On their return from Europe in the summer of ’56, my family passed through New York. I have some of my father’s slides from that moment, including one he took of Penn Station — the lost, lamented Penn Station — less than a decade before it was destroyed.
To think what it might look like had it survived. Probably it would have been restored at some point, just like at Grand Central, as I saw it in 2014.
Not much to say in a case like that except sic transit gloria termini.
Category Archives: Been There
Buses on I-57
Cool over the weekend, at least for August, so actually fairly pleasant. Last week I started noticing peewee football players practicing in the park. Summer’s dwindling.
Last Thursday I needed to be back home by early evening after driving to Champaign, so I didn’t spend quite as much time looking around there as I wanted. For instance, very near campus is the Mount Hope Cemetery, which was a burying ground before Illinois established any kind of higher education in the area. I drove by it, but didn’t stop. This time.
On the way back, I noticed two buses of interest. Here’s the Mark Kirk campaign bus.
Kirk is in a tight race against Tammy Duckworth to retain his U.S. Senate seat. That’s the important race in Illinois this year, since the next race for governor won’t be for two years, and there’s no doubt that the state will vote for Clinton for president. I checked, and the Kirk campaign bus had been in Champaign that day.
At the rest stop north of Kankakee, I took note of a parked bus, the likes of which I’d seen only a few months ago.
Another Megabus. Been a long time since I’ve ridden an intercity bus, but maybe I will again sometime, just to see how Megabus compares with the Greyhounds I used to take sometimes.
The Abbott Oceanarium
Years ago I attended the “groundbreaking” for the Shedd Aquarium’s Oceanarium, officially the Abbott Oceanarium these days, as an editor of a real estate magazine. Usually groundbreaking ceremonies involve guys in suits and hardhats moving a little dirt with gold-colored shovels. It’s an established ritual in the development business.
Occasionally developers take a different approach. One time in Nashville, a developer planned to raze an older building on West End Ave. — a fairly large commercial street — and so painted one of the large wooden doors on the old structure bright red, and then knocked it in with a wrecking ball. The really odd thing about that was that actual demolition didn’t start for a few more days, and in the interim the red door was put back together haphazardly. Maybe the owners didn’t want bums looking for shelter there.
At the Shedd, we stood outside — it was cold, so it must have been late 1989 or early 1990 — as a crane hoisted a square-cut boulder into the air at the edge of Lake Michigan. It was a big thing, the sort of rock used to build breakwaters. The ceremony consisted of dropping the rock into the lake, right where the Shedd planned its expansion.
This is what that the exterior of the Oceanarium looks like now, jutting into Lake Michigan.
The facility’s upper level includes a sizable amphitheater that looks over a large pond and then through the windows out into the lake (with the Adler Planetarium visible not far away). During a show, the window are shuttered.
We saw a show. The Shedd staff didn’t say so openly, of course, but the subtext of the event was, “We’re not like Seaworld. Not at all. Don’t even think it.” The dolphins and beluga whales thus interacted with their trainers, and the animals seemed glad to be there. It wasn’t a particularly exciting show, though.
There’s also a tank for otters and another one for penguins.
We also spent a while watch the belugas in their tank, who were joined by Shedd staff. A lot of other people watched, too.
More fun to watch that the organized show, I think.
The Shedd Aquarium
The Shedd Aquarium, I’ve read, houses 32,000 animals — 1500 species including fish, marine mammals, birds, snakes, amphibians, and insects — and contains 5 million gallons of water. A “water zoo,” as Ann put it as we waited to get in last Friday. A lot of people were waiting to get in. A lot of people were already in.
That made the exhibits a little difficult to see sometimes. On the other hand, sometimes spectators added charm to the scene.
If you were patient enough, you could eventually see the tanks and tanks full of fish and other sea- and riverlife, small —
— and larger —
And some colorful static sealife scenes.
On the whole, the glass tanks and lighting and crowds made it hard to take pictures, but that’s just as well. The first thing to do somewhere interesting is to see it with your own eyes.
Saw lots of interesting creatures. That accounts for the Shedd’s popularity. It’s a water zoo of strange and sometimes bizarre things, even in our jaded age.
Sometimes the creatures were easy to identify, such as the octopi and the piranhas and the blue lobster — intense Prussian blue, as the Shedd notes. “The brilliant blue color is the result of a genetic mutation that causes the lobster to produce an overabundance of a large, complex protein called crustacyanin (‘cyan’ derives from the Greek word for dark blue) that binds the protein for the normal brownish coloration, canceling it out. Even the lobster’s antennae are blue.”
Another star attraction is Granddad, an Australian lungfish that’s been living at the Shedd since 1933. “Weighing in at 20 pounds and measuring four feet long, Granddad is believed to be the oldest fish in captivity at any public aquarium or zoo in the world,” asserts Chicago Tonight. He’s not much to look at, though (and I think his previous name, Methuselah, was better).
Speaking of the piranhas, we got a good look at them. According to a sign next to their tank, “their teeth are razor-sharp. Even so, piranhas usually just nip the tail and scales of other fishes to fill up on protein. Piranhas don’t hunt for people, cattle or other mammals. Many don’t even eat whole fish.”
What? I refuse to believe it. I saw the Saturday afternoon movies. I know that when luckless explorers in the Amazon basin put as much as a toe in the water, piranhas attack instantly and en masse.
Sometimes the creatures weren’t so easy to identify. The Shedd helpfully includes a digital kiosk next to most of the tanks, and you can scroll through pictures with common and scientific names to ID them. Trouble was, I’d look at some odd thing in the tank, and then scroll through looking for some picture like it, and find nothing. That happened more than once. Ah, well.
The crowds were a little tiring, but we enjoyed the place enough to stay most of the afternoon, to near closing. Part of the time we were in the Shedd’s new — new to us, since we hadn’t seen it, but it was completed in 1991 — Oceanarium. More about which tomorrow.
Olmec Head & Man-Sized Fish in Chicago
Where in the Chicago area is this fellow?
Between the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium in downtown Chicago, that’s where, with the Field Museum in the background of the picture. It’s a replica by Ignacio Perez Solano of Olmec Head 8, and a gift of the state of Veracruz to Chicago, dedicated in 2003. So while near the Field Museum, it’s actually part of the city’s collection of outdoor art. It might not be as imposing as the original, but it’s no small thing at seven feet high and a weight of seven tons.
Later it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the original Olmec heads, beyond their great antiquity in pre-Columbian Mexico, so I read a bit. “Seventeen heads have been discovered to date, 10 of which are from San Lorenzo and 4 from La Venta, two of the most important Olmec centres,” the Ancient History Encyclopedia tells me. “The heads were each carved from a single basalt boulder which in some cases were transported 100 km or more to their final destination, presumably using huge balsa river rafts wherever possible and log rollers on land….
“The heads were sculpted using hard hand-held stones and it is likely that they were originally painted using bright colours. The fact that these giant sculptures depict only the head may be explained by the widely held belief in Mesoamerican culture that it was the head alone which contained the emotions, experience, and soul of an individual.”
Apparently the state of Veracruz, especially when Miguel Alemán Velasco was governor (1998-2004), decided that norteamericanos would benefit from replica Olmec heads, so there are now eight such heads in the U.S., according to Wiki: Austin, Chicago, Covina, Calif., McAllen, Tex., New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and West Valley City, Utah.
Closer to the Shedd is a very different sort of sculpture, the aptly named “Man With Fish.”
According to the Chicago Park District, the work is “a gift to the Shedd Aquarium from William N. Sick in honor of his wife, Stephanie… The painted bronze sculpture portrays a man with his arms wrapped around an enormous fish. Water sprays from the fish’s mouth, dripping into a reflecting pool below.”
William Sick is a prominent local businessman, and also happens to be a trustee and former chairman of the Shedd Aquarium, and a director of Millennium Park. He must have decided at some point that a sculpture by Stephan Balkenhol was just the thing for the Shedd. It was the artist’s first work in the U.S., installed in 2001.
“Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957), a German sculptor who studied at the Hamburg School of Fine Arts, created “Man with Fish,” the park district continues. “Several of Balkenhol’s works feature human figures relating to an animal or several animals in an unexpected way. ‘Man with Fish’ conveys this playful approach as does ‘Small Man with Giraffe’ which stands in front of the Hamburg Zoo.”
We didn’t go all the way downtown just to look at statues, as interesting as they were. Lilly goes to university this week, so we all wanted to do something together before that. Ultimately we picked the Shedd Aquarium. We figured it wouldn’t be quite so crowded on Friday as it would be on Saturday, so we went on Friday.
Wrong.
Yogyakarta
Yogyakarta is a city on Java than few North Americans ever seem to have heard of. But I won’t use that as evidence of any egregious geographic ignorance on the part of Americans, though in fact we aren’t known for that kind of knowledge. After all, how many Javanese, do you suppose, have heard of Memphis, Indianapolis or Kansas City?
We went there in August 1994. One important reason for going to Yogyakarta was that Borobudur and Prambanan were located nearby; in fact, they were reason enough to go. But the town itself also featured some other sites of interest, such as the Kraton of Yogyakarta, a palace complex that also featured a museum, as well as some interesting ruins whose name escapes me, and a few other places in town.
One day we witnessed a large parade through the heart of town, or would have, had the authorities had any notion of keeping the street clear. As it was, the street filled completely with people, and the parade — a lot of men on horseback, as I recall — had to push its way through the throng. This got tiresome pretty fast, so we didn’t stay long.
Then there was the time we were walking down the curiously named Malioboro Street (Jalan Malioboro), which is a major shopping street, past a lot of shop stalls and booths. As I walked past one vendor, a man perhaps about my age at the time, said, “Keep smiling, friend. I kill you.” Maybe he was just tired of tourists, who so obviously could afford his wares, wandering by without buying anything. Or maybe his psychosis was deeper. We didn’t go that way again.
He was the only bit of hostility that we encountered, however fleeting. On the other end of the spectrum, a couple of teenaged Javanese girls buttonholed me on the street one afternoon, and wanted me to pose with them for a picture. Maybe I had novelty value. So I posed.
Another fragment of memory from Yogyakarta: sometime before dawn one morning, a rooster woke me up, because, cartoons notwithstanding, roosters crow whenever they feel like it. I lay awake for a while, and then off in the distance, I heard what must have been the pre-dawn call to prayers. Unfamiliar, mesmerizing, reminding me that I was somewhere else.
One evening, we had got a wonderful chance to enjoy Ramayana ballet at the Ramayana Open Theatre Prambanan.
It’s something tourists do. Some people might sneer at that reflexively, but they’d be thoughtless. I’m glad that Ramayana ballet has some audience. I don’t, however, remember much about it now, except for a notion of colorful costumes and stylized movement.
Thursday Trifles
One more picture from Navy Pier.
Saw about a half-dozen ASK ME sign holders on Saturday, and I did ask one which way it was to the tall ships entrance. He told me.
Occasionally I still flip through TV channels, just to see what I can see. A few weeks ago I was doing so, and happened to have my camera handy. Here’s something I found.
By gum, it was original cast Three’s Company. Accept no substitutes. I spent all of about a minute watching it. Enough to get the gist of that week’s comedy of errors: a holiday show that saw Jack and the girls wanting to get away from the Ropers to attend a more interesting Christmas party, while the Ropers were doing their best to bore their young guests, so they could attend a more interesting Christmas party. The same one. Har-dee-har-har.
Then I became curious about Man About the House. It occurred to me that I’d never seen it. In the age of YouTube, there’s no reason not to, so I watched Series 1, Episode 1 (since removed, but it’ll probably be back). It was no Fawlty Towers, or even Steptoe and Son, but it wasn’t that bad. It had a couple of advantages over its American counterpart, such as better comic acting, especially the part of the landlord, and no Suzanne Somers. Remarkable how much of a difference that makes. Well, not that remarkable.
Some of the Man About the House lines were so very completely, breathtakingly British. The last line of the episode, for instance. Off camera, the brunette roommate persuaded the landlord to let the male character move in, as he was on camera in the kitchen with the blonde roommate. When the male character asked her how she did that — the landlord was gone by this time — she said, “I told him you were a poof.”
An announcement on Wednesday from the IOC: “The… IOC today agreed to add baseball/softball, karate, skateboard, sports climbing and surfing to the sports programme for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.”
What, no tug-of-war? Skateboarding, but not tug-of-war, a sport that’s easy to understand, telegenic and opens up the possibility of beach tug-of-war?
A Lot of Tall Ships
Last Saturday, Navy Pier, Chicago: Pay your money, get your wristband, and pretty soon you can board the likes of this.
Even better, this.
The first ship is brig Niagara out of Erie, Pa., while the next one is El Galeón Andalucía, out of Cadiz, Spain.
Every three or four years, Chicago hosts a tall ships festival. The formal name of this year’s event was the Pepsi® Tall Ships® Chicago 2016, complete with registered trademarks symbols flying like pennants. I’m sure PepsiCo paid big bucks for the naming rights, but I can’t help feeling that the drink of choice among seafarers on tall ships should be rum. Bacardi ought to look into it.
Pepsi® Tall Ships® Chicago 2016 is part of a larger movement of sailing ships through the Great Lakes this year, known as the Tall Ships Challenge®. (There’s that trademark again, but I refuse to use all caps.) The event is organized by the Tall Ships Foundation and includes visits to Great Lake ports this summer, as well as races between the participants.
Even now, the ships are on their way to Green Bay and then Duluth. Next year, other ships will visit Atlantic ports, and presumably after that Pacific ports, and so on. Guess the visits count not only as seafaring — an end unto itself — but are also for publicity and fundraising. The tall ships probably cost a lot to maintain, now that the supply of cheap Jack Tar labor isn’t what it used to be.
The participating ships were docked at Navy Pier. All were available to board and look around, while some offered rides on the lake for an extra (and fairly high) fee. All together, we boarded eight of the ships, or more than half: the Niagara and the Andalucía, but also the Pride of Baltimore II, Denis Sullivan, Madeline, Mist of Avalon, Playfair, and the Draken Harald Hårfagre.
Coolest of all was the galleon. Everybody seemed to feel that way, since that ship had the longest line to board. It was worth the wait of about 30 minutes. How often do you have the chance to board a Spanish galleon and look around? Not often.
The vessel, completed only in 2010, is a 170-foot, 495-ton wooden replica of a galleon that was part of Spain’s West Indies fleet, or, as Wiki puts it: “El Galeón Andalucía es la reproducción de un galeón español del siglo XVII.”
The other ships had their interests as well, including the Niagara and the Pride of Baltimore II —
— and especially the Draken Harald Hårfagre, a re-creation of a Viking ship. The light was wrong for me to get a good side image of the vessel, but there are plenty of pictures of her.
Apparently there was some kind of kerfuffle about the Draken Harald Hårfagre in U.S. Great Lakes waters. Something about leaving behind a swath of destruction, pillaging as they went by — Cleveland, Detroit, Mackinaw City, Green Bay… No, that wasn’t it.
The ship’s problems are more pedestrian than that: not being able to pay a pilotage fee. The Sun-Times reported before the tall ships event: “While docked in Bay City, Michigan, the crew of a 115-foot vessel found out last week that they were required by law to have a pricey navigational pilot on board while traveling the Great Lakes in U.S. waters.”
Maybe that’s an onerous requirement. I’m not competent to say. But you’d think that the owners of the ship might have known about it before entering U.S. waters. Anyway, apparently they raised enough scratch to get to Chicago, and I’m glad. It was another cool ship to tour.
In fact, we got a guided tour by one of the crew, the only ship to provide that.
As a 21st-century replica, certain things about the ship would have been unfamiliar to, say, Erik the Red. Such as the hidden diesel engine, or the hidden stove and toilet aboard. Modern safety regs don’t allow as many crew as the ship would need to actually row it, so the oars are mostly for show, though the crew uses the sails as propulsion if it all possible. Also, in the spirit of modern Scandinavian egalitarianism, the crew’s half men and half women.
Navy Pier 2016
One of the new things this season at Chicago’s Navy Pier is the Ferris wheel.
“The new attraction, dubbed the Centennial Wheel in honor of the Lake Michigan landmark’s 100th anniversary this July, offers a higher and longer but also higher-speed hoop ride than the one provided by its predecessor,” noted the Chicago Tribune in May. The ride is also significantly more expensive.”
But of course. Can’t let any opportunity pass to grab more of that tourist dollar.
“At 196 feet tall, 48 feet taller than the structure it replaces, the Centennial Wheel is present on the pier but not dominant, occupying roughly the same footprint as the old one, which began offering rides in 1995 and gave its last one here in September.
“The old wheel — expected to start offering rides from its new home on Branson, Mo.’s Highway 76 next month — served up about 760,000 rides in 2014, just under 10 percent of all Navy Pier visitors (both figures were down from pier peaks). That was at $8 for an adult ticket.” The new basic price is $15, with (naturally) other options that cost more, to make those buying the base ticket feel like cheapskates.
Good to know that the old wheel, like so many aging entertainers, is finding a new audience in Branson. I remember that the cars were red and sported the Golden Arches, denoting its sponsor. I only rode the old one once, ca. 2002, on a company outing one summer day. Worth $8 (probably less then) for the views of the city and the lake.
Even so, there are plenty of views from Navy Pier, from the pier itself. Such as of the East Loop.
And sailing craft on Lake Michigan.
It had been a while since we’d been to Navy Pier. Not sure how long. A few years. Saturday was a good day for it, especially since temps weren’t expected to be in the 90s, as they had been the weekend before. While crowded, the expanse of the space — about 50 acres — holds a crowd pretty well, except for the food court.
As mentioned, Navy Pier is now 100 years old, built as Municipal Pier. “Navy” was an honorary title given in the 1920s, as the “Soldier” in Soldier Field, though in fact the U.S. Navy did use the pier for a while during WWII. By the time I got to know it in the late ’80s, the structure was in a state of picturesque decay.
As I wrote years ago: “For those unfamiliar with the pier, it juts into Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago a good quarter-mile or so. In the mid-90s, the City of Chicago fostered a redevelopment of the pier that transformed it from a seldom-visited, decaying relic, to the top tourist draw in the entire state of Illinois, featuring a large array of mostly family-friendly diversions, part outdoors, a good many indoors. Also, it has a relatively small amount of convention space (a gnat’s worth, compared to the elephantine McCormick Place).
“Occasionally, I miss the decaying relic, since it had some charm. I recall going there only twice in the late ’80s, once to see a live broadcast of a live radio show WBEZ no longer produces, at the ballroom at the tip of the pier; and another time to see parts of the AIDS Quilt on display under the pier’s enormous empty shed.”
As a summertime destination this year, Navy Pier wasn’t a random choice. We’d come to see the tall ships, more about which tomorrow.
Nonstop-Kino, Last Day of July 1983
Why do I still have a movie ticket stub after a third of century? Don’t ask. I don’t save all of them, or even very many. This one, yes. On July 31, 1983, I went to the Nonstop-Kino in Innsbruck, Austria.
Rich and I took in a screening of Manhattan that afternoon. All together only four people — including the two of us — were at the show. Even so, in an example of doing what the Romans do, or in this case the Austrians, we actually sat in Row 6, Seats 7 and 8.
I’ve seen movies in London (Return of the Jedi and Babette’s Feast and Duck Soup) and Rome (I forget what) and of course many in Japan and some in other Asian countries, but the cinemas in the German-speaking world are the only ones I’ve encountered that sold seats like a live theater.
Manhattan was dubbed in German. I’d seen movie before, so that didn’t matter, but I didn’t think the voice actor doing Woody Allen was a good fit. In the age of the Internet, it’s easy enough to find out that the voice actor who’s done Allen for years — the Synchronsprecher, love that word — is one Wolfgang Draeger (who also was Sir Robin in Monty Python und Die Ritter der Kokosnuß). Apparently Draeger’s highly esteemed, especially for doing Allen. Still, I didn’t care for the match. His voice wasn’t nebbish enough.