Chicago Day 2: more songs about buildings and food
Tuesday
Morning: Architecture Tour
One thing about taking a vacation trip that is, unavoidably, a vacation trip, is that one can't deny the urge to Be A Tourist. In Chicago, that means going to the top of Sears Tower taking an architecture cruise on the river.
M and I had already developed an urban crush on Chicago. It's the kind of city that would turn our every conversation around to fresh musings on its elegance. It's so much like Berlin, I would say, what with the elevated U-Bahn overhead, the soaring downtown buildings, the pedestrian-friendly planning, and the rivers and bridges. You know, M would say, it's so much nicer than New York, without the grunge, the pressing buildings, the sheer bigness. And the people are businesslike here downtown, but not as self-important as in DC, maybe it's Midwesterners' easygoing nature.
Without a doubt, the architecture and urban planning made the biggest impression. This was America's Prague, where every building is a work of art. It was a palimpsest of American philosophy, with each building bespeaking a different idea of how people should live - straight lines vs. natural curves, mixed-use vs. monolithic temples of commerce, visible ornamentation as public art vs. pure structural forms. Most importantly, the architects were not seeking to impose their ideas in isolation, which would make for a monstrous commotion of space, but rather had taken in the surrounding ideas and the landscape and considered their response. One building curved to parallel a bend in the river, with two tints of polished glass to reflect the opposing buildings and sky like the river's ripples. The Hancock Building resembled the Sears Tower, with its black tubes and white bunny-ear antennae, but added an exoskeleton of diamonds coursing up the inclined sides like a snakeskin.
My favorite example was the three-building row on the north bank (on the right of the picture):
The curved buildings are Marina City, built in the early '60s to look like giant cornstalks (in tribute to Illinois's chief source of commerce), with no right angles, identical apartment sizes, and a rounded balcony for every dwelling. Next door is Mies Van der Rohe's Internationalist rectangle of rigid, black steel and glass. Finally, the building under construction in the foreground is a Trump property and will be the second-tallest in the city (third, I suppose, once the Chicago Spire is built). But for now, it's a synthesis of the two: straight lines and steel-framed glass, but with rounded sides rather than right angles.
In other words, the Chicago skyline is a dialectic of ideas about how, in what, and amid what Americans should live. A conversation on utopia.
And a beautiful one at that. As if to show that dialectical philosophy need not be merely functional and block-headed (i.e. Soviet architecture).
Witness the neo-French-gothic Tribune Tower:
This picture shows something else M and I loved about Chicago. Whether or not it was planned this way, the skyscrapers are almost always surrounded by lower buildings. This preserves one's view of the skyscrapers and the sense of space, air, light. The pedestrian isn't walled in and forced to look downward by the tall buildings; one can see them and let one's eyes be drawn upward. City planning itself seems to be conceived (rightly) as a public art project, not just as a pissing contest between architects.
With all this on our mind, we couldn't help contrasting Chicago with hapless DC. DC's building height restrictions force its buildings to be short, which is fine, but the massive offices end up eking out their space by spreading out over a thicker footprint. Given DC's already limited space, this doesn't leave much room for enterprises that could bring the city tax revenue. Add to that the fact that most business (and most business space) in town belongs to the federal government, which can't be taxed. The wan tax revenue stream means DC doesn't have much to work with for planning purposes. Which brings it back to relying on Congress's allocations, which is fraught with uncertainty from year-to-year. Hence, DC's hampered on one side by its formal limitations and on another by a schizoid flow of resources. The result is scattershot planning according to the whims of the age and isolated developers: some blocky concrete government buildings here, some flashy new highrise condos there. In short, Chicago appears like a queen of successful city planning that promotes art and commerce hand-in-hand; DC like the retarded scullery maid trapped in the basement.
/rhapsodic waxing
Ok, so here are some more awesome buildings we saw.
The Wrigley Building:
Our docent was great for the most part, but her bit on Wrigley HQ was kidn of incomprehensible. The clock was supposed to be modeled on one from a Seville monastery, which was "the old country" (Wrigley being a Spanish name?), but WTF there are no hands? Ummm, moving on...
We headed west to the river split, and looked back on the Merchandise Mart, Marina City, etc.
There were all these awesome new condos along the North Branch. Unlike in DC, where condos just look newfangled and wankish, these condos were refurbished to acknowledge their buildings' industrial roots, right down to the cast iron on the greenery-filled balconies. These new River Cottages weren't former factories, but they were still really neat:
Back down the North Branch, we looked up to the now-permanently suspended railroad bridge. Fulton House (to the left of the bridge) was the former home of North American Cold Storage Co., which is probably only famous to students of administrative law because of a turn-of-the-century due process case that arose out of Chicago's seizure of tainted meat there.
When the city wanted to convert the building into apartments, it took a year for the building to thaw.
Here's a view from the bottom of the South Branch leg. In the background is Sears Tower, which is as ubiquitous as the Fernsehturm is to Berlin. In the foreground is River City, designed by the same architect as Marina City. When M and I spotted it the previous day, we'd rejoiced to see a touch of Gaudí in an American city, all curves and ovals and irregularity.
Final tour picture: This doesn't look like much now, but it's a "we were there when" thing. This is the construction site that will become the Chicago Spire, the future tallest building in Chicago.
BONUS: On the tour boat were two small groups of Germans. That's a perk of being a tourist in an American city: you run with Teh Germans. Also, in line for another boat, I think I made a young woman's day by correctly identifying her as Swiss, based on the telltale saachsensaachszk (= sechsundsechsig, 66). Like Chicago, Germans = LUV.
After the tour, we wandered around Near North in search of (A) the Jazz Record Mart and (B) Lunch. We found the two together, along with a neat used bookstore. Lunch was at Star of Siam, which had both delectable Singapore noodles and gorgeous Thai textiles framed on the walls.
Interlude for Random Picture That Won't Fit In Anywhere
In the morning we passed this mosaic of Daedalus and Icarus in the entry of a massive bank (?) building.
End Interlude
Evening: Uptown, Ethnos, Succulence
We were itching to get out of the Loop and experience other sides of Chicago's urban life. We also wanted to experience the El. And I really really wanted to get some Polish food, since (A) Chicago's the 3d biggest Polish city in the world and (B) the food I had in Poland was possibly the most surprisingly delicious that I had in my time in Europe.
So we took the Blue Line up to Little Poland. The trip was fodder for more favorable Berlin comparisons, such as how the buildings went right up to the train platforms, such that we could see into backyards and balconies. Little Poland was The Real Deal:
We sought out The Red Apple (or, as the sign called it, Czerwone Jabluszko), based on the Chicago Reader's recommendation as "a great find." And that's exactly what it was. $8.50 for a long, long buffet that started with three types of cole slaw and a few different sauerkrauts before moving into the kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, schnitzel, meatballs, pork, pork, pork, and ending with blintzes, stroganoff, pierogies, and apple pancakes. The price also included a cup of rapturous split-pea soup, flavored with dill and caraway, and a separate buffet of poppyseed, apple, and creme pastries. All this with a huge, delicious half-liter of Okocim. Oh, and we were practically the only people in the place speaking English: even a detachment of cops came in speaking Polish with our waitress. I was in heaven. Absolute heaven.
The plan was to eat there and then bus and walk up to Cullen's, where TheSession.org assured us would be a seisiun that night. We bused and then walked (and walked and walked), only to discover that the seisiun had stopped just a couple weeks before. Blazes! That's what we get for relying on Teh Intarwebz instead of picking up a phone and calling ahead. :( So no Irish music in Chicago, home of Liz Carroll and the immortal scribe Police Chief O'Neill.
That was pretty much it for a packed day. We walked past Wrigley Field and were treated to the sight of drunk people yelling for Da Cubs. Took the El home. Crashed. Chicago. LUV.
Morning: Architecture Tour
One thing about taking a vacation trip that is, unavoidably, a vacation trip, is that one can't deny the urge to Be A Tourist. In Chicago, that means going to the top of Sears Tower taking an architecture cruise on the river.
M and I had already developed an urban crush on Chicago. It's the kind of city that would turn our every conversation around to fresh musings on its elegance. It's so much like Berlin, I would say, what with the elevated U-Bahn overhead, the soaring downtown buildings, the pedestrian-friendly planning, and the rivers and bridges. You know, M would say, it's so much nicer than New York, without the grunge, the pressing buildings, the sheer bigness. And the people are businesslike here downtown, but not as self-important as in DC, maybe it's Midwesterners' easygoing nature.
Without a doubt, the architecture and urban planning made the biggest impression. This was America's Prague, where every building is a work of art. It was a palimpsest of American philosophy, with each building bespeaking a different idea of how people should live - straight lines vs. natural curves, mixed-use vs. monolithic temples of commerce, visible ornamentation as public art vs. pure structural forms. Most importantly, the architects were not seeking to impose their ideas in isolation, which would make for a monstrous commotion of space, but rather had taken in the surrounding ideas and the landscape and considered their response. One building curved to parallel a bend in the river, with two tints of polished glass to reflect the opposing buildings and sky like the river's ripples. The Hancock Building resembled the Sears Tower, with its black tubes and white bunny-ear antennae, but added an exoskeleton of diamonds coursing up the inclined sides like a snakeskin.
My favorite example was the three-building row on the north bank (on the right of the picture):
The curved buildings are Marina City, built in the early '60s to look like giant cornstalks (in tribute to Illinois's chief source of commerce), with no right angles, identical apartment sizes, and a rounded balcony for every dwelling. Next door is Mies Van der Rohe's Internationalist rectangle of rigid, black steel and glass. Finally, the building under construction in the foreground is a Trump property and will be the second-tallest in the city (third, I suppose, once the Chicago Spire is built). But for now, it's a synthesis of the two: straight lines and steel-framed glass, but with rounded sides rather than right angles.
In other words, the Chicago skyline is a dialectic of ideas about how, in what, and amid what Americans should live. A conversation on utopia.
And a beautiful one at that. As if to show that dialectical philosophy need not be merely functional and block-headed (i.e. Soviet architecture).
Witness the neo-French-gothic Tribune Tower:
This picture shows something else M and I loved about Chicago. Whether or not it was planned this way, the skyscrapers are almost always surrounded by lower buildings. This preserves one's view of the skyscrapers and the sense of space, air, light. The pedestrian isn't walled in and forced to look downward by the tall buildings; one can see them and let one's eyes be drawn upward. City planning itself seems to be conceived (rightly) as a public art project, not just as a pissing contest between architects.
With all this on our mind, we couldn't help contrasting Chicago with hapless DC. DC's building height restrictions force its buildings to be short, which is fine, but the massive offices end up eking out their space by spreading out over a thicker footprint. Given DC's already limited space, this doesn't leave much room for enterprises that could bring the city tax revenue. Add to that the fact that most business (and most business space) in town belongs to the federal government, which can't be taxed. The wan tax revenue stream means DC doesn't have much to work with for planning purposes. Which brings it back to relying on Congress's allocations, which is fraught with uncertainty from year-to-year. Hence, DC's hampered on one side by its formal limitations and on another by a schizoid flow of resources. The result is scattershot planning according to the whims of the age and isolated developers: some blocky concrete government buildings here, some flashy new highrise condos there. In short, Chicago appears like a queen of successful city planning that promotes art and commerce hand-in-hand; DC like the retarded scullery maid trapped in the basement.
/rhapsodic waxing
Ok, so here are some more awesome buildings we saw.
The Wrigley Building:
Our docent was great for the most part, but her bit on Wrigley HQ was kidn of incomprehensible. The clock was supposed to be modeled on one from a Seville monastery, which was "the old country" (Wrigley being a Spanish name?), but WTF there are no hands? Ummm, moving on...
We headed west to the river split, and looked back on the Merchandise Mart, Marina City, etc.
There were all these awesome new condos along the North Branch. Unlike in DC, where condos just look newfangled and wankish, these condos were refurbished to acknowledge their buildings' industrial roots, right down to the cast iron on the greenery-filled balconies. These new River Cottages weren't former factories, but they were still really neat:
Back down the North Branch, we looked up to the now-permanently suspended railroad bridge. Fulton House (to the left of the bridge) was the former home of North American Cold Storage Co., which is probably only famous to students of administrative law because of a turn-of-the-century due process case that arose out of Chicago's seizure of tainted meat there.
When the city wanted to convert the building into apartments, it took a year for the building to thaw.
Here's a view from the bottom of the South Branch leg. In the background is Sears Tower, which is as ubiquitous as the Fernsehturm is to Berlin. In the foreground is River City, designed by the same architect as Marina City. When M and I spotted it the previous day, we'd rejoiced to see a touch of Gaudí in an American city, all curves and ovals and irregularity.
Final tour picture: This doesn't look like much now, but it's a "we were there when" thing. This is the construction site that will become the Chicago Spire, the future tallest building in Chicago.
BONUS: On the tour boat were two small groups of Germans. That's a perk of being a tourist in an American city: you run with Teh Germans. Also, in line for another boat, I think I made a young woman's day by correctly identifying her as Swiss, based on the telltale saachsensaachszk (= sechsundsechsig, 66). Like Chicago, Germans = LUV.
After the tour, we wandered around Near North in search of (A) the Jazz Record Mart and (B) Lunch. We found the two together, along with a neat used bookstore. Lunch was at Star of Siam, which had both delectable Singapore noodles and gorgeous Thai textiles framed on the walls.
Interlude for Random Picture That Won't Fit In Anywhere
In the morning we passed this mosaic of Daedalus and Icarus in the entry of a massive bank (?) building.
End Interlude
Evening: Uptown, Ethnos, Succulence
We were itching to get out of the Loop and experience other sides of Chicago's urban life. We also wanted to experience the El. And I really really wanted to get some Polish food, since (A) Chicago's the 3d biggest Polish city in the world and (B) the food I had in Poland was possibly the most surprisingly delicious that I had in my time in Europe.
So we took the Blue Line up to Little Poland. The trip was fodder for more favorable Berlin comparisons, such as how the buildings went right up to the train platforms, such that we could see into backyards and balconies. Little Poland was The Real Deal:
We sought out The Red Apple (or, as the sign called it, Czerwone Jabluszko), based on the Chicago Reader's recommendation as "a great find." And that's exactly what it was. $8.50 for a long, long buffet that started with three types of cole slaw and a few different sauerkrauts before moving into the kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, schnitzel, meatballs, pork, pork, pork, and ending with blintzes, stroganoff, pierogies, and apple pancakes. The price also included a cup of rapturous split-pea soup, flavored with dill and caraway, and a separate buffet of poppyseed, apple, and creme pastries. All this with a huge, delicious half-liter of Okocim. Oh, and we were practically the only people in the place speaking English: even a detachment of cops came in speaking Polish with our waitress. I was in heaven. Absolute heaven.
The plan was to eat there and then bus and walk up to Cullen's, where TheSession.org assured us would be a seisiun that night. We bused and then walked (and walked and walked), only to discover that the seisiun had stopped just a couple weeks before. Blazes! That's what we get for relying on Teh Intarwebz instead of picking up a phone and calling ahead. :( So no Irish music in Chicago, home of Liz Carroll and the immortal scribe Police Chief O'Neill.
That was pretty much it for a packed day. We walked past Wrigley Field and were treated to the sight of drunk people yelling for Da Cubs. Took the El home. Crashed. Chicago. LUV.