Salon, of all places, had a wonderful article last week featuring a slew of gorgeous posters designed for the various passenger rail lines that serviced Chicago and the region surrounding the city, as well as the Chicago Transit Authority. The posters are mostly from the 1920s, and they feature many Chicago landmarks, some of which are gone but not all. There are also nature scenes and other travel poster style images of such “exotic” destinations as the Ogden Dunes in Indiana and Benton Harbor, Michigan. Toward the bottom of the article, there are even some photographs of the actual posters “in the wild” at “L” stops in Evanston and Wilmette. Though the posters pre-date the iconic art of the WPA, it’s clear where some of the aesthetics for WPA-period travel posters comes from when you look at these.

Thanks to my old Northwestern University grad school classmate Nina Berry for pointing me to this link.

If you bring up the subject of World’s Fairs, most Americans probably immediately think of the iconic New York World’s Fair of 1939, and, if they’re knowledgeable about history, they will also probably be able to mention the 1893 World’s Fair im Chicago (more properly known as the Columbian Exposition).

The 1893 fair was really Chicago’s debut on the world stage. The “White City” of exhibition buildings dazzled visitors. Only one building remained after the fair, the Palace of Fine Arts, which would become the Museum of Science and Industry. But that’s a better fate than what befell the NEXT World’s Fair to be hosted in Chicago. Forty years after the Columbian Exposition, the 1933 World’s Fair was meant to commemorate Chicago’s centennial. The fair itself was actually pretty successful and was carried over for a second year, but despite featuring some spiffy Art Deco buildings and a ton of entertainment venues, nothing was left except the Roman column donated by the Italian government to commemorate the trans-Atlantic flight of Italo Balbo that year. The 1933 fairgrounds became the home of McCormick Place and the now-defunct Meigs Field airstrip.

Chicago Magazine dug up some rare Technicolor film footage of the 1993 World’s Fair that give you a sense of the splendor of The Rainbow City.

Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich writes about the recent passing of blues guitar legend Hubert Sumlin as just the latest in a string of passings of legendary Chicago bluesmen. The tradition of Chicago blues is dying out along with those old men, Reich says, and there aren’t a lot of younger musicians taking up where they are leaving off.

Being a sheltered white boy from Maine, I didn’t know anything about the blues when I actually LIVED in Chicago, so I can’t even share a story of the time I saw Pinetop Perkins or something. Well, actually, I did *almost* see Pinetop Perkins years later, but not in Chicago; it was in Portland, Maine, as a matter of fact, and he was supposed to play at one of the venues for Portland’s New Years Eve celebration, but he missed the gig because of the weather. So there you go. A few years after that, once we had moved to Massachusetts, I began listening to “Blues After Hours” on WGBH radio on Saturday nights, which always opened with a special tune created just for the show by Pinetop Perkins, so he and I eventually caught up with one another. I spent many Saturday nights playing Civ until the wee hours and listening to the great artists of blues music, not just from Chicago but St. Louis and Kansas City and the Mississippi Delta and everywhere else. That phase ended not long after Charlotte was born, when the host of the radio show, Mai Cramer, passed away. The show lingered on for a few more years with another host. WGBH pulled the plug on it in ’07, but I had moved on anyway. These days I don’t need to listen to the blues, because I got ‘em myself.

Here’s a video clip of Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, and Willie Dixon playing “Smokestack Lightning” back in 1964, just so you know what you’ve been missing:

Most American cities have recognizable neighborhoods with their own demographic identities, but Chicago is perhaps the quintessential city of neighborhoods (link downloads a PDF).

Designer Steve Shanabruch has undertaken a small project to create unofficial logos for some of Chicago’s better-known neighborhoods and you can see them on his website (via Coudal Partners). They have a decidedly retro feel to them, harking to design and typography from Chicago’s 1920s heyday. As such, they don’t necessarily reflect the nature of some of those neighborhoods as you would find them today, but still capture some of the history and heritage of those places. He’s only got about a dozen so far, and there are officially about 200 neighborhoods according to a landmark survey done by the city in the 1970s, so he’s got a long way to go.

For such big shoulders, somebody in Chicago has an awfully little head. A Chicago Sojourn recently told the story about a vast abandoned section of the West Side, where the company that has the franchise for parking meters in the city installed dozens of them, even though there is nothing around for blocks and blocks and nobody ever parks there.

But the real head-scratcher came when the parking company pulled all of the meters and replaced them with high-tech pay boxes that set the city back nearly half a million dollars.

Pruned, a blog by Alexander Trevi that usually features posts about landscape and architecture, recently had this post about the Nike air defense missile system that the United States operated in the 1950s and 1960s and, more specifically, about the missile launch sites in and around Chicago. Nike missile sites were deployed around 40 “Defense Areas” in the U.S., but the Chicago area had the largest number of missile batteries (22), and, to my astonishment, three of those batteries were located right along the lakefront in central Chicago. One was located underneath Jackson Park, right next to the Museum of Science and Industry. Another was located near the McCormick Place convention center. The third was located at Belmont Harbor. Trevi includes a Google Map that allows you to locate the sites.

All of the sites were decommissioned in the late 1960s, as military planning shifted from air defense to ICBM deployment, and most of the sites were completely destroyed or converted for civilian use. Trevi’s post includes some photographs from inside a missile site elsewhere in the Chicago Defense Area, taken during decommissioning. There is also this photograph of one of the Nike sites here in Massachusetts:

Wikipedia tells me that there were twelve Nike sites in and around the Greater Boston area, including a couple very close to my home: a site in Reading that is now a skating rink just a couple of miles from my house and one in Burlington that is now a parking lot for a Northeastern University satellite campus. According to the Wikipedia list, at least a couple of the sites are still mostly intact (minus the missiles, of course).

My fellow New Englanders should feel a twinge of recognition looking at these pictures of cars trapped in the drifting snow on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive during the storm on Tuesday.

Nobody here got trapped on the highway this time around, as far as I know, but instead people are having to contend with collapsing roofs from too much snow. The town where we live now has the rather dubious distinction of having received the most snow in the state for the last TWO storms. Yay us. Poor Charlotte is going to be going to school until July at this rate.

Yesterday, he had this post about a collection of churches that remain along a stretch of W. Damen Ave., on Chicago’s West Side. Most were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and are in various stages of disrepair and ruin, but the post builds on that to think about the overall rise-and-fall of the West Side: there was a time when it was a prestigious part of the city, then gradually declining until in recent years it became essentially unbuilt except for the churches. Now that particular part of the city has been repurposed for the United Center, with vast vacant lots surrounding the stadium and little else.

Newsweek tries to put the plight of those Chilean miners into perspective with this amazing infographic from last week’s issue:

There are four access holes from the surface to the miners, each exactly the size of that circle (which I have attempted to show here exactly as it is on their website), and EVERYTHING they receive from the outside world until the rescue shaft is completed must fit that diameter.

This one might be a little hard to discern at first:

That is a density map of the Boston metropolitan area indicating racial makeup. Red represents white people, blue represents black people, orange represents Hispanics, and green represents Asians. As you can see, honkies got the bruthas surrounded. It’s not new knowledge that Boston remains a deeply-divided city racially, but it’s still a little startling to see it displayed so markedly. Compare Boston to the maps for New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and you’ll see that the difference isn’t in the segregation but in the overall diversity of a metro area. These maps were created by a fellow named Eric Fisher, who created similar maps (all based on 2000 Census data) for 40 major American metro areas (which I found via this Fast Company post)

Revisiting old BKO posts has been a source of all sorts of good material this week…here’s a post from March 2008 about an Australian entertainment company called Village Roadshow that was making plans to build a bunch of super-premium movie theaters in various locations around the United States. A $35-dollar ticket would include luxury seats, valet parking, and table service.

Well, here’s a first-hand account of what that experience is like from True/Slant blogger Piet Levy posted back in November 2009. On the plus side, the ticket price has dropped to $25, and the plush reclining seats do look awfully comfy. Levy says the food is somewhat inconsistent and pricey, although $18 for a lobster roll is about what you’d pay in any restaurant that isn’t in Maine (and even some that are) and the price of ordinary movie snacks at the multiplex these days isn’t that far behind. He gave it a B+ overall, but it sounds like he enjoyed it quite a bit.

The initial plan, as I posted in ’08, was to build 50 of these around the country, but so far there are only six: one in Pasadena, California, two in the Chicago area, two in Texas (Austin and a Dallas suburb), and one in Redmond, Washington (no doubt where all those millionaire Microsofties go to the movies).