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August 18, 2004
Riding Around America: Science, Industry and Architecture of Chicago
I still had a lot of things on my list of things to see and only had one day left, but I managed to fit the big things in. First, I went downtown to take an architectural walking tour. The Chicago Architecture Foundation leads about a dozen different tours of the city, highlighting different time periods and buildings. It was tough to decide which tour to take but I eventually picked “Historic Skyscrapers”. I took a year long course in college on the history of architecture which is what sparked my interest so I was looking forward to seeing the world’s first skyscrapers on the tour.
I won’t mention all the buildings that the two hour tour covered, but we probably hit at least a dozen. Almost all of the buildings we saw were some of the first in the world to be considered “skyscrapers”, a term which can be applied only to buildings that are over ten stories tall and have a steel skeleton rather than load bearing walls. The highlights for me were the Marquette, Field, and Rookery buildings.
I would highly recommend the tour for anyone that has even a slight interest in architecture. The guide that our group had didn’t go into excessive detail and kept his explanations simple and in laymen’s terms but was knowledgeable enough to answer more specific questions while walking to and from the buildings. The tours also incorporate a lot of Chicago history because events in the city, especially the Great Fire, are part of the reason that the skyscrapers exist.
The tour ended just after noon and I caught a southbound bus to the Science and Industry Museum. It has changed a bit since I was last there, which was when I was a kid and my dad took me to Chicago for the weekend. I basically remembered two things from the museum: the German U-boat and the coal mine. I ended up seeing neither on this trip. The U-boat is closed because it is being restored and moved indoors to a new exhibit space. The coal mine was in operation but I chose not to go inside. I have an image in my head of what it was like and, in a sort of cheesy and sentimental way, I don’t want to taint that image by seeing it as an adult.
There were a couple of exhibits that stood out at the museum. First is the Pioneer Zephyr, an extremely fast train that ran between Denver and Chicago. It’s a slick, aluminum skinned machine in the style of Gulf Airstream campers and trailers. The Amtrak trains of today are nice, but I would have loved to be able to ride the one on display at the museum when it was in operation. The other cool exhibit was also about trains (you’d have thought I would have had enough of them by this point) and is a gigantic model train layout meant to symbolize the route of the Empire Builder. Both Chicago and Seattle are modeled, skyscrapers and all, in some detail. Trains that run through the layout include the Empire Builder, the Cascades, freight trains, and Chicago’s mass transit system.
The part that I enjoyed most at the museum, however was not any of the exhibits, but the film I watched in the Omnimax theatre. “Lewis and Clark” is a sweeping 40 minute film about the expedition, narrated by actor Jeff Bridges. It’s a documentary with the bird’s eye views of western scenery that Imax films are famous for, interspersed with scenes of Lewis, Clark and their crew. Some of the scenes are simply amazing and the entire production is uplifting, informative and patriotic without being cheesy. It conveys the magnitude of the undiscovered parts of North America and the extreme danger that the group faced along the way.
After seeing most of the museum it was 5:00 and time to catch a bus to Comiskey Park - I mean U.S. Cellular Field, to see the White Sox play the Detroit Tigers.
Posted on August 18, 2004 at 9:46 AM