The Fern Room at the Garfield Park Conservatory
My favorite exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry has nothing to do with science and precious little to do with industry. Jollyball, located just past the ticket collectors on the first floor, is a gigantic, self-starting pinball machine dedicated to promoting Swiss travel. After the ritual ka-chunk, a silver ball emerges from a hotel and starts to roll energetically about the tour-bus-sized contraption, doing things a silver ball might do if it were a tourist in Switzerland–riding ski lifts, passing an outsize fondue bowl, being magnetically integrated into a loudly ticking clock. When the hustle and bustle gets to be too much, it slips into a bar, sets off some whistles, and eventually pops out again, wobbling noticeably. The ball’s constant motion, not to mention its many modes of transportation, makes the exhibit fun for all ages–though now that I’ve seen it a few times, I usually take the opportunity to sit down for a few moments at a nearby table while my kid stares enraptured. Jollyball gets high marks for ingenuity and even higher ones for the surrogate parenting. a 57th and Lake Shore Drive, 773-684-1414, msichicago.org. –Noah Berlatsky
The first time I laid eyes on Marina City, at the age of eight, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I told myself, that is where I want to live when I grow up. Twenty-two years ago, I moved in. The apartments went condo in the 1980s and the complex went through rough times in the early 90s, but today it’s as vibrant as ever. The old theater now does brisk business as the House of Blues. Some of the upgrades have come at a cost, like the battleship gray paint that’s desecrated the base of the former office building, now the Hotel Sax Chicago (and formerly the House of Blues Hotel), or the kitschy steakhouse built over the former skating rink.
By the beginning of the decade, the Lake Street art gallery/work space/crash pad the Butcher Shop was probably best known for its insanely, unsafely crowded Christmas balls, where wasted, uninvited guests blithely pissed in corners, in stairwells, and off the roof for want of sufficient toilets. Such youthful follies are now a thing of the past, but the Butcher Shop, in business since the mid-90s, remains a treasure. On the fourth floor, the print shop Crosshair soldiers on under Dan MacAdam, whose ravishing architectural designs grace some of the city’s best silk-screen posters. On the third, the gallery has undergone various curatorial changes–Lasso Gallery opened its first exhibit in the space this month–but longtime impresario Tom Colley is always somewhere in the background and the shows invariably kick ass–the swampy, drooling multimedia exhibit “Klustercrust” recently put together by local artist Paul Nudd being a case in point.
The system can seem like an affront to nature: Cartesian right angles imposed on swampy Chicago. Yet again the opposite is true. The grid gives us the wild: green corridors lead coyotes to Lincoln Park. Most of the angled streets were prehistoric beaches; they became Native American trade routes and the settlers’ first interstate highways. The grid dictates how sunlight falls on the city: it’s indirect in summer and winter, but in fall and spring the east-west streets are luminescent tunnels as sunlight barrels, unobstructed by buildings, westbound at dawn and eastbound at dusk.
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While it doesn’t have the sheer labyrinthine mass of Powell’s or Myopic, what After-Words does have is fantastic pricing, a generous exchange rate, and location, location, location. But even if it wasn’t right next door to the Reader offices I’d still come downtown to get lost in the stacks on a regular basis. In a River North that’s become congested and overpriced and riddled with chain-store tedium, After-Words and its neighbor to the east, Jazz Record Mart, are about the last places left in this area to shop for the life of the mind on a human scale. a 23 E. Illinois, 312-464-1110. –Monica Kendrick
The North Branch Trail
