Windy City: By foot, by cell phone.

This week while Jen was in Maine, I was at a conference in Chicago. In my experience, conferences try to schedule venues that have certain appeal to the visitors and presenters, so as to increase registration as much as possible. Well, our locale was the McCormick Place Convention Center about 2 miles south of anything. Though I do hear that that is the venue for the big auto show...

Anyway, having been made aware that the hotel staff does not recommend walking in the region (I think Jim Croce told them all about Bad Leroy Brown on the south side of Chicago), and with colleagues being confronted on their walk to Chinatown for dinner, I decided my gallivanting really needed to be limited the morning hours. After all, what hooligan gets up at 6 am to rough people up? I've never heard of one.

Here are a few of the things I saw:
With Chicago to the east of Lake Michigan, there is a sunrise over the water. That was pretty nice, given that I walked out on Northerly Island. It was quite beautiful. It's a part of the Museum campus, where they have the Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, and Shedd Aquarium.
I guess that ages ago, the land was set aside for public use, and they couldn't put buildings on it... then they changed the legislation so that museums could be built. All along the lake shore there is a hiking and biking trail, which is quite nice. For that matter, Northerly Island is under a vegetation project to return the landscape to prairie grasses. I like it when cities try to include greenspace in their city plan.


Along with the parks come the typical strange art on display... I don't recall what the motivation was behind these feet, but I bet you could look it up without too much hassle. I thought I needed to join in the art, if indeed it was meant to be inclusive of all city walkers.

I saw all sorts of buidings and folks on the sidewalks in the morning. For example, this little building here was The Cable House, built for the president of the Rock Island and Pacific Railway company. The building to the right was... I dont know, but I thought it was cool at 6:15 seeing all the folks going to their construction jobs with the traditional Igloo coolers. There must have been hundreds of workers walking to work.
I saw all these other buildings, too. The American Book Company print shop. The Monadnock Block downtown. This big columnar street view. It was alot to take in, and consider that the whole place burnt down in 1871. Fire seems to have taken a pretty big role in town, as there are now firehouses converted to high end restaurants. There are buildings built upon rubble of old foundations, historic fire towers probably built after paranoid residents lost their whole estates due to that bad accident. Do you think Old Lady O'Leary really had something to do with it? I guess traditions will live on.

Let's see. What else? I went to the end of Route 66. Or the start. I guess it depends on which direction you are going. Closer to the hotel was this Calumet Plant, where Time and Life publications were printed. I thought it was cool to see the window washers scaling the building. Modern spider-men, if you ask me.

One of the nights we went to dinner at the Signature on the 95th floor of the John Hancock tower. That was pretty nice. The service was poor, the portions were small, and the bill was large. I suppose those are the things that come with the territory. Who ever thought that you'd have to pay extra for side dishes anyway? Call me uncultured. Call me cheap. Call me afraid-to-submit- an-exorbitant-receipt-to-my- -company's-accountant. I had an entree and drank water. My supervisor was there, too, so I don't think we'll get too much grief about it when we submit receipts. So it was a fun trip. Along with taking these pictures, my cell phone counted my steps. I did most of my walking in the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday, and I hit the 30 mile mark over those two days. Seriously. I had super sore feet, since I wasn't wearing the best walking shoes. But that's what you are supposed to do, right? Go to a new city. Hit the streets. Take pictures. Avoid getting mugged. Get to know your colleagues better and feel rejuvenated with your job knowing what the state of the art is for your field. The only clue to seeing what I thought was mob-related activity was their local oozie and cement shoes store. Have a look.