9. I forgot to mention this yesterday, but I
CAN'T BELIEVE this is still sitting there. It's been - what? 10 years? 15 years? It's gotta be one of the most valuable undeveloped parcels in the whole world, but it's just sitting there with that stupid hole. Since that Spire thing or whatever it was called is obviously not gonna get built, you'd think they'd come up with something else to put there in the meantime, but it appears not.
10. There were a bunch of streets around Soldier Field that were closed off this morning (some event going on, it looked like), which sucked because I wanted to park somewhere nearby to take a few picks of the stadium but there weren't any other good spots to park nearby without having to walk a quarter mile so I said screw it and didn't get any pics. /rant
11. As far as I can tell, the entirety of the north half of Chicago is one giant yuppie/hipster heaven. Or at least most of the north half. I sure didn't see anything I'd categorize otherwise. I drove up to Wrigley (mostly on Clark St), and then a couple miles north of Wrigley or so to (I think) Lawrence Ave, then headed west for several blocks on that street, then drove south on Damen Ave for quite some while, just to pick an ordinary street to get an idea of what the place looked like. The entire journey was pretty much nonstop yuppie/hipster habitat. While I was at Wrigley I parked my car for a bit to wander around some local streets, and even some of the streets I thought might have some junkier houses were still mostly yuppie/hipster habitat.
12. There is a lady on Kenmore Ave a few houses from the back side of Wrigley who claims she's the only person on that block who is a White Sox fan. She was raking her yard and, since it was just a few houses from Wrigley, I was wondering and asked her if there were any White Sox fans on that block. She said she was, and was the only one on the block. And come to think of it, I wandered into a couple team stores in various places, and Cubs paraphernalia seemed to outnumber White Sox paraphernalia by, like, 10-to-1.
13. Related to #11, parts of that area appeared to be as white as ... I dunno, Minnesota or something. Maybe even North Dakota. Just an observation. At one point I stopped in this yuppie/hipster boutique grocery store about a half-mile south of Wrigley to get a cup of coffee, and while there must have been 200 or so people in the store, I think there was maybe 5 non-white people. Forget the name of the place and I can't seem to find it on Google maps. But as far as I can tell most of that area up there was kinda like that. Or at least the majority of it.
14. Speaking of Wrigley, and back to my discussion of the El, I saw that the El goes all the way up there, too (and no doubt much farther north). I suppose it would be impractical to build a subway all the way up
there so I got the idea ... if they ever got some money to replace it, they could replace it with a monorail! They could replace all that steel stuff with a nice, more compactly-built concrete doohicky and have monorails with rubber wheels. Like in Disney World. Would be much nicer-looking, be a lot quieter, and be futuristic-looking too boot! They could do that downtown, too.
15. Back to my discussion about State Street .... I drove down it today and went several blocks south of the library this time. And even the "nicer" parts of it as you get toward the river were really kinda ... meh. Clearly past its heyday. I also noticed a Macy's there which I didn't notice yesterday (even though I walked right past it). It looks like a street which was a bustling place back in the heyday of downtown shopping districts (like, prior to WWII) and has been struggling since. It occurred to me that maybe the Magnificent Mile has sucked a lot of its life out of it. The Magnificent Mile was bustling and thriving with all kinds of upscale stores and huge crowds even on a weekday night, while State Street was ... bleh. Maybe State Street was more of an ordinary, workaday shopping street (hence the Macy's, which used to be Marshall Fields I think?), while the Mag Mile was always the upscale, specialty street. Well, maybe in-city shopping has become more upscale and less workaday over the decades, so the ordinary, workaday shopping areas went downhill while the upscale areas thrived. Plus you get the shopping centers that have the Nordstrom and Bloomingdales and that gives you even more fancy places to put a store, so basically everything gravitates to the upscale Magnificent Mile and State Street goes bleh. Correct me if I'm wrong.
16. I drove west on Grand Ave west of I-90 for a mile or two and it looked like an area that was rapidly gentrifying. I then went north on one of the residential streets and, honestly, it didn't look much different from stuff in the north end. I then headed back east on Chicago Ave. So I guess maybe it was just the main drags that had gotten a bit dumpy and were being fixed up, while the residential areas behind the main drags were still OK.
17. Both in the area in #16 and the north end, I can't tell you how many new houses that look just like
these were popping up everywhere. It gave me the impression that in, like, 50 years or so, half the houses in Chicago are gonna look like that. Obviously tear-downs of older houses, re-built with these distinctive "Chicago Style" houses. I see very few houses like that in KC.
18. Compared to Kansas Citians, Chicagoans seem:
-- not quite as fat
-- a little better dressed
-- not as many tattoos.
However, considering that Kansas Citians are really fat, slobbier dressed and tattoo-infested, that's not hard to achieve.
19. When you drive in NYC (or at least Manhattan) and you're waiting at a red light which turns green, if you wait for just a half-second before you start going, you'll get someone behind you beeping at you to go. Chicagoans seem to be considerably more patient and wait 2 seconds.
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