The air is cold and clear and the wind in the early part of the day is bearable, so we bike south along the lake for a few miles. Heading back towards town, gray clouds roll in and it cools down. The wind picks up and we see some snowflakes; not so pleasant anymore.
Our show is in the opera house — very fancy, prestigious and grand. I am surprised that the folks in charge allow the audience to dance in the aisles, as they do for the last third of the show. I can’t imagine that being allowed at Lincoln Center, for example.
The next day C, Mauro and I bike out to Oak Park, where there are a whole bunch of Frank Lloyd Wright houses, including his very first commission after he left the Sullivan firm. That one looks more like a Victorian Gothic mansion gone out of control, but one can see hints of what was to come. I prefer the prairie style ones that came later, which seem to contain mixtures of suburban ranch, Gothic fortress and art nouveau/deco.
Some of his other vaguely modernist ones look less uniquely modern in the context of the surrounding houses in this neighborhood. The Wright houses are sometimes like morphed versions of the surrounding midwestern suburban houses — elongated, fractured and stretched — but with many of the same elements still intact. One can see where his style came from by looking up and down the street. In architectural books one sees his houses in isolation and they seem to have sprung out of Wright’s imagination fully formed and out of nowhere, but that’s clearly not the case. While the other houses are nowhere near as original, there is a common solidity and grammar.
Wright’s home and studio was in this neighborhood too, at least for a while. It seems almost a little incestuous; the neighborhood architect, getting commissions from his immediate neighbors (many of his commissions are on his own block), reworking the kinds of houses that surround him.
On the way out, a long bike ride west on Chicago Avenue, we passed out of downtown, over some rivers and then first through a Latin neighborhood in the process of being gentrified and flavored with some hipster elements. Alongside the bodegas and Mexican groceries are some indie record shops and fancy restaurants and lounges. Interspersed with this are elements of the long established Eastern European population that makes up much of Chicago’s history. The layers of communities and immigration are all right there. The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art is closed, but their website shows that there is a lot more going on besides pierogies and kielbasas. A little further away from downtown this neighborhood gives way to the ghetto, where there are storefront churches, guys in hoodies manning the corners, lounges, fried chicken and fish fry joints, liquor stores and check cashing stores. One church creatively uses a 60’s plastic chair to represent the hand of God, or maybe Jesus.
A lounge called Dr J’s Place also sells package goods. Their sign lists 3 kinds of music that they feature — rock, blues and dusties. Dusties are RnB oldies from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.
