Wednesday 21 June 2023
The first adventure for the day was an architectural river cruise. Before this, our first discovery of the day was that Chicago's transit system has stations with duplicate names. So we hopped on the blue line and jumped off at Grand only to discover there was more than one Grand (there's also one on the red line). In fact, on closer inspection, there are 3 Chicagos, 3 Cicero, 3 Pulaskis etc. I get the logic of naming them after the streets they sit on, but it's so very confusing. It's not even that each colour line only has one of each colour - the blue line has two Harlems, so wow betide you if you get on in the centre of Chicago and head for the wrong Harlem!
Anyway, we'd left enough time so made our cruise in time. I'm rarely happier than when on a boat - I love being close to the water level pottering along. Ours was an architectural tour, and big impressive buildings is certainly something Chicago is not lacking.
We initially headed down to the lock gates separating the river from the lake, noting that we were last on the pecking order for priority here.
We sailed back up the river marvelling at the skyscrapers and the amazing bridges spanning the river. Fun fact - the river flow was reversed in the early 1900s by building a canal through a small watershed to the Des Plaines River. This prevented sewage and other soiled water from flowing into the lake - this would not have been a fun fact for those residents of Lockport, new recipients of the unwanted effluence of Chicago. Fun fact 2 - when rainfall has been super high they occasionally re-reverse the flow of the river to allow water to drain out into Lake Michigan and help prevent flooding downtown.
Apparently it's rare to see a bridge lifted. They usually only raise them twice a year - once to let all the yachts out of the marina and later to let them all back in.
Oooh, train on a bridge, and a much loved favourite.
This was a rare example of a bridge which lifted up horizontally rather than the more common swing bridges. I certainly would not be keen to live here.
Another few old swing bridges on the southern and northern branches - left high to keep them out of the way (and look arty).
We headed down to the downtown area called The Loop for lunch. This is the central CBD, Central Business District, and where the L transit line does a loop overhead. Makes for lovely road shadows.
We also navigated ourselves down to the zero point of Chicago, as in the point where the names of the streets turn from East-something to West-something, and where the Norths turned to Souths - the junction of Maddison and State Streets. Sadly it was very unexciting and nobody had thought to put up a small plague to reward me for my efforts.
I did however find a benchmark on a wall, my first! And then, a while later, found one in the pavement. This latter find I deemed "less proper" than the first which was installed by the US Geological Survey, whereas the second was by the highways team of Cook Country (sorry if you're reading Cook surveyors).
We also made time to visit the Cultural Hall of Chicago, mainly because we knew it had a magnificent Tiffany style domes inside, and I'm a bit of a sucker for these sort of things.
The grand finale to the day was ascending the Hancock 360 degree tower for sunset and night views. I love getting high to orientate myself and it was amazing. I am definitely getting old as my vertigo, once ignorable, prevented me from getting near the windows for the first 30 minutes. JC kept finding me in the middle browsing the shop goodies. Once my world stopped wobbling I was able to sit near a window and enjoy the vista as the sun set.
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