A tour of Chicago’s Fisk Generation Station circa 1987, via HABS/HAER. Considering how touchy the people who run power plants are about security and access issues, this is probably the closest most of us will get to wandering the grounds.
Maybe you have already seen these, but if not they’re worth a look: two bits of video from WTTW’s Chicago Tonight that deal with parts of the city’s underground infrastructure like the old freight tunnels and the Metropolitan Water Reclaimation District’s “Deep Tunnel” project. The segments, hosted by Geoffrey Baer, are short (about 8 minutes each) and don’t go into a lot of detail, but still…
part 1, from 8/12/09: http://video.wttw.com/video/1213974541
part 2, from 8/19/09: http://video.wttw.com/video/1220626736
These have been online for a while now, so maybe you’ve already seen these. Or, maybe not: archive photos from the World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago of 1893, on flickr. Read more…
The demolition of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, which began in the Summer of 2008, is nearly complete. You might not even guess that a large modernist hospital block used to stand here if it wasn’t for the huge hole in the ground…
Until I get around to doing a proper write up on the the latest walking tour hosted by ForgottenChicago.com, I offer you this photo of a monument to the game of softball, a game that was invented on Thanksgiving Day, 1887, in what is now an empty lot behind the nearly vacant Michael Reese Hospital complex. I was suspicious at first, but then I read THIS…
I suspect that this is one of those internet things everyone else already knows about, but a friend just pointed me to the website HistoricAerials.com. Like most other online map/satellite photo sites you just type in an address and POOF, there’s your aerial photo. What sets this site apart is that it has images going back to 1938. I’ve been using this great tool to study up on some of my favorite building sites in Chicago…
The latest Chicago Journal has a great article on a local cartography firm and their methods for checking the accuracy of the maps they create. Even with all of the online mapping software available, cartographers still have to do a lot of fieldwork to see if certain landscape features on official government maps really exist, or if new roads have been created through development. This can be a challenge in Chicago, where new neighborhoods of condos and big-box stores seem to sprout up overnight…
Chicago Public Works was assembled by the Chicago Public Works Information Section, so the text reads like something written by a government agency–detailed and dry, yet oddly enthusiastic (“The unequivocal success of these early incineration plants demonstrated beyond question the concept of economic refuse disposal…”) The many photos that catalog the built Chicago of the 1950′s and 60′s more than makes up for any lack of style in the writing.