Navy Pier – Tuesday Part 2

The name of the Water Taxi’s were making me laugh…
Giddy Up

Shake a leg

Lickety Split

We decided to do the Architectural tour. What we really wanted to do was the skyline tour at sunset but that was 6:45 and we didn’t want to wait or come back so we decided on this one. Hindsight being 20/20 we should have done one of the other daytime skyline tours. This one hit a lot of the same area that the bus tour hit, although the boat tour guide was WAY better than the bus tour guide and we saw some places we didn’t see on the bus.

This was going under one of the bridges. There were cars driving over us…

This is actually what most of the bridges the cars drove over looked like. I wish I’d have caught a car going over, how cool would that have been?

This was the Chicago Tribune building. There was a contest in Chicago to build the “prettiest” building and the Chicago Tribune building won.

Here’s the Wrigley building again.

This is the Merchandise Trade Building. It is the largest building in the world square feet wise with 4,000,000 square feet of floor space. It is 2 city blocks and has it’s own postal code. The Mart centralized Chicago’s wholesale goods business by housing all under one roof. It was originally owned by the Marshall Field Family and opened in 1930.

The tour guide said now mostly the Chicago River is just used for recreational but every once in a while you catch a barge going through, just as we did here. That sucker was trucking it too!

The Chicago Sun-Times building. They actually went from the ugliest building in Chicago to the ugliest building in Chicago…. At one time the Tribune was for White Class and the Times was for the Blue Collar Workers.

That is looking South down the river. We went North first and then South.

The bridge in the air is an old Railroad bridge. It is no longer working but could if they needed it to. They just keep it in the air now.

This building was a Frozen Foods Storage plant at one time. They then went in and remodeled it to be apartments. The architect that took on the business said that this was the WORST task he’d ever taken on. You can kind of see the terraces, how deep the walls are, that’s how deep the entire outside concrete building is. Once they got busted through, it took 1 year for the building to thaw out. At the time it was built horse hair was actually used for insulation…

So the architect that took on the previous picture, did this set of apartments right next door as a make-up for the previous job he did.

Here is an UP CLOSE of the bridge.

As our boat turned around this was the view heading South.

I just thought this was wild looking! And get this, I didn’t get a picture of it 🙁 but there was a tree growing in the middle of the river in concrete. They don’t know how and can’t find its roots….

It was crazy, the traffic and the L go over the river.

Now here’s something interesting… Once you get south on the river this is a view of the train tracks. No one is allowed to build buildings into the ground due to the Amtrak…

So how do you explain all these buildings standing here?

Very simple. Someone got the bright idea to sell the “air space” above the tracks. So all these buildings aren’t built into the ground, but they are built in the air space above the tracks.

Now some of the buildings along the Chicago River, you’ll notice have a curve to the building… this is because they are “paying tribute” to the river. I kid you not!

Here was a bridge they had elevated and were working on. You can’t see any workers on this side but they were pounding away on the other side.

Now this, this is the old post office. And it really isn’t that old. Here’s a great story… The built this post office, 4 floors, to do ALL the mail in Chicago, but being 4 floors it was a pain to move mail up and down the floors. So in just a years time they built a new post office and were done with this one. The new one (which apparently I didn’t take a pic of b/c I was engrossed in the story) was supposed to be New and Improved. It was 2 floors and they made it so the mail trucks could drive right through as opposed to having to wheel mail to the trucks. So the architects measured trucks and built. They had news media and tv media and any media they could get for the Grand Opening. They went to drive the first truck through the post office and It Got Stuck. I swear I’m not making this up :). When they measured the trucks, they measured them without tires. So to get the truck un-stuck they had to let air out of the tires. They went through, re-vamped the new post office and today you can drive a mail truck through it. The architect hasn’t been seen in the city of Chicago since.

Now you’ve heard of the Great Chicago Fire and Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow right?? A guy at the Tribune started a story that the fire started with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocking over a lamp. He later admitted he made it up however the story is still the legend. It was based on the fact that Chicago over used wood to build the city and with a strong SW wind and a drought they were in embers caught a 4 square mile part in the heart of the city on fire and burned it to the ground. In this picture you can see an orange speck… that’s where Mrs. O’Leary’s barn was and where the fire started.

On an earlier post from the Bus i told you about the Corn Cobb Towers. Well this building is the same type of building built by the same architect. It’s great for those people who are scared to leave their house. It is located on the South part of the Chicago River.

This was the view headed back North on the river. And there’s the TALL Sears, er… Willis Tower 🙂

And just so you know, we are still here 🙂

Smooching and all 🙂

And we had the waitress take our photo. Yes we both got a sunburn in Chicago in September 🙂