If you love good baked goods, you will love Chicago’s Chiu Quon Bakery
If you would like to experience heaven on earth, please walk over to the Chiu Quon Bakery. It is one of those places that if I lived there I would be in every day, just to try one of everything! They have a little food, too. Seventy cents for a cream bun, that will send you to the moon! The baked goods are to die for!
Shiver me timbers, matey, the Captain addresses the passengers
Although water has always been a theme, boats are rarely part of it. Some people live on boats. My contact has been simply trying to remain vertical as the old ferry plowed into the wharf, or trying not to get blown into the harbor when winds hit 40. We spent an hour plus in Lake Michigan on the Tall Ship Windy.
Each view becomes a postcard
My favorite, the color of the water is always unique
Hopper, eat your heart out
It looked like a circus, but it is a water purification station
Some people just have a great time.
If the real captain is wearing red, who is steering?
The true beauty was simply in the fact that out of the third largest US city, is this beautiful lake, which people boat and swim off of. Something unheard of in parts of the East. Another beautiful thing about Chicago. Too bad the juice ran out of my battery midway. Arrrg!
Summertime Chi
Airbourne to Glasgow
From the bus from Toas
Near Charlotte
Inside Roxanne Swentzell’s Tower Gallery
Outside the Met Museum NYC
Inside Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, DC
Inside Millenium Park
Inside the Plaza, Santa Fe
At the wonderful Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Museum of Contemporary Art designed by Josef Paul Kleihues
I am fascinated with spaces and always have been. I was born in a city where you can get a crook in your neck from the verticality of the place. Chicago is more kind on your neck, even though home of the skyscapers. Sam Alexander, my design and film teacher said, the job of the book designer is to look like you aren’t there, and all the while you are guiding them through spaces. The same holds true for architects and interior designers.
Museum of Contemporary Art stairwell view. Carp optional.
The famous Picasso sculpture, around which the skateboarders go, and office workers sitting having lunch. Murals at the Midway. Both show how a city thinks about it space, what it utilizes.
How it may redefine spaces.
Which space is more famous?*
Typical, yet not so typical urban.
Or how spaces exist when someone is not there.
The shot directly above was in a storefront. Notice the placement of red.
Or how self-aware a city is.
The shot above was done within the exhibition, Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
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*For more on one of its giants.
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.
Blues Bros. check out Midway action
A few days can clear out your nostrils, etc. and remind an Easterner who travels West, that there is life in between and often life cosmopolitan. Chicago has all the sophistication of the big East cities, while still retaining some of the easy of the mid-West.
The Navy Pier need not obscure the beauty of the skyline. . .
nor does the river.
After all this is the city of Adler and Sullivan, as well as Wright. These folks were the home of the first skyscrapers. They also had that loop, that branched out into a metro system, and is still pretty easy to ride.
Greeting from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
It hurt to see the North side of Chicago, where I saw some old neighborhoods where houses that might have once been there were razed to the ground, leaving asymmetrical arrangements of houses on some streets visible to the eye from the green line. I could also see, even through clean clothes and brushed hair, a certain element of poverty that had set in. As well as a few crazies, mostly women, who spoke to themselves, and sometimes others, with words beginning in m, f and s.
This was the city that gave us Jane Addams and the Hull-House settlement crowd, which revolutionized the way we think about our society. This building housed the brains that developed the blueprint for Social Science, furthered feminism, child care and civil rights. Remember Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle used Chicago as its setting.
Wow! Two top notch museums, the CTA system, Lake Michigan and the Navy Pier, a real Chinatown and tons of interesting architecture. Now that’s no chichi. That’s something to dance about! Thanks, Chicago. More to come.
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