Another reason I like Chicago: Chinatown

Gate of Chinatown

I’m a sucker for Chinatown. Being brought up in NYC, Chinatown was a natural to go to when it was a smaller venue south of Canal from one side of Mott to the other. Chinatown went into a sprawl in the 70s, crossing over Canal and surrounding Little Italy. And the other way passing the theater and moving into the business section east. Main Street in Queens became Chinatown  Flushing (唐人街, 法拉盛華埠) of the modern immigrants to the US, as Chinatown Manhattan becomes sleeker and more hip.

Dragon Wall in the Forbidden City, 1987 (above) and Chicago, 2012 (below).

There is a smaller Chinatown in LA and Philly, an interesting one in Boston. There is the amazing Chinatown of glitter in SF. So I felt very comfortable in Chicago with a real Chinatown. Lots of good smells and food. And very established in the community. Chinatown Manhattan was dominated by its closed in spaces. Chinatown  Flushing reflects its Jewish roots where places like Gertz, Alexander’s and Korvette’s used to be.

Chinatown in Chicago is not huge like San Francisco, but the food is good and the sights remind me more of the real place, than many of the other cities.

The theme of Communist China and Mao serving you food at Lao Hunan, had great visual and stomach appeal.

Chinatown old and new.

Only a block from the Cermak–Chinatown CTA station on the red line. Go.

Museums without Walls: Postcards along 75 South

Cotton in bloom.

We often take it all too serious inside the museum, but sometimes our museums are en plein air, outside open air/open spaces. I had less time to shoot, as I was behind the wheel, but the stretch of extreme south 75 in lower Georgia on my way to and from Atlanta afforded me the look of plein air and how things relate to people around them. I did similar a time back to 95.

I was a little perplexed by this series of ads below, I’ll reserve the right to show one.

These folks held up traffic but appeared okay.

I missed out on several choice signs, like “Best Hot Dog in the World” and one about why Christians need to vote for Romney.  Although I am happy about getting this little guy below.

Live from ATL: Ciao, baby.

The Fox was decorated ever so tastefully, but it was the same old wonderful Fox and being able to see it in all it’s splendor.

It is always sad to say goodbye, especially the night going. But these live blogs, mean I don’t have to go home and start all over again. I have been waiting to finish Paris and Peru, and I won’t even talk about those wonderful shots of Cappadocia. For a person who works where he lives, I sure move around a lot. But it is all so different and even more so wonderful. Atlanta is progressive in look, has problems with homeless and great for localized food.

Shots from the Atlanta History Center and at the Carter Center.

The Fox is a great reflection of a city which has so much history, but which seems to have lost so much of it. Is the past so painful that you want to do it in, or is it the lower Southern air. So much of it is “modern,” interesting because it is both highrise and lowrise, sometime suprisingly together like no other city. Except for DC, which is like a fairyland of those post-modern structures which have absolutely the minimal of character, Atlanta’s steel and glass still do. The 9th largest metropolitan area in the U.S. has a similarity of space that its Civil War structures in the b/w shot does.

We ended the evening with Doc Chey’s Noodle House in the Virginia Highland/Morningside area of town.

What I appreciate the most about Atlanta is a big city and a smaller city atmosphere. And the five million people who do great on food. Thanks.

Live from ATL: Another black friday

Instead of spending time in some lame Atlanta mall, why not visit the King Center in Sweet Auburndale

Instead of being a consumer of some bullshit you don’t need to buy, holiday or not. Then, stay out of the shopping mall, and start using your Atlanta time to realize a group of consumers who took matters into their own hands and got the country under control. I mean the Freedom Riders.

“We don’t shop where we can’t eat.” Proved Woolworth and others had to make sure Jim Crow would go.

Dr. King’s work is still powerful work and comes across to this day as being just as relevant in the tech age as it was pre-Civil rights. Dr. King was not a fairy tale, he was a real person and missed. No one has taken his place, in his sense of fairness and conscience. The King Center is free, with lots of parking and offers a chance to see both the house his grandparents lived and he spent his young days in after birth. Down the street is the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and of course the crypt site.

Romney spent so much time running against Jimmy Carter, as much as he did Obama, he might want to spend some time at the end of Freedom Parkway and see what it takes to be a real president. In light of the recent Gaza incident, the work done by Carter in the peace accords over thirty years ago, remind us of what work remains to be done.

Carter tried, and actually was, successful at initiating a new tone of compromise and cooperation between Israel and some of her neighbors.

Carter also tried like hell to get a new awareness going to change the way we (mis)used energy. The impact of what he did, even today is realized way beyond his time. I don’t think we would be allowing BP to tell us every 20 minutes on TV how lucky we are that they are spending millions in the Gulf, after causing a complete disaster and then sinking oil chemically rather than getting rid of it. Romney’s recent statements about regulation sound a lot like the guy below.

I was perplexed by this shot. No one ever mentioned it was Carter, not Clinton, who first had Nixon back to the White House for a State Dinner.

We spent a little time at the High, I would love to show you photos, but you know how that one goes. It is the only place I have to sign a contract to shoot photos and not be able to electronically share. It also has a $15 dollar parking lot.

Evening at the Buckhead Fellini’s

Check out Atlanta pizza. We don’t ever shop where we eat.

Live from ATL: Thanksgive

 

You can’t find too much open downtown, but the Aquarium was open.

What a great idea. For the first time in years a chance to be somewhere else, than home, with family members. We have turkey all year long, and often nicely many times during the year. I am re-evaluating always our primary dependency on Anglo based history, coming first from NYC who Dutch roots predate the British, and now living in FL, which hails its roots to Spain. That is, our Euroroots. A lot of our indigenous roots have been displaced, dispersed or decapitated from their origin.

World of Coca Cola was not open, not that I was crying, they even locked the park.

But Coca does do a great job promoting itself, so I won’t here. I know they are big since they are top 10/Fortune 500. But so are the Koch Brothers with GP. I rather have a day of thanks. There are still a ton of homeless you can find around Underground Atlanta, giant shopping mall that it is, was not open today. Although I believe the High was.

Anderson Cooper could not be with us today, but his presence could be felt at Centennial Olympic Park.

A perfect autumn day in Atlanta.

Lots of people in the park just hanging out.

Later on we went over to the Colonnade for their version of a Thanksgiving feast. It is a comfort to return there, they had plenty of folk outside waiting to get in. We got there after 5 and they first estimated a 2 hour wait. There must be people who may make this a tradition.

After the acorn squash bisque and the cranberry salad, the turkey with many sides, mine were simply Southern rice with giblet gravy and Brussels sprout.

Oh yeah. There was that mince meat pie, which the waitress asked if i wanted it heated. Wonderful. The last part of the evening was over at Macy’s where there is a tradition of the tree on top of the store gets lit up, and there are fireworks. There was a lot of fun and a good time.

Macy’s provided the tree on top, and various entertainments  

We waited, the wonderful young lady on the wall did a great version of “All I Want for Christmas,” the old Mariah Carey standard. The Shake a Weight person got shot with a happy bystander.

Once the tree lit and the fireworks went kaboom! you knew were a viewer of someone else’s traditions. Happy T-day.

Weekend in nc

Beautiful morning light in living room of soft pink with pale gold rug

It is a strange world, only because it is today and I am in a room more like thirty to fifty years ago, in my aunt’s house. This was a world in which the most modern thing in the room might have been a television in a cabinet. It was the world Spielberg tried to explore in Back to the Future, but his looked like it came out of a bunch of stills of old movies. My aunt’s living room has genuine 1950s or 60s wall to wall wool carpet.

The porch is (right) out of the old time, rattan and wicker with the old battleship gray porch paint.

I love the way, while the plan is central, the porch  extends left, extending the top and shifting the balance.

I somehow doubt that the porch and steps (above) were original. Certainly the little windows date it from another period. The brickwork of the porch seems more like 50s or 60s to me. Most of the houses, including this one, date to the 1920s. Many with porches. This was a small town with a railroad stop, it exported denim jeans or something years back. That is all gone now, it remains a distant town to Raleigh.

I loved the truck parked right on the grass.

I couldn’t get over this little store, which is still sort of in business.

Look at the glass doors, the large awning and the two steps up. Beyond this store is a local boulevard, with strip malls and a WalMart, Dollar Tree  and Sonics not too far away. We kind of forget the way the world used to be. This gives us a peek into a past which is slowly disappearing.