It was a great city, wasn’t it? I, literally, grew up in Rainbow Park. Our back porch sat right on it. Incredible place to be a kid. Just acres and acres of places to play. (We we’re allowed to do that back then).
Of course, we had the beach a few steps away, two playgrounds, handball, tennis and two football fields that the city flooded every winter to give us two skating rinks.
Can you even imagine that today? The city’s lawyers would have to be taken out on stretchers.
Don’t tell the soccer moms and snowflakes, but we played on cast iron bars set in cement.
And, miraculously, lived to tell the story.
The city offered so much. The museums, the planetarium, the aquarium, you could never be bored.
Funny true story for anyone who recalls Koch’s and Brentano’s. It was a great bookstore chain. The MLK riots happened in 1968. My dad had to go downtown while things were still pretty feral. Remember, this was pre-cell phone, internet, IPod, DVD—very primitive times.
He heard a lot of smashing glass so he knew looters were heading his way. What did he do?
He ducked into the one store he knew they wouldn’t hit: the bookstore.
He was right.
I always thought that was pretty clever.
My mom and her mother would go to Marshall Field’s cafeteria, which was actually very fancy but surprisingly inexpensive (bet it was a “loss leader”). Or my grandfather and I would go to Riis park and catch crayfish using hot dog slices (!) as bait. Just after Marina City was built, you could go to the top of it (the ACTUAL ROOF, not a glassed-in floor) for 50 cents and also take a tour of the then-fancy Eames-era model apartments.
No other large city in the world EVER had such a nice lakefront, park system, and attractions. It took a disaster, the fire, to create it, and another disaster, Chicago/Illinois government, will destroy it.
Great story about the bookstore.
The one store they wouldn’t loot!
ROFL.