August 5th 2017
The suburban trains in Chicago are clad in stainless steel and are double decked, so they look very cool.
Martin and I took the train from Clarendon Hills into Union Station, a very grand classical building with a cavernous ticket hall. There was a pop festival on in Grant Park today called Lollapalooza, so the city centre was full of lightly clad young people. We walked through the park past Anish Kapoor’s giant shiny steel bean, and then Frank Geary’s Millennium Park, an outdoor theatre with a curlicued titanium proscenium arch.
Martin had brought some food along, so we ate it sat on a wall overlooking a marina. I ate half of a supermarket sandwich which must have had a pint of assorted cold meat in it. A steady procession of yachts and motorboats came past us heading towards Lake Michigan, so we smiled, waved, and said all sorts of terrible things about the boats and their occupants.
Chicago city centre is very impressive, and has many of the best skyscrapers in the world. They date back to the first steel framed buildings in the 1880’s, and there are many beautiful Gothic skyscrapers and some that look like wedding cakes.
I last visited Chicago and the city has changed since then. There is now a walk along the Chicago River, with restaurants, bars, boat trips and gardens. It could rival the walk down London’s South Bank. By then we wanted a bit of culture, so we got an Uber to the Museum of Science and Industry. It is sited a few miles out of the centre in a huge classical styled building, a proper temple to learning. There are many excellent interactive displays, buttons to press and levers to pull to make things happen.
We returned through busy traffic to the city centre and went to the Trump Tower for a drink. It has a bar on the sixteenth floor with fantastic views of the river and surrounding buildings. The President didn’t show up, he was playing golf in Florida. Martin thought there were some good bars in an area called Rush and Division, but we only found one underwhelming Irish bar for a pint of Samuel Adams. Walking back to Union Station we had to wait an hour for a train, which was then half an hour late setting off! It was crammed with teenagers going home from the festival, in high spirits but well behaved. Arriving back at Martins at midnight, he made us poached eggs on toast.
timharnesstravels 