What's Blooming?

The Lurie Garden at Millenium Park is in bloom! The Garden is designed to change seasonally and highlight the Chicago motto (Urbs in Horto, or, City in a Garden). Two of the many pretty and interesting Spring plants are Meadow Sage (the deep purple flowers - with and without bees) and Prairie Smoke (with the pink plumes).

(click the photo to enlarge)

Feathered Friends: Blackburnian Warbler Comin' at You

This Blackburnian Warbler was having a great time in the Grant Park trees recently. He sang and flitted around the trees on a warm morning. I'm posting a few more pictures of male and female Blackburnian Warblers on my bird watching blog, which is here.

Traffic Cop

This seagull was making sure that everyone obeyed the traffic lights near Navy Pier.

Surfing ... um ... Paddling?

I guess when the surf's not up, you have to improvise and get back to shore somehow. Caught this guy paddling back to shore at Montrose Beach recently.

The Boston Store

Painted advertisements on buildings are an endangered species. Either the building gets torn down or another building goes up next to it that hides these old time ads. I think they are rather interesting and provide a peek at the past.

This ad for "The Boston Store" stands out amid the newer buildings in the Loop. I'd never noticed this ad before and had never heard of the Boston Store. So I "googled" it. It had quite the history in Chicago.

According to the site www.chicago.urban-history.org, where you can see an antique postcard of The Boston Store, the store was owned by Charles Netcher. He named it The Boston Store because he "hoped the New England city's reputation in merchandising would add credibility to his establishment". It expanded quickly in the late 1800s and eventually took up the corner of State and Madison. Charles Netcher's wife, Mollie, turned it into a full service department store and it was a competitor of Marshall Field's and Carson Pirie Scott. It had a cigar factory on one floor that produced three million cigars annually. It also had "a post office, a Western Union office, a savings bank, a barber shop, a first-aid station, several soda fountains and restaurants, and an observation tower 325 feet above street level. ... For the four thousand Chicagoans employed by the firm, there were private reading rooms, employee lunchrooms, and a full-sized tennis court on the roof."

By the late 1930s, business had begun to decline, apparently because Ms. Netcher didn't modernize the store or its business ways - she didn't expand to the suburbs and kept a cash-only policy. The store closed in 1948.

The building was renovated in 2001 and now has a Sears store on the first few levels.

Sound of Silence

Yesterday was the eighth Bike the Drive put together by the Active Transportation Alliance. (It used to be called the Chicagoland Bike Federation but they recently changed the name to incorporate walkers and public transportation riders.) The annual event involves closing down Lake Shore Drive (US 41) to motorized vehicle traffic for several hours, allowing bikes to ride north from Grant Park up to Bryn Mawr, back south to the Museum of Science and Industry then back north to the end at Grant Park (about 30 miles round trip).

I didn't participate yesterday but I have in the past and it is pretty great to bike on Lake Shore Drive - it is a different perspective than the Lakefront Trail even though that trail runs next to Lake Shore Drive. And, you find out that there are some pretty long steep hills on the Drive that you do not feel in a car but are quite evident on a bicycle.

But the neat part is the silence on Bike The Drive morning. It was so quiet yesterday morning that I could hear the el train rumbling through downtown, over a half-mile away, when I took this picture from the Cancer Survivors Park (which is built on the spot that used to be the infamous Lake Shore Drive "S" Curve.).

Two Sunrises in One Day

Sometimes, you don't even get the same sunrise in the same day. These pictures are about 45 minutes apart. The sunrise started out looking like the big red sunrises over the African savannas you see in pictures. Some lake fog then developed and turned the whole scene gold.