Chicago, Illinois

12th – 14th July 2019

As we headed towards Chicago we took a modest detour to visit the architectural wonder that is the Farnsworth House. Fans of mid 20th century modernist design, like my husband, might already know of this small gem of a weekend retreat located about an hour from the big city, in the town of Plano.

It was designed by renowned German born architect Mies van der Rohe for a Chicago nephrologist, Dr Edith Farnsworth, the project spanning the lean post war years 1945 to 1951. It was cutting edge design, simple yet elegant, a single roomed floating glass box on the banks of the Fox River. It is a seminal piece of work, but perhaps a classic example of both the ability of an architect to push their thirst for artistic form over the client’s parallel need for function, and also to extend their client’s budget into the zone where cordial relationships degenerate into legal battles. It was a sweltering greenhouse in the summer, had no closet space, woefully inadequate roof drainage via a single internal downpipe and went hugely over budget. Dr Farnsworth’s peaceful retreat was never quite the perfect idyll that it may have been. Soon after she moved in a new state park was created just across the river from the house requiring the nearby road and bridge to be upgraded to accommodate the increased traffic. To do this the state of Illinois appropriated 2 acres of her land, making the house visible from the road and noisy due to increased traffic. She was very upset by this. Architectural snoopers also used to trespass onto the property for a closer look, often to be found faces up to the glass as she opened the curtains in the morning. This was disconcerting. In 1972 she sold the house to a rich British aristocrat and property developer, Lord Peter Palumbo. After 31 yrs of ownership, and some serious money spent on upgrades and repairing flood damage, he sold it at auction in 2003. After some tense bidding the house was bought by a consortium on behalf of The National Trust for Historic Preservation and is now a museum, saving it from potentially being uplifted and taken away. We took a tour and spent the whole time discussing amongst ourselves how we could tweak the design if we were to build a replica. It was gorgeous.

We jumped back into Big Dave and rolled on. The closer we got to Chicago the heavier the traffic got. It was a Friday. There were as many people going to the city as leaving. In retrospect it transpired that there was a weekend of baseball games and ‘Taste Chicago’, a food festival. It was going to be busy. The highway was chock-a-block, but we eventually arrived at our first destination: a place to park Big Dave and Tin Can. About 3 miles from downtown Chicago there is a big events and conference centre complex called McMormick Place. It has huge parking lots, including one where all the trucks for the events centre can park. Here, for a modest $35 bucks a day, you can also ‘dry camp’ in an RV if you hadn’t already gleefully booked a nice hotel in the heart of the city for the weekend.

We parked, grabbed our bag, called an Uber, and headed to our hotel, The Radisson Blu Aqua. (Apparently Lady Gaga used to own the penthouse of this building, dontchaknow) At last, after six weeks living in the cramped quarters of Tin Can, we had two nights on dry land: A super king sized bed, a bath, quiet air conditioning. Bliss! We chilled out for the rest of the afternoon, had a swim, a bath and waited for the arrival of our co-conspiriators for the weekend, Greg and Gigi. These are our friends who live in Connecticut and who were flying up for the weekend from New York. By 7pm we were all sat with drinks at the hotel bar, catching up and planning the weekend’s fun.

For fun, read mainly eating and drinking, obviously.

That evening we sampled deep dish pizza ‘pie’, Chicago style, at the highly recommended local institution, Pequods. By the time we ate (after an Uber ride, waiting 45 minutes for a table, several drinks, and then waiting 50 minutes for our pizzas to cook) it was 11.30pm and we were all starving and ready for our beds. The unanimous opinion amongst our council of four was that deep dish style was okay but not as good as thin crust. Too much bread, it was overwhelming. We ate it though. We would have eaten dead lizards marinated in crude oil by that stage.

In the morning we strolled through downtown and had brunch in a busy, popular spot called Beatrix. This was very good and they did some quirky dishes which included some actual real vegetables. Practically health food, although the second doorstep-sized piece of toast saturated in melted butter and honey might not have been strictly necessary. Much replete we decided to partake in one of the many boat trips that leave from the lower river. Ours was a combination of a cruise up the river with a commentary giving information about all the beautiful and notable buildings, then passing into Lake Michigan. Little known to any of us, there is a big lock separating the river and the lake. This has been necessary since they dug the river out in 1936-8, lowering the water level by 2-5 ft compared to the lake. This was to reverse the flow of the river and keep all the dirty water out of Lake Michigan which supplies the city’s drinking water. The lock can accomodate up to 100 vessels, making it the 4th busiest commercial lock in the nation and the 2nd busiest for recreational craft. The commercial vessels have priority to enter the lock and then the small boats and jet-skis get the go ahead to pile in and fill the gaps. It was organised chaos! The trip out to the lake gave a good view of the cityscape and all the sky scrapers.

The tall, the ‘previously-the-world’s-tallest-building-until-someone-else-finished-their-even-taller-building-two-weeks-later….Rats.’, the ‘mine’s-taller-than-yours-because-I-put-a-taller-pylon-on-top’, the ‘tallest-building-in the world-designed-by-a-girl….’ And so on and so forth. It is, for all that, quite a magnificent city. The downtown area was clean and pleasantly devoid of too much homelessness and pan-handling. The river was a pretty aqua marine colour and a hive of activity of boat tours coming and going, water taxis buzzing up and down, cruising rental boats adorned with the bikini clad (girls) and the naked chested (guys) and shoals of kayakers generally getting in the way of it all. The buildings are a fabulous array of the 1930’s gothic revival, art deco and the modern glass-clad monoliths. Even the Trump Tower was pleasing to the eye. There are a plethora of parks, green spaces, and cycle/walking paths. Sculptures, and play areas abound and any city with a waterfront and a marina is a winner in my book.

When returned to dry land we walked over to see Chicago’s most famous sculpture, Anish Kapoor’s impressive ‘bean’. It is very shiny and draws a good crowd of selfie takers. At this stage the boys felt they needed a snack and availed themselves of a ‘Chicago-style’ hot dog. This was a product of the Great Depression era and consists of sesame seed bun, a pickle spear, chopped white onions, tomato slices, bright green sweet pickle relish and an all-beef frankfurter. Traditionally it is accompanied only by mustard, not ketchup. It had too many vegetables for Nick’s liking, but did the job in keeping the wolf from the door. After this we all agreed that we had had enough sunshine for the day, called time-out and headed back to the hotel for some R&R. The evening brought with it another walk out into town, some cocktails in the open air bar of the stylish art deco ‘Gwen’ hotel and then dinner at a restaurant called Tanta. This served an unusual Peruvian-Southeast Asian tapas style menu. Interesting and very delicious and on this evening we managed to eat before it was nearly tomorrow.

On Sunday morning we had an early-ish brunch to give us time to have a final stroll before we had to go our seperate ways again. We headed through downtown, past a stretch of the famous Chicago ‘L’, the elevated railway, into the park and down to the waterfront, dodging the gazillion fellow walkers, cyclists and Segway tour members on the way. (Nobody, just nobody, looks cool riding a Segway).

It was a windless scorching day and the lake was flat calm and quite beautiful. This is stunning city in the sunshine. I hear it is a bit different in the mid-winter… An hour later, hot and weary, we arrived back at the hotel, called our respective Ubers, said our swift goodbyes and headed off in our opposite directions: Greg and Gigi to the airport and us back to Big Dave and Tin Can who were exactly where, and how, we left them. Which was nice.

We thrashed out of the city on a busy highway, the congestion made worse by people slowing to have a gander at the burnt-out truck on the other carriageway, which was backed up for miles. We had a surreal half hour of ‘watching’ the tense closing plays of two simultaneous neck-and-neck UK sporting finals: Wimbledon mens’ final and the World Cup Cricket final. This was by live text updates on BBC Sport, so a bit lacking in the visual impact of TV viewing, but beggars cannot be choosers and it was exciting nonetheless. (Disappointingly NZ lost the cricket…We were robbed….) We only had about 60 miles to travel to our next stop, a night in Union, just out of the clutch of Chicago’s ‘burbs.