Allen J. Benson Park. Or, the Illinois-Indiana Border Obelisk.

I have a certain fascination with borders, probably dating back as long as I’ve been looking at maps just for fun, which is a long time now. I seem to have written about them a lot as well, something I didn’t realize until I checked.

Such as the posting about the meeting of British Columbia and Alberta; of Banff National Park and Kootenay National Park; and on the Continental Divide. Or the U.S. Canadian border just south of Vancouver. Or the borders we crossed in 2005 and 2006 and another posting about them again. Or the Tennessee-North Carolina border. Or Missouri-Kansas. Or Texas-Louisiana.

Not long ago, I had an encounter with a closer border: Illinois-Indiana. But not just any point on that long line — as far northwest as you can go in Indiana and still be on land, because the NW corner of the state is actually a point in Lake Michigan.

This is what you see at the Illinois-Indiana line just a few feet from Lake Michigan, while you are standing in Indiana.
A weatherworn, graffiti-scarred limestone obelisk. This is a closer view.
“In 1833, as Chicago and the Midwest were starting to grow, Congress ordered a new survey of the boundary between Illinois and Indiana,” says Chicago History Today, which asserts that the obelisk is the oldest public monument in Chicago. “When the survey was completed, a 15-foot high limestone obelisk was put in place on the shore of Lake Michigan, straddling the state line.

“By the 1980s the marker was isolated and neglected among the rail yards. Allen J. Benson, a ComEd executive, convinced the company to sponsor its restoration, in conjunction with the East Side Historical Society and other interested groups. In 1988 the marker was moved 190 feet north to its present location, just outside the [ComEd coal-fired power plant] gate. A new base was added at that time.”

Though moved into an area created by landfill, I understand that the obelisk still straddles the north-south Illinois-Indiana border, which a few feet further north heads out into Lake Michigan. It’s also the border between the city of Chicago and the city of Hammond. (Chicago extended out this far in massive 1889 annexation, which is yellow on the map.)

There’s a plaque near the obelisk that says the small area (maybe inside the fence) is Allen J. Benson Park to honor the exec, who has since died. The power plant closed in 2012, and its former site, a brownfield on the Indiana side of the line, is being redeveloped to be home to a data center.

When the plant was up and running, the marker didn’t look quite so forlorn: in the 2011, according to a Wikimedia image, three flagpoles and some trees were in the vicinity — but no metal fence — and there were plaques on the side of the obelisk with the state names. Guess they were stolen. Such is life in the big city, but I’m glad this curiosity from the 19th century still stands.

Oz Park

Oz Park is a mid-sized green space on the North Side of Chicago, bounded by W. Webster Ave. on the north and W. Dickens Ave. on the south, though there’s a patch of it south of Dickens; and N. Larrabee St. on the east and N. Burling St. on the west, which is a block east of Halsted.

After strolling north on Halsted recently, I visited Oz Park. Baseball fields and tennis courts take up much of the park, and people were using them to the fullest the day I wandered by. A fair share of the park is wooded or grassy, with walking or bicycling paths snaking through. Occasionally life is a walk in the park.

Oz Park is a successful example of urban renewal. That movement gets a bad rap, and it mostly should, but there are worthwhile spots as a result.

“In the 1960s, the Lincoln Park Conservation Association approached the City of Chicago in efforts to improve the community, and the neighborhood was soon designated as the Lincoln Park Urban Renewal Area,” the Chicago Park District says.

“The urban renewal plan identified a 13 acre-site for a new park, and in 1974, the Chicago Park District acquired the land. In 1976, the park was officially named Oz Park in honor of Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919), the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Baum didn’t live in Lincoln Park, but he did live in Chicago, so close enough. Certain aspects of the park honor his work, such as the Emerald Garden.

In more recent decades, Wizard of Oz characters have come to the park, such as the Scarecrow, who’s at one of the Emerald Garden entrances.
“In the early 1990s, the Oz Park Advisory Council and the Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce commissioned artist John Kearney to create a Tin Man sculpture, installed in October 1995, the Cowardly Lion, installed in May 2001, and the 7 ft., 800 lb. cast bronze Scarecrow, installed June 2005,” the park district says. “In Spring 2007 Dorothy & Toto joined their friends in the park.”

Being first, the Tin Man is the most prominent, standing in a highly visible spot where Larabee, Webster and Lincoln Ave. meet (Lincoln’s a diagonal that passes by the northeast corner of the park).

West of the Tin Man are Dorothy and Toto, standing back a bit in the shade.
Note the Ruby Slippers, not Silver Shoes. Artist’s prerogative, I guess.

I didn’t see the Cowardly Lion, but I figured he was elsewhere was in the park. As he is.

North Halsted, North to Dickens

Recently while in the city I took a stroll on N. Halsted St. from North Ave. to W. Dickens Ave. It was a pleasant summer day, but a little hot, so I spent most of my walk on the east side of the street — the shady side.

Sure, the song says to direct your feet to the sunny side of the street. That might be all right some times of the year, but not so much on a clear summer day.

As I wandered along, I decided to take pictures of ordinary North Side buildings along Halsted. I didn’t keep careful notes, but anyone wanting to know exact locations can consult Google Streetview.

Here’s the corner of Halsted and Dickens. Nice building. Then I turned east on Dickens.

Just a small sample. Halsted is a long street, passing through interesting areas both north and south in the city.

Last Thursday in June Olla Podrida

A few days ago, when it was cloudy and cool, I happened to be at the Schaumburg Town Center. The place has an underappreciated garden. Underappreciated by me, anyway.Since then, genuine summer has returned in the form of warmer temps. High 90s are forecast for the weekend. It’s been a rainy summer so far, though.

One detail I forgot to mention about the Lincoln Museum. Ann said she was most amused by learning that in his youth, the president was a talented ax-thrower. I was amused too. They took entertainment where they could get it in the 19th century.

One more picture from the Lincoln Museum. Don’t recognize them? On Jeopardy, the clue would be “Maj. Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris.”

The question: Which couple was in the presidential box with the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre?

Their story is as sad as that of the Lincolns, or even worse. Rathbone later married Harris, but his mental health deteriorated in the following years, and he eventually murdered her. He died in 1911 in an insane asylum.

Saw this not long ago in Chicago, on Irving Park Blvd.
A bust of Jose P. Rizal, ophthalmologist and martyred Philippine nationalist. How many ophthalmologists get to be national heroes as well? I can’t think of any others.

Chagall’s Four Seasons

Lunch break was long enough on Friday for me to wander over to what’s now known as Chase Tower Plaza, only a few blocks from Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago, and take another look at Marc Chagall’s Four Seasons.

That’s actually a picture I took a few years ago. But the light was about the same, and the mosaic isn’t any different. Some details.
It’s a fine work, though not one of his more famous ones. It’s also late Chagall, since he completed it in 1974. A canopy was added 20 years later, and renovations were done, because by the early 1990s, the Chicago elements had taken a toll.

The Daley Plaza Food Truck Array

On Friday, the court gave us a generous hour and a half for lunch, so I had time to look around the collection of food trucks in downtown Chicago’s Daley Plaza, some of them ‘neath the Chicago Picasso.

The array of trucks was broad. Maybe 15 in all, though I didn’t count.

The one I eventually picked. Had a grilled cheese sandwich a cut above most diners, say, but still a little expensive, I thought.

Jury duty was over late in the afternoon.

It was as if the trucks had never been there.

Jury Duty ’18

Some weeks ago, I got a postcard from the county informing me that I had jury duty. Time: Friday, June 15. Place: the 17th floor of Daley Center in downtown Chicago. So I got up early on Friday, caught a train and arrived ahead of the appointed time, 9:30 a.m.

Jury duty this time around was the same waiting slog it was some years ago. The large waiting room looked exactly the same, with its chairs and tables and a counter behind which the woman in charge of calling the panels spent the day as well. You might call the room design late 20th/early 21st-century nondescript public waiting space.

One small difference from last time: the wireless network name and password were posted on about a half-dozen small signs along the wall. Also, very visible green signs marked the location of electric outlets. There aren’t nearly enough of them.

Five or six panels of maybe 20 people each were called as the day went on, but not mine. I was able to do certain kinds of work: answering emails, deleting debris from my email account and my laptop, downloading picture and audio files, preparing documents to use later — all the sort of things that don’t involve writing. If I’d started a writing project that needed to be finished that day, sure as shooting my panel would have been called.

I also read some Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken Road, the third book about his travels on foot across the now-vanished Europe of the 1930s. That’s a volume I pick up and put down with some regularity. The writing is so erudite and painterly that I read much slower than usual, as if savoring a particularly wonderful piece of chocolate.

Fairly late in the afternoon, the woman behind the counter said, “You’ve done your jury duty. Come collect your checks.” So we did. For our troubles, $17.20, exactly the same as nearly six years ago.

2001 at the Music Box

Just before the screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago at noon on Saturday, one of the theater’s managers spent a few minutes telling us what to expect. Not in terms of content — it was a safe assumption that most (but not all) of the audience had seen the movie sometime in the last 50 years — but that there would be a few minutes of introductory music to a dark screen, and an intermission.

She also mentioned that the Music Box was one of a relatively small number of movie theaters nationwide equipped to screen the new 70 mm print of 2001. Interesting that a neighborhood jewel box of a theater from the 1920s has the latest movie screening tech.

I’d read about the new print. It was made recently from the original negatives, the goal of which wasn’t to clean up the images or digitally goose the movie, but to re-create as closely as possible what an audience would have seen in 1968. When I read about that, I knew I wanted to see it, even though I’ve seen the movie n times over the years.

For one thing, it had been a long time since I’d seen 2001 in a movie theater. I know I did at some point in the early ’70s, when I was old enough to be dropped off at a movie theater, the Broadway Theater in Alamo Heights, but not old enough to drive there myself. I saw it again at some mall theater during high school, after which I read Arthur C. Clarke’s book. In college, I saw it a few more times, at the Vanderbilt student cinema, and I think at an early multiplex in San Antonio during an early ’80s summertime revival.

Since then, I’ve seen it on VHS, DVD and on demand, but not in a theater. I was miffed that TCM didn’t pick it for its big screen series this year for the 50th anniversary, while choosing to show entertaining but lesser moves like Big and Grease. But maybe that’s because the 70 mm version was in the offing elsewhere (including Cannes, where it was first shown not long ago).

More than wanting to see 2001 in a theater, I was intrigued by the idea that it would look like it did 50 years ago. I wasn’t old enough to see it then. I’ll never have the experience of seeing it when it was just a strange new movie — no one ever will again — before it worked its way into the common culture, inspiring volumes of interpretation and giving us an unshakable image of a killer sentient computer with an unctuous voice. Still, this would be as close as I’d get to an original showing.

Ann went with me. Yuriko did not want to go and Lilly had a conflict. The Music Box wasn’t full for the showing, but there was a fair crowd, and not everyone was my age or older. The 70 mm “unrestored” print didn’t disappoint. It also showed, if there was ever any doubt, that 2001‘s special effects were special indeed, from the closest foreground to the furthest background.

Odd how those model spaceships, on actual celluloid, look more real than any GCI spaceships I’ve seen in a digital medium. That observation might be conditioning left over from my youth, or valid for most people, or meaningless all together. I don’t care. That’s what I see.

I noticed a few imperfections in the print: a scratch or two, minor pops of light, that kind of thing. That took me back. Do I remember right that probably as late as the 1980s, movies displayed those kinds of visual ticks?

Speaking of visuals, one new thing that occurred to me during this viewing, and there’s always something new each time, was the visual debt that some of the backgrounds owed to Chesley Bonestell and Luděk Pešek. For instance, a long shot showing the vertical landing of the ship that took Dr. Floyd to the Moon, with unrelated astronauts in spacesuits in the foreground, instantly brought Bonestell to mind — this time. You’d think I’d have noticed that before.

The soundtrack was loud. Except when it wasn’t. At first I thought that was a function of the more advanced sound systems of our time compared with 1968, and so not quite like an original audience would have experienced it. Now I’m not so sure.

“The team also went back to the original six-track soundtrack and faithfully transferred it to the new prints,” the Variety article notes. “ ‘The film is mixed in a very extreme way,’ [director Christopher] Nolan says with awe. ‘There are incredible sonic peaks that are beyond anything anyone would do today.’ ”

Sonic peaks from the get-go, I’d say, as the heavens align to the “Also sprach Zarathustra” fanfare. But for me the most startling sonic peak comes when HAL decides to murder the hibernating astronauts. The cut is from the quiet of the spaceship while Bowman is out retrieving Poole’s body to a sudden, full-screen, flashing COMPUTER MALFUNCTION accompanied by a loud beeping. Louder, I believe, than in other versions of the film. I heard at least one audience member gasp when the scene started.

As well she should have. In my earliest viewings of the movie, that scene disturbed me the most. Sure, you can say HAL went just a little funny in the head because of contradictory programming. Or maybe he was just an evil bastard willing to murder people in their sleep. You know, like some people are. I’m hardly alone in noting that HAL was pretty much the most human member of the crew, for better and definitely worse.

Then again, the sound wasn’t always loud, or even quite intelligible. The more-or-less idle chitchat on the space station at the very beginning of the spoken dialog was a little hard to hear. Everything is intentional in a Kubrick movie, so I suppose that fits with the movie’s well-known lack of exposition.

That was one of the few things I told Ann before the movie. I didn’t want to over-prepare her, but I did say that obtrusive exposition wasn’t one of the movie’s characteristics. Had there been voice-over narration — the original script apparently called for that — I believe that would count as obtrusive, and the movie wouldn’t be regarded as highly. I never did quite like the brief narration at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove, though I can see why it’s there.

Here’s something I never noticed in the soundtrack. Again, during the idle chitchat at the beginning, there’s a background PA voice announcing the following. Twice.

A blue lady’s cashmere sweater has been found in the restaurant. It can be claimed at the manager’s desk.

How did I never hear that before? It popped out at me this time. Maybe that’s a function of the new print. Or maybe it’s just one of those things tucked inside a densely layered work of art that isn’t noticeable early on.

Later, the PA says: Will Mr. Travers please contact the met office.

Whatever that is. Interesting detail, those PA announcements. As if to show that by the end of the 20th century, space travel will have some of the ordinariness of air travel in 1968. Many of the space station details — the customs screening, the restaurant, the phone call — point to that.

Guess that counts as 1968 optimism about the future of space travel. It’s easy to deride that in hindsight, but it wouldn’t have been completely unreasonable at the time. We were well on the way to the Moon, for one thing.

After that would come large space stations, Moon bases, voyages to Mars and rocket engines and spaceships large enough to mount an expedition to Jupiter in 18 months. The idea that extensive space travel would be part of the near future had jumped out of speculative fiction into the realm of serious expectation. Turned out no one wanted to pay for those things, but that was still in the future.

The movie is not, on the other hand, optimistic about future of politics, as you’d expect from Kubrick. That’s another thing that occurred to me for the first time. It’s only hinted at, but the hints are pretty clear. Mainly, the movie assumes that political bureaucracies will be the same prevaricating, susicious entities they’ve long been.

Dr. Floyd is either an important official of the U.S. government, or in a quasi-governmental body, but in any case the lid is slammed down on the discovery of the monolith on the Moon. He offers the official, and secret, reason.

Floyd: I accept the need for absolute secrecy in this and I hope you will too. Now, I’m sure you’re all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public without adequate preparation and conditioning. Anyway, this is the view of the council.

Eighteen months later, the monolith is still a secret, even from the astronauts going to investigate where the radio beam pointed. Talk about paranoid secrecy. It’s almost Soviet in its reach.

Floyd expresses the idea, which isn’t unusual in science fiction, that the discovery of extraterrestrials would somehow cause “cultural shock and social disorientation.” Not just science fiction. I seem to remember discussion along those lines — a “fundamental change” in our thinking or some such, if not shock or disorientation — as far back as when the Vikings were digging unsuccessfully for microbes on Mars.

I’m skeptical that any such thing would happen. Say we discovered an alien artifact tomorrow. Something indisputable, except that there would be a group of fools that disputes it anyway. But let’s say most people accepted it for good reasons.

Then what? Assuming the artifact isn’t attacking us or producing pathogens, nothing too dramatic. The reaction would be, how about that. Someone is out there. How interesting. Maybe over the course of decades or centuries, the discovery would change the way we think, but for most people in the here and now, it would be a curiosity. Our lives would go on. Besides, we’ve already been conditioning ourselves, in books and movies and TV and more, to the possibility of aliens for years.

Overall, I’d say 2001 is optimistic, assuming a certain common interpretation of the movie. After much travail — it is an odyssey, after all — mankind does reach for the next level of development, just as the ape-men did.

One more thing I thought about for the first time this time around: Why no redundancy for HAL? The astronauts talk about shutting down HAL and resuming the mission using Earth-based computers, which would certainly be a clunky way to go about it at that distance. And mission control mentions “twin” 9000 series computers at its disposal. So why weren’t at least two HAL-class computers built into the Discovery? In case, you know, one fails in some way, such as trying to go all HAL on the crew.

A nit to pick. After it was over, Ann seemed impressed, and had some questions and observations. She did sleep through some of the movie, though. Especially those long scenes outside the spacecraft.

She may or may not grow to like 2001 as much as I do. It’s an acquired taste, and not for everyone. But I’m glad she went.

More About Infrastructure

At last, a warm day, as days in May should be. The soggy ground is drying up, too. Enough that I could mow the front yard and cut down the standing dandelions. Then sit on the deck with a soft drink. Bzzz. What’s that? The first mosquito of the season. There will be more.

Another item I picked up at the water reclamation plant last weekend: a Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago calendar.

Each month has a different picture from the 1890s to the 1920s, presumably from the archives of the district, since all of the images are of water-related structures or workers busy building such structures: the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, bridges across the Chicago River, and Cal-Sag Channel and the North Shore Channel.

So I was inspired to made a list of the various kinds of infrastructure that I’ve seen over the years, besides the recent visit to a water reclamation (sewage treatment) plant. It isn’t very long; I need to see more infrastructure, clearly.

The list includes a UPS distribution hub, a control room for an electric substation, an intermodal container facility, a railroad switching yard, a recently completed warehouse, an unfinished airport, a space port, a deep-space relay dish, a drinking water treatment plant, a solvent recycling facility, and a geothermal energy plant. The basement of the greenest building in the country might count, too, as well as green roofs.

I suppose bridges, tunnels and dams count as infrastructure, though if you’re getting that general any road one has been on would be so too, and that’s not particularly distinctive. Still, it’s hard to deny Hoover Dam’s place in the world of infrastructure, even if it’s also a tourist attraction.

If you count factories — and in some sense, they count as the infrastructure of the modern world — that would include seeing places where beer, wine, cars, steel, coins, paper money, chocolate, cheese, refrigerators, bread, jelly beans, and Tabasco Sauce are made.

“Nuclear Energy”

If you visit the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, you can also easily visit “Nuclear Energy,” which is on a small plaza only about a half a block to the south, on Ellis Ave. (but not part of the museum’s collection). I’d seen it before — I couldn’t say exactly when — but Yuriko and Ann hadn’t. So we took a look.

“Nuclear Energy” is a Henry Moore bronze on the site of the first manmade self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, the 75th anniversary of which just passed last December 2.

As for the sculpture, it was dedicated exactly 25 years after Chicago-Pile-1 was built and tested on the site, so its 50th anniversary was on December 2 too. Looks good for being out in the Chicago weather for so long, but I suppose it’s maintained.
Abstract, as Henry Moores tend to be, but of course you think of a mushroom cloud. Moore denied that, offering up (I’ve read) some art-speak about a cathedral, but I’m not persuaded. A mushroom cloud is perfectly fitting.