Entry tags:
Chicago (sort of)
I am back from Chicago! Or possibly more accurately, Back From Evanston, since getting all of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stellar_dust's moving and settling in taken care of took longer than expected, and we really only went into the city proper on one day. Also, she unexpectly had no internet, television signal, or radio in the new apartment yet, so we were pretty much completely cut off from the modern information flow - I know more about local Evanston gossip from last week than I did about the apparently really! important! things! that have been happening in the wider world. It was kind of nice.
Evanston is a really really nice little town, though, with an old-fashioned main street full of interesting and walkable shops and restaurants (and not many vacant storefronts), lots of used bookstores, lots of public lakefront, a pretty historic district full of big old Victorians, and lot of local community-building stuff going on, (and of course several El stations that take you right to the big city.)
So I mostly did a lot of wandering around Evanston on foot. I went to three of the used bookstores (one of the rambling-building-full-of-dusty-odd-ends-and-taciturn-shopkeeper sort, one of the indy-hipster-we-make-most-of-our-money-from-LPs sort, and one of the utilitarian-with-piles-of-romance-novels-in-the-narrow-aisles sort, which makes a good matched set, and two of them had shop cats!) and also picked a book off of the giveaway self of the privately-run 'public' library on Main Street, and also bought books at two thrift stores, so clearly it is a town that has all of the necessary resources. :P (there is also a HUGE fabric store that basically made me swoon, and a yarn store I didn't quite manage to go into.)
And I went to the two downtown museums in Evanston - the Museum of Prehistoric Life, which is some guy's private fossil collection in one room in the basement of the rock shop. It had some really really awesome fossils, and they were probably really well displayed the last time the displays were updated in 1980, but I couldn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to over the sound of the little voices in my head going 'were these properly excavated? was the provenience recorded? are they in the scientific record?' Which is probably unfair in some ways, but early indoctrination does that to you. (The rock shop was pretty cool too, even if they were selling fossils. And they were sold out of flint. And their prices were pretty high. Very sparkly though.) Also I was kind of distracted by the mother with two small girls who was reading the placards and kept asking me to explain obscure scientific vocabulary for her. Vocabulary like 'amphibians'. *facepalm*
The other one is the American Toby Jug Museum, which seemed to have just started having public hours every week - before that you had to make an appointment for a guided tour. Apparently my social anxiety, while still not up to calling to make an appointment for a guided tour, is totally up to ringing the bell during public hours to get a curator up to open the door for me so I can wander alone through an entirely empty museum! And who would pass up a chance to see a collection of over 8,000 figural mugs from six contents and almost four centuries? Not I, obviously. It was really nice (if you like that sort of thing) - rows and rows of labelled pottery in shiny glass cases and silent air conditioning. I probably could have stayed longer, actually, but the family wanted me to help carry more heavy things up to the third-floor walkup instead. :P They had all of our Star Wars mugs! (something else to check off on my private list of 'things I own that I have seen in a museum', started when my Snoopy lunchbox turned up in a display at the NASM.) Interestingly, they *didn't* have most of the mugs that are in my uncle's sub-collection of occupied Japan ceramics.
(the story of this museum is that there was a rich guy who collected Toby jugs since he was a teenager, and started bringing a few back from business trips, but mostly managed to keep things under control. Then Ebay happened. And he figured since he'd have to rent an extra storage space for the collection it might as well be a museum.)
On our final day in town we did actually take the el into the city; we basically just wandered from the Cloud Gate down to the Field Museum and said 'hi' to Sue, but that was pretty cool! The Cloud Gate is *much* larger and more awesome than I had realized from the description, thus I am giving it its proper name, which it has totally earned. :P My favorite bit is that if I walk through it, only looking up, I really do feel as if I'm stepping off the edge of the world when I come out the other side, and stumble. (someone needs to write a Dresden Files fic about what happens if you let a wizard lead you through the Cloud Gate.)
The overwhelming impression I got, walking down Chicago's tourist promenade, is that Chicago is prosperous. Chicago is a city that can spend money on pretty stuff just because it's shiny! Create new parks and public spaces! Do exciting things by working together as a community! There are new-looking skyscrapers *everywhere*! Etc. This is an impression I don't get in Baltimore and Washington, the cities I know best, which are mostly struggling to keep things from falling over. (It might also be a false impression, because OMG some of the bridges the trains went over in other parts of the city were scary-looking.) But in general Millennium Park is pretty much what American cities were supposed to be in the 21st Millennium.
Sue, on the other hand, is smaller than I expected. She is very cute. And I hadn't realized how much difference it makes to be looking at a large dinosaur skeleton that is very clearly, and distinctly, and interpreted to be, that of an individual - I know best the mounts in the Hall of Dinosaurs the NMNH, which are kind of patched together and not really interpreted in detail. Also, thinking on it, they're a lot harder to look it - the Hall of Dinosaurs is so much more cramped compared to Sue's display in the main atrium, which probably makes them look bigger, and also makes it hard to look at them from any perspective but up.
Anyway, looking at Sue, all her various aches and pains - the broken and healed bones, the arthritis in the tail, the bone infection - is just so obvious and present, you can't not think about her hurting, and feeling old and creaky in the mornings, as a real creature who had a full life. It really was almost worth it to go to the museum just to see her.
On the other hand, I was exactly the right age to be following avidly during all of the publicity about Sue's discovery, the disputes over her ownership, and her sale, which I couldn't help but notice were not mentioned in the displays in the museum at all. :/ Also it, and the notices in various other displays in the museum about how the Field Museum has purchased most of its collections, and a lot of things are seriously lacking in provenance, re-woke all those little voices from the Museum of Prehistoric Life about the buying and selling of museum-quality artifacts. *sigh*
While we were there we also looked at the exhibit which had been put together by a fashion designer given free reign in the collections (which could have been *so much* cooler than it was, why is so much fashion-design-related-stuff so boring? I mean the designs are wacky, but it seems like everything else is completely mired in these very conventional ways of thinking about design and style.) Also I am still very curious about why the Field Museum apparently has a huge collection of uncatalogued modern American shoes from 1997.
Then we went through the plants exhibit - which is HUGE and rigorous and very old-fashioned, which is great, but we didn't actually, ahem, get through the whole thing. And then the geology displays, which seemed to have been moved intact from some other space and were unchanged (down to fading colors in the photos) from probably sometime in the mid-sixties. (and by 'unchanged' I mean 'some of the placards cross-referenced other exhibits in rooms that no longer exist') and then the Egypt exhibit which was v. v. cool, and had a good balance between modern shiny interpretation, informativeness, and lots of well-displayed artifacts. The Egypt exhibit was probably one of the best museum exhibits I've been through lately, in fact, and I wish I'd been less tired at the time.
Then we went to the museum store and I brought some holiday cards on clearance that feature the Winter King visiting Sue, so I guess I need to decide who needs one of those sent to them. :P
The other thing I brought back from Chicago was a head cold, apparently. Oh joy.
stellar_dust's moving and settling in taken care of took longer than expected, and we really only went into the city proper on one day. Also, she unexpectly had no internet, television signal, or radio in the new apartment yet, so we were pretty much completely cut off from the modern information flow - I know more about local Evanston gossip from last week than I did about the apparently really! important! things! that have been happening in the wider world. It was kind of nice.Evanston is a really really nice little town, though, with an old-fashioned main street full of interesting and walkable shops and restaurants (and not many vacant storefronts), lots of used bookstores, lots of public lakefront, a pretty historic district full of big old Victorians, and lot of local community-building stuff going on, (and of course several El stations that take you right to the big city.)
So I mostly did a lot of wandering around Evanston on foot. I went to three of the used bookstores (one of the rambling-building-full-of-dusty-odd-ends-and-taciturn-shopkeeper sort, one of the indy-hipster-we-make-most-of-our-money-from-LPs sort, and one of the utilitarian-with-piles-of-romance-novels-in-the-narrow-aisles sort, which makes a good matched set, and two of them had shop cats!) and also picked a book off of the giveaway self of the privately-run 'public' library on Main Street, and also bought books at two thrift stores, so clearly it is a town that has all of the necessary resources. :P (there is also a HUGE fabric store that basically made me swoon, and a yarn store I didn't quite manage to go into.)
And I went to the two downtown museums in Evanston - the Museum of Prehistoric Life, which is some guy's private fossil collection in one room in the basement of the rock shop. It had some really really awesome fossils, and they were probably really well displayed the last time the displays were updated in 1980, but I couldn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to over the sound of the little voices in my head going 'were these properly excavated? was the provenience recorded? are they in the scientific record?' Which is probably unfair in some ways, but early indoctrination does that to you. (The rock shop was pretty cool too, even if they were selling fossils. And they were sold out of flint. And their prices were pretty high. Very sparkly though.) Also I was kind of distracted by the mother with two small girls who was reading the placards and kept asking me to explain obscure scientific vocabulary for her. Vocabulary like 'amphibians'. *facepalm*
The other one is the American Toby Jug Museum, which seemed to have just started having public hours every week - before that you had to make an appointment for a guided tour. Apparently my social anxiety, while still not up to calling to make an appointment for a guided tour, is totally up to ringing the bell during public hours to get a curator up to open the door for me so I can wander alone through an entirely empty museum! And who would pass up a chance to see a collection of over 8,000 figural mugs from six contents and almost four centuries? Not I, obviously. It was really nice (if you like that sort of thing) - rows and rows of labelled pottery in shiny glass cases and silent air conditioning. I probably could have stayed longer, actually, but the family wanted me to help carry more heavy things up to the third-floor walkup instead. :P They had all of our Star Wars mugs! (something else to check off on my private list of 'things I own that I have seen in a museum', started when my Snoopy lunchbox turned up in a display at the NASM.) Interestingly, they *didn't* have most of the mugs that are in my uncle's sub-collection of occupied Japan ceramics.
(the story of this museum is that there was a rich guy who collected Toby jugs since he was a teenager, and started bringing a few back from business trips, but mostly managed to keep things under control. Then Ebay happened. And he figured since he'd have to rent an extra storage space for the collection it might as well be a museum.)
On our final day in town we did actually take the el into the city; we basically just wandered from the Cloud Gate down to the Field Museum and said 'hi' to Sue, but that was pretty cool! The Cloud Gate is *much* larger and more awesome than I had realized from the description, thus I am giving it its proper name, which it has totally earned. :P My favorite bit is that if I walk through it, only looking up, I really do feel as if I'm stepping off the edge of the world when I come out the other side, and stumble. (someone needs to write a Dresden Files fic about what happens if you let a wizard lead you through the Cloud Gate.)
The overwhelming impression I got, walking down Chicago's tourist promenade, is that Chicago is prosperous. Chicago is a city that can spend money on pretty stuff just because it's shiny! Create new parks and public spaces! Do exciting things by working together as a community! There are new-looking skyscrapers *everywhere*! Etc. This is an impression I don't get in Baltimore and Washington, the cities I know best, which are mostly struggling to keep things from falling over. (It might also be a false impression, because OMG some of the bridges the trains went over in other parts of the city were scary-looking.) But in general Millennium Park is pretty much what American cities were supposed to be in the 21st Millennium.
Sue, on the other hand, is smaller than I expected. She is very cute. And I hadn't realized how much difference it makes to be looking at a large dinosaur skeleton that is very clearly, and distinctly, and interpreted to be, that of an individual - I know best the mounts in the Hall of Dinosaurs the NMNH, which are kind of patched together and not really interpreted in detail. Also, thinking on it, they're a lot harder to look it - the Hall of Dinosaurs is so much more cramped compared to Sue's display in the main atrium, which probably makes them look bigger, and also makes it hard to look at them from any perspective but up.
Anyway, looking at Sue, all her various aches and pains - the broken and healed bones, the arthritis in the tail, the bone infection - is just so obvious and present, you can't not think about her hurting, and feeling old and creaky in the mornings, as a real creature who had a full life. It really was almost worth it to go to the museum just to see her.
On the other hand, I was exactly the right age to be following avidly during all of the publicity about Sue's discovery, the disputes over her ownership, and her sale, which I couldn't help but notice were not mentioned in the displays in the museum at all. :/ Also it, and the notices in various other displays in the museum about how the Field Museum has purchased most of its collections, and a lot of things are seriously lacking in provenance, re-woke all those little voices from the Museum of Prehistoric Life about the buying and selling of museum-quality artifacts. *sigh*
While we were there we also looked at the exhibit which had been put together by a fashion designer given free reign in the collections (which could have been *so much* cooler than it was, why is so much fashion-design-related-stuff so boring? I mean the designs are wacky, but it seems like everything else is completely mired in these very conventional ways of thinking about design and style.) Also I am still very curious about why the Field Museum apparently has a huge collection of uncatalogued modern American shoes from 1997.
Then we went through the plants exhibit - which is HUGE and rigorous and very old-fashioned, which is great, but we didn't actually, ahem, get through the whole thing. And then the geology displays, which seemed to have been moved intact from some other space and were unchanged (down to fading colors in the photos) from probably sometime in the mid-sixties. (and by 'unchanged' I mean 'some of the placards cross-referenced other exhibits in rooms that no longer exist') and then the Egypt exhibit which was v. v. cool, and had a good balance between modern shiny interpretation, informativeness, and lots of well-displayed artifacts. The Egypt exhibit was probably one of the best museum exhibits I've been through lately, in fact, and I wish I'd been less tired at the time.
Then we went to the museum store and I brought some holiday cards on clearance that feature the Winter King visiting Sue, so I guess I need to decide who needs one of those sent to them. :P
The other thing I brought back from Chicago was a head cold, apparently. Oh joy.
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Chicago is NOT, in fact, as shiny and prosperous as it looks and the Cloud Gate was HOTLY contested as being worthless and over expensive which on the one hand I think most public art is criticized for the same thing, but it also ran way over budget and wasn't finished at all on time AND we're continuing to slash
important things like "bus routes" and "library staff and hours of operation" and "school budgets."
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And yeah, what with things like the TEACHERS BEING ON STRIKE, I am quite sure that the shininess is more than a little bit of facade. On the other hand, there's something to be said for doing the shiny things even if there are still major needs! The the need for better public transit will always be with us. (and really, even with the libraries being cut and the crumbling train track and the teachers on strike, Chicago still seems to be doing better than a lot of other American cities. After all, you *have* bus routes. And your teachers are allowed to strike...)
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(ps write your paper!)
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http://www.megafabrics.com/
(Not in Evanston or convenient to it, but I think you'll like it. Run by a crazy old Jewish guy; there are three floors plus a scary basement full of just about everything. Not the best place for natural fibers, though.)
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I do mostly stick to natural fibers, but still fun to poke through scary basements full of stuff. :D (Sounds very Pinkwater.)
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But in general Millennium Park is pretty much what American cities were supposed to be in the 21st Millennium.
That is an excellent insight.
I agree with the other commenters above that some of the image of prosperity is just an illusion--there are large parts of the city where things are still Not Good. (The most recent example of the fine tradition of differential treatment: the city is going to refurbish the Red Line, the major subway through the South Side, starting next year. When they refurbished the Blue Line through the mostly-prosperous northwest part of the city, they did one or two stations/track segments at a time; when they do the Red Line, if plans haven't changed, they'll close the whole thing down for five months, leaving only bus service and the much more dangerous Green Line (which doesn't go the last four miles, either).)
On the other hand, I try to think of my friend who visited from Detroit, looked around, and said, "It's so strange to be in a place where all the buildings are occupied."
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And that was pretty much my reaction, coming from Baltimore: Oh hey, I haven't seen any streets where more than half of the buildings are boarded up yet! And there are shopfronts with things other than liquor stores, pawn shops, loan sharks, and mission churches! And I'm out in a first suburb, and there's, like, commerce going on! And young families with kids! Wow.
Mind you, we didn't go into any of the really bad parts of the city, but in Baltimore you get those kind of neighborhoods starting anywhere within about three blocks of the tourist district.
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Mind you, we didn't go into any of the really bad parts of the city, but in Baltimore you get those kind of neighborhoods starting anywhere within about three blocks of the tourist district.
If you're familiar with Cabrini Green, which I think a lot of people have heard of as the poster child for the failed housing projects in Chicago...the interesting thing is that it wasn't the worst of the housing projects. But it was in the Gold Coast--the residential neighborhood just north of the downtown area, where all the rich people live, mostly--and so these people in million-dollar homes could hear gunshots from this housing project, and so it got a lot of press.