Since the Wife and I first started dating, she’s told me about how wonderful Chicago is.  Having been to both New York and Los Angeles, and not really being a big fan of either, I was unsold, even after we got married.  I far prefer places like Seattle and Phoenix, places with a little smaller feel, to huge cities like New York and Los Angeles. 

We swung through the Chicago suburbs after our trip to Europe a couple years ago on an overnight layover, but we were so jetlagged that it was hard to really get any appreciation for a city by driving around the suburbs at night.  Even with my low expectations, I couldn’t bring myself to judge the city by THAT experience. 

We made plans with a couple friends in Charlotte to head to Chicago for the Taste of Chicago, prior to our move to Las Vegas.  While I had left the door open for a return trip, between work, Australia, and the move, I had really not been engaged in the planning of the trip, and left it to the resident Chicago expert, the Wife, to plan the trip.  It wasn’t really until we were about a week away from traveling that I asked, “So what day is the flight?  What are we doing when we get there?  Do we even have a hotel, yet?”

Once we arrived, in Chicago, the Wife wanted to take the El (elevated train, i.e. Subway, Metro, MARTA, BART, etc.) into the city to the hotel. It was nearly midnight, and all I could think about when she suggested taking the El into the city was getting on a dingy light-rail car, with the Lords of Hell brawling with another local gang, as we clung to our luggage waiting for the next stop. 

“You sure we don’t want to take a cab?”

“No, it’s expensive, and I’m sure it’ll be fine.” 

Hmmmm… “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”… sounds like something Amelia Earhart might have said at one point.

But onto the El we hiked.  It was late.  We were tired.  I was concerned.  But we got on the El.

As I got onto the train, it was cleaner than I expected.  No gangs in site.  Nobody was offering three-card monte.  These were good omens, I suppose, but it was probably too early to claim that Chicago was a crime-free city.  Perhaps Christopher Columbus had led me astray in my perception of Chicago.

Our El train was uneventful to our stop.  40 minutes and efficient, with no real hassles, and none of the drama or danger I had feared.  We got off the train and walked the two blocks to our hotel.   Even the city streets seemed almost… inviting.  It was eerie for a large city.

In the morning, we headed for the Taste of Chicago.  At this point, I had decided to throw all my pre-conceived notions regarding the city out the window.  We walked down to see the Marshall Field building.  While Marshall Field is long-since gone, the Wife was glad to see a sign still marked the famous building.

We continued down State Street to Michigan Ave.; the Miracle Mile.  It was quite a sight.

We walked for several blocks down Michigan, passing the Chicago Institute of Art.  I thought this majestic fellow deserved a photo op.

As I have a tendency to do, I try to check out the architecture of cities as we explore.  Like so many other older cities, the architecture was beautiful, but in so many places, it was hidden by the immense size of the buildings it graced.  Some buildings were so ornate, in terms of the stone work, that every edge seemed to have been etched by a master.  This stone mural is probably 10 stories off the ground.

It’s no wonder that the Chicago skyline isn’t as notorious as the New York Skyline, or Seattle’s for that matter.  The downtown skyline is so expansive that it was nearly impossible to find a vantage point that encompassed more than a third of it.  I recognized individual buildings, although admittedly, I did NOT recognize the Sears Tower without some help, but the everywhere I looked, it was a like a mini-skyline on the horizon, and each one had its own uniqueness.  In every direction there was a reminder that this was a BIG city.  The expanse of buildings is almost like an urban expression of the expansive farmlands throughout the Midwest, with streets replacing rows of corns, and buildings replacing the corn stalks.  

I think the expansiveness led to another sensation that I didn’t expect; the feeling of free space.  Manhattan is so “tall” that it’s easy to feel claustrophobic amidst all the hustle and bustle.  When I’m in Manhattan, I feel like the city’s structural integrity is dependent on the immense concentration of energy of people on the street, and any cessation of that energy will cause the entire city to collapse.  Manhattan is the best example of that feeling that I know, but I feel the same way, to a lesser degree, in the Pittsburgh and Boston downtown areas.

Chicago just didn’t feel like that.  I felt like taking a couple minutes to stand on a street corner and just look around wouldn’t necessarily warrant a second look by a police officer, and taking an extra 30 seconds to decide what belongs on my hot dog might earn some light teasing from the person behind me, but not an exasperated sigh or rude comment.

Anyway, to digress from my diatribe about Chicago, we saw all sorts of wonderful sights while were walking through the city.  While there is no definitive skyline, as far as I could see, I did try to capture it’s essence in a couple pictures.

The river through the middle of the city was a real treat.  I have been to cities with Rivers.  Pittsburgh, for example, has plenty of rivers, but none of them were quite as… accessible? as the river in Chicago.  Something about the riverwalk, and the peaceful, pedestrian-friendly bridges made this Chicago River unique among other rivers.

Then there were the typical tall buildings.  Honestly, the individual tall buildings were more lackluster than most of the other things Chicago has to offer, I thought.  They were tall buildings, just like any other city, and while some were more interesting than others, in general, they lacked a certain amount of inspiration which I was hoping to see.

Don’t be confused by my earlier discussion about the skyline and this comment about the buildings.  The skyline is unique in that it is really undefined, and perspective-dependent, and really is not remarkably striking, i.e., it’s remarkable in its non-remarkability.  The buildings, on the other hand, are just generally non-remarkable.  The buildings that did look interesting, looked like they were built in the 70s and 80 (i.e. they LOOKED like the buildings of the 70s and 80s).  The others didn’t look all that interesting.  Some had some great features in their ornate details, but most were so tall that the details were simply swallowed up by their immense size.

I did manage to get this shot at night of an ornate building and bridge that I thought turned out nicely.

We eventually made our way out to Navy Pier, a tourist district, where a replica or the original Ferris Wheel resides. The original Ferris Wheel was built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.  It was a nice evening, and I thought, “Now THIS is a landmark for a city to have!”  While it’s really not Chicago’s flagship landmark, it certainly would be were the city significantly smaller.  It’s impressively large, although not huge by any measure.