DIARY
I never promised to be much of a webmaster or photographer.
Some of these shots are underexposed, and I scrapped the worst, but my main intention in posting these is to help describe the adventure I had walking the inception of Route 66 on the night of June 23rd.
ROUTE 66
GRANT PARK, THE LOOP, and DOWNTOWN CHICAGO
Route 66 begins in at the corner of Jackson and Lake Shore Drive
in Downtown Chicago.
The “old west” look of the foreground is courtesy of the setup
for the Taste of Chicago festival, which began the following day.
The wall of skyscrapers in the background is the west side of
Michigan Ave., one of only a few places in the world in which
a wall of high-rises fronts open parkland on a harbor. Typically
high property values prevent this sort of planning.
For some reason Buckingham Fountains always fails to impress
me in pictures, while taking my breath away in real life.
The fountain is ornate, but without any immediate features to
scale it by, picture’s don’t fairly convey a sense of its size.
Buckingham is about fifty or sixty feet across, fires jets of
water a hundred or so feet in the air, and the spray can be
felt blocks away in a strong wind.
But in spite of all this, the fountain still feels a somewhat
intimate place to be.
Michigan Avenue, looking south from Jackson.
The Santa Fe Building ยท 224 S. Michigan Ave.
Home of the Chicago Architecture Federation.
The Chicago Institute of Art
It’s supposedly the premiere art school in the U.S.
While there’s all sorts of sweet exhibits inside the CIA, the
life out front is equally fascinating. In addition to dozens
of students, tourists, and passerby, it’s not unusual to see
groups of musicians like these kids thumping on plastic water
barrels. Their ability to improvise with their hands and a
discarded chunk of plastic is nothing to laugh at.
One block east, at Wabash and Adam, Connor
tries to get artsy with the El. Incidentally, I’d just
passed the Chicago Symphony Center.
Where are you going?
The Sears Tower above the famous Berghoff Restaurant.
Rush Hour in the Financial District
Canal and Adams, facing east.
Union Station. Outside.
Inside. There isn’t an earthquake. My hand slipped.
With a major renovation, the place could rival Grand Central.
Evidently the original Mitchell’s restaurant has
been torn down.
I always thought the place was a bit overpriced, frankly.
I-94 and Adams, facing east.
THE NEAR WEST SIDE and THE CHICAGO MEDICAL CORRIDOR
Racine and Adams, facing east.
Ashland and Adams, facing east.
This is almost two miles due west of the Sears Tower.
Cook County Hospital
One of Chicago’s historic hospitals. It’s difficult to
explain how huge the hospital complex actually is, except
to say that it took twenty minutes to pass at a brisk walk,
and that’s its easily larger than U of C hospitals and
probably all of the Flint hospitals combined.
At this point, 66 has turned from Adams/Jackson, and
plunged southwest along Ogden.
LAWNDALE and DOUGLAS PARK
Just west of Western, Ogden passes under the P.C.
Railroad and enters the neighborhood of Lawndale.
Lawndale is one the AfroAmerican neighborhoods on Chicago’s
West Side, and it picked up a nasty reputation with the
riots just following the MLK assassination.
I always feel awkward in areas where I stand out, not out
of fear so much as I hate causing people to feel as if they’re
being visited like a museum. As a result, I didn’t take many
pictures, even though the neighborhood was three miles across.
Photographing Flint last summer, many things were shouted at
me, but I think my Lawndale anxiety was all in my head. Two
people asked me for cigarettes, but otherwise, nobody seemed
to notice me.
Douglas Park dominates the Eastern quarter of Lawndale.
The park covers half a square mile, making it one of Chicago’s
largest, and genuinely beautiful with lagoons, streams, hills,
golf course and ballparks, and a fabulously restored field house.
Unlike Washington Park on the South Side, however, Douglas seemed
to be a real neighborhood park; it was crowded with people,
from kite flying children to the homeless, squatting in archways
and amid dumptsters.
The intermingling of tasteful maintenance and superimposed
poverty in Douglas Park galvanized me. I want to return.
The Blue Line. Looking east-northeast from Central Park and Ogden.
Approximately five miles from the Sears Tower.
Somehow, I missed both the Castle Car Wash and the Western
Electric Hawthorn Works plant in Douglas… two more reasons I’ll
have to undertake this walk again.
The latter was “once a workplace for 40,000 workers producing
virtually all telphones made in the U.S.” according to my downloaded
guide to Route 66.
CICERO
City limit. Looking east-northeast from Cicero and Ogden.
Approximately seven miles from the Sears Tower.
My first glimpse of Cicero.
Cicero has a somewhat infamous reputation throughout the
midwest, given it’s former connections to Al Capone. Ciero
seemed “tough” is the way Bridgeport is “tough”… you don’t
mess around, sure.
But a den of iniquity? Please.
?
For a half-mile I passed this vertical slatted fence, which
hid rows of semis, which hid thousands of tons of freight
slowly creaking along the C.B. & Q. railroad.
Cicero was where I first recognized many telltale sights of 66.
A surprising number weren’t shuttered or demolished.
A shitty photo of the Egger, which was an awesome restaurant.
Henry’s Drive-In.
Robin Hood Mufflers.
A paraphrase of either Jess or Meridith: “He steals from Mercedes and gives to Corvairs.
Tragically, Bunyon’s Hot Dogs had been demonlished.
Even the address is gone.
BERWYN
Berwyn is the suburb immediately following Cicero.
It felt slightly more upscale and is supposedly very Czech and Mexican.
This is, incidently, home to Daryl and Dembowski.
Route 66 is Big Business in Berwyn.
The clouds came out and the sun set, so underexposure
became an increasing problem.
In this shot, though, it had a kind of cool effect:
Another view of Beverages.
My flash didn’t work this time, and it pisses me off. I’ve
posted the negative, however, so you might be able to make
out some of the mural.
It appears to have been painted in airbrush, and depicts a
globe, with the US lifted off, and Illinois lifted off the
US, with the serpentine path of Route 66 twisting to Chicago
from L.A. and Route 66 Beverages proudly guarding the gate.
I decided to forego the famous Spindle (you can see it in
Wayne’s World; another reason I have to return this summer),
because it was four miles extra, and decided posting the
White Castle on the corner of Harlem and Ogden was a
waste of bandwidth.
I did however, get one more nice shot,
looking east-northeast from Ogden and Harlem.
Approximately ten miles from the Sears Tower…
At this point the sun had sunk and with my weakass film, any pictures I took from this point on didn’t turn out.
The third and final installment of this account will be befeft of photos.
~ Connor