Category Archives: Suburban Chicago

Graue Mill & Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve

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Not long ago I was passing through the western suburbs, not too far from where I lived — and it feels a little strange to put it this way — around the turn of the century. Since I had a little extra time, I decided on a whim to visit the Graue Mill and Museum.

Re-visit it. The last time I was there, I remember pushing one of my daughters in a stroller. I don’t remember which one. In either case, that was a while ago. Around the turn of the century.

Graue Mill is a water-powered grist mill on Salt Creek in DuPage County, dating from the 1850s. The machinery inside is elaborate, restored to operation, and still grinding small quantities of grain that the museum sells. I didn’t go inside this time, but pondered the handsome exterior of the mill.

As well as its large water wheel.
“Frederick Graue was born in Germany, came to the United States and settled in Fullersburg, Illinois, in 1842,” the museum’s web site says. In 1849, he purchased the site of a sawmill that had burned down, along with his partner William Asche, and constructed a gristmill there. Asche later sold his share to Graue.

“Limestone for the basement walls was quarried near Lemont; bricks for the rest of the walls were made from clay from the Graue farm and fired in kilns near the mill site; flooring, beams, and posts were from white oak timbers cut along the I&M canal. The four one-ton buhrstones used for grinding were imported from France. After the gristmill opened in April 1852, it ground wheat, corn and other grains produced by local farmers.

“The mill was a major center of economic life during the 19th century and was also used by Fred Graue to hide runaway slaves on their journey to freedom in Canada.”

In the 20th century, the now-obsolete mill fell into ruin, but it was restored in the 1930s by none other than the CCC. Specifically, Troop V-1668, made up of veterans. These days, the mill is part of the Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, which is a unit of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. The village of Fullersburg, for its part, was never incorporated and doesn’t exist as a modern entity.

This is Salt Creek next to the mill, which gives it its power.
Salt Creek, despite its name, is really more of a river in this part of DuPage County, but never mind. It joins the Des Plaines River in Cook County, which later joins the Illinois and then of course the Mississippi.

I had time enough to take a stroll on one of the paths through Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, not too far from the mill.

Along the way, the path takes you past other views of Salt Creek, slightly upstream from the mill.
Past summer fields. The years do go by like so many summer fields.
And a handful of well-maintained CCC structures.
Though I didn’t capture any of the activity with my camera, the paths of Fullersburg Woods are very popular with dog walkers and their dogs.

The Warrenville Garden, 1987

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About once a month during the warm months of 1987, and maybe a few times the year after that, I drove from Chicago to southwest suburban Warrenville — it seemed pretty far away — to visit a friend of mine who had just bought a house in that suburb. He lives in Texas these days, and I’ve since lost touch with him, except for a nominal link on Facebook.

He cultivated a large garden in his large back yard and I helped him out because it was a novelty and because he gave me some of the produce. There was a lot of produce.
“We aren’t gardening for food,” he once said. “We’re gardening for virtue.”

He was a conscientious gardener, and I took home so many vegetables and melons that I further took some to my office and gave them to anyone who wanted them. They were a hit. A woman in the office who’d grown up on a downstate farm complimented the squash in particular.

I’d forgotten that my friend had made pictures of the garden. Also that I had a few of them tucked away.

Corn, tomatoes, melons, carrots, peas, green beans, cucumbers, squash and much else I’ve probably forgotten.

Not a bad thing to do for part of a summer. But I also found I had no natural passion for gardening. Later attempts in my own back yards were indifferent and lackluster. One problem in particular, aside from hating to weed: when the plants I wanted to grow were just sprouting, I couldn’t always tell them apart from weeds.

The pictures of the plants on the seed packages were no use in making that determination, either. They always showed idealized, fully grown examples.

San Antonio Riverwalk Views

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Summer’s pretty pleasant here in the not-so-hot reaches of Illinois. Up in the sky.
And down toward the ground, where strange critters lurk.
So pleasant that I’m taking a week off from work and posting. Back on August 5.

Both of the places I visited in San Antonio recently were near the San Antonio River and thus the Riverwalk. So I took a few minutes each time to go down to the river.

Near the King William District, the walk was almost deserted.
Temps were in the 90s, of course, which might have contributed to it, but I suspect not many people come this way anyway.

A few do. Here’s a view of the Arsenal Street Bridge.

A view from the Arsenal Street Bridge, looking north toward downtown San Antonio.
The building poking over the trees, with the flag, is the Tower Life Building, though I’ll always think of it has the Smith-Young Tower, completed in 1929. One of the city’s finest office buildings. I understand that once upon a time, my civil engineer grandfather had an office there.

After visiting the Briscoe Museum, I walked over to the Riverwalk — it’s only a short distance away — at one of its more touristed spots.

This is the Arneson River Theatre.
The stage is on the north side of the river, while 13 rows of grass are on the south side for seating. Just another idea of the Father of the Riverwalk, H.H. Hugman, finally realized as the WPA built the Riverwalk in the late ’30s. Arneson was the WPA engineer who was to have been in charge of building the Riverwalk, but he died before the project really got under way.

High Summer Misc.

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Time for a high summer break. Back to posting around July 22.

Last night around midnight I spent a few pleasant minutes on my deck. Temps were neither hot nor cold, the noise from traffic was subdued, and Mars hung above the garage, a pretty orange point of light. The suburban haze dimmed it some, of course, but not enough to obscure the planet as a object of contemplation.

We, as in human beings, could go to Mars if we really wanted to. So far we don’t. The people who will go there might not be born yet, but I think they will go.

Closer to home, I visited a mall recently and decided to document something that might not be around much longer.

The same retailer has a location in Chicago — a neighborhood store, smaller than the suburban locations, that I drive by sometimes — that’s closing. Or maybe it has already. I wouldn’t mind documenting it either, but it would be a pain in the butt to find parking, and then a vantage to get a good shot.

In another store, an actual bookstore that sells other things, I saw these recently.

I know there are a lot of variations on Monopoly, but Deadpool Monopoly? Walking Dead Monopoly? Golden Girls Monopoly?

Somewhere out there is a collector of Monopoly editions. Must be hard to keep up. Or maybe the Smithsonian, or the Library of Congress, has tasked itself to preserve a copy of every edition. Maybe not. Maybe Golden Girls Monopoly will be highly prized for its rarity by collectors during the Monopoly craze of the 2160s.

Finally, a picture of Independence Day fireworks here in suburban Chicago.

Not a great picture. But not bad for a phone camera.

Last Thursday in June Olla Podrida

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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.

New Robins in the Front Yard

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May is ending, and June is beginning, as they should: warm. With periodic rain — which we had a lot of yesterday — to keep things growing for a while.

The robin eggs in the front yard nest hatched not long ago, and the hatchlings are eager for food. There seem to be three.

The female and the male robins oblige them. This I can see with my own eyes, though I read a bit about robin behavior to confirm that both parents feed the young.

As “The Story of Robin Eggs” puts it, “Now it becomes a full time job for both parents to protect the nest, find food, and feed the clamoring babies during the 9-16 days they spend in the nest.”

More About Infrastructure

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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.

Back to BAPS

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About a year ago, I visited BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Chicago in Bartlett, Ill., and among the things I thought — besides, wow, look at that — was that the rest of my family would enjoy seeing it too. So on Saturday, ahead of the rain and unseasonably, annoyingly cold weather that gripped the area starting Sunday morning, we went. Yuriko and Ann and I, since Lilly had another commitment.

I’d hoped the extensive fountains would be active this time, but no. Still, the place is as impressive as ever.

This time, I got a better look at the ceremonial gate, which is just as ornate as the mandir, a panoply of intricate white stonework. I took pictures of gate iconography that I’m not familiar with, but liked looking at anyway.

Toward the rear of the grounds, we happened across a small muster of peafowl in a small fenced area. They weren’t out and about the last time I was here.

An important bird in Hinduism. Some details are here.

We also discovered a small cafe toward the back of the haveli, which I didn’t remember seeing before. Just the place for samosa and mango lassi.

The Hanover Park Water Reclamation Plant

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I come across a fair number of things in my work, or even just gadding around the Internet, and not long ago I found out that last week was Infrastructure Week

“Infrastructure Week is a 501c4 non-profit working to educate America’s public about the importance of infrastructure to the nation’s economy, workers, and communities. Since 2013, Infrastructure Week has been led by its Steering Committee – a bipartisan coalition that includes leading business groups, labor unions, and think tanks working to improve America’s infrastructure,” says the organization’s web site.

I sense lobbyists in the background of that statement, the sort who lobby for more spending on infrastructure. There are worse things to lobby for.

The site also told me that there are events associated with Infrastructure Week. Many of them are panel discussions and the like, with little interest except to industry professionals and maybe infrastructure nerds (there have to be some). Then I saw that the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which has seven water reclamation facilities — treating about 450 billion gallons of wastewater each year — was having an open house. Just show up on Saturday morning at one of the facilities and you can look around.

The closest to where we live is the Hanover Park Water Reclamation Plant. The plant is on a large piece of land, 289 acres, and has 12 buildings, plus wells and large storm retention reservoirs, yet is remarkably inconspicuous even in the thick of the northwestern suburbs, set back from major roads and completely enclosed by tall fencing.

Yuriko and I went at 10 on Saturday; our daughters were still asleep, and didn’t want to be wakened for mere infrastructure. The facility’s usual closed gates were open when we got there. The main building looks exactly like what it is, part of an industrial complex developed in the early 1960s, just when the suburbs were coming out this way.
At some point, I suspect, “Sewage Treatment Works” was deemed unseemly, so it became a Water Reclamation Plant, but the old name remained carved over the door.

First we watched a short video about the plant and its various operations, including efforts in sustainability, and then one of the staff showed us around. There were eight visitors all together when we were there, including us, so overcrowding wasn’t an issue. Infrastructure doesn’t pack ’em in.

The sewage is pumped from the sewer up to a series of treatment pools that cascade downward, letting gravity take the water through the successive steps. Large objects and then smaller particles are removed in various ways, and microorganisms that eat the waste are introduced.

In this way, the plant treats an average of 12 million gallons a day, with a maximum capacity of 22 million gallons. During periods of heavy rain, it comes close to that, and occasionally the facility can’t keep up. The guide said that during the heavy rains of September 2008, sand bags had to be used to protect the plant buildings from flooding.

The water reclamation district says: “Water entering Hanover Park WRP passes through coarse screens to filter out large debris, followed by pumping and primary settling, which includes further screening, grit removal and separation of solids from the water in which aerated grit tanks and settling tanks remove fats and oils.”

The primary settling tanks were the only ones that smelled bad. A slight whiff of human fecal odor hung in the air, just enough to notice. Elsewhere, there was little smell, except chlorine near where that is introduced to the water (before the water is released, the chlorine is neutralized).

“In secondary treatment, microorganisms remove organic material from the water as oxygen is pumped into aeration tanks,” the district continues: “Solids then settle at the bottom and clean water flows out the top of additional settling tanks.

“After passing through primary and secondary treatment, the treated water at Hanover Park passes through sand filters and is then disinfected using chlorination and de-chlorination. Clean water that has passed through the Hanover Park WRP treatment processes is released from the Hanover Park WRP into the DuPage River. It only takes 12 hours for wastewater to be converted from raw sewage to clean water.”

The sand filters are in a large, long shed of a building. According to the guide, the filters were the first of their kind to go into service, ca. 1971, and it was considered so important that President Nixon came to the dedication. Might have been during the run up to the passage of the Clean Water Act.

As far as I could tell from the description, a sand filter is exactly what it sounds like. Water leeching through sand to remove even more particles. It might have been state-of-art 45 years ago, but the sand filters are going to be phased out soon for newer tech, the name of which I forget.

At the end of the visit, we picked up some water reclamation souvenirs that the district was giving away. Including postcards!

Also, 40-lb. bags of compost that the plant makes. Remarkably, most of the plant’s solid wastes (sludge) eventually goes to fertilize a farm — which is on site.

“In 1969, the MWRD purchased the Fischer farm (200 acres adjacent to the Hanover Park WRP) and built the Upper DuPage reservoir, which holds about 75 million gallons of stormwater overflow. The farmland also includes 100 acres for growing corn and soybeans… The harvested corn and soybeans are used for feedstock, ethanol and biodiesel.”

Glad to see this bit of infrastructure. I’m all for visiting more conventional sites, which should be obvious. Infrastructure’s worth seeing, too, if only to remind me occasionally of the massive machines and systems in motion out there, all essential to our health and comfort but unnoticed unless something goes badly wrong, and all put together by us clever apes.

New Library in the Neighborhood

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A Little Free Library has appeared on my block. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there a few days ago, the last time I walked by. Dog walking usually takes me by that front yard.

Today I took a moment to look into the new Little Free Library. Looks like the family that put it up stocked it, for now, with children’s books that their daughters no longer want. I know them slightly: husband, wife, two daughters younger than mine, but not little kids any more. And a dog smaller than mine. Sometimes they sniff each other through the back yard fence.

I’ll have to contribute a volume or two, to be neighborly. Right now, though, I’m looking for my copy of The Right Stuff. Wonderful book. I read it again last year, after first reading it ca. 1991. Now I want to re-read a favorite part, about the trials of Enos the space chimp.