Late summer 2019, northwest suburbs.
Might as well be late summer, 2022. Except for everything that’s happened since then.
Category Archives: Suburban Chicago
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.
Late Bloomers
Summer is ebbing away, but it’s still warm. Looks to be for a little while longer.
Took a photographic survey of our back yard flowers this afternoon. The hibiscus are mostly gone, but other blooms whose names I don’t know carry on during the declining summertime.
Such as this blood-red bloom.
Less intense, but still a vivid color.
On to pink.
White.
One more — vivid red again, but this one was worth a look not only because it’s striking, but because its a bloom on what many people would probably disdain as a weed (before it flowered, that is).
The term weed ought to be specifically plants that interfere with agriculture, as well as old slang for cannabis. Mostly it just means plants people don’t like. There are plants I don’t like, and sometimes — when I have the energy — I uproot them. But usually I think of plants such as the one above as volunteers, whether they produce vivid flowers or not.
Budget Buster
I’ve been seeing items in various stores advertised as “inflation busters,” which is vacuous as most other ad-speak, and not very original. But it did seem to inspire this variation, found on a circular for a local pizza joint.
Made me smile. Budget buster, eh? What was the thought process that went into that choice of words, which ended up meaning the exact opposite of what was probably intended?
Unless, of course, they meant to say that the place is expensive, so it’s got to be good. Somehow, I doubt it. If you really can feed 20 people — let’s take the low-end estimate — then $8.25 each isn’t bad.
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.
Dimming Summer Light
Goldenrod has started to turn golden out toward the back yard fence. I noticed that as the sun was going down for the last time in August 2022. It’s been an eventful month.
The dog was patrolling the yard at that moment.
Her patrols know no season, but various creatures to spy — including dogs beyond the fence — are more likely in the warmer months
Temporary Saw Horse Installation
A thunderstorm rolled through yesterday around 6 pm, and today again around noon. Each was followed by slightly cooler air and clear skies. Summer’s in decline, but not gone. Ragweed has started pumping out its pollen.
The repaving of our street is done, leaving behind asphalt smooth as Tennessee whiskey, but dark as a claims adjuster’s heart. Will genetically modified moss or some such — smooth and hard, but green and alive — one day in some future decade be the surface of choice for transportation infrastructure?
Meanwhile, the paving contractor recently gathered all of the lighted saw horses from the street, and lined them up for removal. It was a few days (and nights) before they got around to picking them up.
Nice effect after dark. We’ve walked the dog that way a few times, and while it might impress us a little, the dog doesn’t seem interested in such items. Can’t eat it, or smell it, or exchange growls or whines with it, so who cares?