HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Seeing the BEAN!!!!!!!!
BUMMER OF THE DAY: May it was a little too hot?
WORD OF THE DAY: BEAN!!!!
I was up early this morning at 8am, before anyone else was up. It is always a little awkward the first night/day in some-ones house as you don’t want to wake anyone, you don’t know their routine and I just want to be the best house guest I can be. People open their homes to me and I know how lucky I am and not to mention the money I am saving by not having to pay for accommodation for the week is priceless. So I had a shower in the upstairs bathroom and then sat on the couch and fired up the computer till the rest of the house surfaced. I did try and turn on the 108cm TV but with 4 remotes staring at me and after hitting the on button on 3 of them I decided to just listen to some music instead. I then decided to download some Top 40 songs, it has been a while since I have updated my music library, so I always jump onto Top 40 Australia and then get the songs and artists from there. So I now have 32 new songs ready to go. It was a productive morning and I also started the very big blog entry of the Day in Quebec, I have been skirting that entry for the last few days and I just need to knuckle down and get it written. So this was also started.
We were meeting David and a friend Kent for brunch today in the city and then we were going to see some of downtown on foot. When some-one mentions Chicago I always think of The Bean aka Cloud Gate, so I was really looking forward to seeing this, to me this was part of Chicago. Whether this is right I’m not sure but besides all the architecture this is what I pictured. It was a Sunday of a public holiday so as we got into the heart of the city there were people everywhere. It was busy. They were all out making the most of all the sun shine and the glorious day that it was. We parked in a ‘garage’ and made our way to ‘The Gage’. It was located on Michigan Avenue and was across the road from one of the major parks of the city, Millennium Park. I’m not sure if I have mentioned but my friends work for the airline United, which is a domestic and international American owned airline. Without divulging too much there is a lot of things that happen behind the scenes that we don’t see and what they have to put up with is just amazing. I think they deserve medals when you hear some of the passenger stories. So there was a lot of airline talk around the table, which is always interesting, thrown in with some of my travel antidotes and before we knew it 2.5 hours had passed! I remember checking my Blackberry while I was sitting at the table and then putting it back, what I thought, in my bag. More on that to come.
So after we finished lunch we made our way down Michigan Avenue towards Millennium Park when we came across the Chicago Architecture Foundation store. This is where the Architecture tours can be booked and they also have shop that has all sorts of products you can buy that are on the funky side like kitchen wares, books, information on the city etc. It really is a cool shop and then if you go through the shop into the internal of the building there is a massive model, massive. It is called Chicago Model City is the only accurate and up-to-date three-dimensional portrait of Chicago's downtown. This 320-square-foot work-in-progress enables you to see Chicago as you've never seen it before. The model became an instant icon when it opened in 2009, beloved by tourists and locals alike. It has become the centerpiece for exhibitions in the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s atrium gallery.
We then continued on our own ‘Cheryl, David and Joe’ tourist walk. Our next stop was the beautiful Buckingham Fountain. Buckingham Fountain is a Chicago landmark in the center of Grant Park. Dedicated in 1927, it is one of the largest fountains in the world. Built in a rococo wedding cake style and inspired by the Latona Fountain at the Palace of Versailles, it is meant to allegorically represent Lake Michigan. It operates from April to October, with regular water shows and evening color-light shows. During the winter, the fountain is decorated with festival lights. The fountain is considered Chicago's front door, since it resides in Grant Park, the city's front yard. The fountain itself represents Lake Michigan, with each sea horse symbolizing the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, that border the lake. The fountain was donated to the city by Kate Buckingham in memory of her brother, Clarence Buckingham and was constructed at a cost of $750,000. The fountain's official name is the Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain. The fountain operates daily 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. from mid-April through mid-October. Water shows occur every hour on-the-hour and last 20 minutes. During shows, the center jet shoots up vertically to 46 m and after dusk, shows are choreographed with lights and music. The last show begins at 10:00 p.m. nightly. The fountain is constructed of Georgia pink marble and contains 5,700,000 L of water. During a display, more than 14,000 U.S. gallons per minute (0.88 m3/s) are pushed through its 193 jets. The fountain's pumps are controlled by a Honeywell computer which was previously located in Atlanta, Georgia until the 1994 renovation when it was moved to a Chicago suburb. In 1994, the fountain received a $2.8 million restoration to its three smallest basins which developed leaks due to Chicago's harsh winters. Buckingham Fountain was the eastern terminus of U.S. Route 66. The Fountain was also prominently featured in the title sequence to the television show Married...with Children. The Fountain was the starting point for the television show The Amazing Race 6 in 2004. In September 2010, three people were arrested for swimming in the fountain and charged with reckless conduct.
We then continued our walk down on the water front of Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America and the only one located entirely within the United States. The other four Great Lakes are shared by the US and Canada. It is the second largest of the Great Lakes by volume and the third largest by surface area, after Lake Superior and Lake Huron (and is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of West Virginia). It is bounded, from west to east, by the U.S. states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. It has a surface area of 58,000 km2 making it the largest lake entirely within one country by surface area (Lake Baikal, in Russia, is larger by water volume), and the fifth largest lake in the world. It is 494 km long by 190 km wide with a shoreline 2,640 km long. The lake's average depth is 85 m, while its greatest depth is 281 m. It contains a volume of 4,918 km³ of water. Twelve million people live along Lake Michigan's shores, mainly in the Chicago and Milwaukee metropolitan areas. It was beautiful with the sail boats all bobbing in the harbor and marina and with the sun beating on the water, it looked so blue.
We crossed over the famous ‘snake bridge’. Officially known as The BP Pedestrian Bridge, or simply BP Bridge, is a girder footbridge. It spans Columbus Drive to connect Daley Bicentennial Plaza with Millennium Park, both parts of the larger Grant Park. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, it opened along with the rest of Millennium Park on July 16, 2004. Gehry had been courted by the city to design the bridge and the neighboring Jay Pritzker Pavilion, and eventually agreed to do so after the Pritzker family funded the Pavilion. Named for energy firm BP, which donated $5 million toward its construction, it is the first Gehry-designed bridge to have been completed. BP Bridge is described as snakelike because of its curving form. The pedestrian bridge serves as a noise barrier for traffic sounds from Columbus Drive. It is a connecting link between Millennium Park and destinations to the east, such as the nearby lakefront, other parts of Grant Park and a parking garage. BP Bridge uses a concealed box girder design with a concrete base, and its deck is covered by hardwood floor boards. It is designed without handrails, using stainless steel parapets instead. The total length is 285 m, with a five percent slope on its inclined surfaces that makes it barrier free and accessible. Although the bridge is closed in winter because ice cannot be safely removed from its wooden walkway, it has received favorable reviews for its design and aesthetics. It was designed to be a berm noise barrier blocking noise on the eight-lane Columbus Drive from the Park's outdoor band shell (Jay Pritzker Pavilion), by deflecting traffic sounds upward. The bridge, which uses steel girders, reinforced concrete abutments and deck slabs, hardwood deck, and a stainless steel veneer, cost between $12.1 and $14.5 million. As it was made if stainless steel the heat of the day reflecting off that sucker as we walked through was INTENSE. As David said you could have cooked an egg on that thing. It really was scorching hot. So with no diddle dawdling we hooked it over the bridge to find ourselves at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. It is a band shell in Millennium Park. The pavilion was named after Jay Pritzker, whose family is known for owning the Hyatt Hotels. The building was designed by architect Frank Gehry, who accepted the design commission in April 1999; the pavilion was constructed between June 1999 and July 2004, opening officially on July 16, 2004. Pritzker Pavilion serves as the centerpiece for Millennium Park and is the new home of the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Grant Park Music Festival, the nation's only remaining free outdoor classical music series. It also hosts a wide range of music series and annual performing arts events. All rehearsals at the pavilion are open to the public. The pavilion, which has a capacity of 11,000, is Grant Park's small event outdoor performing arts venue. The construction of the pavilion created a legal controversy, given that there are historic limitations on the height of buildings in Grant Park. To avoid these legal restrictions, the city classifies the band shell as a work of art rather than a building. The Pritzker family had donated $15 million to fund Gehry's band shell and an additional nine donors committed a total of $10 million. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion cost $60 million, a quarter of which came from the Pritzker family donation. It includes 4,000 fixed seats and a 95,000-square-foot (8,800 m2) Great Lawn that can accommodate an additional 7,000 people. We were lucky enough to hear the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra and Chorus practicing for a concert next week-end and to hear the full orchestra playing was amazing. It was that hot that people were sitting and standing in the shade of the large overhead steel beams, it really was a hot day, and like Montreal and London people were out making the most of the sunny day.
Only 5 minute walk and not far from Jay Pritzker Pavilion was ‘The BEAN’!!!!!!!! This was what I was looking forward to all day and it was pretty cool. Officially known as Cloud Gate, it is a public sculpture and the centerpiece of the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park. Constructed between 2004 and 2006, the sculpture is nicknamed "The Bean" because of its bean-like shape. Made up of 168 stainless steel plates welded together, its highly polished exterior has no visible seams. It is 10m by 20m by 13m and weighs 100t tons. Said to have been inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture's surface reflects and distorts the city's skyline. Visitors are able to walk around and under Cloud Gate's 3.7m high arch. On the underside is the "omphalos" (Greek for "navel"), a concave chamber that warps and multiplies reflections. It is popular with tourists as a photo-taking opportunity for its unique reflective properties. The mirror-like surface would reflect the Chicago skyline, but its elliptical shape would distort and twist the reflected image. As visitors walk around the structure, its surface acts like a fun-house mirror as it distorts their reflections. The concave underside allows you to walk underneath to see the omphalos, and through its arch to the other side so that they view the entire structure. Some of the main concerns for the BEAN included being outside, concerns arose that it might retain and conduct heat in a way that would make it too hot to touch during the summer and so cold that one's tongue might stick to it during the winter. The extreme temperature variation between seasons was also feared to weaken the structure. Graffiti, bird droppings and fingerprints were also potential problems, as they would affect the aesthetics of the surface. Officially named Cloud Gate", three-quarters of the sculpture's external surface reflects the sky and the name refers to it acting as a type of gate that helps bridge the space between the sky and the viewer. It was busy with people but not too many that you couldn’t get some good photos. It was cool to stand under The Bean and see the kaleidoscope of a hundreds of me in the reflection.
Crown Fountain was next and also walking distance from The Bean. It is an interactive work of public art and video sculpture in Millennium Park. The fountain is composed of a black granite reflecting pool placed between a pair of glass brick towers. The towers are 15.2 m tall, and they use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to display digital videos on their inward faces. Construction and design of the Crown Fountain cost $17 million. Weather permitting, the water operates from May to October, intermittently cascading down the two towers and spouting through a nozzle on each tower's front face. While some of the videos displayed are of scenery, most attention has focused on its video clips of local residents; hundreds of Chicagoans visit the fountain hoping to see themselves appearing on one of the fountain's two screens. The fountain is a public play area and offers people an escape from summer heat, allowing children to frolic in the fountain's water. In December 1999, Lester Crown and his family agreed to sponsor a water feature in Millennium Park. Approximately 75 ethnic, social, and religious Chicago organizations were asked to provide candidates whose faces would be photographed for integration into the fountain. The subjects were chosen from local schools, churches and community groups, and filming began in 2001 at the downtown campus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The SAIC students filmed their subjects with a $100,000 high-definition HDW-F900 video camera, the same model used in the production of the three Star Wars prequels. Each face appears on the sculpture for a total of 5 minutes using various parts of individual 80-second videos. Of the original 1,051 subjects filmed, 960 videos were determined to be usable for the projects. Each face is cropped so that no hair and usually no ears are visible. The Crown family, for whom the fountain is named, donated $10 million of the $17 million construction and design cost. The Goodman family, known for funding the Goodman Theatre, was also a large contributor; the entire $17 million cost was provided by private donations. The fountain's black granite reflecting pool measures 15m by 71m and has an approximate water depth of 6.4 mm. It displays videos on two LED screens, each encapsulated in a glass brick tower measuring 7.0m by 4.9m. The fountains use over one million LEDs. The inner surface of each tower uses 147 smaller screens with a total of 264,480 LED points. Needless to say that this was super busy with people frolicking in the water, especially kids and adults walking through with their shoes off. It was the perfect Oasis in this heat wave.
That was pretty much is done for the afternoon in the sun anyway. The heat had really zapped us so we left the park and headed back on one of the busy streets, State Street, and headed into Macy’s that was once an iconic shopping destination known as Marshall Field & Company (Marshall Field’s). It was a department store in Chicago that grew to become a major chain before being acquired by Macy’s, Inc., on August 30, 2005. The former flagship Marshall Field and Company Building was officially renamed Macy’s on State Street on September 9, 2006, and is now one of four national Macy’s flagship stores—one of two within the company's Macy’s East retail division, alongside its New York store at Herald Square. Marshall Field & Company traces its antecedents to a dry goods store opened in 1852 by Potter Palmer. We had a look around inside, partly to get into some air-conditioning and to get out of the sun and to also show me the internal of the building which was like stepping back in time and getting to the top floor where the eatery was and also views of State Street from the 7th floor of this historic building. It was here that I also saw, what I would have to say, the largest country flag I have ever seen. It dropped from the roof of the 7th floor all the way to the ground floor. It was MASSIVE and looked very impressive.
We briefly stopped at a very large shoe shop called DWS for a quick look and this is where I discovered that I was missing my Blackberry phone. When I reached into where the pone ‘lives’ and it wasn’t there I just knew that it was gone. I turned my bag inside out with the hope that I had put it back in the wrong spot, but with all the contents of my bag now on one of the shoe chairs, it was quite clear that I was now Blackberry-less. It’s the first electronic thing that I have lost all trip and I just knew it was gone. David rang the restaurant to see if some-one had handed it in, and they did put us on hold for a few minutes while they went to check, but alas it wasn’t there. I had owned the phone for 15 months, it was a prepaid and I was going to get a new phone when I got home, so it wasn’t such a big drama, I just didn’t get the chance to get all my numbers from it and to me that is the most disconcerting thing to me. Bummer. But there is no use being cranky or sad about it. It’s happened and I just have to let it go and hope that the bastard that now has my phone will enjoy it with all my pictures of Zeme and I and the 30EUR credit I just added on there 3 days ago. Bastards.
On our way back to the car we had stopped one more time at The Palmer House Hilton is a famous and historic hotel in downtown Chicago. There have been three Palmer House Hotels at the corner of State and Monroe Streets in Chicago. The first (known as "The Palmer") was built as a wedding present from Potter Palmer to his bride Bertha Honoré. It opened on September 26, 1871, but burned down just thirteen days later October 9, 1871 in the Great Chicago Fire. Palmer immediately set to work rebuilding, and with a $1.7 million signature loan (believed to be the largest individual loan ever secured at the time) constructed one of the fanciest hotels in post-fire Chicago. The second Palmer House Hotel was seven stories. Its amenities included oversized rooms, luxurious decor, and sumptuous meals served in grand style. The floor of its barber shop was reputedly tiled with silver dollars. Constructed mainly of iron and brick, the hotel was widely advertised as, "The World's Only Fire Proof Hotel". Famous visitors included presidential hopefuls James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley; writers Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, and Oscar Wilde; and actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse. It was completed in 1875. By the 1920s, the business in downtown Chicago could support a much larger facility and the Palmer Estate decided to erect a new 25-story hotel. Between 1923 and 1925, the hotel was rebuilt on the same site — in stages so not a single day of business was lost. At the time it was touted as the largest hotel in the world. In December 1945, Conrad Hilton bought the Palmer House for $20 million. In 2005 it was sold to Thor Equities, but it remains part of the Hilton chain. From 2007 to 2009 the hotel, now known as The Palmer House Hilton, was completely renovated and restored, at a cost of over $170 Million. It has a total of 1,639 guest rooms in the hotel, making it the second largest hotel in the city after the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The main salon in the hotel was very old world, but amazing and it was just like stepping back into the 1920’s. I wonder how much room’s costs to stay here for the night?
We were in the car and about to head home when Cheryl said let’s just stop back by the restaurant and check ourselves that my phone wasn’t there. I knew it was gone, but to just know that I had checked myself it made sense, so the boys dropped us back onto Michigan Avenue and did a blockie and the gals ran in to double check. The staff were really good about us double checking them and needless to say that the phone wasn’t there and it was now time to let it go now for 100%.
Dinner was a Chezjuane special of shrimp and vegetable pasta and salad and it was divine!!! It was a massive, HOT but productive day. We were all wiped but we all rallied and went for a drive to drop David back home and then we were all tucked up in bed by 11.45pm to get some much needed sleep. It was the hottest day in May since 1911 and at 10.06pm it was still 28C.
Welcome to Chicago
No comments:
Post a Comment