Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008
Ah, beautiful Chicago!
Well, at least a little of it.
This was taken right by the bus stop outside the Field Museum, the natural history museum in Chicago. I had an internship there during the Urban Studies program I was in. I wasn’t the best employee, something about both having no real supervision AND being in the middle of a slow social phobia caused nervous breakdown that would climax at the end of my time in this town – but that’s getting off topic, and it really was a nice place to work.
Still, it did mean busing in every work-day (which was three times a week, if I remember right), or more specifically, train then bus. The thing I miss most about Chicago was the train system. I wish every area had the infrastructure to travel to anywhere I wanted via train…
And that’s off topic again. Not that I actually really had a topic in the first place.
From this angle, only a few of the many skyscrapers in the skyline are visible. The black one is the Sears Tower. Well, these days it’s officially called the Willis Tower, but it was the Sears Tower then and for so much of its lifespan that that’s how I (and many other people) still think of it. It’s the tallest building in the USA, ya know. It’s actually really impressive and mind-boggling to stand right next to it and look up, and up, and up. The sheer perspective starts becoming overwhelming pretty quickly. And the current top building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is nearly twice as tall as this one, 2,723 feet to its 1,729 (and that’s counting the spikes on top!).
They were building an even taller building when I lived there, down near Navy Pier. The Chicago Spire, they called it, and it was planned to be 2,000 feet tall, and didn’t even cheat by putting antennas on top and claiming them as part of the height. They’d broken ground on it, and I went past the site a few times when I lived there.
Alas, that was in early 2008. If you don’t recall, late 2008 was when the economic downturn hit hard. And the Spire project did not survive it. So the Sears- I mean, Willis Tower is still the top dog in Chicago.
The other skyscraper in this photo (the tall one with a curved roof) only looks that tall because its close by. It’s right on the other side of the Field Museum, and was brand new when I lived there. Heck, they were still building it! I think it was a residential tower, with the apartments being very high-end, in the one million dollars price range. I suspect that price point ran into problems when the housing bubble burst as well…
Oh, wait, never mind. Found the name of the building, and its current price ranges. One Museum Park, it’s called. And it still advertises “prices from $800,000 to $2,500,000″. Guess some places weathered the economic storm better than others. Well, so much for any vague plans of living there…
