. It still does.
Something I noticed this time that I never did before: the players were all carrying bags with more than one disc inside. Maybe a half dozen discs. Like a golfer has different clubs, a — disc-er? — has different discs for different shots? Must be.
We didn’t go to toss discs, but just to walk.
And read a bit.
Gold is a prime color of late summer.
This little memorial, under a tree, looked fairly new.
This Tony Esposito? Probably so, considering his long tenure with the Chicago Blackhawks.
Salt Creek Greenway, Wood Dale
What’s our idea of a good way to spend a few hours on a long weekend at home? A long walk between a small creek and a large electric substation.
After a fairly inert Saturday, on Sunday we walked a section of the Salt Creek Greenway, which runs 25 miles or so from Busse Woods in Elk Grove Village to the Brookfield Zoo. The part we walked was in Wood Dale, Illinois.
We started at an empty parking lot. Signs call it a bike trail, but the entire time we were there — on a pleasant, cloudy weekend afternoon — we saw exactly one bicyclist, along with a handful of walkers, including one other family with a dog.
The trail is decidedly obscure, at least to judge by its emptiness on Sunday, and we liked it that way. No dodging bicycles, for one thing. We walked a total of two miles or so, one there and one back, since the trail doesn’t loop.
Early September is still a lush season along the trail.
Salt Creek. The trail crosses it at one point, but mostly runs at some distance from the creek along this section.
Maybe people are put off by the ComEd substation on one side of the trail. It’s impressively large. I get a kick out of getting a good look at important infrastructure, but that’s just me.
Part of Illinois 390 is also visible from a short section of the trail.
Note the birds. For a moment, especially when they took flight, you could imagine you were in a Hitchcock movie.