Being all sophisticated in Chicago. And pizza.

For a city that is home to both a (conceptual) school of architecture and is used as a paradigm example of town planning, it is delightfully large, disorganised and higgledy-piggledy. (And just for the record, doesn't seems to look much like Due South's Chicago at all. Funnily enough, Toronto on the otherhand bears more than just a striking similarity... Weird that.)

My time in Chicago reflected what my academic tutors might have called a 'lack of direction'. I ambled around the city for a couple of days having a lovely time, taking in the pizza and the architecture and even some art, as I went. I'm sure I covered all the most important aspects though. In fact, having got in at just about 7 o'clock in the evening, by 9pm, me and some girls from the hostel had already found our way to a blues bar, with live bands that switched every hour. A great way to start methinks!

Chicago is emphatically not a walkable city. Being the contrary individual that I am, however, I decided to walk downtown from my hostel in the North. Well, that's not strictly speaking how the decision-making process went along, but it's what i ended up doing!

Actually, I really wanted to find Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes intrigue me. A lake that, to all intents and purposes, looks like the ocean is a pretty mind-blowing concept, as well as one ginormous volume of water. So, to the water! I got to the beach and looked at the city. “That doesn't look very far....” I thought. Hmm.... So, it only took, like, an hour and a half, to get to the North of downtown. And at least another half hour til the centre... And my hostel was pretty central, really – there's an awful lot of Chicago beyond it that I hardly even scratched. Huuuuuuuuuge.

I digress. In fairness to whoever did this particular bit lake-side of planning, Chicago's waterfront is kind of awesome (as long as you take it with a large dollop of ignoring the highway that runs down most of its length). The whole way along the city the lake-front is home to parks and beaches and marinas. I don't know where they put their industry but, pertinently, not there! Toronto was certainly a telling juxtaposition to Chicago in this respect. Her waterfront is a damp squib by comparison. Tiny bits of park here and there and no beaches, all mingled with dead looking residential, commercial and industrial complexes all the way along, matched a block or two aways by the main railroad coming through town. Anywayz, I shall come to Toronto in another post. Back to the Windy City.

The lake itself is weird. It looks like the sea, but it looks kind of like the sea in a real-life Truman Show; kind of 'plastic'. There are clearly no tides, but there are impressive waves and swell. Beautiful sandy beaches, but no shells. It's a little bit like someone just forgot the finishing touches. Bizarre.

Eventually I made it downtown and happened upon what is known as 'The Magnificent Mile'. Magnificent? Not sure why... I think it has to do with all the public art along it. In any case, this is the place to be as a tourist just starting out. A stroke of luck on my part, since I hadn't really looked at a map, either of where I was, or where I should be going... one way to make life more interesting (or end up walking twice as far as is necessary, depending on how the whole thing works out for you!).

I did my duty as a tourist and checkout the old water tower; a bizarre-looking building that was more or less the only landmark to survive the great fire of 1871, and around which the rest of modern-day downtown has been laid out subsequently.

This is one of those landmarks that makes every single itinerary of Chicago going, but it's unclear as to what you are supposed to do when you get there other than express a half-hearted “Ooo”. They could perhaps improve the situation by using the inside of the tower as some sort of museum, or at least have a more extensive explanation of events. Actually they've got about 10 photos up of how Chicago has looked in the past, with no annotations. It's a shame really because the fire played such a huge part in shaping the way Chicago is today, particularly in its place as home of so many of the original skyscrapers. Alas.

I can't say I really liked the look of the water tower either... it's like a castle that's started to divide and multiply. Maybe if it was somewhere else it would be pretty, but i'm inclined to agree with Oscar Wilde who said of it, that it looked like "a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it.” Particularly in amongst all the pretty shiny buildings around it.

However, having eased myself into an artistic state of mind with the photo exhibition, yet having been left somewhat unsatisfied, it was a happy accident that I came across a poster for a free art exhibition. Mmm... free. One thing that everywhere else in the world makes you appreciate about London is the whole string of massive, very good, very free museums and art galleries we keep. If Britain ever stops funding that, it will be a massive shame. In this instance however, I'd found some free, so I thought i'd have a look. The advertised exhibition was “Holiness and the feminine spirit”, which sounded like it might be interesting. The exhibition was certainly a refreshing anti-dote to SLCs kids book white, glowy depictions of Christ. Here you could find black and Arabic depictions and women, shock-horror. I mean, i'm no scholar when it comes to religious art, but as it goes I rather liked this exhibition. The one next to it was muuuuch cooler though. It was called, Inscribing the Divine: The Saint John's Bible. At this point I started to get a little suspicious that, perhaps, this was a Christian art gallery...

Random stained glass in the gallery

Anyhow, the bible exhibition was amazing! Some uh, people, I guess - not sure who - decided to create a new illuminated bible for the Millennium (they're just running a little off schedule), and the whole thing is very very pretty. I think we should reinstate the art of illuminating books. It really is very beautiful. And besides, books deserve the respect (mainly, except maybe Dan Brown books...).

On of the illumination pages. *Think* this one was the 7 days of creation in Genesis, but I couldn't honestly be sure... Other pages can be found here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/stjohnsbible/stjohns-exhibit.html if you're interested.

The exhibition also contained dozens of examples of old, pre printing-press polyglot bibles, which was really interesting.

Eventually, I guess I realised that I had a whole city to see and decided to wander a bit further south, passing a variety of bizarre landmarks (art?) on the way. Although a more temporary addition to the city that I enjoyed was a festival of ideas of some sort. This involved putting up groups of yellow balloons all down the street with positive suggestions on them. Nothing quite like positive thinking on balloons to brighten you day :)

I soon came across the Tribune Tower, an extraordinary neo-gothic office building/early sky scraper, which has an inexplicable collection of rocks built into it from other buildings all around the world (and a couple from the moon!). According to font of all knowledge, wikipedia, "Stones included in the wall are from such sites as the Trondheim Cathedral, Taj Mahal, Clementine Hall, the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, Corregidor Island, Palace of Westminster, petrified wood from the Redwood National and State Parks, the Great Pyramid, The Alamo, Notre-Dame, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Great Wall of China, Independence Hall, Fort Santiago, the Berlin Wall, Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Banteay Srei among others."

I find it a little difficult to get excited about rocks, from buildings, but it was definitely an unusual tribtute to important stuff and places... i suppose.

Possibly the other problem with the rocks, is that i was being thoroughly distracted by this sculpture, right next to the Tribune building (not pictured):

I wasn't quite sure what to make of this. It seemed mainly to invite inappropriate photo opportunities and goggling, rather than any greater appreciation of art. According to the sculptor, it is supposed to invite conversation. In reality it seems to invite vandelism - a form of conversation, i'm sure, if and only if, you are an artist.... ? Weird.

The Chicago Sun sums up the situation pretty well:

Marilyn’s making us look bad. Or maybe it’s more like we’re making ourselves look bad?

Or maybe it’s mostly tourists taking those already-cliched photos while clutching Marilyn’s ankle or gawking up her skirt.

Whatever the case, that beyond-kitschy, 26-foot sculpture recreating the moment when Marilyn Monroe’s dress flies up in “The Seven Year Itch” is threatening the Bean as the most photographed attraction in Chicago.

So we’re going from taking pictures of our own reflection to taking pictures while looking up the skirt of a giant woman.

This is not an upgrade.

However, there is plenty of other art around to make up for it. Including more murals on buildings, like there was all over the North West. I don't know if I'm just unobservant, but i'm sure we don't have these in Britiain (N Ireland excepted), and i'm sure we should import them :)


As you cross the river, you move into downtown proper, which I gave myself a whistlestop tour of becfore deciding to explore properly the next day.

Somewhat tired by this point, I arranged to meet up the girls with whom I'd been out the night before. We were all keen to sample Chicago-Style deep dish pizza. I mean, what better reason to visit a city than to eat its pizza. Mmm.

Unfortunately I took no pictures of my own pizza, and this just doesn't quite do the whole thing justice. Chicago pizza is quite amazing. Deep pastry base, then lashings of cheese, then quanities of your filling, and topped with the tomato, then baked for rather a long time. And don't think that because you've had ChicagoTown frozen pizzas that you have any idea what this is like. You don't. These pizzas are quite spectacular - could probably keep you fed for weeks as well. Mine lasted me 3 meals and it was only a small! I'm definitely gonna try and recreate the whole thing at some point, preferably when i'm already very hungry!

So that was that for day one. We all headed back to the hostel, and then I tried to create an action plan for the next day.

The next day I continued on the whole sophisticated artistic bent and opted to do an architecture tour downtown. I wish I could remember all the interesting stuff I was told, but i suspect that it would be a little rambly. However, the architecture tours come highly recommended and I'd have done more if I'd had the time and the money.

The tour tracked the historical aesthetic and structural changes in Chicago's downtown area, with history included right from pioneer days, through the great fire and up to today.

Millennium park was the most recent addition to the scene. Right on the water front, the park was built up over the old rail yard, and has totally transformed the area. Just to complete Chicago's melé of architectural styles is the parks deconstructionist pavillion, designed by Frank Gehry...

However, by far my favourite bit was what's known as The Bean (or Cloud-Gate, as it is properly know) - a hiiige Anish Kapoor sculture, that could entertain me, and i think everyone else too, for hours...


Apparently one of the many ideas is that using the curved reflection, it joins together the architectural style of the old waterfront buildings with the newest sky scrapers that run perpendicular to them...

... and i think it's fair to say that it's some what successful in that, but mainly it's shiny and reflecty, and combining a magpie-like adoration for the shiny with a myspace generation enthusiam for taking pictures of ourselves, it's rather popular!

I'm some what missing out the main thrust of the tour, which was the development of the Chicago School of architecture and new sky scrapers - but I figure you'll live.

My other favourite place on the tour didn't fall into this category at all. This is Illinois' state capitol building - somewhat different from all the other traditional dome-y things i've seem everywhere else. The building is pretty ugly throughout (though not sooo bad on the outside), but we all know that it's what's on the inside that counts, and this building has a lovely philosophy behind it.

The guy who was asked to design the new capitol building (this a 1980s monstrosity) decided that it should be a building for the people, and as such, while the upper floors contain all the state offices and politicians, the lower floors are a very large shopping centre. The designer deliberately invited all the (wo)men on the street into the building of their government, so that they could keep an eye on them an hold them to account.

All the walls inside and outside are glass, and it's such an open construction that even the mechanism of the elevators is on the outside, not hidden. Until a couple of years ago there was no real security into the upper levels either. You could literally just wander up into the office corridors and see what was going on.

Perhaps a cynical person might pass comment on the combination of government and capitalism in America, but I'm not that person. I like the idea, I just think that perhaps implementing it in the 1980s was rather unfortunate for the eyes of the shoppers...

The last building I wanted to mention was one that was dedicated to the guy who sort of originally set up the city. I've forgotten who that was... sorry... but that's not really the important point.

This glass mosaic is part of a much larger frieze which supposedly showed the interaction between the founders of the city and the native americans at the outset. I find it incredible the difference between these kind of representations between Canada and the states. While in the US, i've consistantly come across lovely statues and murals and other depictions of the wonderful and kind interaction between the people. Cos, obviously that's the way it was. In Canada I think there's a much larger guilt culture, but also a much greater contribution of art and culture etc by the native groups there defending their rights. It's weird that an arbitrary border seems to make such a difference.

Speaking of propaganda *ehem*, that afternoon, I continued my sophisticated ways in Chicago's Institute of Art which had an exhibition of Soviet propaganda posters both in the USSR and abroad... weird scary interesting stuff...


And some really cool stained glass...


But the single best thing about having visited the Institute, I must confess, is the fulfilment of a certain amount of Rocky Horror fandom... The gallery is home to American Gothic :D Which I'm perfectly well aware is a Serious Piece of Art... but it's basically all Rocky Horror to me... Maybe i'm a sad reflection of my generation... or maybe I just appreciate innovative avant garde rock musical art and its place in the modern world with a happy nod to indepth iconic cultural references. Um... anyhow, I was a little over excited about the whole thing.


And so that was a fair amount of my Chicago. I spent the next day wandering through other interesting, chic areas of the city, getting my hair cut, and eating more pizza. Good times.

And then, back on the bus, and a return to Canada-land :D Yay!