Four Houses of Worship

Posted on October 19, 2016 by admin

A number of churches — and other houses of worship — were part of Open House Chicago. That’s one of the attractions of the event, as far as I’m concerned.

In Evanston, we visited First Presbyterian. It’s not just a church. It’s a Daniel Burnham church.

The church’s web site says, “In July 1876 a new church building was dedicated after the original church burned down. However, this church only stood for 18 years. In February 1894, the second church burned to the ground [and maybe sank into the swamp]. The congregation met in a former roller rink while our current building was being constructed, at a cost of $80,000. Daniel H. Burnham, the famed architect who was the inspiration for Chicago’s lakefront, designed the new church.

“The church is constructed of Lemont limestone, with an interior finish of red oak and Georgian pine. The sanctuary is ninety by seventy-five feet, and with the balcony, seats eleven hundred persons.” A lovely sanctuary it is.
With a lot of stained glass. This wall includes the Old Testament collection.

In the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago is the Buddhist Temple of Chicago. I’m pretty sure we visited there ca. 1997 during a Japanese cultural festival (I remember the taiko drummers especially). Seems that there’s an new building on the site now, or newer anyway, built 10 years ago. The religious organization goes back much further, to when Japanese and Japanese-Americans forced off the West Coast resettled in Chicago.

A fine altar.And a nice collection of wood panels. This one illustrates Gautama under the Bodhi Tree.

In the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, on the same street and the same block — Lunt Ave., near Ridge — are St. Jerome, a Catholic church, and the local HQ of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON Chicago).

Here’s St. Jerome, a century old this year, with its Italian Renaissance exterior. The architect was one Charles H. Prinderville.

Inside, an ornate Baroque sanctuary. At some point, the building was lengthened, becoming one of the longer church buildings I’ve seen lately.

Practically across the street, the devotees of Krishna do what they do. Until 1980, the structure was a Masonic temple. Now inside you can see depictions of Sri Kishora, or the youthful Krishna, and Sri Kishori, or the youthful Radharani.

Then there’s this fellow.

That’s an awfully lifelike statue of Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977), whom you might call a Vaishnavite Hindu missionary to the West. He seems to have done well with that.

I can’t resist one more thing: cutting and pasting his name here in Sanskrit (according to Wiki, anyway), just because I can: अभय चरणारविन्द भक्तिवेदान्त स्वामी प्रभुपाद

Open House Chicago 2016

Posted on October 16, 2016 by admin

Turns out there are two kinds of building-visiting events in the world, Open House and Doors Open, and a good many cities in a lot of countries participate in one or the other. (Shucks, missed Milwaukee’s — next year, maybe). As far as I can tell, the idea is exactly the same in both cases: one weekend out of the year, various buildings are open — maybe a little more open than they’d usually be — and you can wander in and look around. A really good idea, if you asked me.

I was out of town last year, but participated in Open House Chicago in 2013. Yuriko and I went in ’14, and again this year, on Saturday. This time our focus was Evanston and some sites on the North Side of Chicago. All are parts of metro Chicago that we know well, but no matter how well you know a place, there’s always more to it. First we drove to Evanston, and then on foot and by El train, we managed to visit more than a dozen places new to us.

Including, in Evanston: the Francis Willard House Museum, Sigma Alpha Epsilon National Headquarters (Levere Memorial Temple), Northwestern University’s Charles Deering Library and its Dearborn Observatory, Stone Terrace (an elegant B&B near Lake Michigan), the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, and the Lake Street Church of Evanston.

In the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, we had lunch at a good Vietnamese restaurant — there are many around Broadway and Argyle — and then went to the Bridgeview Bank Building, the Buddhist Temple of Chicago, the ICA GreenRise and the Preston Bradley Center (the Peoples Church).

In the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, just as our energy flagged, we managed to make it to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness building and then, practically across the street, St. Jerome’s, a Catholic church just about to start one of its Saturday masses, in Spanish.

With Evanston as target for the morning, we naturally spent a while walking around the still-leafy campus of Northwestern. The university, we saw, was quick to honor faculty member and recent Nobel laureate, Sir Fraser Stoddart.

Among other things, Sir Fraser is known for his work on mechanically interlocked molecular architectures. How it’s possible to understand such things, besides what they are in the first place, is a source of puzzled wonderment to me. But I’m glad there are people who do understand such things.

Sir Fraser’s banner was on Sheridan Road, near the southern edge of the school. From there we went further north, into the heart of the campus, where we chanced on Sir Fraser’s parking space.

This amused me for no good reason. Maybe it’s because Sir Fraser drives a Camry too (and does have a license plate, which I’ve blocked). His looks in better shape than mine.

Thursday Natterings, But Not From Nabobs of Negativism

Posted on September 29, 2016 by admin

I woke the heater up yesterday from its summertime hibernation, mainly to see whether it would wake up and blow hot air, which is all I ask of it. Fortunately, the machine snapped to its single job without any complaint, such as some weird noise I don’t want to hear. The previous night had been quite cool, as they are starting to be, lowering the house temp to 69 F. My test took it up to 70 F. Normally I keep the house at 68 F. when it’s cold outside.

I saw the first Halloween decorations in the neighborhood the other day when walking the dog. It was a small faux cemetery in a front yard, featuring hand-painted sturdy cardboard (or cheap wood) tombstones. I don’t remember what any of them said.

Probably not Here Lies Les Moore. No Les, No Moore. I think I saw that in a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not collection years ago. That one I believe. Sounds like frontier humor to me.

Another remarkable collection of recent space photos from the Atlantic. As the intro notes, “We [as in, mankind] currently have spacecraft in orbit around the Sun, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, a comet, Jupiter, and Saturn; two operational rovers on Mars; and a recent close flyby of Pluto.”

Closer to home, here are two signs I saw recently in Chicago.

That’s a little alarming. I can think of a lot better places to pass the future. The only future I want from McDougall’s are occasional breakfast sandwiches.

Dirt cheap, eh? And what do your beneficiaries get? Enough to pay for the dirt that covers you, maybe.

The last Weaver is gone. Fred Hellerman died recently, I just learned. Time then to listen to the re-union Weavers sing “Get Up and Go.”

One more thing: I don’t think I’ve ever seen olives packed this way before. A Trader Jose offering, as the package tells us.

I opened them today at lunchtime. Not bad at all.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Posted on September 21, 2016 by admin

A docent at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, asked me how long it has been since I last visited the museum. I couldn’t remember. I’m pretty sure it was sometime after the current building opened 20 years ago, though I couldn’t say when, or what I saw. Reason enough to visit again on a pleasant September Saturday in 2016.

Encyclopedia Chicago says that “the new building clad in aluminum and Indiana limestone opened in June 1996 in a 24-hour summer solstice celebration. Referencing the modernism of Mies van der Rohe as well as the tradition of Chicago architecture, the $46 million structure is among the largest in the United States devoted to contemporary art. Its 45,000 square feet of galleries, with a permanent collection boasting more than 5,600 works and a 300-seat auditorium and outdoor sculpture garden, is suitable for large-scale artworks, new media, and ever larger audiences.”

Maybe so, but the structure, designed by German architect Josef Paul Kleihues, presents an unfriendly face to the public.

I don’t dislike it, exactly, but it doesn’t say art museum to me. Change the signage just a little and you’ve got a police headquarters, a telecom company, or a top-drawer server farm. Then again, art museums don’t have to look like the Art Institute either. MCA is what it is on the outside, and an interesting museum on the inside.

The inside is more welcoming. One example: MCA has some of the more comfy chairs — small sofas enclosed by spacious cubical-like structures — of any museum I’ve been to. Toward the end of our visit, if we’d stayed too long in one of these after so much time on foot, we might have fallen asleep.

Currently the big MCA exhibit is of Kerry James Marshall, an artist I was wholly unfamiliar with, in a show called “Mastry.” That just shows how little I pay attention to contemporary art. He’s a living artist, only a few years older than I am, and a resident of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. A remarkable body of his work is on display.

Of Marshall, Sam Worley wrote in the April edition of Chicago magazine this year, just before the MCA show opened, “At 25, he decided to return to the basics and paint a self-portrait—a classic portrait, almost. Its title alluded to a great literary work: ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.’ [1980]

“Marshall used egg tempera, a 13th-century favorite. He adopted compositional techniques associated with artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael. But, of course, his subject was black. So black that the shade of his skin is deeper than the portrait’s black background, which he fades into, as if invisible. Compared with conventional European portraiture, it’s like a photo negative….

“And so Marshall settled on creating a body of work inspired by and in dialogue with the classics—his early barbershop portrait ‘De Style,’ for example, its name a sly play on the Dutch abstract art movement de Stijl—while remaining resolutely its own thing. He found success with a simple insistence on placing black people, and black history, at the center of his raucous, colorful paintings, and that has opened a space for younger artists.”

A detail from “De Style” (1993).
Here’s one I particularly liked, a more recent painting, “Still Life with Wedding Portrait” (2015).

“In this painting, Marshall imagined a wedding portrait of a young Harriet Tubman… and her first husband, John… presenting her as someone’s beloved wife and not simply the stalwart resistance hero portrayed in standard histories,” the MCA notes.

As interesting as the Marshall show was, we also made time for other galleries. I always enjoy a spot of neon.
“Run From Fear, Fun From Rear” (1972) by Bruce Nauman.

Here are all the portraits of Patty Hearst you could want in one place. Twenty-six, to be exact.
“Patricia Hearst, A thru Z” (1979) by Dennis Adams.

I liked this especially: seven tons of sand on the floor in a dark room, along with radios, LED light box, and some ambient sound.
“A beach (for Carl Sagan)” (2016) by Andrew Yang.

MCA says of this: ” ‘The total of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of planet earth.’ So claimed Carl Sagan. In fact, astronomers estimated in 2003 that for every grain of sand on Earth’s beaches and deserts there exist ten times as many stars above. Yang takes Sagan’s pronouncement to heart in a scale model of the Milky Way in which one grain of sand represents one star; the estimated 100 billion stars are approximated by more than seven tons of sand.”

A scale model in numbers, but not size. How far would you have to scatter the sand to get that? That probably wouldn’t be too hard to figure out, but I don’t feel like it just now. I imagine it would be from here to one of the outer planets in the Solar System.

Behind the building, the museum has a sculpture garden. With only four — or was it five? — works. Quantity isn’t everything, but I think there should be more. Here’s “Graz Grosse Geister,” by German artist Thomas Schütte.
At some point during the visit I noticed that the museum guards weren’t just wearing black shirts with GUARD written on the back.
AVANT was on the front.

Just a little art joke, no extra charge.

The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Posted on September 20, 2016 by admin

Saturday was the annual Churches by Bus tour organized by the Chicago Architectural Foundation, which we were on last year and the year before. Not this year. We’ve been to two of the five churches listed on the tour. The tour isn’t precisely cheap, so I wanted a little more novelty. Four out of five, maybe.

So we planned to look at four churches around Michigan Ave. while in the neighborhood. Nothing new — almost nothing new — but no charge either. As it turned out, only two of the four were open, and a third had a service in progress; not the time to wander around looking at it. The open one that wasn’t busy was Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago on Michigan Ave., a fine Gothic structure in the heart of the shopping district.

Nice courtyard to the south of the main building, too.

When the church was finished in 1914, however, that part of Michigan Ave., still called Pine St., was no great shakes. Cheap land, in other words. All of the action on Michigan Ave. was still south of the Chicago River. That changed with the completion of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the river in 1920, and Fourth Pres has watched temples of mammon grow up around it since then.

A fine interior. Been inside a number of times over the years. The ceiling’s a little dark, but lights up there would be expensive not only in electricity usage, but maintenance, I figure.

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), an architect who did a lot of ecclesiastical work, designed the church. He’s also known for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Adjacent to the church is a much newer structure, the Gratz Center, which was completed only in 2013 to house a preschool program, the Buchanan Chapel, a new dining room and kitchen, offices, and rooms. We took a look at the second-story Buchanan Chapel, which is mostly spare, but well lit with natural light, and with a labyrinth on its floor. The chapel’s architect was Brian Vitale, in Gensler’s Chicago office.

Up in the corner of the chapel hangs “Quaternion,” a 2014 piece by Alyson Shotz, a Brooklyn artist.

Interesting. Often, that’s all I ask from bits of the world.

Michigan Avenue on a September Saturday Afternoon

Posted on September 19, 2016 by admin

We went downtown again on Saturday, more specifically to Michigan Avenue and within a few blocks to the east and west of that famed street. A famed street, and crowded on a Saturday during the time of year when it’s still warm.
The sidewalk wasn’t always that crowded. But sometimes it was, suddenly.

At the spot officially called Pioneer Court — I don’t know anyone who actually calls it that — in front of the Equitable Building and just south of the Tribune Tower, the new Michigan Avenue Apple Store is under construction, to take the place of the store further to the north on the avenue. They say it’ll be a humdinger when it’s done.
Wonder whether the bronze Jack Brickhouse will be in Pioneer Court near the Tribune Tower for much longer.
After all, the Tribune hasn’t owned the Cubs in a while, and the Tribune isn’t even going to own the Tribune Tower much longer (the company got $240 million for it). Then there’s the matter of Brickhouse being dead for nearly two decades. That’s a long time not to be on the radio. Time flies, people forget, your statue ends up in a less prominent location. Just speculation.

The plaza across the street from Pioneer Court, in the shadow of the Wrigley Building, was just the place on Saturday for some wedding photography. At least this party thought so, and they could do a lot worse.
The bust in the corner is of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DeSable, the fellow from Haiti — I suppose that would be from Saint-Domingue — who founded a trading post on the Chicago River near this site in the 1770s, making him the first non-Indian Chicagoan. I think that bust used to be where the Apple store is being built.

Not far away, just at that moment, was Jeremy the Magician from Britain. That’s what his hat said, anyway, and he had the accent for it, and a Union Jack vest, in case you didn’t get the point.
Further north, in fact not far from the Chicago Water Tower (can I call it iconic? Too bad that word’s been beaten to death), this fellow had a different sort of message.

Namely, you’re going to Hell.

(Capitalize “Hell.” English Language & Usage Stack Exchange says: “No less an authority than Fulton Sheen had the galleys for his latest book come back from the typesetters with ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ knocked down to lowercase. He carefully re-capitalized each occurrence. When his editor called to request an explanation, he gave what I think we can regard as the definitive answer to [the] question: Because they’re places. You know, like Scarsdale.)

The South Shore Cultural Center

Posted on August 31, 2016 by admin

The South Shore Cultural Center at 7059 S. South Shore Dr. in Chicago started off as the South Shore Country Club. “In 1905, Lawrence Heyworth, president of the downtown Chicago Athletic Club, envisioned an exclusive club with a ‘country setting,’ ” the Chicago Park District says. “Heyworth selected unimproved south lakefront property, often used for fishing and duck hunting, for the new country club.

“The club’s directors hired architects Marshall and Fox, later known for designing many of Chicago’s most luxurious hotel and apartment buildings, including the Drake Hotel. For inspiration, Heyworth provided a photograph of an old private club in Mexico City, but asked the architects to exclude expensive embellishments…

“Enjoying immediate success and social importance, South Shore Country Club quickly outgrew its facilities. Marshall and Fox were hired to build a new clubhouse, incorporating the original ballroom. Constructed in 1916, the larger and more substantial reinforced concrete building, like the original, was designed in the Mediterranean Revival style.”

So it remains to this day. I have fond memories of the place, since I attended Wendy and Ted’s wedding there 20 years ago last month, but I hadn’t been back since. (The Obamas had their wedding reception there as well in 1992.) Since Oak Wood Cemetery isn’t far away, I decided to swing by and look around again.

This is the front. If you turn around at that point, you’ll see a long, lush garden planted on the narrow boulevard that serves as the driving entrance to the property.

The back. Or maybe that’s actually the front, since it faces Lake Michigan. Wendy and Ted stood just inside those large windows to take their vows, while the audience looked toward them and out toward the lake. A very nice setting.
Some deferred maintenance. It’s 100 years old and belongs to the city, after all.
But the inside still looks resplendent. According to the city, “the country club’s membership peaked in the late 1950s. Simultaneously, many African-Americans began settling in South Shore. Because the private club excluded black members, it went out of business in the 1970s. In 1974, the Chicago Park District purchased the property to expand its lakefront facilities.”

I walked all the way around the building and through it, also taking in a few views of the lake from the South Shore Cultural Center. From a rocky shore.
From the property’s small beach.
I sat for a while at a picnic table nearby, and the ambient sound was an audio parfait. The waves crashed against the shore; the wind blew; and the cicadas in the nearby tree made their buzz.

A warm Saturday, but almost no one else was there. Not sure why. It isn’t the best beach on Lake Michigan, but not the worst either. Maybe there were algae blooms in the water or something else noxious that I couldn’t see.

Confederate Mound

Posted on August 30, 2016 by admin

Something I didn’t know until I visited Oak Woods Cemetery on Saturday: Confederate Mound, which is within the bounds of the cemetery but on land owned by the federal government, is thought to be the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere. Not only that, the memorial at the site is the largest one in the North dedicated to Confederate soldiers.

“Near the southwest corner of Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood [sic] stands a monument dedicated to the thousands of Confederate soldiers who died as prisoners of war at Camp Douglas,” notes the National Park Service. “The monument marks a mass grave containing the remains of more than 4,000 Confederate prisoners, reinterred here from the grounds of the prison camp and the old Chicago City Cemetery.

“Confederate Mound is an elliptical plot, approximately 475 feet by 275 feet, located between Divisions 1 and 2 of Section K. The most prominent feature of the plot is the Confederate Monument, a 30-foot granite column topped with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, a figure based on the painting ‘Appomattox’ by John A. Elder.” (The sculptor doesn’t seem to be known.)

As for Camp Douglas, it “opened in 1861 as a training site for newly recruited soldiers from this area, and part of it would remain so,” says the Chicago Tribune. “It was named for the man who donated its 60 acres of land: Stephen A. Douglas, the politician known as the ‘Little Giant,’ most famous for his 1858 debates for the U.S. Senate with Abraham Lincoln (Douglas won re-election).

“It became a prisoner-of-war camp in early 1862, as 5,000 Confederate soldiers moved in after being captured when Fort Donelson in Tennessee fell to Union troops led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.”

From there, things at the camp went from bad to very, very bad in short order, as usual for 19th-century POW camps. The result was a mass grave in a corner of Chicago probably unknown to most 21st-century Chicagoans.

At least the Confederate dead are memorialized in a highly visible way, a result of sectional reconciliation late in the 19th century. “General John C. Underwood, a regional head of the United Confederate Veterans, designed the monument and was at its dedication on May 30, 1895, along with President Grover Cleveland and an estimated 100,000 on-lookers,” the NPS says.

“In 1911, the Commission for Marking the Graves of Confederate Dead paid to have the monument lifted up and set upon a base of red granite; affixed to the four sides of the base were bronze plaques inscribed with the names of Confederate soldiers known to be buried in the mass grave.”

Near the Confederate memorial are the graves of 12 guards at the prison who probably were carried off by the same diseases that beleaguered their prisoners. Their stones are all marked Unknown.

There are also four well-preserved cannons at the site as well.
Elsewhere at Oak Woods Cemetery are a smaller number of Union graves — as far as possible from Confederate Mound, our guide pointed out (sectional reconciliation only went so far).
If I remember correctly, they were residents of a Chicago old soldier’s home, and so their burials were a good bit later than the Confederates’ (as at the Texas State Cemetery). A weather-worn soldier watches over them.
So does Lincoln, in an unusual posture for depictions of the 16th president.
Post 91 of the Department of Illinois GAR put up the statue, which is a copy of a statue erected in 1903 near Pana, Ill. The sculptor was Charles Mulligan, who also did “Lincoln, The Railsplitter” in Garfield Park.

One more stone at Oak Woods, though it has nothing to do with the Civil War. It’s a memorial to railroad engineer Cale Cramer.
Sacred to the memory of
CALE CRAMER
who lost his life by saving
the train at York, Indiana
July 27 1887.
Aged 37 years, 1 month
and 11 days.

It was a story I’d never heard before. Graveyards.com tells us that “Cale Cramer’s monument resembles a pile of disassembled locomotive parts. Cramer was an engineer for New York Central. On July 27, 1887, Cramer stayed at his post as another train approached. Attempting to prevent a head-on collision, he activated the brakes and shut off the steam. Cramer was killed in the crash, but had reduced speed enough that his passengers escaped without injury. The passengers raised funds to provide this monument.”

Oak Woods Cemetery

Posted on August 29, 2016 by admin

Large thunderstorm during the mid-afternoon today following a clear morning. That wasn’t so odd, but when I checked the radar maps it looked like only the northwestern suburbs were getting any rain at all. The storm also decided to linger here, and pour and pour, rather than race to the southeast as usual.

Oak Woods Cemetery occupies about 183 acres on the South Side of Chicago, only a short distance southwest of Jackson Park and about a mile west of Lake Michigan. On Saturday morning, I got up earlier than usual, drove down to Oak Woods and joined a Chicago Architecture Foundation tour of the cemetery. No one else in my house was interested, so I went by myself.

Skies were overcast, but at least the rains had stopped. Oak Woods, founded in 1853 south of the city — I believe it wasn’t in the city proper until the great annexation of 1889 — was part of the 19th-century vogue for park-like cemeteries. Which it remains to this day, green and leafy in late summer.

To design the place, the founders of the cemetery tapped one Adolph Strauch, a Prussian landscape architect who did parks and park-like cemeteries in the United States (Ve vill haf Ordnung, he was known to mutter). He was especially active in Cincinnati, but in Chicago, Strauch also did the highly picturesque Graceland Cemetery, the North Side equivalent of Oak Woods.

There are also a number of water features that add to the overall aesthetic.
The tour was partly concerned with the burial sites of well-known people. Oak Woods has quite a few, such as a number of Chicago mayors. Here’s Big Bill Thompson’s obelisk, for instance.
Here’s Harold Washington.

Other notable markers we saw included baseball player Cap Anson; Bishop Louis Henry Ford, head of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ; John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines; Rep. James R. Mann, who lent his name to the Mann Act; Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, star of the Negro League; and activist Ida B. Wells.

Along with Jesse Owens.
As well as Illinois politico Roland Burris. Former Sen. Burris, it should be noted, is still alive. He’s planning ahead with a sizable tomb detailing some of his career in stone, in a way that earned him a fair amount of ridicule. It did seem like a pompous exercise. Perhaps he doesn’t understand that Death doesn’t care about your CV.

Interesting stones I didn’t get to see included Enrico Fermi, Nancy Green, Chicago Mayor Monroe Heath, and pre-Capone Outfit boss Big Jim Colosimo, who was rubbed out in 1920. Or the monument and flag for the 16 firefighters and workers who died fighting the blaze at the Cold Storage Building at the World’s Fair on July 10, 1893.

Off in a corner of the property is a small, separate Jewish cemetery, fenced off probably to discourage vandals from disturbing the stones.
Reminded me a bit of the old Jewish cemetery in Krakow, though that’s had a few more centuries to age.

The Abbott Oceanarium

Posted on August 17, 2016 by admin

Years ago I attended the “groundbreaking” for the Shedd Aquarium’s Oceanarium, officially the Abbott Oceanarium these days, as an editor of a real estate magazine. Usually groundbreaking ceremonies involve guys in suits and hardhats moving a little dirt with gold-colored shovels. It’s an established ritual in the development business.

Occasionally developers take a different approach. One time in Nashville, a developer planned to raze an older building on West End Ave. — a fairly large commercial street — and so painted one of the large wooden doors on the old structure bright red, and then knocked it in with a wrecking ball. The really odd thing about that was that actual demolition didn’t start for a few more days, and in the interim the red door was put back together haphazardly. Maybe the owners didn’t want bums looking for shelter there.

At the Shedd, we stood outside — it was cold, so it must have been late 1989 or early 1990 — as a crane hoisted a square-cut boulder into the air at the edge of Lake Michigan. It was a big thing, the sort of rock used to build breakwaters. The ceremony consisted of dropping the rock into the lake, right where the Shedd planned its expansion.

This is what that the exterior of the Oceanarium looks like now, jutting into Lake Michigan.
The facility’s upper level includes a sizable amphitheater that looks over a large pond and then through the windows out into the lake (with the Adler Planetarium visible not far away). During a show, the window are shuttered.

We saw a show. The Shedd staff didn’t say so openly, of course, but the subtext of the event was, “We’re not like Seaworld. Not at all. Don’t even think it.” The dolphins and beluga whales thus interacted with their trainers, and the animals seemed glad to be there. It wasn’t a particularly exciting show, though.

There’s also a tank for otters and another one for penguins.
We also spent a while watch the belugas in their tank, who were joined by Shedd staff. A lot of other people watched, too.
More fun to watch that the organized show, I think.