Monday, April 26, 2004
Two-tiered, tuliped Chicago. Those are the first striking impressions you get by taxi coming in from the airport. Regarding the two-tieredness of Chicago, the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel , for instance, is actually on the eighth floor. The floors beneath cascade down to an eventual rendezvous with the Chicago river below. And then you step out of the taxi and get the wind for which the city is famous. And then you walk the city for two days and get lots more impressions while the hubby attends a Gartner Conference of computer-world-schmoozing.
There are a couple of things I'd like to say about Chicago. For starters I could never live there. It really is too damn windy; a lake just isn't an ocean; the acoustics are terrible i.e. the two-tieredness makes for a reverberating sound system of constant noise no matter where you are downtown. And most disturbing, the city is a disaster for directionally challenged people such as myself. Rather than just going in big circles like I usually do in a new city, I rather go in big orbs , due again to the stacked-like quality of the city. For instance, you can be sitting on a bench underneath the shade of a tree and at the same time be looking out at the top of a tree , one that if you shimmied down it thirty feet would be flush with the pea-soup green Chicago river. Disconcerting for the likes of me but a feather in the cap of the city's engineers that the sub-city isn't a dark thing. Rather the sky scrapers rest gently atop steel-supported platforms spaced strategically to create airy plazas and open swaths of park or roadway below.
The city is spending literally millions on upgrading its inferiority-complexed facade. Mind you I'd never been to Chicago so I'm going completely on first impressions here but one has the sense that Chicago is trying to prove something i.e. Quick! While all of the other major U.S. cities far-superior-to-our-own deteriorate under the weight of their state deficits, let's pull out all the stops, invest heavily, and hope to god someone will say, "Heh, Chicago is pretty cool!" New bike paths, lampposts, walkways, bridges, pavements, buildings, and parks all glisten in their newness.
I have to think that all of the upgrades are being orchestrated by some centralized point because everything has a "coordinated-by-one-project-director" feel to it. In a four square-mile radius, all of the afore-mentioned upgrades appear in complementary shades of gray, rusty red, teal, and silver. Or, maybe it is the ghosts of the Germans and Poles that populated Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century that leave their indelible collective stamp on the coordinated, clean, and functional consistency of Chicago's new aura e.g. everyone is on the same page regarding tulips; every crevice, edging, pot, box, and park of soil is canvassed with purple, yellow, red, and orange tulip (it is gorgeous really although spring tulips are certainly short-lived and I wonder what replaces them when they fade and shrivel a few weeks from now). The city as a whole is one of the most scrubbed and shining I've ever seen and I am again tempted to think that the Germans and Poles have left their indelible stamp on the city.
Chicagonians dress like tulips I noted. I never saw anyone wearing anything not as austere and stream-lined as the stern tulip poking erect and brave against the granite beige bearing down on them.
Like all things in life there is an underbelly to Chicago. There is great loose jazz for instance. Better even than the live jazz performance of Rene-Marie that hubby and I took in was a lone black man playing the saxophone on one of the lone car-noise-protected street corners of Chicago. There are great steak restaurants in Chicago which defy franchising. The one we went to (aptly named the Chicago Steak House) is frequented by locals and was painted the same pea-green soup color as the sludging river a few blocks away. But this underbelly exists as an adjunct to the city, not a part of it. The city as a whole lacks soul in my opinion. In less of course you are the afore-mentioned blogged Darwinian specimen that thrives on concrete and un-naturally planted trees.
There are a couple of things I'd like to say about Chicago. For starters I could never live there. It really is too damn windy; a lake just isn't an ocean; the acoustics are terrible i.e. the two-tieredness makes for a reverberating sound system of constant noise no matter where you are downtown. And most disturbing, the city is a disaster for directionally challenged people such as myself. Rather than just going in big circles like I usually do in a new city, I rather go in big orbs , due again to the stacked-like quality of the city. For instance, you can be sitting on a bench underneath the shade of a tree and at the same time be looking out at the top of a tree , one that if you shimmied down it thirty feet would be flush with the pea-soup green Chicago river. Disconcerting for the likes of me but a feather in the cap of the city's engineers that the sub-city isn't a dark thing. Rather the sky scrapers rest gently atop steel-supported platforms spaced strategically to create airy plazas and open swaths of park or roadway below.
The city is spending literally millions on upgrading its inferiority-complexed facade. Mind you I'd never been to Chicago so I'm going completely on first impressions here but one has the sense that Chicago is trying to prove something i.e. Quick! While all of the other major U.S. cities far-superior-to-our-own deteriorate under the weight of their state deficits, let's pull out all the stops, invest heavily, and hope to god someone will say, "Heh, Chicago is pretty cool!" New bike paths, lampposts, walkways, bridges, pavements, buildings, and parks all glisten in their newness.
I have to think that all of the upgrades are being orchestrated by some centralized point because everything has a "coordinated-by-one-project-director" feel to it. In a four square-mile radius, all of the afore-mentioned upgrades appear in complementary shades of gray, rusty red, teal, and silver. Or, maybe it is the ghosts of the Germans and Poles that populated Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century that leave their indelible collective stamp on the coordinated, clean, and functional consistency of Chicago's new aura e.g. everyone is on the same page regarding tulips; every crevice, edging, pot, box, and park of soil is canvassed with purple, yellow, red, and orange tulip (it is gorgeous really although spring tulips are certainly short-lived and I wonder what replaces them when they fade and shrivel a few weeks from now). The city as a whole is one of the most scrubbed and shining I've ever seen and I am again tempted to think that the Germans and Poles have left their indelible stamp on the city.
Chicagonians dress like tulips I noted. I never saw anyone wearing anything not as austere and stream-lined as the stern tulip poking erect and brave against the granite beige bearing down on them.
Like all things in life there is an underbelly to Chicago. There is great loose jazz for instance. Better even than the live jazz performance of Rene-Marie that hubby and I took in was a lone black man playing the saxophone on one of the lone car-noise-protected street corners of Chicago. There are great steak restaurants in Chicago which defy franchising. The one we went to (aptly named the Chicago Steak House) is frequented by locals and was painted the same pea-green soup color as the sludging river a few blocks away. But this underbelly exists as an adjunct to the city, not a part of it. The city as a whole lacks soul in my opinion. In less of course you are the afore-mentioned blogged Darwinian specimen that thrives on concrete and un-naturally planted trees.
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