kaffy_r | Entries tagged with chicago

Happy Birthday Chicago!

I don't know why I'm unable to post things in the beginning of the day, and why my posts always end up at the end of the day. That's not good when you want to celebrate something on a particular day. And this one is even more delayed; Tuesday, March 4, 2025, was Chicago's 188th birthday.

( Read more... )

And here's a good epilogue to my maunderings: Chicago, by Carl Sandburg

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: the living room
Current Music: Stray Kids "Voices"

Chicago, Summer, 1995

Back in 1995, Chicago suffered through a five-day heat wave that killed more than 700 people, a majority of them old, poor, and people of color. Almost 30 years later, a lot has changed in terms of the city's response to heat. But we still have many of the systemic problems that exacerbated the tragedy. And now we are dealing with a climate crisis that could make the Anthropocene the final hurrah for humans.

Last week, Chicago experienced two days where the heat topped 100F (37.8C) in some neighborhoods, with heat indexes hitting 120F (48.9C). I'm not aware of any deaths, which would be a blessing. And our heat was certainly less dire than elsewhere in the U.S. or around the world.

Still, we kept our blinds down and our curtains drawn for both days. The one time I headed outside, to take garbage to our dumpsters, I was staggered by how hot it was; certainly worse than I'd experienced for years - possibly since July of 1995, when the heat helped kill my cat, Rissa.

Once the temps dropped (they're really lovely right now. We've been able to turn off the AC and open the windows the last couple of days), I started thinking of that time, and remembered a poem I wrote for my dear heat-hating friend Nick.

In (dubious) honor of last week's heat, and the likelihood that we'll see more and more destructive summer heat, here's the poem.

*** *** *** ***

( Read more... )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: the neighborhood at night

Chicago

It's been more than a month since I put my brain in gear and posted here. It's been a month of little ambition and fewer spoons, I guess. But I'm going to get back to posting, I swear to god.

Doing this - getting back up on the blogging bicycle - is more difficult than it once was. I try to find something interesting to say, and when I can't find something that meets that description (at least in my own eyes), I write nothing at all. Worse than that are the times when I do have an idea I think is worth writing about - and I still can't put pen to paper. But there comes a time one must attempt it, she said portentously.

So here I am, on a fairly sunny Sunday, with nearly all our windows open and the tiniest breeze making it truly enjoyable, ready to write about Chicago.

( It's ALL under here. )

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: birds chirping outside my window

Slippin' On By On LSD, Friday Night Trouble Bound

One of the first things I fell in love with as a newcomer to Chicago was driving north in the wee small hours of the morning, on Lake Shore Drive.

The Drive, created in stages since the 1860s, and currently running from Hollywood Avenue on the North Side to 66th Street on the South Side, has a fascinating history (at least I find it fascinating, YMMV).

I didn't know any of the history when I arrived in Chicago back in 1981. What I did know were the drives north at 4:30 a.m. in a friend's car, as we drove BB home from his bartending job. As I was falling headfirst in love with BB, I also fell headfirst in love with the Drive.

Darkness to the east; Lake Michigan, its vast inland sea depths unimaginably compelling. Unseen at night, the stretches of park and beachfront, miles long, fronting the lake's shoreline.

Jewels of light on the Drive's west side, the variegated windows of high-rises, each building another stone strung along the invisible necklace of internal streets pacing the Drive.

The sight was magical to me, especially the sleep-deprived lovesick me of that time.

In the years since I first fell in love with it, I've driven more of Lake Shore Drive - heading south into the heart of Burnham's big plan, past Buckingham Fountain and Millennium Park, past Grant Park', where antiwar protestors warned Boss Daley and his cops in 1968 that the whole world was watching, past the Adler Planetarium, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and, further south, the University of Chicago and Hyde Park and past the Museum of Science and Industry. I've driven past the Jackson Park lagoon and the South Side neighborhoods many of those in all those North Shore high-rises would like to forget.

Lake Shore Drive is Chicago, just as much as all the city's inland neighborhoods. It's evolved a long way from the days when it was Potter Palmer's front drive, or the days when it was known as Leif Eriksen Drive. So I fully support the most recent effort to help it evolve: the effort to have the Outer Drive (there's an Inner Drive that shelters rich folk) named after the first non-indigenous settler of Chicago, the black, possibly Caribbean-born trader Jean Baptiste Poiint DuSable.

The move has been postponed for a month - racial politics in Chicago, what a surprise - but it will happen. And I'm glad.

Still, it will probably take a little time before it stops being Lake Shore Drive in my head. So have this song, by the gloriously regional Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, which is just as wonderful for me (especially the piano) as the roadway it celebrates.

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: the home office
Current Music: Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, "Lake Shore Drive"
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/579769.html

A Green Gem on Chicago's North Side

One of my last posts mentioned that Bob and I planned to go to the West Ridge Natural Area, which fronts of Chicago's Western Avenue on the (relatively) far North Side. I even mentioned taking pictures and perhaps putting a few of them up.

It took some time, but I finally got around to offloading pictures from my phone, and I'll share a few of them here.

Not a ton, however. During our time there, both Bob and I deliberately put our phones away for a majority of our walk. I agreed with Bob when he wondered about people who seemed to be walking around spending more time looking at their phones than at their beautiful surroundings. (I say that knowing that some folks I know take equally beautiful pictures as a way of chronicling events and places in their lives. That's something quite apart from experiencing an event solely through a lens.)

The natural area is still very young; it's been developed slowly since about 2011, and I know that recreating the various mini-ecosystems that once were native to the Illinois area takes time. You could tell that some of the prairie areas were really new because their blooming plants were all varieties with golden flowers. I have an acquaintance who's a specialist on native plantings in this area, someone I met while doing a story on another prairie garden in a nearby suburb, and she told me that she'd be happy once the prairie garden she was more or less in charge of began showing purple and blue flowers in summer. That's when she'd feel as if the plantings had a chance at becoming more secure and mature, she said.

I didn't mind the relative youth of the area; all the golden flowerings made an intermittently cloudy day very sunny.

It was an odd feeling to wander through this fairly large area (it was so large that we didn't get a chance to see the oak savannah area, but we'll get to it another time) and feel at some times like we were in a near-wilderness, then t urn a corner and look out on the cemetery that bordered one side of the natural area, or see Western Avenue buildings on the other side. And we never completely lost the sounds of the city. Still, it really was a relief to walk through. I'm always reminded of something my Aunt Peggy used to say - that coming to the country could give her eyes a rest, They could look out at vistas, instead of visually running up against city walls, she'd say. I understand that.

Anyhow, enough talk. Here are some of the pictures I took, under a cut.( Some are way too large .... )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: the home office
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/529103.html

Labor Day Weekend

My Dreamwidth/Live Journal output for August was better than for July, although that's not saying much. I still find it positive that I haven't given up chatting with people here, or using the space to talk about things I find interesting, bothersome, or worthy of delight.

Today we had an actually cool day, with temperatures in the high 60s Fahrenheit, so I've decided that I could call today the first day of true fall. I've asked Bob to go with me tomorrow to the West Ridge Natural Area. It's a 21.23 acre nature preserve created from a corner of Chicago's historic Rosehill cemetery.

Because both the cemetery - the final resting place for Chicago firefighters, Civil War Union dead, members of Chicago's Chinese community and more - and the eventual nature preserve front on Western Avenue, we've had years to watch and wonder about the overgrown area that became the preserve. (We've also loved going to Rosehill to wander its paths, first with Andy when he was a little boy, and occasionally without him.)

When I saw the north-western corner being redeveloped, I made up my mind that I wanted eventually to go in. And today I decided that tomorrow was the day. If Bob and I actually do make it, I'll try to take some pictures with my phone.

I'm still on my calorie quest to lose weight, and sticking to it fairly well, although last night was a foreseen complete failure. I had supper with my three former Pioneer colleagues, something that happens 2-3 times a year, and we went to an Indian restaurant. I knew that the food, which was very good, was also soaked in oil and butter, but since this was a social engagement, I was prepared for going well over my caloric limit. I was surprised when I only went over it by 1,500 calories. Heh. The compay was well worth the extravagance.

I am enjoying the long weekend, which amuses me, because if I'd had any thought about Labor Day Weekend 2019 prior to now, it probably was the thought that, as a retiree, I didn't have to labor any more. And now my work with my favorite labor union has rendered that thought incorrect. Ah, yes, I amuse myself.

To all my UK friends; I hope there's any chance at all to fight Johnson's prorogation of parliament. I wish Corbyn had done more to fight against Tory chaos, or to take better advantage of it than he did, but I am looking at it from the outside, and you all have been caught in the midst of it all. What a terrible situation. You have my sympathy.

I think that's all for now. But tomorrow, some nature awaits

Oh, I did forget; I wanted to link to this story, which once again showed me how amazing and confusing and wonderful this world is.

Current Mood: peaceful
Current Location: the home office
Crossposts: https://kaffyr.livejournal.com/528636.html

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Entries tagged with chicago

Dept. of Hog Butcher to the World

Dept. of Old Poetry

Dept, of Lo, She Rises

Dept. of Chicagoland

Dept. of The Great Outdoors

Dept. of Labor