Chicago and Home

Philadelphia Airport had, apparently since the last time we had come through, three works before, adopted free wi-fi, so I was able to post to the blog from there. When we got to O’Hare, everything had gone too well. We took the Blue train downtown. Toward the end of the ride, we noticed that it appeared to be raining. We changed to the Red subway and then got off at Clark and Division. We came up out of the subway into a downpour, with thunder and lightning (one stroke was uncomfortably close). Our small umbrellas were pretty much useless and soon we and our luggage were very wet. Rather than walk the last few blocks to our hotel, I flagged down a taxi (Chicago is a very good taxi town—they are always cruising the major streets, and all you have to do is find one with the “Taxi” sign lit up and wave your arm). We got in and I told the driver (an African immigrant) to take us to the Ambassador East. He looked surprised and said that it was just over in that direction. I replied that we needed to get out of the rain. So he took us the three or four remaining blocks and let us off. Too little, too late. Our clothes were soaked through, as was much of what we were carrying in our luggage. Our room was soon festooned with stuff hanging to dry.

We managed to scrounge together enough clothes to go to dinner. We asked the woman at the front desk to recommend a nearby, informal, ethnic restaurant. She suggested Mario’s Ristorante, a block away. It fit all our requirements. The food wasn’t outstanding, but it was good enough, under the circumstances.

The next morning (Wednesday, July 7th), the last day of our trip, we had breakfast at a restaurant that we had been to a number of times, and liked our breakfast, but there was a problem with the bill (either gross incompetence or dishonesty, or both), so we won’t eat there again.

We went back to the hotel, checked out (they stored our luggage for us), and walked over to the beginning of Michigan Avenue. Mary Joy said that she could see herself living in one of the brownstone rowhouses we passed on the way—we guessed the prices in that neighborhood to be at least a million dollars. We went down Michigan, in what was already (10:30) sauna-like heat, to the Chicago Architecture Foundation, across from the Art Institute. We have, over the years, taken a number of their walking tours (all very interesting), and once we took their boat tour on the Chicago River, though Mary Joy missed most of the narration by being under deck, buying candy and pop for her niece, whom we had been talked into taking along.

We got there in time to take the 11:00 two-hour “Intersections” tour. The CFA has now gone hi-tech—the docent has a microphone and everyone in the group carries a radio receiver with an earphone. Our docent, Jim, walked us around downtown, pointing out how buildings very close to one another and/or with similar purposes and uses were built very differently, depending on the era. For instance, he showed us three houses of worship very close together—a synagogue from the 1950s, St. Peter in the Loop Catholic Church (with whose Schola Mary Joy’s brother and sister-in-law have often played and recorded) from, I think, the early 60s, in two very different modern styles, and the Chicago Temple Methodist church from the 1920s, which was like a medieval gothic church which had had the top half sliced off and a tall Art Deco office building stuck between the entrance level and the spire! Also, right near each other were the ponderously monumental neoclassical City-County Building of about a hundred years ago, the International Style 1960s glass and (intentionally) rusted steel city offices, and Helmut Jahn’s post-modernist phantasmagoria State of Illinois building, which looks something like a big circus tent. We ended up at the new Millennium Park, with its big, polished “bean,” its Frank Gehry bridge and music pavilion and the fountain that is a big block with films of people’s faces—every five minutes the person in the film opens his or her mouth and real water gushes out on the waiting kids below. We enjoyed the tour very much.

Afterwards, as suggested on the tour, we visited the Chicago Cultural Center, formerly the Public Library, and saw the Tiffany glass dome there. Gorgeous.

We had intended to have a late lunch-early dinner at Rick Bayless’s new restaurant, Xoco, but when we got there we discovered that it and his other restaurants (we’ve eaten at and greatly enjoyed the Frontera Grill) were closed so that Bayless could take the entire staff on their annual trip to Mexico, presumably to keep the food as authentic as possible and to come up with new ideas. This had happened to us once before, also in early July, so we’ll remember for future reference.

Instead, we ate at the reliably decent, if not exciting, Bistro 110, half a block from the Water Tower. We’ve eaten there a number of times and know what to expect (sort of like my dad and Perkins). Then we went back to the hotel, picked up our luggage, walked back to the subway, caught the Red train to Lake Street, got out and up the stairs to the El and eventually caught a crowded Orange train to Midway Airport.

What with lugging our (heavier than when we started the trip) luggage around, Mary Joy was exhausted by then and said “Never again!” as far as taking public transit in this sort of situation, even though it’s a lot cheaper than a shuttle or taxi. I passionately love the CTA and the New York subways. Mary Joy does not--she thinks they’re dirty and crowded and it’s too difficult to maneuver in them with luggage. I adore BART in San Francisco, the MTA in Boston (unlike the man in the song, I did return, and am not riding forever ‘neath the streets of Boston), the London Underground, the U-Bahn and S-Bahn in Berlin, the Metros in Paris, Rome, Madrid (even though a man I was jammed against in the Madrid metro attempted to pick my pocket—I stared him down and he got off at the next stop), Milan, Barcelona, Budapest, Vienna, Prague (as well as the streetcars in Vienna and Prague!) and even in Mexico City (you don’t know what a sardine feels like until you’ve ridden the Mexico City Metro at rush hour). I fell in love with urban rail, as the fastest, best and most efficient way to get around in big cities, at the age of thirteen, back in 1964, when I visited my uncle in Cleveland Heights and he took me downtown on the Cleveland Rapid Transit. There was nothing at all like that in Alliance!

Once we got to Midway, there were no problems, other than a half-hour delay due to nearby lightning, though I was disappointed that this Southwest pilot didn’t play the harmonica. We took a taxi from the Humphrey Terminal and got home around 9:30 p.m.