Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s
Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders…
Carl Sandberg wrote those words about Chicago in 1914. The first line was literally true in that era: Chicago processed more meat than any other place in the world up until the mid-1920’s. And although the last of the stockyards closed 50 years ago, it is still the nation’s largest rail transportation hub (and of course home to O’Hare International Airport, where you have likely been delayed at some point in your flying history). It is also still situated on the shores of Lake Michigan and thus subject to notoriously lousy weather. So a fair amount of Sandberg’s century-old description still holds.
Neither Alice nor I had ever visited Chicago as adults (I was there briefly as an 11-year-old), and so she requested a trip there to celebrate a recent milestone birthday. (It’s one of those birthdays to which people invariably react “Really?? You look so much younger than that!” Which she in fact does.) We got lucky on the weather: Chicago’s famous “Windy City” moniker did not apply during our stay, and we were able to walk to many of our destinations under warm and sunny — if rather humid — early June skies.
The reason everything was so accessible is that we were strategically situated at the Chicago Athletic Association (CAA), which once upon a time was in fact the Chicago Athletic Association but is now owned by Hyatt Hotels. They have preserved the “1940’s Rich Guy Athletic Club” decor: dark wood paneling, deep red leather chairs, brass trim and fixtures, and even cigar humidors in the rooms (which are nonetheless all non-smoking). And you know how many nice hotels provide robes in the rooms? This place does too, only the robes are padded and say “Welterweight” on the back. We put ours on and I TKO’d Alice in the middle of the third round. Take that, birthday girl.
Anyway, the CAA sits strategically on Michigan Ave., the main downtown drag, right across the street from Millennial Park and Grant Park — two central gathering and strolling locations — and within occasionally ambitious walking distance of quite a few of the sights. And walk we did, several miles a day, feeling very virtuous as we did so. It was a calorie-burning virtue born of necessity, as Chicago’s attractions include a lot of really interesting restaurants of which we took full advantage, gaining a few pounds each despite all the walking around.
Chicago is also rightly known for its architecture, starting with “The Bean”, which our hotel looked down on.
66 feet long and 33 feet high, its official name is “Cloud Gate”, but for obvious reasons is known to one and all as “The Bean”. In non-COVID times people congregate underneath it to enjoy the fun-house-mirror effect of one’s own distorted image, but it was fenced off during our stay to prevent possibly infectious crowds from gathering.
This kind of architectural creativity is a hallmark of the city, the ethos being sort of kicked off in 1967 with the installation in Daley Plaza of an original untitled Picasso sculpture — which he donated to the city — that at the time was variously derided as resembling a baboon, an aardvark, the Egyptian god Anubis, or the artist’s pet Afghan hound. (He really had one.) You can decide for yourself:
In the same vein we have this animated face (two, actually, facing each other) gracing the park just a few hundred feet from The Bean:
So whatever Chicago is these days, architecturally stodgy is not it. Indeed, it is quite the architectural grab-bag, sporting a complex and fascinating skyline that incorporates a grab-bag of styles: Art Deco, Spanish Revival, Mies van der Rohe, you name it. Taking advantage of this, a handful of tour operators offer architectural sightseeing cruises on the Chicago River, which winds through the city. You can click on individual images in the gallery below to see each one at full size.
In the photo at lower right, the tall building with the two white spikes is the Willis Tower (no, not Bruce), formerly — and still widely called — the Sears Tower. Built in 1973, it reigned for 25 years as the tallest building in the world and (depending on how you count) is still the second tallest building in North America after the CN tower in Toronto. It’s observation gallery is 1353 ft (412 m) up, and afforded us a spectacular nighttime view. It also illustrated in a small way the economic ravages of COVID: admission to the tower is timed, with advance reservations, and there is usually a very long wait. We made a reservation as required but pretty much just walked right in. (Though it took two tries: the elevator was broken on the night of our original ticket, so we went back the next evening.)
The river also has a River Walk extending for a mile or two, densely dotted with shops and restaurants, and populated enough to be lively without being too crowded. Near one end of the River Walk is a grassy area where the crowd (such as it was) chilled out in the evening, at least some of them in anticipation of the nightly light show projected onto the side of the Merchandise Mart, a huge blocky commercial building that, at 4 million square feet, was the largest building in the world in 1930 when it was completed.
Besides this sort of thing, the city’s architectural heritage is secured by the largest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the world; Wright spent much of his career there. There are any number of tours and day trips that you can book to visit his creations — there are dozens of them, 25 in the Oak Park neighborhood alone — but we picked a single one to visit: the Robie House, right at the edge of the University of Chicago campus, on the shore of the lake near the south end of the city.
Our peregrinations brought us to a number of world-class museums, of which Chicago has many. We spent the better part of a day at the Art Institute of Chicago — home to the original of Grant Wood’s much-parodied “American Gothic” farming couple — and a similar amount of time at the excellent and expansive Museum of Science and Industry, which as far as I know is the only science museum in the world displaying an actual previously-operational submarine. That would be the U-505, captured from Germany during World War II; the interior tour was alas closed due to COVID but it is quite an impressive even from the outside. It was captured in June 1944, just before D-Day — the first such capture of an enemy ship by the US Navy since the War of 1812. 252 feet long, it’s housed in its own big domed room with assorted artifacts and memorabilia. (And in case you were wondering, that’s a little less than half the length of a modern nuclear missile sub.)
I’ll close by mentioning the restaurants. It seems like half the people to whom I mentioned that we had been to Chicago and eaten well responded with, “Oh, you had Chicago-style pizza?” No, we did not. Given the opportunity to eat deep-dish pizza, I will generally take the more efficient approach of eating an entire loaf of bread instead. So, no. But we did eat at some excellent and unusual restaurants, for example enjoying the first Indonesian food I had had in some years. (The establishment was, strangely, in an altogether unpopulated food court with an unsettling post-zombie-apocalypse vibe.) We had a wonderful Chinese Hot Pot meal at a restaurant that serves only that… essentially a Chinese fondue, in which your “base” is a savory broth of your choice, boiling at the table, rather than hot oil or melted cheese. And we had a Japanese meal of type that we had previously only ever enjoyed (or even seen) in Kyoto, a sort of thick Japanese crepe, cooked hibachi-style at the table, called okonomiyaki. I was, however, taken aback by the name of the okonomiyaki restaurant, which is “Gaijin”… strange to me because I knew that the word meant “foreigner” in Japanese, but as a pejorative. Wondering if I was mistaken about that, I sent a note to our friend in Japan, Mariko, and asked about it. She responded in horror, explaining that the word was indeed so derogatory that you couldn’t even print it in a newspaper in Japan. The owners of the restaurant are American, not ethnic Japanese, and their website explains that the name of the restaurant is a little tongue in cheek. But it sounds more like someone has a tin ear for ethnic humor.
Rich and Alice Go Globetrotting 
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