And its theory was proven true by all the places I went this week with my 16-year-old cousin Josie when she was visiting from Omaha. We saw so many things that I had to make a list (in order of appearance) so as not to forget anything:
The Magnificent Mile and Watertower Place
Chicago Crime Tour
Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower, which is what everybody still calls it)
Navy Pier
Shedd Aquarium
Museum of Science and Industry
Lincoln Park Zoo
We also did drive-bys of Millenium Park and the Buckingham Fountain, and went to the beach. Twice. Plus we drove through some of the North Shore suburbs on our way back from IKEA and the movies.
So, let us begin on Sunday when we took the bus to Michigan Avenue and explored the Watertower Place Macy's. Although not the flagship Marshall Field's (which is on State, south of the river), it's a pretty nice store and much bigger than department stores Josie and I are used to. For instance, they have an entire mezzanine level devoted to handbags. Josie found a really adorable dress and then we had to hightail it across the street to meet the bus for our tour of Chicago's criminal history. It was a pretty long tour.
Our guide was Will, a twenty-something kid with big glasses, boyish charm and a lot of energy. He began with a history of Streeterville, which is the area where the Magnificent Mile is located.
Streeterville dates to the 1880's, when a would-be gun runner with a fondness for drink named George Streeter ran aground on a sandbar near Michigan Avenue. He decided he would found his own community regardless of the actual ownership of the area and the fact that it was within the city limits of Chicago. His story shows what you can do when you have no scruples or respect for anyone's authority but your own. Plus his timing was excellent, as Chicago was still rebuilding following the 1871 fire. Streeter charged builders to dump their construction debris and excess dirt onto "his" property. There was a lot of such debris, and as the land filled in, he started selling it to people on which to build shanties. This is what you call a win-win. For Streeter, that is - not so much for the guy who actually owned the property whose lawyers and court documents were no match for the well-armed Streeter. Of course, as more families settled in Streeterville, thinking that they were legally purchasing land for their homes, there were a lot more people with guns to help run off anyone who tried to push them out. Streeter was eventually convicted of murder but just served a few months and was pardoned by the governor - because that's how we roll in Chicago.
Of course Will gave us the full John Dillinger tour, including a stop at the Biograph Theater where Dillinger met his end with the Lady in Red. She was actually wearing orange, Will said, but Lady in Orange doesn't sound very impressive. I agree. We drove by a speakeasy and the vacant lot that used to be a warehouse where the St. Valentine's Day Massacre occurred. We stopped at a church which had to replace its steps because they had been so damaged by gunfire during Prohibition.
But Chicago's criminal history didn't end in the 1930's. We drove by the Rock 'n Roll McDonald's where in the early 1990's you could buy crack at the drive-through. Will said that the code had been to ask for a "Large Coke, no ice." When asked what would happen if someone actually wanted a large Coke, no ice, the answer was: "right - that's how they got caught." The police had a remarkably easy time arresting these guys, who clearly were not criminal masterminds.
Near the McDonald's is a Walgreens that was a major source of cyanide-laced Tylenol in 1982. Several people died and the murderer was never found. Will said that some people suspect that the Unabomber might have done it, as his parents lived in the area. (The Unabomber denies the allegation.)
We drove downtown to see the Metropolitan Correctional Center, one of the few federal prisons located in an urban center. We counted windows to find the 17th floor, from which two guys escaped (using bed sheets and clothes) last winter. Both were recaptured in a few days, and according to Will they have been assigned to window washing duty since it's hard to find prisoners willing to be on the outside a building that is a couple of hundred feet high.
Speaking of tall buildings, Josie and I also went up to the skydeck in Willis Tower Sunday afternoon. The humidity had turned into more haze than we'd realized, but it was still a pretty good view. The view straight down, however, was the most impressive.
See the little white rectangle by Josie's black shoe? That is a bus, 103 stories down.
Monday we went to Navy Pier, which was something of a disappointment. It would have been better had the humidity not been 150%, but the fact is that there's just not a lot to see there, once you've bought a t-shirt and a coffee mug.
But the good part of the Navy Pier trip was that Josie had been told that you should take a boat there. I hadn't heard of that, so I'm glad she mentioned it, because it was fun and slightly cheaper than a cab. You leave from the north side of the Chicago River at the Michigan Avenue bridge.
Tuesday it was still very hot and humid so we went to the Shedd Aquarium. There are two ways to see the Shedd, the cheap way and the very expensive way. We did it the cheap way - we took the Red Line to the Roosevelt CTA station, then caught the bus that drops you off nearly at the front door, and bought general admission tickets which only cost $5 apiece since I am a Chicago resident (otherwise they're $8 - still very reasonable.) The Shedd is really a great aquarium, and even without the extra exhibits that would have cost us about $20-25 per person more, we spent a great couple of hours there. Josie has an excellent camera so she got some good pictures through the glass. I don't, and I didn't, so you can just look at their website for some good shots, especially of the Amazon Rising exhibit, which describes what happens every year when the Amazon rises about thirty feet (nearly three stories). (Hint: stuff gets really, really wet. And muddy.)
It was so hot that we decided the beach was definitely in order, so we made the first of our two visits to Kathy Osterman Beach by my apartment. It was a fairly short visit, because it started to rain, so we got cleaned up and headed out to the 'burbs for errands, dinner and a movie.
Josie's dad, my cousin Marty, had gone to the Museum of Science and Industry years ago when our grandmother took him and his brothers to Chicago. He told Josie not to miss it, so we didn't. Marty was right, of course, and I actually bought a membership because I'll be back. Plus members get free parking which is worth $20. I lived in Fort Wayne long enough, apparently, to pick up a minor case of parking entitlement mentality. I'm working through it, but if I have a chance to get free parking I'll almost always say yes.
The main exhibit we saw was the U-505 German submarine which was captured by the American Navy during WWII.
We took a tour of the innards, which are pretty close quarters for 59 men. Our tour guide, Anson, was very dramatic which was fun. Submarines don't have room for things like laundry and water for washing (and the normal temperature in the sub was 90 to 110 degrees), and they don't have enough space for everyone to have his own bunk. The enlisted sailors would sleep in shifts, and at the end of their three months at sea, they would simply burn the bedding. The tour did a good job of having lights and sounds at opportune times to add to the realism, but I am very grateful that they did not attempt to recreate the odor of a sub.
The U-505 was captured in 1944 by the U.S.S. Guadalcanal under the command of Chicagoan Captain Daniel Gallery. The reason to capture the sub, rather than sink it, was because it contained a treasure trove of military codes and secrets. Of course, if the Germans learned of the capture, they'd change the codes so it was vital to prevent knowledge of the capture from leaking out.
The fact that it was captured at all was something of a fluke. The Guadalcanal had been looking for a sub for a couple of weeks but had found nothing. Just as the ship was leaving the area to refuel, they pinged a sub. Then, both of the U-505's officers were injured by the Guadalcanal's attack, and the engineer was in another part of the sub and didn't know the officers had been incapacitated, so the standard order to blow up the U-boat was not issued. Anson dramatically explained that they only found thirteen of the expected fourteen explosives - but since the museum built a building around the sub, I'm guessing that no one is very concerned about that anymore.
This picture shows a couple of bunks, but this is a control room that had been sealed by the Germans during the attack. The Americans were afraid that it could be booby-trapped or flooded but as luck would have it, neither was the case.
Although towing a damaged submarine was no small feat in itself, the major intelligence challenge was the German crew, all of whom but one survived the attack. The Geneva Convention requires a country to report the capture of another country's service members, but that was not done here. The Germans were sent to a POW camp in Louisiana where they tried, unsuccessfully until the war ended to contact the military or family in Germany. Later in 1944, the German Navy had informed the seamen's families that they must have been lost at sea because there was no word at all from the U-505. Someone on the tour asked Anson whether any of the wives - who thought themselves widows - remarried prior to the return of their husbands. Anson said that this had always been the lore, but recently some historian had actually checked the records and found that no, no such marriages occurred. There you go again, facts ruining a good story.
The fact that Captain Gallery was from Chicago is significant to the preservation of the U-505. After the war, the Navy planned to use the sub for demolition practice. Captain Gallery knew that the Museum would love to have it and the Navy was fine with that, but there was the minor matter of getting the sub from its east coast port to Chicago. The Navy's deal was an "as-is, where-is" arrangement and the people in Chicago had to raise the $2 million (in the 1950's!) to move it through the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. Then they had to roll the thing across Lake Shore Drive to the Museum. For about fifty years it sat on the lawn of the Museum, and then they dug a big hole to lower the sub and built an underground exhibit around it which is where it rests today.
At the exhibit outside the sub we met a man named Gene who had been a cook in a U.S. Navy sub following the Korean War. He showed us a picture of himself in his galley, and it was fun to listen to him recount stories which included the time that he burned the spaghetti and then a later time when a visiting commander commented on how good his spaghetti was.
There are a ton of things to see at the Museum. One small item of interest to me (less so to Josie) was a Jones Live Map Meter from 1909. This was sort of the original GPS. Don't ask me how it works, but apparently if you find your location and then turn the dial it tells you the directions to your destination. This one is supposed to get you to Indianapolis, except it must be wrong because it doesn't include I-65.
That was a joke, by the way, about I-65, since the Map Meter predates....yeah, you get it.
There was also a vehicle called an armored car, although it does leave something to be desired in the way of personal protection:
Technology has, in fact, improved in the past century.
In honor of my grandmother (Josie's great grandmother), Grandma Shreffler, I took a picture of Josie in front of a train. (Grandpa Shreffler worked for the Union Pacific railroad.)
And while not an aerospace museum, they do have a bunch of planes.
They also have the largest model train set-up I've ever seen. It's probably 50 feet by 100 feet, maybe bigger. Here's part of it.
That's Chicago in the background, as the exhibit represents a trip from Chicago to Seattle.
Here are some of the mountains:
And here, of course, is Seattle:
They have a large exhibit of weather science, which is very cool. There is a giant (20 or 30 feet in diameter) disc that shifts sand around to show you how an avalanche works. Perhaps I was getting hungry, but it looked like a giant snickerdoodle to me. One that I could watch for hours.
So BIG WIN for the Museum of Science and Industry.
By then the day had turned hot and gorgeous, so we headed back to the beach and didn't worry about rain this time.
Thursday morning we went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which is a pretty nice zoo especially considering that it is always free. That is not a word you hear a lot in Chicago, and while I've been in better zoos, I've never been in a better zoo that didn't cost me a bunch of money to get into.
They have an animal I'd never, ever heard of, a Sichuan Takin. I didn't get a picture of him, but for some reason I did get a picture of the sign.
My favorite part of the zoo was the polar bear.
And then it was off to Union Station, where we enjoyed a hotdog and Amtrak took Josie back to Omaha, departing on time to the minute, which would have made Grandpa Shreffler proud.
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