Detour by Train from Chicago to Visit Kansas City
We are so lucky to live in the transportation hub of Chicago. While of course Chicago has gazillions of attractions, sometimes we have to get away and travel elsewhere. We can easily do so with two major airports and plenty of highways, but people often forget–or just don’t know–about the beauty of train travel. Kansas […]
Chicago’s Innovation with Corten Steel
Let’s focus on a seemingly mundane material for a moment – corten steel. A guy named Mark Kurlansky has gotten really into telling history through a mundane commodity, food, or event. He wrote Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World in 1997 and Salt: A World History in 2002. So why not […]
The Evolution of the Merchandise Mart
While on the green line last week I rode past the hefty, block-long Merchandise Mart and began to wonder about its history. As I learned from Amanda‘s talk at the Union League Club this past week, the structure of older buildings usually aren’t very flexible and so they struggle to provide functioning spaces like modern […]
Candy and Community: Austin Neighborhood Architecture
The Austin neighborhood of Chicago has had some years of sweet glory. I mean that literally since a big candy factory once operated there. Austin is a primary example of a neighborhood that went through “white flight” in the ’50s. Because of that, the social and architectural make-up of the Austin neighborhood has dramatically changed […]
Why Does UIC Have So Much Brutalist Architecture?
In Part 1 of this two-part blog post, I introduced the development of the University of Illinois at Chicago, now let’s explore the campus’s famous Brutalist architecture. This was an experimental architectural style for a college campus, especially because it’s a style that many people don’t understand. We do our best to explain and contextualize […]
UIC Campus History: Part 1
Walking on the manicured lawns of the UIC campus, it’s easy to forget that this venue for higher education was not always here. Before I dig into to Brutalist architecture in Part 2, let’s talk about UIC campus history and this Chicago neighborhood. From the early 1900s through the 1960s, the area between Halsted, Roosevelt, […]
Polonia Triangle Part 2: Chopin’s Music Still Plays
In Part 1 of this two-part blog post on Chicago Polish culture and history, we left off with Chicago Polonia’s contribution to the recreation of the Polish State in 1918. Now let’s talk about the lively Polish community around the Polonia Triangle and its surrounding neighborhood today of Wicker Park, Noble Square and Ukranian Village. […]