Chicago

As Karen has mentioned in previous posts, we spent 10 days in Chicago while attending my brother Brian's wedding to Shannon. We really enjoyed ourselves in America's third largest city. Hard to believe that it was only founded in 1837. Even though we were there for quite some time, we still didn't get to see everything we wanted to (I think it was mainly due to sleeping in late - same thing happened to us over the last few days in D.C.).

Chicago is the original home of the skyscraper (the world's first generally agreed to be in 1884-5) and the modern city is dominated by them. The wedding reception was held on the 56th floor of the Chase Tower, which permitted great 360 degree views of all of Chicago. In town, we took an architectural boat tour along the river, which allowed a different perspective of the buildings.

Here are a few pictures from our boat tour as well as from some other vantage points around the city.

Karen on the Chicago River. I think this is the one they dye green for St. Patrick's Day. If you've seen the movie "The Fugitive" with Harrison Ford, you might have seen this.







A view of downtown from a peninsula, with Lake Michigan in the foreground.





America's tallest building, the Sears Tower:





A view of downtown from Lincoln Park (near the free zoo). The John Hancock building (not the Sears Tower) is on the left.



For some reason, I just liked the look of this parking lot built into the bottom few floors of a skyscraper. I like the way the cars back up right to the edge.





I also liked the way these American flags blew in the strong breeze.



Here's the famous Field Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately this was one of the places we didn't have time to visit properly. It's one of the premier museums of natural history in the world.



Buckingham Fountain:



The fantastic Art Institute of Chicago, which has a tremendous collection, especially of the Impressionists. Karen and I took advantage of the free Thursday and Friday evenings in the summer and visited twice.



And a few samples of the works inside.

Georges Seurat's famous "Sunday Morning on La Grande Jatte", with a few close up shots, including the mysterious monkey being taken for a walk by his owner.









A close up shot from Henri de Toulose-Lautrec's "At the Moulin Rouge":



René Magritte's "Time Transfixed":



And finally, Grant Wood's much-celebrated, often-imitated "American Gothic":



We were lucky enough to take in a Cubs baseball game at historic Wrigley Field in the North Side of Chicago. The Cubs are everyone's favorite perennial losers, having not won a World Series championship since ... 1908!!! That puts the Boston Red Sox' drought from 1918 to 2004 to shame. Chicago's other baseball team, the White Sox (aka the Southsiders, as they play in south Chicago), was basically as futile as the Red Sox. Their last championship was in 1917 until they followed up the Red Sox' improbable title in 2004 with their own World Series win in 2005. But no one in Chicago actually cares about the White Sox. The Cubs are said to be as cursed as the Red Sox were and have not even made it to World Series since 1945!

Wrigley Field was built in 1914 and is the second oldest baseball park in the major leagues, behind Fenway Park in Boston. It is basically as ill-designed as its Boston counterpart, with many of the seats facing toward the outfield rather than toward the batting area. Still, it provides a great view of the surrounding neighborhood and probably used to provide a view all the way to Lake Michigan before the tall buildings obstructed the view. It also has a hand-operated scoreboard like Fenway and ... no jumbotron!

Now is a good time to mention Wrigley in that it was the last park in the major leagues to install lights. The lights finally went on on 8/8/88, a mere 19 years ago. Up until then, then played every game during the daytime, even the weekday games. The Cubs still play more day games than any other team in the majors.