Walking Chicago

The theme of this Chicago trip was simple: walk hard, look at buildings. Chicago is for buildings, of course; this is the city that put up the world’s first skyscraper, and Chicagoans have never once let anyone forget it, have they?

We started with the cruise. The river is the bottom floor: boats on the river, bridges over the boats, trains over the bridges, and above the trains, the towers.

The river corridor downtown, an El train on the bridge, towers on both banks

A boat only shows you so much. We got off and started wandering. Chicago thinks about towers, and about downtown, differently than Manhattan does: plenty of tall buildings, but they don’t crowd, and the sun gets through. The front row still belongs to the 1920s: the needle spire of Mather Tower, the dome of the Jewelers’ Building, with the glass grids standing behind them. One street over, brick warehouses and glass balconies face each other across the road, and the low sun comes straight down the block.

A street canyon at dusk, taillights down the block

An empty downtown street behind barricades, a traffic cone in the foreground, an El train crossing above

A packed tour boat on the river with a lone kayaker alongside, seen from above

In the afternoon we barged into an interior at random. The Driehaus Museum was a banker’s house first, finished in 1883. The house has its own rules about light: curtains drawn, rooms held at dusk, and the dinner table laid with silver, for guests now a hundred and forty years late.

The Driehaus Museum dining room: dark wood, stained glass, a long table set with silver

July was not on the guest list. It pressed in anyway at every window, through the sheers, through the stained glass over the doors; the corners it couldn’t reach were left to the Tiffany lamps.

A bright window in a dark room, golden sheer curtains

A marble statue at a window beside Tiffany lily lamps

In one room July won: a whole beam came in past the curtains and landed, all of it, on the marble woman sitting in the window. We checked the temperature outside and decided to let July keep winning.

A marble figure seated in a window, a beam of afternoon sun across her

这次芝加哥的主题是暴走和建筑。芝加哥当然要看建筑，毕竟盖出了世界上第一栋摩天楼，而且芝加哥人从没让任何人忘记过这件事，不是吗？

我们先坐的游轮。河是最底下的一层：船在河上，桥在船上，火车在桥上，火车再往上是高楼。

从河上看市中心，高架桥上的列车和两岸的高楼

坐船看到的毕竟有限。下了船，我们开始在市中心闲逛。芝加哥对高楼还有市中心的理解和曼哈顿不一样，高楼虽然多，但是不挤，阳光能透进来。前排还是 1920 年代的：Mather Tower 的细尖顶，Jewelers’ Building 的圆顶，玻璃格子楼都站在它们后面。另一条街上，红砖老仓库和带玻璃阳台的新楼隔街对望，太阳顺着街口平着照进来。