Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Lincoln Park Zoo - A Prison for Animals or Something Better?

On Sunday I decided to spend sometime at the free Lincoln Park Zoo. I'm not sure if the economy is to blame or something else but I sort of feel sorry for the animals there. I know over the past 5 or 6 years there has been problems at Lincoln Park but I don't know if the worst is behind them. Lincoln Park Zoo lost all of it's Elphants a few years back and I guess they're not going to replace them.







Here is the tiger. Why is there a cardboard box in his area?








Granted I arrived around 10:30 and most of the animals still looked very sleepy. I'm not sure if that was because of the weather or not but the Big Cats all looked lazy and the male lion looks bad as below.

The only animals to look playful were the other primates the chimps and gorillas. Here's a gorilla foraging.





I planning to go back when the weather cools a bit maybe the animals will be more active in September.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Safely in water


In Water, originally uploaded by kendoman26.

Sunday morning I watched the mother duck and the ducklings skittle by the Shedd Aquarium. Momma duck jumped into the water and then each one of the ducklings jumped as well. A super cool experience

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Odgen Avenue Removal Part 3





The Odgen avenue Viaduct passed thru the area north of Cabrini-Green and then Over Halsted. This is the Intersection of Halsted and Division and the overpass went right over Halsted. To see a picture of what it looked like you can visit forgottenchicago.com. Today one of the last Cabrini-Green highrises can be seen in the background.


Here we can see the support members for the Odgen Viaduct over the Chicago River.

This is a former Pickens-Kane warehouse. That door at the top of the building was the exit out to Odgen Avenue. Were almost to the end of the cutback. Below is where Odgen ends today.




That's right a six lane road has become a parking lot for a cement factory! Below is the final picture in the series showing Odgen Avenue towards Chicago Avenue.

That concludes this series. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed taking the walk!

Monday, July 13, 2009

Urban Renewal and Odgen Avenue Part 2




To the right of Terry's Red Hots you can see how the Brownline tracks interacted with the now vacated Odgen Avenue. Starting from the northeast here, at what would have been the Odgen Vidaucet, Larabee and North Avenues and ending at Chestnut and Odgen, the rest of Odgen was vacated in 1993.



Here we can see sidewalks, part of Odgen avenue Streetlights and even a fire hydrant left behind, next to new townhomes. Thes townhomes are build next to the highrise senior housing seen in the above photo. I took this shot at Clybourn. Interestingly enough, this intersection is still marked as Odgen Avenue as seen in the photo below.




This concludes part 2 of the tour. Stay tuned for part 3 sometime this week, were I'll show you what the northern most point of Odgen Avenue looks like today.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Urban Renewal and the Removal of Odgen Avenue

For a brief 40 year period Odgen Avenue ended at the intersection of Armitage and Clark. The above highrise sits on land that was once the street. Today Odgen Avenue pretty much ends at Chicago and Milwaukee, thou it does stretch north to Chestnut.




I plan this to be a multi-day piece in which I cover the walk I did this morning. Most of this information comes from Forgotten Chicago's webiste. I followed the route of a walk they hosted in August of 2008. They've just recently posted the details of the walk on their website.




I started the walk at the site of were I took the above picture, on the grounds of the Chicago Zoology Society. I Crossed through this site and walked along the Odgen Mall, pictured below.




Odgen Mall, was the only retail that was developed along what was once Odgen Avenue. You can see that it is quite quiet! So why did they get rid of Odgen Avenue? Well the Lincoln Park neighboorhood was one of the first to go through what we now call gentrification and it happened in Lincoln Park during the 1960's. Odgen was extended from Chicago Avenue in the mid 1920's with the idea people would use it to get to the Lakefront. There was two problems with the exectution of that plan. First, Lake Shore Drive was extended one year later than Odgen Avenue but no attempt was made to link the two together. Secondly when the expressway's were build, Odgen was not really provided any service as an on ramp. These shortfalls caused Odgen with much lighter traffic loads than the six lane road needed.


By the late 1960's it the road was in poor shape and the NIMBYS in Lincoln Park wanted the road truncated, so in 1967 the street was cut back to North Avenue.



This concludes part one of this walking tour.


Saturday, July 4, 2009

Happy 4th of July


Happy 4th of July, originally uploaded by kendoman26.

Went down to the lakefront with the other million people around to watch the 15 minute fireworks show at 9pm. Some of the fireworks were really cool, like the smiley faces. The sky was somewhat overcast with a foggy moon in the sky.

This picture isn't the best but that the best I could do with the point and shoot. It at least had image-stablization