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.

The Shedd Aquarium

Posted on August 16, 2016 by admin

The Shedd Aquarium, I’ve read, houses 32,000 animals — 1500 species including fish, marine mammals, birds, snakes, amphibians, and insects — and contains 5 million gallons of water. A “water zoo,” as Ann put it as we waited to get in last Friday. A lot of people were waiting to get in. A lot of people were already in.
That made the exhibits a little difficult to see sometimes. On the other hand, sometimes spectators added charm to the scene.
If you were patient enough, you could eventually see the tanks and tanks full of fish and other sea- and riverlife, small —
— and larger —
And some colorful static sealife scenes.
On the whole, the glass tanks and lighting and crowds made it hard to take pictures, but that’s just as well. The first thing to do somewhere interesting is to see it with your own eyes.

Saw lots of interesting creatures. That accounts for the Shedd’s popularity. It’s a water zoo of strange and sometimes bizarre things, even in our jaded age.

Sometimes the creatures were easy to identify, such as the octopi and the piranhas and the blue lobster — intense Prussian blue, as the Shedd notes. “The brilliant blue color is the result of a genetic mutation that causes the lobster to produce an overabundance of a large, complex protein called crustacyanin (‘cyan’ derives from the Greek word for dark blue) that binds the protein for the normal brownish coloration, canceling it out. Even the lobster’s antennae are blue.”

Another star attraction is Granddad, an Australian lungfish that’s been living at the Shedd since 1933. “Weighing in at 20 pounds and measuring four feet long, Granddad is believed to be the oldest fish in captivity at any public aquarium or zoo in the world,” asserts Chicago Tonight. He’s not much to look at, though (and I think his previous name, Methuselah, was better).

Speaking of the piranhas, we got a good look at them. According to a sign next to their tank, “their teeth are razor-sharp. Even so, piranhas usually just nip the tail and scales of other fishes to fill up on protein. Piranhas don’t hunt for people, cattle or other mammals. Many don’t even eat whole fish.”

What? I refuse to believe it. I saw the Saturday afternoon movies. I know that when luckless explorers in the Amazon basin put as much as a toe in the water, piranhas attack instantly and en masse.

Sometimes the creatures weren’t so easy to identify. The Shedd helpfully includes a digital kiosk next to most of the tanks, and you can scroll through pictures with common and scientific names to ID them. Trouble was, I’d look at some odd thing in the tank, and then scroll through looking for some picture like it, and find nothing. That happened more than once. Ah, well.

The crowds were a little tiring, but we enjoyed the place enough to stay most of the afternoon, to near closing. Part of the time we were in the Shedd’s new — new to us, since we hadn’t seen it, but it was completed in 1991 — Oceanarium. More about which tomorrow.

Olmec Head & Man-Sized Fish in Chicago

Posted on August 15, 2016 by admin

Where in the Chicago area is this fellow?

Between the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium in downtown Chicago, that’s where, with the Field Museum in the background of the picture. It’s a replica by Ignacio Perez Solano of Olmec Head 8, and a gift of the state of Veracruz to Chicago, dedicated in 2003. So while near the Field Museum, it’s actually part of the city’s collection of outdoor art. It might not be as imposing as the original, but it’s no small thing at seven feet high and a weight of seven tons.

Later it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the original Olmec heads, beyond their great antiquity in pre-Columbian Mexico, so I read a bit. “Seventeen heads have been discovered to date, 10 of which are from San Lorenzo and 4 from La Venta, two of the most important Olmec centres,” the Ancient History Encyclopedia tells me. “The heads were each carved from a single basalt boulder which in some cases were transported 100 km or more to their final destination, presumably using huge balsa river rafts wherever possible and log rollers on land….

“The heads were sculpted using hard hand-held stones and it is likely that they were originally painted using bright colours. The fact that these giant sculptures depict only the head may be explained by the widely held belief in Mesoamerican culture that it was the head alone which contained the emotions, experience, and soul of an individual.”

Apparently the state of Veracruz, especially when Miguel Alemán Velasco was governor (1998-2004), decided that norteamericanos would benefit from replica Olmec heads, so there are now eight such heads in the U.S., according to Wiki: Austin, Chicago, Covina, Calif., McAllen, Tex., New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and West Valley City, Utah.

Closer to the Shedd is a very different sort of sculpture, the aptly named “Man With Fish.”

According to the Chicago Park District, the work is “a gift to the Shedd Aquarium from William N. Sick in honor of his wife, Stephanie… The painted bronze sculpture portrays a man with his arms wrapped around an enormous fish. Water sprays from the fish’s mouth, dripping into a reflecting pool below.”

William Sick is a prominent local businessman, and also happens to be a trustee and former chairman of the Shedd Aquarium, and a director of Millennium Park. He must have decided at some point that a sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol was just the thing for the Shedd. It was the artist’s first work in the U.S., installed in 2001.

“Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957), a German sculptor who studied at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, created “Man with Fish,” the park district continues. “Several of Balkenhol’s works feature human figures relating to an animal or several animals in an unexpected way. ‘Man with Fish’ conveys this playful approach as does ‘Small Man with Giraffe’ which stands in front of the Hamburg Zoo.”

We didn’t go all the way downtown just to look at statues, as interesting as they were. Lilly goes to university this week, so we all wanted to do something together before that. Ultimately we picked the Shedd Aquarium. We figured it wouldn’t be quite so crowded on Friday as it would be on Saturday, so we went on Friday.
Wrong.

Notes From the Silly Season ’97

Posted on August 7, 2016 by admin

August 8, 1997

Summer is dwindling… & the days float by like so many logs on a river, on their way to the sawmill of mind, to be made into the planks of memory… hm, don’t know that I would show that metaphor in public. Or is it a simile? What was the difference, anyway? So much for my liberal education.

Had a light brush with celebrity last Friday. A movie crew spent the whole day out in front of my office building, shooting something. It’s a good, very urban sort of location, and features a conveniently large traffic island to boot, so they weren’t the first ones I’ve seen there.

But it was no small effort, unlike a TV commercial or some music video. On hand were two huge cameras, a couple of cherry pickers outfitted with artificial shade that they could adjust as the sun crossed the sky, dozens of extras and a lot of technicians and crew waiting around for something to do. As I left for the day, I could see some active filming going on, and the star (as I’d heard) was indeed Bruce Willis, whom I got a short look at. Not my first choice among movie stars, but he was good in 12 Monkeys, anyway.

E-mail has proven itself quite interesting in the month or so I’ve had it. I’ve heard from people I almost never — in a couple of cases, flat-out never — get real mail from. I’ve also found out a number of things I might not have otherwise, not at least for months or years. Just this week an old VU friend e-mailed me to say he was moving to San Francisco after living 14 years on the East Coast. Not long before that, I found out that a Scotsman I knew in Japan had become a father this year.

Then there was the running series of E-Postcards (the sender’s phrase). One fellow I know took a laptop on vacation and has sent a daily report on his movements (mostly on the West Coast) to a large number of e-addresses, mine included.That’s something you won’t catch me doing, taking a laptop on vacation.

2016 Postscript: Since then, a child of mine then in utero has grown up, I often take laptops on the road, but not on vacations per se, and the most recent Bruce Willis movie I’ve seen is The Sixth Sense. I think Mercury Rising was the movie being made that day. It was one of the turkeys that earned Mr. Willis a Golden Raspberry that year.

As for email, I don’t use the hyphen any more, and the in pre-social media days, the regularity with which people corresponded on paper was a pretty good predictor of how much they used email. After the novelty was over, people who were lousy paper correspondents proved to be the same electronically.

Thursday Trifles

Posted on August 4, 2016 by admin

One more picture from Navy Pier.
Saw about a half-dozen ASK ME sign holders on Saturday, and I did ask one which way it was to the tall ships entrance. He told me.

Occasionally I still flip through TV channels, just to see what I can see. A few weeks ago I was doing so, and happened to have my camera handy. Here’s something I found.

By gum, it was original cast Three’s Company. Accept no substitutes. I spent all of about a minute watching it. Enough to get the gist of that week’s comedy of errors: a holiday show that saw Jack and the girls wanting to get away from the Ropers to attend a more interesting Christmas party, while the Ropers were doing their best to bore their young guests, so they could attend a more interesting Christmas party. The same one. Har-dee-har-har.

Then I became curious about Man About the House. It occurred to me that I’d never seen it. In the age of YouTube, there’s no reason not to, so I watched Series 1, Episode 1 (since removed, but it’ll probably be back). It was no Fawlty Towers, or even Steptoe and Son, but it wasn’t that bad. It had a couple of advantages over its American counterpart, such as better comic acting, especially the part of the landlord, and no Suzanne Somers. Remarkable how much of a difference that makes. Well, not that remarkable.

Some of the Man About the House lines were so very completely, breathtakingly British. The last line of the episode, for instance. Off camera, the brunette roommate persuaded the landlord to let the male character move in, as he was on camera in the kitchen with the blonde roommate. When the male character asked her how she did that — the landlord was gone by this time — she said, “I told him you were a poof.”

An announcement on Wednesday from the IOC: “The… IOC today agreed to add baseball/softball, karate, skateboard, sports climbing and surfing to the sports programme for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.”

What, no tug-of-war? Skateboarding, but not tug-of-war, a sport that’s easy to understand, telegenic and opens up the possibility of beach tug-of-war?

A Lot of Tall Ships

Posted on August 3, 2016 by admin

Last Saturday, Navy Pier, Chicago: Pay your money, get your wristband, and pretty soon you can board the likes of this.
Even better, this.
The first ship is brig Niagara out of Erie, Pa., while the next one is El Galeón Andalucía, out of Cadiz, Spain.

Every three or four years, Chicago hosts a tall ships festival. The formal name of this year’s event was the Pepsi® Tall Ships® Chicago 2016, complete with registered trademarks symbols flying like pennants. I’m sure PepsiCo paid big bucks for the naming rights, but I can’t help feeling that the drink of choice among seafarers on tall ships should be rum. Bacardi ought to look into it.

Pepsi® Tall Ships® Chicago 2016 is part of a larger movement of sailing ships through the Great Lakes this year, known as the Tall Ships Challenge®. (There’s that trademark again, but I refuse to use all caps.) The event is organized by the Tall Ships Foundation and includes visits to Great Lake ports this summer, as well as races between the participants.

Even now, the ships are on their way to Green Bay and then Duluth. Next year, other ships will visit Atlantic ports, and presumably after that Pacific ports, and so on. Guess the visits count not only as seafaring — an end unto itself — but are also for publicity and fundraising. The tall ships probably cost a lot to maintain, now that the supply of cheap Jack Tar labor isn’t what it used to be.

The participating ships were docked at Navy Pier. All were available to board and look around, while some offered rides on the lake for an extra (and fairly high) fee. All together, we boarded eight of the ships, or more than half: the Niagara and the Andalucía, but also the Pride of Baltimore II, Denis Sullivan, Madeline, Mist of Avalon, Playfair, and the Draken Harald Hårfagre.

Coolest of all was the galleon. Everybody seemed to feel that way, since that ship had the longest line to board. It was worth the wait of about 30 minutes. How often do you have the chance to board a Spanish galleon and look around? Not often.

The vessel, completed only in 2010, is a 170-foot, 495-ton wooden replica of a galleon that was part of Spain’s West Indies fleet, or, as Wiki puts it: “El Galeón Andalucía es la reproducción de un galeón español del siglo XVII.”

The other ships had their interests as well, including the Niagara and the Pride of Baltimore II —
— and especially the Draken Harald Hårfagre, a re-creation of a Viking ship. The light was wrong for me to get a good side image of the vessel, but there are plenty of pictures of her.

Apparently there was some kind of kerfuffle about the Draken Harald Hårfagre in U.S. Great Lakes waters. Something about leaving behind a swath of destruction, pillaging as they went by — Cleveland, Detroit, Mackinaw City, Green Bay… No, that wasn’t it.

The ship’s problems are more pedestrian than that: not being able to pay a pilotage fee. The Sun-Times reported before the tall ships event: “While docked in Bay City, Michigan, the crew of a 115-foot vessel found out last week that they were required by law to have a pricey navigational pilot on board while traveling the Great Lakes in U.S. waters.”

Maybe that’s an onerous requirement. I’m not competent to say. But you’d think that the owners of the ship might have known about it before entering U.S. waters. Anyway, apparently they raised enough scratch to get to Chicago, and I’m glad. It was another cool ship to tour.

In fact, we got a guided tour by one of the crew, the only ship to provide that.
As a 21st-century replica, certain things about the ship would have been unfamiliar to, say, Erik the Red. Such as the hidden diesel engine, or the hidden stove and toilet aboard. Modern safety regs don’t allow as many crew as the ship would need to actually row it, so the oars are mostly for show, though the crew uses the sails as propulsion if it all possible. Also, in the spirit of modern Scandinavian egalitarianism, the crew’s half men and half women.

Navy Pier 2016

Posted on August 2, 2016 by admin

One of the new things this season at Chicago’s Navy Pier is the Ferris wheel.
“The new attraction, dubbed the Centennial Wheel in honor of the Lake Michigan landmark’s 100th anniversary this July, offers a higher and longer but also higher-speed hoop ride than the one provided by its predecessor,” noted the Chicago Tribune in May. The ride is also significantly more expensive.”

But of course. Can’t let any opportunity pass to grab more of that tourist dollar.

“At 196 feet tall, 48 feet taller than the structure it replaces, the Centennial Wheel is present on the pier but not dominant, occupying roughly the same footprint as the old one, which began offering rides in 1995 and gave its last one here in September.

“The old wheel — expected to start offering rides from its new home on Branson, Mo.’s Highway 76 next month — served up about 760,000 rides in 2014, just under 10 percent of all Navy Pier visitors (both figures were down from pier peaks). That was at $8 for an adult ticket.” The new basic price is $15, with (naturally) other options that cost more, to make those buying the base ticket feel like cheapskates.

Good to know that the old wheel, like so many aging entertainers, is finding a new audience in Branson. I remember that the cars were red and sported the Golden Arches, denoting its sponsor. I only rode the old one once, ca. 2002, on a company outing one summer day. Worth $8 (probably less then) for the views of the city and the lake.

Even so, there are plenty of views from Navy Pier, from the pier itself. Such as of the East Loop.
And sailing craft on Lake Michigan.
It had been a while since we’d been to Navy Pier. Not sure how long. A few years. Saturday was a good day for it, especially since temps weren’t expected to be in the 90s, as they had been the weekend before. While crowded, the expanse of the space — about 50 acres — holds a crowd pretty well, except for the food court.

As mentioned, Navy Pier is now 100 years old, built as Municipal Pier. “Navy” was an honorary title given in the 1920s, as the “Soldier” in Soldier Field, though in fact the U.S. Navy did use the pier for a while during WWII. By the time I got to know it in the late ’80s, the structure was in a state of picturesque decay.

As I wrote years ago: “For those unfamiliar with the pier, it juts into Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago a good quarter-mile or so. In the mid-90s, the City of Chicago fostered a redevelopment of the pier that transformed it from a seldom-visited, decaying relic, to the top tourist draw in the entire state of Illinois, featuring a large array of mostly family-friendly diversions, part outdoors, a good many indoors. Also, it has a relatively small amount of convention space (a gnat’s worth, compared to the elephantine McCormick Place).

“Occasionally, I miss the decaying relic, since it had some charm. I recall going there only twice in the late ’80s, once to see a live broadcast of a live radio show WBEZ no longer produces, at the ballroom at the tip of the pier; and another time to see parts of the AIDS Quilt on display under the pier’s enormous empty shed.”

As a summertime destination this year, Navy Pier wasn’t a random choice. We’d come to see the tall ships, more about which tomorrow.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Chicago