6 posts tagged “bike”

So, just a few weeks left until it's finally bicycling season again here in Chicago; long-time followers of the moblog, in fact, know that I first got heavily involved with bicycling last year, when not coincidentally I initially quit smoking. Of course, this being nerdy GTD me, I needed to invent an elaborate project for myself in order to justify all that bicycling in the first place; and this was right at the same time (spring 2007) that Google first allowed people to sign up for an account and start creating customized mashup maps through their official API, which convinced me to start doing such a thing too. But alas, because of the complexity of these maps (but more on that in a bit), I ended up doing a lot more trips than I had time to sit down and put together into a mashup; and I promised myself that over the winter I'd finally sit down and finish them, before it was time for bicycling season 2008 and yet more riding/photographing/mapping.

Anyway, it just occurred to me this weekend that I don't have much time left, so I better get started; and the first step, of course, was to sit down and look through all the photos and notes I took last year when actually on the bike trips, and determine exactly how much work I have ahead of me. The good news? It turns out that I actually biked a lot more and a lot farther than I had been remembering in my head, boding well for my chances of even longer and more regular trips this spring and summer. The bad news? I have 11 maps that need to be created, and so far only three of them "done" (and by "done" I of course mean "eh, like 80 percent done").

So, I just sat down on my other Mac (the one with Photoshop) and made a master map of all the mini-projects I'm shooting to finish by the beginning of May; this image, then, will also serve as a master map to interior pages over at the section of my personal website where you can always find the latest grand total of finished mashups. Anyway, so here we go with the descriptions...hold yr breath...

1 through 5: Chicago Lakeshore Path. An uninterrupted 18-mile bike and runner path stretching nearly from the north edge to the south edge of the city, surrounded nearly at all times by public parkland, a holdover from Edwardian times when the "City Beautiful" movement managed to get the entire Chicago lakefront declared a "public resource."

1) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park North. Upper half of the seven-mile Lincoln Park, one of the largest city parks in the entire United States. Riding the length of Lincoln Park is a lesson in American history and architecture, in that the park was designed in regular stages from 1860 to 1960; here in the north half are the sections created between 1910 and the '60s.

2) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park South. The lower half of the park just described, the sections designed from 1860 to 1900, containing the vast majority of the historical destinations the park is most known for.

3) Lakeshore path: North Avenue to the Loop. Want a smart alternative the next time you come into the inner city for a holiday like the 4th of July? Why not park your car on the northside and bike the rest of the way in? Although not regularly used by a lot of people, there is a perfectly safe and in fact delightful section of the lakefront path that stretches from the end of Lincoln Park to the Loop, including easy stops at Navy Pier, River North, the Chicago River and Millennium Park. It's only six miles from Montrose to the Loop by bicycle; why not try it the next time you're down there on holiday, avoiding the snarl of vehicular traffic that always forms during such events?

4) Lakeshore path: Loop to 57th Street. For many years the Hyde Park area of the city's southside was built up along the lakefront, but nothing else between there and the Loop; that finally changed throughout the mid-20th century, especially once a series of corporations and civic groups came in and sponsored the landscaping of vast tracts of the land. Although not as historic as the northside's better-known path, this slice of Chicago's lakefront is a beautiful and uncluttered space, perfect for lazy weekend rides as well as weekday wind sprints for more serious riders.

5) Lakeshore path: South Campus. The extreme south tip of the city-sponsored 18-mile lakeshore bike/running path, encompassing several historic areas: Hyde Park, the University of Chicago campus, the Museum of Science and Industry, Jackson Park, and the South Shore Cultural Center, spanning roughly 57th to 79th Streets.

6) Northside to the Loop, via Southport/Lincoln Avenues. Hey, city-dweller creative-class fucks! You know how the mayor and your hippie neighbor keep crowing about how easy it actually is to bicycle from your place to your office in the Loop each day? Keep wondering if it's actually true? Here's one of what will hopefully be an always expanding series of maps, looking at various inner-city routes from residential neighborhoods to the Loop, all of them lying along streets with dedicated, legally-protected bike lanes. Featuring not only the routes themselves, but various practical tips about city bicycling embedded in my photos and videos.

7) Northside to the Loop, via Halsted/Milwaukee Avenues. Exactly the same as map 6, but this time using the city bike lane on Halsted, passing through such neighborhoods as Boys Town, Old Town, Goose Island, Fulton Market, River West and more.

8) Burnham's Boulevards and the West Side Parks (north half). As part of the "City Beautiful" movement's 1909 overhaul of the city, architect Daniel Burnham recommended building a "green ring" through the most congested neighborhoods at the time, allowing not only for rapid middle-class development but also a small slice of healthiness in the middle of the most packed places in the city. At the same time, then, a group of Gilded Age entrepreneurs started a series of grand, giant public parks on the west side of the city as well (where the vast majority of the city's immigrants lived at the time); these were linked to Burnham's green boulevard system, to form a legitimate grand green circle all the way around the city's downtown, a few miles out in distance from the Loop's center. My map, then, is just of the north half of this circle; it includes Diversey Boulevard at Lincoln Park (including the Goethe statue, Hamilton garden, Elks headquarters and more), Logan Square, Garfield Park and more.

9) Northside Neighborhood Parks. It's the giant civic parks of the Victorian Age that get all the press in Chicago; but did you know that the park district here actually maintains over 550 public spaces? The vast majority of them, in fact, were created and first maintained by private neighborhood organizations, before the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal consolidated all the groups into one unified government administration. In this map, a winding and detailed route that will take a bicyclist to over 65 small neighborhood parks on the northside, ranging from a mile or two in size to sometimes the length of someone's backyard; the total route lasts 25 miles, with of course many opportunities to stop for food, shopping, coffee and more.

10) Northside to the Westside, via the "Industrial District." Here, a supplemental add-on to either map 6 (inner-city path on Lincoln) or 7 (inner-city path on Halsted) for getting over to such hipster westside neighborhoods as Wicker Park and Bucktown, specifically by riding through the last area of the northside left with working factories, smokestacks and more. A fascinating route to take at least once, especially for those who enjoy photographing urban industrial areas.

11) Near South Historic Neighborhoods. Did you know that there are half a dozen nationally important historic neighborhoods all butting against each other in Chicago's Near South Side? There are! Here, a map detailing them all, including the IIT campus, Bronzeville, Prairie Avenue, the Museum Campus, Chinatown, Printers Row and the South Loop.

Whew, okay, that's it! And three of these are now "done," like I said (i.e. 80 percent done), which you can find over here for now; and hopefully by May, like I said, I'm going to have all 11 of these maps finished and online, and with downloadable KMLs as well for Google Earth (for those who like their maps in 3D and spinnable and all that shit), and with a brand-new interface as well over at the section of my personal site where people will be able to find all these. And that's it! See you later, fuckers!

So we've finally gotten to Labor Day, which in America is the unofficial end of summer -- the holiday after which most schools start their terms, most pools close, many amusement parks shut down, etc. And just like I promised myself way back at Memorial Day (America's unofficial start of the summer, back in May), I'm indeed making one more big bike adventure today, and shooting lots of photos and video for the eventual customized Google map I'll be creating on the subject. But alas, gone are my original plans for making some giant-ass 30- or 40-mile trip out to some far suburb like Glencoe or the like; as a bad knee injury and a mild case of hemorrhoids taught me earlier this summer, when you suddenly go near the age of 40 from unhealthy to physically active, there's only so much your body can take, with that "so much" literally being less than you could take at even 25, and for me in particular with 30-mile day trips being far outside my "so much" comfort level. And that's just how it is, and there's nothing to be done about it -- that you simply cannot do as many physical things as a middle-ager that you could as a youth, and that only a fool would try to deny it and wreck their body instead.

So instead I'm making another inner-city day trip, something that relies on taking the train in one direction, so that the total distance is something a lot more manageable. And today, in fact, I'll be visiting the historic neighborhoods of the near southside -- I'll be taking the train to 35th Street, to be specific, hopping off across the street from where the White Sox play, then meandering my way northward until finally hitting Harrison Street in the South Loop. And believe it or not, this ten-mile (16 km) route will take me through six different areas of historic interest in a single afternoon...

--The campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), much of it famously designed by Mies van der Rohe and other Modernist masters in the 1950s;

--Then historic Bronzeville, the very first neighborhood in Chicago for middle-class blacks, much of it razed over in the 1970s to make room for a cutting-edge urban revitalization project;

--Then Chinatown, not as famous as New York or San Francisco's version, but still a very interesting destination;

--Then over to the Prairie Avenue district, which was the first neighborhood in Chicago for upper-class whites, and which still contains several historic grand mansions from the period (which because of the Great Fire of the 1870s, which missed this neighborhood, also happen to be the oldest set of buildings in Chicago as well);

--Then northeast into the tourist-mecca Museum Campus, a unified and very contemporary green space (built just a few years ago, in fact) linking together three of the city's most popular museums (the Field, Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium) along with Soldier Field, McCormick Place and others;

--And then finally, due west into the historic Printers Row neighborhood, which is where almost every book and newspaper publishing company used to be headquartered in the 1800s and early 1900s (back when a whole lot more book and newspaper companies used to be headquartered in Chicago in the first place), which was then transformed into a residential area after World War II, and is now a popular haven for the creative class.

Zow! It's pretty amazing, all the cool things packed into this small area of the city, once you get to thinking about it; I'm anticipating a very fun trip, accentuated by the fact that it's a public holiday and therefore a ton of other people will be out as well (especially in the more touristy sections of this route). And this should provide for a really great, information-rich map when I'm done as well, which of course is why I picked this route in the first place. Anyway, I'll be taking off in just another half-hour or so, so wish me luck, and make sure to stop by this site throughout the day for small real-time updates during the trip itself.

Oh, and then the trip home is going to provide material for yet another new map; because of it having a dedicated bike lane its entire length, I'm going to take Halsted Street almost the entire distance from Printers Row back to my neighborhood of Uptown, a total length of seven miles (11.25 km), for a total bike trip today of 17 miles (which coincidentally enough is just around 17 km as well). And that will be fun, I think, because it gives me a chance to make a map more for locals than locals and tourists together; a map showing a particularly bike-friendly route for getting around the city itself, featuring all the interesting everyday things found along that route. And Halsted should be particularly interesting when it comes to this subject, I think; this particular section of the street first runs through the expensive River North neighborhood, then across the formerly industrial Goose Island, then through the tony Old Town and Lincoln Park neighborhoods, before then becoming the spiritual center of the infamous Boys Town gay neighborhood, up in Wrigleyville which is one neighborhood south of mine. I'll hopefully be coming across all kinds of interesting things along the way today, stuff that will hopefully make for a good and entertaining map afterwards.

Anyway, like I said, wish me luck, and pray to the bicycle gods that this adventure be yet one more where I don't get hit by a car. First update coming in just a little bit!

And of course, don't forget to turn on the '3D Buildings' layer as well in Google Earth, when viewing my maps; Chicago is one of something like 30 cities now for which Google owns sophisticated 3D information concerning thousands of its buildings (and not just the Loop, either, but going all the way up to Belmont). It adds to the surrealism even more, and especially when you own a powerful computer and can navigate such a virtual environment in real time.

In essence, it turns the entire thing into not just a scrapbook-style sharing experience, but also a powerful education/entertainment one, like the proverbial "encyclopedia come to life!" that giddy sci-fi documentaries have been promising us for decades, but that no one has yet delivered on. Check out this three-image series above, for example, from one section of my southern map; how you can click on a placemark to get sophisticated multimedia info on a specific spot, or click on the line itself to get the same kind of info concerning that entire section of the park. And this is just a silly little bike map of a small tourist area of Chicago; imagine now applying these new tools to the location of a historic battle, or Egyptian tombs, or a thousand other things I'm sure people will be cooking up over the upcoming months.



Or if entrepreneurialism is your thing, why not think of the possibilities along those lines that this suddenly presents? Take this shot, for example, of the commercial North Pond Cafe, which happens to lie inside the government property of Lincoln Park, and which already exists as a 3D building within Google Earth, just a gray, featureless one? Now imagine if the owners of the cafe hired someone (like me, for example) to go into Sketchup and create a photorealistic version of the building, as well as a placemark containing photos, video, cafe information and a link to their website. Even better, hire the person to create an information-rich map of the entire North Pond area, including the Nature Museum and more; then suddenly your KML file becomes what the marketers call a "value-added advertising experience," something that actually adds to the quality of your customers' lives, not just screams messages at them. Such a thing is currently available in Google Earth to any company on the planet, right this moment; it's also available to arts organizations, neighborhood associations, historical societies, even individuals with too much time on their hands, as I have already so woefully proven.



So what's my third map going to cover? Well, the West Side Park system, to be specific, as well as the historic boulevards hooking them together; I'm going out in just another day or two, in fact, to take the photos and videos. I was going to write out a little background behind what I'll be viewing, but now I'm too tired; just go read the Wikipedia entry on Douglas Park if you're interested. Anyway, if I stop where that red placemarker is above, which is technically the end of the actual parks, that'd be a total of 14 miles, when you factor in the distance from my apartment to the start of the system; there's an el stop there where the placemarker is too, making for an easy commute back to my place. If I still have the energy, though, I'm going to extend the trip to 20 miles, by biking due east to the lakefront there at Roosevelt Avenue, and taking a tour of the South Museum Campus (Field Natural History Museum, Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium); then I'll finally end the trip at Jackson and State, the location of an Intelligentsia Coffeehouse, for which I happen to have a frequent-customer card to turn in, and then catch the train there instead to go home. Wish me luck!

Once again, here is the link for my Lincoln Park North map, and here is the Lincoln Park South one; once there, simply click on the "KML" link in the upper-right corner to download the 3D Google Earth file.