12 posts tagged “park”
Egads! The police aren't releasing any details, aren't saying whether they died of an OD or if this was a crime gone bad; still, strange to know that you were literally sitting across the street from three loser junkies while they died in a transient hotel room, at the same exact moment they were actually dying. It somehow fits the rather apocalyptic mood that's descended over our entire country this week.
Are you wondering, by the way, why none of my recent bike videos have shown up on my maps yet, or why no new maps have been posted since early July? Well, that's because I'm too busy actually bicycling these days, while the weather is still warm, plus running my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which wasn't open yet earlier this summer when I got the first three maps finished and posted. But in just another two months or so, it's suddenly going to be too cold and nasty again to go bicycling on a regular basis, and will stay that way for another six months or so; I figure better to just go ahead and run around and collect up all the raw data for these maps now, while the weather is still good, then spend the winter slowly getting the rest of the maps done at home while hiding from the cold and snow. That way I'll have a good seven or eight maps ready by next spring, when it'll be time to start bicycling again every day, and with all those map placemarks fully integrated by then into Google Local Search.
Did you know that, by the way? That whenever you create a customized Google map, whenever you add a placemark for a specific situation that contains either text or a photo or audio or video, it gets added to the overall Google Maps database? That way, whenever someone does a search on, say, "Wrigley Field," they'll not only get the official Google search result, but the option to view user-created content as well; and any person on the planet who chooses that option, then, will see your placemark right next to the official Google one. Pretty cool, I have to admit, and pretty smart of Google to add all this precious original content to their overall database.
The obvious goal, then, is that people will also combine Google's SketchUp to this all, a free and easy-to-use CAD/CAM program that allows people to create 3D buildings, then automatically load THEM into Google Earth and the Google database as well. If a chamber of commerce could get their stuff together, for example, they could get all the businesses in their organization to fill out a detailed placemark about themselves, plus get someone to make a fully textured 3D version of the business (or maybe the chamber of commerce hiring some computer geek to do all the buildings at once, hint hint, hint hint). The chamber of commerce, then, could create a customized Google map with all these businesses within it, which could be used in all the following ways...
--Adding to the Google online database, for people to stumble across randomly or while searching on a specific topic;
--As a downloadable Google Earth file, at the chamber of commerce's website;
--As a cool standalone demo for visitors at the chamber of commerce offices, or even city hall;
--As a source of press for those businesses; it's not that often, after all (or yet, anyway), that chambers of commerce band together and create a media-rich 3D customized map of all their businesses at Google.
This is what I'm trying to do with my bike maps, after all; not only add a little to the overall Google database, to increase the overall value of the info there, but also to drive traffic to my website "long tail" style, ergo the arts center as well, not to mention do a little boosterism for the city of Chicago, not to mention explain a little about my theories concerning city planning and urban renewal. Oh, plus give smart tourists an idea of other things they can do while visiting here besides going down to Navy Fucking Pier, plus give locals ideas for cool day trips they can make right within the city itself, on a boring Sunday where not much of all is going on, without having to worry about hotels or train rides back and the like. See how many different benefits you get from investing once in a technology like this?
I don't reallly hide the fact that I did LSD roughly a dozen times as an undergraduate, back in the 1980s and '90s; in fact, I was one of those annoying little art-major shits who always had to take acid under "controlled environments," and pay all this attention to what was going on, unlike my friends who wouldn't think twice about dropping a tab or two before a rave and then either dancing and/or fucking for the next ten hours or so. (Well, okay, I did that once or twice too. Vive la Universite!)
Anyway, they say that everyone who does acid has a certain "thing" they most associate with the experience, a certain aspect of reality that suddenly seems really heightened or distorted or whatnot, which is what lets that person know they actually are on acid. Mine, for example, was for some reason the ways that artificial lights look when reflected off trees in the middle of the night; whenever I was on acid, the subject would endlessly fascinate me, of the million different subtle little hues such a situation actually produces, that you just never bother noticing when you're NOT on acid, and how you can double that number when God forbid there's streetlights of two different colors hitting it. It's a product I'm sure of my environment at the time; the middle of Missouri in the middle of the summer, that is, where nature can't help but to encroach around every single corner, no matter what you tried to do to stop it (and as big-city wannabes in that environment in those years, believe me, we tried everything we could to stop it).
So now, a decade and a half since the last time I did acid, I still have those sense memories associated with the experience; balmy summer nights, quiet back streets, the dramatic shadows of a streetlight beaming down on an otherwise dark tree, the feeling of being SURROUNDED by color on all sides, so many subtle shades of the same few colors that while on acid were suddenly as different as night and day. And even now sometimes, on warm evenings when I'm on a quiet side street in Chicago and feeling contemplative, and come across some trees being dramatically lit by two differently-colored streetlights at once, my mind can kick back into the memories of being on acid so dramatically to almost be scary; the jaw-grinding, the unnatural sweating, the heightened paranoia and all the rest. There's a reason I stopped doing acid 15 years ago, after all; it's not exactly a party drug, although I did attend some excellent parties back then while on it. It's not the same as a true flashback, I know, with the tracers and all that, which I never experience because I didn't do enough of it in school; but still.
All right -- a rare nighttime bicycle adventure tonight! There's the route above, which I'll be traveling between 6:30 pm tonight and about midnight, as well as live-blogging along the way, courtesy my Palm Treo 650 and the excellent Palm mobile client for VOX. Tonight adventure includes stops at...
--First, the famed music club Abbey Pub, near Kedzie and Elston, because it's halfway to my final destination, to stop and have a beer and catch my breath. Total distance from my place: 3 miles (5 km).
--Then, to LaSalle Bank at Irving Park Road and Cicero; which just happens to have a professional-quality movie theatre in their auditorium, because of a personality quirk of the man who started the bank, and who show classic movies from the '30s, '40s and '50s here every Saturday night. It's a true quirky secret of Chicago, something I've done before; thought I'd do it again tonight and get some photos too. On the playbill for tonight: American Madness, the 1932 Frank Capra Great Depression melodrama which precedes the better It's a Wonderful Life; The Criminal Code, the 1931 prison drama from Howard Hawks, just preceding his better Scarface; and Screwball Squirrel, the deliciously subversive Tex Avery answer to the Tom and Jerry cartoons from the 1940s. Total distance from Abbey Pub: 2 miles.
--Then to the Daily Grill in Lincoln Square on the way back, also about halfway to my final destination, to have another drink and regain my composure. Total distance from LaSalle Bank: 3 miles.
--Then finally to Montrose and Ashland, to my friend Guy's place (who is the owner, by the way, of Guy.com), for a party he's throwing. Total distance from Daily Grill: 1.5 miles.
--Well, and then home, of course. Total distance from Guy's: half a mile. Total distance for the night: 10 miles (16 km).
Anyway, I invite you to join along with the live adventure if you're bored, whether it's evening for you as well (here in the US) or perhaps morning (if you're in Australia, for example). Expect the first report around...oh, a half-hour after I'm posting this.
So for those who don't know, a sudden rainstorm yesterday put an unexpected end to my bike adventure (a trip to over 35 small neighborhood parks on the north side), about 10 parks earlier than I was expecting; unfortunately for my legs, I still ended up putting in about 20 miles yesterday (32 km) altogether, which means my originally planned route must've been more like 24 miles, which really would've killed me. Thank God for sudden rainstorms, I suppose. Anyway, because of this, and because it's so damn big to begin with, it's going to be a number of days before that map is done; as long as I had a little time this afternoon, though, I thought I'd post some thoughts about one particular park I came across...
Sunken Gardens Park, near Lawrence and the Chicago River, will never be mistaken for Millennium Park -- it's barely the size of a suburban backyard, has no facilities at all other than a couple of benches, is hidden among a closed-off residential zone, and indeed is a place you'd typically go your whole life without knowing about, unless you happened to live across the street from it. See, back in the late Victorian period (roughly late 1800s to early 1900s), it became very fashionable here in America for local neighborhoods to form civic-minded citizen associations, dedicated to such things as buying up vacant lots and turning them into public parks, as well as sponsoring cultural activities in those parks, using a combination of government funds and private donations. Between the 1830s and 1930s, in fact, Chicago had 22 such private organizations all over the city, before the Great Depression prompted them all to be enfolded into one giant government agency, known as the Chicago Park District and that still oversees them all.
One such neighborhood back then was the Ravenswood Manor & Gardens one; their entire boundaries, though, spanned only a quarter-mile, making their revenue stream almost non-existent. Still, though, between 1915 and '20, they managed to purchase three tiny lots that came up for sale, ones that would've otherwise become the sites of private homes, which are still part of the park system and still able to be used to this day. I love thinking about all the ways the citizens of this neighborhood probably enjoy this "backyard park" throughout the year -- of all the holiday block parties and barbeques that have probably been thrown there, all the snowmen built there during winters, all the elderly couples who have had strolls and conversations there. And then I think about how much I love that Chicago finds such things so important -- so important, in fact, that they're still maintaining hundreds and hundreds of such parks, and earmarking over a third of a billion dollars from the city budget each year to maintaining them. I love the fact that, even on the random Monday morning I was visiting, there was literally a Park District employee there with a lawnmower, edger and leafblower, making sure that this forgotten one-block patch of city property is looking as pristine and beautiful as the day in 1917 when a tearful Ravenswood Manor & Gardens community dedicated it in the first place.
Ultimately it's an example of something that still blows my mind on a regular basis, and that Chicago has so far been one of the only large cities in the Midwest to really get, which is the idea of "micro as macro" in city planning; that what is of most importance to the overall health of a city is the small day-to-day quality of lifestyle for any of its citizens, and that by planning things literally on a block-by-block basis you can actually successfully manage as large an urban space as you possibly want to mention. See, in places like St. Louis where I grew up (and also Detroit, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, etc etc), the people who have been put in charge of city renewal over the years have tended to be wealthy suburbanities, who then tend to bring their suburban mall mentality with them to the job -- this mindset that says that the key to successful urban spaces is to create a series of centralized marquee-level destinations, ones that people will naturally want to live near so that they can visit often. But as anyone who's lived in a city with such "marquee destinations" knows, these projects tend to be suburban-friendly spectacles that no one in their right mind would actually want to live next to -- giant malls, sports arenas, overpriced museums and more -- and in fact in typical suburban style tend to be destinations best arrived at by car on a busy Saturday afternoon. And thus in a place like St. Louis do you find a downtown littered with such projects -- Union Station, the St. Louis Center, the Gateway Arch, the new stadium -- surrounded by miles and miles of abandoned, burnt-out warehouses, punctuated with the sleek eight-lane highways that take their millions of visitors back to the suburbs every Saturday evening where they all still continue to live.
Chicago has taken a very different stance on all this, ever since the years following World War II when the deterioration of the inner cities first became an issue; although riddled with corruption over the decades as well, the people who have been put in charge of this stuff over history really have believed in the power of micro-environments, of the key to thriving cities being such tiny little neighborhood things as cafes, parks, art galleries, streets that are quickly repaired, bars with outdoor seating, and more. Yes, Chicago has its own gaudy oversized franchise destinations, which suburbanities for some reason just seemingly can't get enough of -- see Millennium Park, see Navy Pier, hell, see the entire River North neighborhood now that I think about it. In just about any other large city in the midwest, though, if I were posting a photo of a place like Sunken Garden Park, I'd be instead posting a photo of a garbage-filled fenced-in lot, or perhaps a fast-food place, telling you about how the space used to be a genteel citizen park back in a more sophisticated age, before that city closed all the neighborhood parks in order to afford the new football stadium by the airport instead. The fact that I'm instead showing you a photo of a park is why in a nutshell I love Chicago so much, and why I live here versus any other midwestern city.
Regular readers know that last week, I successfully finished my first-ever customized bike map, for use in both Google Maps (2D) and Google Earth (3D), that one covering the southern two-thirds of Chicago's Lincoln Park. Well, this weekend I finished up my second map as well, which I'm happy to now present to the public; it covers the northern third of Lincoln Park that the first map doesn't, meaning that both maps together now comprehensively cover the entire 14-mile round trip. For those who don't know, the northern third of Lincoln Park constitutes the third official expansion of the park over the years, originally created between the 1930s and '50s; it's not nearly as historical as the southern half, of course, nor as grandiose, and exists more for daily benefit by various neighborhood locals than for out-of-town tourism. Nonetheless, this section of the park does contain some items of general interest as well, including the Jose Rizal Memorial, Montrose Harbor, Margate Fieldhouse and more, not to mention the northern terminus of both the lakefront bike path and the vehicular Lake Shore Drive.
As always, the map is interesting enough when viewing in its 2D online form, through the static Google Maps; where things really start getting mind-bending, though, is when you import the KML file into the 3D Google Earth and take a look that way. Seriously, I just cannot get over yet what a freaky mindjob it is to see one's customized maps in full, stunning 3D glory, with the ability to spin that map and twist it whichever way you want, or perhaps zoom to ground level and traverse the path as if you were actually biking it. Combined with just how easy it is to actually make these maps, it is a flabbergasting new development from Google indeed.
Even better, though (and again, just like last time), it is super-easy to embed media such as photos, videos, text and hyperlinks into one's placemarks, and this info shows up just as easily in Google Earth as it does when you click on one online in Google Maps. It's the final kick to this new service that officially makes it brilliant; it's what turns this customized mapping ability from a fun toy into something much more powerful, almost like a working version of virtual reality. (Don't forget, by the way, all of today's screenshots can be clicked on, to see much larger versions.)
By the way, I figured something out in Google Earth yesterday that hadn't occurred to me before: that if you import both Lincoln Park files I've now made, you can simply turn them both on within Earth at once, allowing you to do the full tour of the park without interruption. I highly recommend checking out the files for the first time in this way! I'm all excited, to tell you the truth, about the opportunity to present a little of Chicago to worldwide strangers in this fashion; I think it's an amazing way to check out a slice of a city a tourist might not normally see, and especially someone who's never gotten a chance to visit Chicago in the first place. As word of these customization tools start spreading, and more and more people start making them for the cities in which they live, I can't wait to see what ends up appearing in the big Google database.
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.
Ever since Google officially started offering a way to create customized maps within both their 2D Maps program and 3D Earth one, I've of course wanted to make one; and as regular readers know, last weekend I went out and finally shot a whole mess of photos for my first one, a four-mile tour of the southern two-thirds of Chicago's Lincoln Park. I got on a tear tonight and just finished, and the results are so stunning that I simply had to write up a quick blog entry about it, and post some screenshots.
Here is the 2D Maps version you're seeing above, which is impressive enough (click on any of these thumbnails today to see the larger versions); as you can see, I can plot quite the detailed paths, could've added shapes as well if I had wanted, can change colors along the way, and can even embed photos and videos into placemarks. (You don't have to host your photos and videos at Google's Picasa and YouTube respectively; but it doesn't hurt, and both are free, just as the ability to make these customized maps are.)
Where things get truly jaw-dropping and science-fictiony, though, is with the 3D Earth file also generated in the process; imagine this customized map but now with the ability to spin it in real time in all directions, and to have the placemarks' titles virtually displayed on the map itself. Google Earth is freaky enough, as habitues of the software will attest; but now imagine being able to add your own hyper-customized path to it, too, that you can spin around at any angle and at any altitude you want in real time.
But of course it's even better than that -- just like with the 2D Maps version, clicking on the placemarks will bring up the description and photo or video I've embedded to it, no matter what the direction or zoom level you're at in the file itself. It...is...amazing, and I can't stop playing with it.
In fact, one of my fun activities has turned out to have very serious benefits; and that's when you manage to line up the path in Earth with the angle the placemarked photo was taken at as well. I realized, this cool new thing one can do in Google Maps and Earth, it could also be a profound and powerful research tool for anyone planning a trip as well, whether that's a local bicycle one or an international tourist one. I can't get across what a mind-jarring thing this customized 3D Earth file is, putting it together yourself out of your own cellphone photos and videos, suddenly having this hyperreal virtual version at your fingertips, ready to share with the world.
But hey, don't take my word for it; try it out for yourself. Here is the link to the 2D Maps version, for those who would simply like to check it out online quickly right now; and once you're there, you can just click on the "KML" link in the upper-right corner to download the 3D Google Earth file. (Of course, you'll need Google Earth downloaded and running on your computer for it to work; but you already knew that.) If you've got any suggestions regarding future maps, send them along to ilikejason [at] gmail.com; I hope to make lots more of these maps over the course of this summer and fall. Coming next: a detailed look at Montrose Harbor in my neighborhood, another eight-mile (13 km) round trip, photos of which have already been taken.
As always, a quick recap first for those who need it...
Because of my looming 40th birthday, I've decided to make a number of big changes to my lifestyle this year; among other things, I've decided to try biking between 3 and 5 miles (5 to 10 km) on every day this year it gets over 60 degrees (15 C), and every couple of weeks to put in a longish bike ride in order to build up my endurance. By the end of the summer I'm hoping for such rides to be 30 to 50 miles in length (50 to 80 km), but for now I'm shooting for more like 10 to 15 miles (15 to 25 km); so one of the things I'm doing these days is thinking of various fun trips in the city I could make that would be that total distance, either one-way or round-trip. (Bikes are allowed on all city trains and buses, making one-way bike trips quite easy.)
Anyway, an upcoming promotional event from one corner of the literary industry has inspired what I think is going to be my first longish trip of the year; it's happening this Saturday, in fact, where I will bike all over the north side of the city to celebrate national Free Comic Book Day. I worked out a route on Google Maps, in fact, that lasts 12 miles total, that would not only take me to three comic-book stores participating in the promotion, but up almost the entire length of Lincoln Park as well, including such landmarks of heavy interest as the zoo, the conservatory, the Lorenzo Taft sculpture of Lincoln, the last grave left in Lincoln Park (from when it was a cemetery in the 1800s), two museums, a historic belltower, a mysterious totem pole and a lot more. And such a route of course is especially cool for two reasons:
1) Because I'm actually excited about Free Comic Book Day this year: instead of the usual exclusive collection of lame superhero comics specially given out in the past, this year includes such indie favorites as a Victorian detective story from Eddie Campbell (From Hell), a collection of never-before reprinted Peanuts strips, and more;
and 2), ever since Google introduced the ability to build highly sophisticated custom maps -- ones that can not only have text, photos and videos embedded within the route, along with mile markers and multiple colors, but can also be exported en-masse as a Google Earth (.kml) file -- I've wanted to make one! But to make one, I need to actually go out and ride the route of the map I want to make, and take all the photos and videos that will be in the mashup.
Anyway, like I said, the full route takes me a total of 12 miles (20 km), and takes me by enough interesting stuff to add at least a dozen and a half points to my finished Google map afterwards. The rough breakdown is shown below:
*) My home, Uptown; start/finish.
1) Chicago Comics, 3244 N Clark. Total distance: 1.25 miles.
2) Graham Crackers Comics, 2562 N Clark. Total distance: 2.45 miles.
3) Brainstorm Comics, 1648 W North Ave. Total distance: 5 miles.
4) Southern tip of Lincoln Park: Chicago History Museum, Taft sculpture and more. Total distance: 6.85 miles.
5) Historic Art Deco cafe at southern edge of zoo. Total distance: 7.45 miles.
6) Conservatory. Total distance: 7.8 miles.
7) Chicago Nature Museum. Total distance: 8 miles.
8) North Pond Cafe. Total distance: 8.3 miles.
9) Elks national headquarters and veteran memorial, a ridiculously magnificent structure that must be seen to be believed. Total distance: 8.6 miles. Also in this section, Goethe sculpture and garden.
10) Back officially on the lakefront path, in this case at Diversey. Total distance: 9.1 miles.
11) Start of Belmont Harbor. Total distance: 9.6 miles.
12) "Dog Beach" at Belmont Harbor. Total distance: 10 miles.
13) Mysterious totem pole, near Addison. (I'll explain where it came from in my eventual map.) Total distance: 10.35 miles.
14) Waveland Clubhouse and Bell Tower, recently restored to its original historic condition. Total distance: 10.65 miles.
15) The mysterious "Peace Garden" at Buena Avenue, beautifully landscaped but with almost no official information existing concerning its origin. Total distance: 11.25 miles.
*) Back home. Total distance: 12 miles.
So anyway, like I said, I'm going to try to very slowly make such a trip this coming Saturday, on national Free Comic Book Day; in fact, I asked my oral surgeon today during my check-up if it'd be okay to do such a thing, just a week after my latest bout of surgery, and he said sure. Then I'll upload the photos to Picasa (owned by Google), and the video to YouTube (also owned by Google), so that I'll be ready to import it all into my custom Google map, which will eventually be imported as a whole into Google Earth. Whew, that's a lot of synergy! So wish me luck; and of course if you live in Chicago and want to join me for part of the trip, or a coffee/drink somewhere along the way (I'll be spending the entire day to go its length, so obviously will be taking it easy and making a lot of stops), just drop me a line and let me know.
Okay, the backstory once again, for anyone who needs it...
In 2005, for the first time since college, I took possession again of a bicycle -- partly because of my first-ever trip to Amsterdam the year before, partly because of the very political and outspoken bicycling community here in Chicago, partly because of my growing dissatisfaction with the Chicago Transit Authority, partly because of my desire to get more exercise in my life. The main goal when first getting the bike two years ago was to eventually make all of my neighborhood trips and nearby ones with it, whenever the weather was nice enough; and two years later, I've indeed gotten myself into the habit almost daily.
Last month, however, I turned 38 years old, and realized that I wanted my body to be in a certain shape by the time I turn 40; this resulted in me giving myself a series of physical challenges this year, such as to finally finish up my dental work, quit smoking, gain 40 pounds and the like. Along with everything else, one of the challenges was to expand the amount of bicycling I do, now that I've quit smoking and can take on such a challenge for the first time; to not only put in three to six miles a day (5 to 10 km) on any day it gets over 60 degrees (15 C), but also every couple of weeks put in a 10- to 30-mile ride (15 to 50 km), most of the time tied to something of interest that just happens to be that far away from my apartment. (Hey, there's a lot of interesting things in a 10- to 30-mile radius of Chicago, believe me; why, the city itself is 30 miles long to begin with.) It's not a length I expect to churn out on a regular basis, at least not this summer; it'd be nice, though, to get at least six or so such lengthy rides under my belt by the time Labor Day rolls around, and for such distances as five miles or so (or from my place to the Loop, in other words) to not really even faze me anymore. And as I've discovered even at this early date, quitting the cigarettes is going to help this process even more than I had supposed.
Anyway, figured I'd put off any 30-mile rides until late this summer, after a couple of months of working up to it; but definitely sometime around Memorial Day (the unofficial start of the summer here in the US), I thought it'd be fun to get a 10- to 15-mile ride in (15 to 20 km), probably just one way and then taking the train back home. But where to go? Hmm, hmm, hmm! And then, and then I stumbled onto some information that I had never known, not once in the entire 13 years I've now lived in Chicago; that tucked away in the corner of one of our city parks here is a full-fledged, nationally-known historical Japanese "stroll" style garden. Wow! Did you know that Chicago has one of the larger and more historically significant Japanese stroll gardens in America? I certainly didn't, even though I'm a huge fan and annual visitor of one of the other largest in America, which happens to be down in St. Louis where I grew up, at the St. Louis Botanical Gardens. (They throw an annual gala Japanese Festival, in fact, that my family used to attend each year when I was growing up.)
Chicago's Japanese garden, in fact (known officially as Osaka Garden, after one of our sister cities -- but more on that in a bit), has this long and utterly fascinating history to it, leading me to wonder even more how I could've gone this long without ever hearing of it. Turns out that the entire thing is a grand leftover from the World's Fair of 1893, held at the same exact spot (Jackson Park, that is, down on the south side of the city, where the current Museum of Science and Industry is located); Japan, in fact, was the very first foreign country to financially commit to the World's Fair, in return for getting a large chunk of the "wooded island" being planned for the south side of the fairgrounds. (This yield was a bit contentious, in fact; the island had been originally designed as a place of refuge and peace for frazzled fairgoers, and was only given over to the Japanese after Daniel Burnham himself stepped in and made the deal go through.)
As these things happen, the Japanese garden ended up sticking around after the World's Fair, as did a handful of other structures (such as the building the museum is now in); it generally fell into disrepair, though, as America's relationship with Japan soured as well, leading to a vandal-caused fire on the eve of World War II. That plus white flight of Hyde Park after the war pretty much turned Wooded Island into an abandoned section of the city; the once fabled Japanese garden was quickly taken over by nature again, forgotten by the citizens who lived so near to it.
In the 1960s and '70s, though, a series of efforts to revitalize the communities brought the parks of the area back into focus; partly because of a series of famed bird walks through the island, the abandoned structures of the Japanese garden were rediscovered by the neighborhood locals, and eventually reclaimed by the Chicago Parks Department. This happened to be at the same time that Chicago was getting serious about its now-famed sister-city program; in particular this was when a lot of cooperative work was being done between it and Osaka, Japan. As a result of the partnership, the Asian city ended up donating over $250,000 in fauna and structures to the garden; in gratitude, the Chicago city council renamed the site "Osaka Garden." And apparently the garden's been a hot destination ever since; in fact, in 2002 the entire area went through yet again another major facelift.
Anyway, the garden is only 15 miles from my apartment, once you factor in biking over to the el stop afterwards; at my current biking rate, that's roughly a 60- to 90-minute one-way trip for me, not too taxing at all. If I did it in the morning, then, I could make a whole day out of visiting the two big parks down there (Jackson and Washington), including Osaka Garden, and maybe catch lunch with my friend Carrie Golus who lives in the neighborhood. Hmm! It's not a bad plan, to tell you the truth; just far enough to challenge me, not far enough to overwhelm me, with no long return trip to dread at the end of the day, and with a chance to visit a major Japanese stroll garden I never even knew existed (and with me being a big fan of Japanese stroll gardens already). And with lots of photos I'd get out of such a trip, and my first excuse to finally make a Google mash-up map, and a chance to get a lot of sun and exercise, etc etc.
Yeah, yeah! So okay, I think I'm going to make this my official Memorial Day trip, so as to actually have an excuse to get out of my house on the holiday, and to kick off my official summer of bicycling a lot more than I ever have before. Oh, I think I'm excited!
More:
Osaka Garden
Jackson Park
Washington Park
Chicago Park District (official website)
Chicago lakefront bike path (maps)
Chicago lakefront bike path (tips)
1893 World's Fair
Random pre-war apartment building in my neighborhood. It's easy to forget that such dumpy buildings, the ones here that no one spends time noticing, would nonetheless be the tallest and most impressive structures in my entire collegetown, if they were somehow to be imported there. Scale is everything, I suppose.
