Urban oasis

A few years after the Wacker Drive demolition and rebuild the little Vietnam Memorial plaza on the Chicago River is open for passersby. Between State and Wabash on the south side. It isn’t exactly a full-on riverwalk, but it does make the waterway seem less like a gulch. Really quite nice.

This is right across from the former location of IBM in Chicago. Makes me miss the area all the more. What a great place it would have been to get away from the office hubbub. Might have even been able to rig a Wifi repeater to shoot across the river. Oh well. I’ll just sulk in the skyscraper canyon we’re now in.

For Chicago River fans out there, here’s a video of me taking the water taxi east on the main branch to the Michigan Avenue quay.

Sluicing through the blog archives I am struck at my obsession with this river. Go with the flow:

Brita City (re-engineering the river)
Escher streetscape (watching the drawbridges let sailboats in)
A unique phone call (floating past a bridge on fire)
Tipping Point (the Eastland disaster)
Available: loft apartment w/ lake and river view (man who lived in the Michigan Ave. bridge)
Man vs. sailboat (outrunning the drawbridges)