Category Archives: Suburban Chicago

October Scene

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Yesterday and today were unseasonably warm. They were also a Monday and Tuesday, so I didn’t have a lot of time to lounge around on the deck outside and enjoy it. In theory, I could take my computer outside and work there, but the charms of a warm afternoon are distracting when there’s laptop work to be done, and the screen can be hard to see.

But I did have a few minutes in the afternoon to look up at the sky.

That’s to the southeast. The puffy mass was moving fast and left my view pretty quickly, replaced by grayer clouds that dropped some rain about 30 minutes later.

Does the dog care about the weather?

Who can say? But when the wind is up, she does sniff vigorously.

Ruddigore

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On Saturday, Ann and I went to see Ruddigore by the same troupe that did The Pirates of Penzance last year, the Savoyaires, who do their shows at a junior high auditorium in Evanston. Musical direction by Timothy Semanik, stage direction by Kingsley Day.

Except for the hard seats, it was a good time. I understand that the work was originally the followup to The Mikado, which must have been a hard act to follow, but Ruddigore was topsy-turvy fun anyway, as Gilbert & Sullivan tends to be. Probably it helps that we have no reason, more than a century later, to compare one work too closely to another that happened to come just before it.

Ann said it was enjoyable too, partly because the story wasn’t quite as convoluted as the other productions she’s seen. Not that the story’s ever the main thing, but as she said, it was nice to be able to keep track of the characters.

All of the main cast acquitted themselves well. I was particularly fond of the energy that Jonathan Joseph Larson, a large man with a large beard, brought to the sailor Richard Dauntless, and Lane Halverson’s amusing performance of the relatively small part of Old Adam, Robin Oakapple’s faithful servant. He has his moment when he’s tasked to abduct a maiden.

There were some laughs. Maybe not as many as in Patience, especially when the Duke of Dunstable emerged in pink tights, but even chuckles are impressive in a work that’s more than 130 years old. Some clever lines I chuckled at:

RICH. And I make bold to ax your honour’s advice. Does your honour know what it is to have a heart?
SIR D. My honour knows what it is to have a complete apparatus for conducting the circulation of the blood through the veins and arteries of the human body.

ROB. My good sir, if I can’t disinherit my own unborn son, whose unborn son can I disinherit?
SIR ROD. Humph! These arguments sound very well, but I can’t help thinking that, if they were reduced to syllogistic form, they wouldn’t hold water.

MAR. Listen – I’ve come to pinch her!
ROSE. Mercy, whom?
MAR. You mean “who.”
ROSE. Nay! It is the accusative after the verb.

Of course, no joke about grammar is as funny as this.

The Schaumburg Labor Day Parade

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This year I decided to watch the Schaumburg Labor Day Parade, whose name pretty much sums up the time and place (no one else in my family was interested). Luck was with the parade and parade-goers this year. The parade was held in the morning, under partly cloudy skies and in only somewhat hot and humid conditions. A few hours later, intense thunderstorms rolled through.

The parade featured a thin selection of local politicos — I expect state reps and senators and such had union picnics or rallies to go to — public service equipment, local businesses, veterans, nonprofits, clubs and two high school marching bands. None of the floats were that elaborate and sometimes there were minutes-long gaps in the movement of the parade. Ah, well. The bar’s a little lower on free entertainment.

The mayor of Schaumburg (actually village president) and some trustees came by first in golf cards, and a while later came the fire equipment.
Both the Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates FDs were represented.

An organization I knew nothing about.
Instead of forays into the wilderness, Sea Scouts take forays onto the water. A different kind of wilderness, I suppose. These days, co-ed.

The odd float of the Volkening Heritage Farm at Spring Valley. Complete with plants and an oom-pah band to celebrate Schaumburg’s German past.

Flag girls. They heralded the approach of the Schaumburg High School marching band.

A different sort of band.
The Memories Entertainment float. According to their sign, the band features Buck-A-Roo & the Fabulous Memories. For this parade, they were dressed as clowns and playing ’70s rock standards.

More flag girls.
This time, ahead of the Conant High School marching band.
When the band paused for a moment near me, I noticed a number of adults moving up and down the lines with squirt bottles, squirting liquid into the mouths of the band members. Water, I assume. I also saw one fellow squirt water on the back of the neck of a band member.
That struck me as odd. Forty years ago, I was in a marching band and we marched in a parade every year in April in San Antonio. Not terrifically hot, but always warm enough, and no one gave us water. I feel a curmudgeonly moment coming on. We marched in the heat and we got dehydrated and we liked it.

More Riverside

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Hanging in the metra station in Riverside, Illinois, is a reproduction of the plan of the town as originally envisioned in the late 1860s, except the spot that says “land not belonging to the company” (that is, the Riverside Improvement Co.) is part of the town in our time.

The streets and the green spaces are still pretty much still the way they were originally laid out. Note the bend in the Des Plaines River that forms a tongue of land, marked by me by a red circle. Also, the red star is roughly where the train station, tower, library, etc. are located.

With a Riverside Museum walking tour pamphlet in hand, we decided to take a walk in the tongue of land after seeing the sights near the train station. The air was a little steamy, but with the sun hiding behind clouds, we put up with it.

One of the streets along the river is Bloomingbank Road. The river, hidden by foliage, is to the right in this image.

The road is populated mostly by large vintage houses. Such as the Clarence Cross Cottage, 1887 Shingle & Queen Anne.

The Thomas W. Blayney Residence, 1869 Italianate.

The John C. Smith House, 1907 American Four Square. That’s a nice porch.

Most people probably come this way for the Frank Lloyd Wright works, which are a cluster of residences on 10 acres near the tip of the tongue. Originally they were built as a single residence for the Coonley family.

Per Wiki: “Avery Coonley, a Chicago industrialist and his wife, Queene Ferry of the Detroit-based Ferry Seed Company, were both heirs to industrial fortunes and had an unlimited budget to commission a new residence.” Just the kind of clients FLW liked, no doubt.

Formerly the stables and coach house.

Formerly the gardener’s residence.

Formerly the main house.

Not the best view of the house. That would be the other side, but there’s no access to ordinary gawkers since the house is privately owned. That source says the house is up for sale, listed this spring for $1.6 million. Might be a reasonable price for a FLW work, if you remember it’s an artwork more than a residence, and don’t mind the invisible hole somewhere in the place where your money seems to go.

Riverside

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I’ve known about Riverside, Illinois, for years, and used to pass through it every weekday in the late ’90s and early ’00s when I took the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Metra line to work downtown. One thing I could see from the train window was the fine brick station.

As well as the town’s former water tower, not far from the station. The building underneath the tower is now the town’s park and recreation department.
Riverside is a special place beyond what you can see from the train. But I never got around to a longer visit than a train stop, so on Saturday morning, inspired by the fact that some of its buildings were part of Doors Open Illinois — not to be confused with Open House Chicago, or Doors Open Milwaukee — we drove to Riverside for a look around.

“Starting [in 1869] with a blank canvas of 1,600 acres of purchased farmland, the Riverside Improvement Company arranged for a complete utility infrastructure — water, sewer, and gas for lighting,” WTTW says. “They called their brand-new community ‘Riverside’ for the Des Plaines River that flows through the site.

“To design and plan the village, they hired Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux, whose Central Park success a decade before had made them superstars of design.

“Olmsted’s signature approach was to create a picturesque, landscaped topography. Inspired by the winding Des Plaines River, he eschewed a standard city grid, instead creating a series of curvilinear streets that wound across each other — a pattern that resulted in dozens of tiny triangular mini-parks.”

These days, Riverside is still a prosperous suburb, as it was intended to be from day one. We parked near the station and first got a better look at the station’s handsome interior.

As well as a closer look at the former water tower.
Unfortunately, it isn’t open to the public for a climb. Too bad. Even local vistas are usually worth the effort. A view of Riverside from that perch would probably be a fine thing.

A nearby former pumping station is now a small museum devoted to Riverside. Mostly it sports photographs on the wall of earlier times in the town.
The three volunteers inside, local ladies all, seemed really glad to see us. I expect that word never really got out about Open Door Illinois, and the little museum doesn’t get that many visitors anyway.

They told us a bit about the town and the structures we’d been looking at. For example: parking is usually possible near the train station, even on weekdays, which is unusual among suburban Metra stations. Most commuters walk or ride bicycles to the station, one of the volunteers said. Probably just as Olmstead wanted it.

More from WTTW about Riverside: “In 1871, when the Great Fire decimated Chicago and before Olmsted’s plan was fully executed, the developers went bankrupt. But before long, Riverside picked up momentum again, with community resident and notable architect William LeBaron Jenney stepping in to complete the town plan, and other notable architects of the day such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan designing homes.”

One of the aforementioned mini-parks is next to the train station: Guthrie Park.
Named after a local luminary, not the folk singer. There are an assortment of commemorative plaques attached to rocks ringing the flag pole in Guthrie Park. Some of them honor men, presumably locals, who were killed in the Great War.

Rev. Hedley Heber Cooper, d. May 26, 1918. War was dangerous for chaplains, too.

Private Albert Edward Moore, d. July 19, 1918.

There’s also a plaque for a soldier who died not long after the Armistice, but here at home. A little late for the flu, but still possible. Accident, maybe.

Sgt. James P. Quinn, d. February 4, 1919, Camp Logan.

Near Guthrie Park is the Riverside Public Library, completed in 1931, which looks like a church. The architect is given as Connor & O’Connor, or simply “Mr. Connor” in this timeline.
On the inside it looks even more like a church. A certain kind of church, anyway.

The library is the only one I’ve ever seen with an Olmsted collection.

The collection takes up a number of shelves in its own special niche.

RIP, Amando Chavez

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I didn’t know Amando Chavez. I only heard about him after he died a week ago Wednesday in a traffic accident on a road near where I live. A road I drive on frequently.

A small, informal memorial is at the site. I stopped by there this afternoon.

To give a little more context to that image, here’s a wider shot.
An ordinary suburban road. “Accident” isn’t quite the word, though, since by all appearances, a DUI driver was completely at fault. That road isn’t particularly busy at that time of the evening, so there’s even less excuse for what happened.

Looks like the driver at fault was one of those young fools who darts around other cars as fast as his engine will take him. Everyone’s seen that kind of ass, in a hurry to get to the next red light, as he weaves around you or around the cars ahead, with scant room for error — and error’s all too likely when DUI.

It’s the kind of accident that sets my teeth on edge. It didn’t have to be Mr. Chavez. It could have been me or anyone in my family. All the same, I’m not going to avoid that road.

Graue Mill & Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve

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Not long ago I was passing through the western suburbs, not too far from where I lived — and it feels a little strange to put it this way — around the turn of the century. Since I had a little extra time, I decided on a whim to visit the Graue Mill and Museum.

Re-visit it. The last time I was there, I remember pushing one of my daughters in a stroller. I don’t remember which one. In either case, that was a while ago. Around the turn of the century.

Graue Mill is a water-powered grist mill on Salt Creek in DuPage County, dating from the 1850s. The machinery inside is elaborate, restored to operation, and still grinding small quantities of grain that the museum sells. I didn’t go inside this time, but pondered the handsome exterior of the mill.

As well as its large water wheel.
“Frederick Graue was born in Germany, came to the United States and settled in Fullersburg, Illinois, in 1842,” the museum’s web site says. In 1849, he purchased the site of a sawmill that had burned down, along with his partner William Asche, and constructed a gristmill there. Asche later sold his share to Graue.

“Limestone for the basement walls was quarried near Lemont; bricks for the rest of the walls were made from clay from the Graue farm and fired in kilns near the mill site; flooring, beams, and posts were from white oak timbers cut along the I&M canal. The four one-ton buhrstones used for grinding were imported from France. After the gristmill opened in April 1852, it ground wheat, corn and other grains produced by local farmers.

“The mill was a major center of economic life during the 19th century and was also used by Fred Graue to hide runaway slaves on their journey to freedom in Canada.”

In the 20th century, the now-obsolete mill fell into ruin, but it was restored in the 1930s by none other than the CCC. Specifically, Troop V-1668, made up of veterans. These days, the mill is part of the Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, which is a unit of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. The village of Fullersburg, for its part, was never incorporated and doesn’t exist as a modern entity.

This is Salt Creek next to the mill, which gives it its power.
Salt Creek, despite its name, is really more of a river in this part of DuPage County, but never mind. It joins the Des Plaines River in Cook County, which later joins the Illinois and then of course the Mississippi.

I had time enough to take a stroll on one of the paths through Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, not too far from the mill.

Along the way, the path takes you past other views of Salt Creek, slightly upstream from the mill.
Past summer fields. The years do go by like so many summer fields.
And a handful of well-maintained CCC structures.
Though I didn’t capture any of the activity with my camera, the paths of Fullersburg Woods are very popular with dog walkers and their dogs.

The Warrenville Garden, 1987

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About once a month during the warm months of 1987, and maybe a few times the year after that, I drove from Chicago to southwest suburban Warrenville — it seemed pretty far away — to visit a friend of mine who had just bought a house in that suburb. He lives in Texas these days, and I’ve since lost touch with him, except for a nominal link on Facebook.

He cultivated a large garden in his large back yard and I helped him out because it was a novelty and because he gave me some of the produce. There was a lot of produce.
“We aren’t gardening for food,” he once said. “We’re gardening for virtue.”

He was a conscientious gardener, and I took home so many vegetables and melons that I further took some to my office and gave them to anyone who wanted them. They were a hit. A woman in the office who’d grown up on a downstate farm complimented the squash in particular.

I’d forgotten that my friend had made pictures of the garden. Also that I had a few of them tucked away.

Corn, tomatoes, melons, carrots, peas, green beans, cucumbers, squash and much else I’ve probably forgotten.

Not a bad thing to do for part of a summer. But I also found I had no natural passion for gardening. Later attempts in my own back yards were indifferent and lackluster. One problem in particular, aside from hating to weed: when the plants I wanted to grow were just sprouting, I couldn’t always tell them apart from weeds.

The pictures of the plants on the seed packages were no use in making that determination, either. They always showed idealized, fully grown examples.

San Antonio Riverwalk Views

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Summer’s pretty pleasant here in the not-so-hot reaches of Illinois. Up in the sky.
And down toward the ground, where strange critters lurk.
So pleasant that I’m taking a week off from work and posting. Back on August 5.

Both of the places I visited in San Antonio recently were near the San Antonio River and thus the Riverwalk. So I took a few minutes each time to go down to the river.

Near the King William District, the walk was almost deserted.
Temps were in the 90s, of course, which might have contributed to it, but I suspect not many people come this way anyway.

A few do. Here’s a view of the Arsenal Street Bridge.

A view from the Arsenal Street Bridge, looking north toward downtown San Antonio.
The building poking over the trees, with the flag, is the Tower Life Building, though I’ll always think of it has the Smith-Young Tower, completed in 1929. One of the city’s finest office buildings. I understand that once upon a time, my civil engineer grandfather had an office there.

After visiting the Briscoe Museum, I walked over to the Riverwalk — it’s only a short distance away — at one of its more touristed spots.

This is the Arneson River Theatre.
The stage is on the north side of the river, while 13 rows of grass are on the south side for seating. Just another idea of the Father of the Riverwalk, H.H. Hugman, finally realized as the WPA built the Riverwalk in the late ’30s. Arneson was the WPA engineer who was to have been in charge of building the Riverwalk, but he died before the project really got under way.

High Summer Misc.

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Time for a high summer break. Back to posting around July 22.

Last night around midnight I spent a few pleasant minutes on my deck. Temps were neither hot nor cold, the noise from traffic was subdued, and Mars hung above the garage, a pretty orange point of light. The suburban haze dimmed it some, of course, but not enough to obscure the planet as a object of contemplation.

We, as in human beings, could go to Mars if we really wanted to. So far we don’t. The people who will go there might not be born yet, but I think they will go.

Closer to home, I visited a mall recently and decided to document something that might not be around much longer.

The same retailer has a location in Chicago — a neighborhood store, smaller than the suburban locations, that I drive by sometimes — that’s closing. Or maybe it has already. I wouldn’t mind documenting it either, but it would be a pain in the butt to find parking, and then a vantage to get a good shot.

In another store, an actual bookstore that sells other things, I saw these recently.

I know there are a lot of variations on Monopoly, but Deadpool Monopoly? Walking Dead Monopoly? Golden Girls Monopoly?

Somewhere out there is a collector of Monopoly editions. Must be hard to keep up. Or maybe the Smithsonian, or the Library of Congress, has tasked itself to preserve a copy of every edition. Maybe not. Maybe Golden Girls Monopoly will be highly prized for its rarity by collectors during the Monopoly craze of the 2160s.

Finally, a picture of Independence Day fireworks here in suburban Chicago.

Not a great picture. But not bad for a phone camera.