I might have to stay here forever. Just saying. Friends and family, you will have to seek me in the tight-packed wilds of Chicago from now on.
Last entry I listed three things that I loved about this city, and that seems a good format to stick to now, when I know a little more about it and have been exploring. The first of my three wonders for this time around should be Wicker Park. Wicker Park is a neighborhood, about fifteen minutes away from Canterbury Court Apartments on the L, and you could probably spend a week straight walking around there and not get bored.
You step off a blue line train onto a platform high above the neighborhood, and your first glimpse leaves you floored. Down below you is a bustling intersection with streets branching off in five possible directions like spokes on a wheel. Each building you see is, like every building in Chicago, totally individual and idiosyncratic, but at the same time grown into its neighbors like two trees close together in a rain forest. I’ve been to Wicker Park three times already, seeing something totally new and exciting each time, and I’ve only walked down one of the five streets.
The street I’ve seen happens to be the one with all the amazing vintage clothing stores. I’ve never even seen such clothes: 70s dresses, 40s gloves, overstated clip-on earrings and delicate art nouveau bracelets. Plus there’s Reckless Records, which in addition to selling actual records has CDs and movies for an average of four or five dollars. But the crown jewel, for a nerd like me, is the giant three-and-a-half floor used bookstore, Myopic Books, which seems to be slightly magical in that you walk in intending to just look and walk out with three or four books you never even knew existed but that are just what you wanted deep down.
And when the scampering around Wicker Park is through, there is scampering in Millenium Park to be had. Millenium Park is an actual park, with a massive stage that frequently has live music, everything from jazz to rock to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, most of it free. (Speaking of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: mind-blowingly amazing. They might be channeling the music of the spheres, I don’t know.) And right next to the stage is the bean, a giant metal sculpture that will reflect you in all sorts of crazy curvy fun-house ways. It’s the simple things in life we treasure.
And directly across from the stage is the Art Institute, which is free on Thursday nights. I walked in at about six last Thursday, walked out at eight when it closed, and had seen a tiny fraction of what it had to offer. And I was still overwhelmed. It will take me every Thursday until the end of the semester, probably, to see it all, and I’ll enjoy every second of it. (The Art Institute has the original American Gothic, I discovered. That’s pretty ridiculously cool.)
My third wonder is the Newberry itself. I now have an awesome job working in Special Collections, which is also where most of the documents I’m looking at come from, so I can tell you quite authoritatively: the Newberry has an Academy Award in its vault. And a jewel-encrusted copy of Paradise Lost. Also, a letter written by Michelangelo. And those aren’t even things I’ve worked with.
Somehow they have documents to support all of our mad, wildly varied projects. I’m paging through sixteenth-century Polish chronicle or Latin-Bohemian dictionary, and on one side a guy is reading Bureau of Indian Affairs propaganda from WWII, and on my other side a girl is perusing a colonial American song book. And every day at work I get to walk into one of the four floors of stacks that are just the library’s special collections and wander down aisle after aisle of potential research. I am amazed. And having a blast.
