At a remove from the lead attractions in Millennium Park is a small secluded canal where weary people from all over may sit down, take off their shoes, and dangle their feet in a cooling stream.
The garden canal
Chicago’s Trump Tower: Is it for the birds?
I think it’s the best mirror-wall in the city. I’ve written enthusiastically before about the Trump Tower. Now I see another aesthetic reason to like the building. I fear, though, that its mirror-cladding poses a new threat to birds. Our newest glass skyscrapers are so mirage-like that many birds probably die flying into them. If…
The Wrigley Building at 4:15
One of the great things about commuting home on the bus is how slow it is.
Market-day crowd
Families roll out of bed on Saturday and head for the farmers’ market in Lincoln Park. The kids run while parents buy produce and pick up a plein air breakfast to eat on the lawn. It’s about as low-key as city life gets. I like the communal look of so many people quietly eating at…
Encircling one
Before it was nicknamed “The Bean” and became one of Chicago’s most visited tourist attractions, the massive, mirrored Millennium Park sculpture formally named Cloud Gate was intended to serve a more meditative and transcendental end.
Enough for a conversation?
Three poles carrying a bit of everything communicate with a neighboring wall. Much care has gone in to maintaining all these wires and the wall, with its band of red and conscientious tuckpointing.
Summer lawns
The suburbs sustain their own landscape aesthetic, different from that of the city or country. Whenever I visit my brother, who lives in a sweet subdivision in Palatine, I realize how much I crave those expanses of lawn and the calming sight of manicured bushes and sheltering trees. Like many city-dwellers, I grew up in…
Breakfast-room dinner
Our apartment is old-fashioned, with a kitchen that’s not eat-in but only for cooking, a too-big dining room, a butler’s pantry (where a butler is supposed to be plating our food), and a cozier ‘breakfast room,’ where we end up eating most of our meals. The table in the breakfast room is beat-up and small. …
The nighttime park
Night never really sets in thoroughly in Chicago. We get closest to dark in summer, when the trees’ shadows leaf into a canopy, blocking out some of the streetlights’ glare. The lights are overly bright, to the point of making it hard to sleep. How would we be affected were the city naturally dark at…
Bricolage
A rooftop shows the work of generations, its flaking chimney, paint-spattered shingles, and ancient tar-paper overlaid with present-day graffiti, satellite dishes, and solar panels.
Yellow flowers on green water
In the summer, the lily pool offers subtle opportunities for appreciation, even when, as in June, the cottonwood floats on the water, gumming up its mirror-like surface.
