Midwest Road Trip
Part 3
Saturday was our first day in the Chicagoland area, and we were determined to make the most of it. It started out easily enough, going to the Evanston Farmers’ Market, which was in the parking lot behind our hotel. There, I met up with Sis, who was walking their dog, Juni (short for Junimo, as in from Stardew Valley), while Chris shopped the market. She explained that the farmers’ market in Evanston doesn’t allow dogs, while other markets did. So while Chris shopped, Sis, Juni, and I went for a walk around Evanston. That was fun, as I got to see parts of Evanston that I had not seen before, plus I hadn’t seen Sis in person since July 2021, though we’d spoken on the phone many times between these visits.
Juni says hello to Chris after he came out of the farmers’ market.
After we got back to the farmers’ market, Elyse and I got breakfast from The Eating Well, which was one of the vendors there. We got some breakfast burritos, and we took those back to the room to enjoy. Then we came up with a game plan for the day. Elyse and Kyle wanted to explore the transit, while I wanted to do a photo walk in Lincoln Square. Elyse pulled out some transit maps of Chicago and laid them out on the big table, and I remarked that it looked like we had a war room set up.
Elyse stands with the maps in our “war room”.
So with our plans in place, the five of us walked the couple of blocks down to Davis station, and Elyse, Kyle, and I got ourselves set up with our SmarTrip, er, I mean, Ventra cards. I got a Ventra card with a five-day pass on it, and then quickly converted it to a mobile card that I could use on my phone. In other words, I bought a card, and then immediately killed it by loading it onto my phone. But that’s okay, because it’s nice to have the physical media for collection purposes, but I’d rather just use my phone to actually pay my fares, because that’s one less thing to have to fumble around for. My phone, on the other hand, is almost always readily available in my hand or my pocket.
After getting fares squared away, it was time to go out. We all boarded the Purple Line and headed down to Howard, where we transferred to the Red Line. At Howard, I got to talk shop with some CTA employees, discussing how our systems differed. That was fun.
Then on the Red Line, I sat right behind the cab on car 5574, in order to watch the operation of the train. Unfortunately, due to how crowded the train was, I really only was able to observe the door operations on the left side of the train. However, that was interesting because it’s very different from my agency’s doors. On the trains that I operate, we use pushbuttons for opening and closing, and those buttons control the movements of the doors themselves, as well as the “Doors opening! Step back to allow customers to exit. When boarding, please move to the center of the car,” and “Step back, doors closing!” announcements, along with a third “Step back to allow the doors to close!” announcement when the buttons are pressed in a specific sequence. But it’s all done with just two buttons. In Chicago, the announcements and the door movements are separated. The door announcement is activated with one button, and then the doors themselves are controlled via a lever. Push the lever one way, and the doors open. Push the lever the other way, and the doors close. A warning chime sounds when the doors are actively closing. Meanwhile, the operator was having some difficulty getting the doors closed at some stations, necessitating their making announcements to board the nearest car at a few stations, and having to troubleshoot a door problem at one of the stations.
At Belmont, Sis, Chris, and I got off of the train in order to transfer to the Brown Line, while Elyse and Kyle continued towards the Loop.
Our Red Line train departs Belmont station.
An apartment balcony overlooking Belmont station, still decorated for Halloween.
We took the Brown Line quite some distance, going as far as Western station. With this ride, I am now only four stations shy of completing the Brown Line, having ridden it from the Loop all the way to Western. All I have left to do there is to ride it the rest of the way to Kimball, and I’ll have completed my first CTA line.
Exiting at Western, we first headed into a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts store. There, Sis bought a doggy toy for Juni that was made to look like a breakfast sandwich in a bag. There was a very big “hail corporate” vibe to it, but Juni enjoyed it thoroughly when it made it home to her.
From here, we headed over to Lincoln Avenue, where we headed northbound to where I intended to start my photo walk, making a brief stop at The Book Cellar in order to hit the restroom before getting started.
The purpose of the photo walk was something of a spoof of a spoof. Back in September 2000, Greg Galcik, on his website SpinnWebe, did a photo shoot along a few streets and alleys in Chicago, ending up at a specific Starbucks Coffee location, and published it on his website as part of a larger piece critiquing Schumin Web as it existed at the time. The photo set that he made was a specific spoof of my Walmart photo set from June 2000. The spoof photo set that Galcik created was really cute, coming off as playful. I was amused by it at the time, and it still amuses me today.
Now fast forward a couple of decades. I knew that I was making this trip to Chicago, and unlike past trips, where Mom was heavily involved, she wasn’t on this trip, so I could call most of the shots myself. I wanted to do a photo shoot of my own in this same area, following the same route. In reviewing the SpinnWebe photo set at home ahead of the trip, I spotted enough distinctive landmarks to locate the area where it was shot. I found the Starbucks, and then I worked backwards from there to retrace the entire route, using Google Street View to verify locations. I wrote it all down on a OneNote page, and ultimately made a turn-by-turn description of the entire route, complete with coordinates.
My very detailed directions on OneNote. I left absolutely nothing to chance.
Then from there, it was just a matter of completing the walk. The plan was to do a proper Schumin Web photo set, following the same route as was taken on the SpinnWebe set. In other words, it would be a completely original work, drawing a heavy amount of inspiration from Galcik’s earlier work on SpinnWebe, with SpinnWebe‘s being cited in the introduction, but no references to it in the set itself. We found the starting point, at the western end of an alley along Claremont Avenue, just north of Lawrence Avenue. And then the walk began, as I went and did my thing, while Sis and Chris followed along.
The photos that I’m going to show you from the set are mostly reference photos taken with my phone. While my DSLR and my phone both have onboard GPS, I consider the phone’s GPS to be far more reliable than the DSLR. Therefore, when I’m shooting with the DSLR in an area where I’m less familiar with the geography, I’m going to use my phone to get plenty of reference shots for the GPS coordinates so that I can put everything together later when I’m back home working on the photos.
Found the start point and I was ready to go.
A Cadillac Brougham D’Elegance comes out of the alley from the opposite side of Oakley Avenue.
This building was a Blockbuster Video back when it appeared on SpinnWebe. It’s currently vacant, and most recently housed a CorePower Yoga facility. According to signage in the window, this space was planned to become a cannabis dispensary, at least as of September 2022. The leasing page for the shopping center contains conflicting information on it, though, as it shows as being leased to the dispensary in one place on the site, and shows its being available for lease in another place. The only discussion that I could find was stuff like this, when the plans were first announced. Considering the state of things here, I suspect that this project may have fallen through.
I spotted a beer bottle behind the building’s facade before continuing on.
Going down another alley off of Oakley Avenue, behind the shopping center.
A city “Don’t feed the rats!” poster posted on a utility pole in the alley.
My reference photo for a “speed hump ahead” sign. This sign was specifically featured on SpinnWebe (as was the speed hump itself), so I had to get it. I also ran a different photo of this sign as the photo feature shortly after the trip.
“Beware of Attack Flamingo” sign on the back door of Timeless Toys, one of the businesses facing Lincoln Avenue.
I suspect that Sis and Chris didn’t completely understand what they were getting themselves into when I got into photography mode. It had been a very long time since either one of them had been with me when I was photographing, and they didn’t realize that I now take a lot longer to do these things than I used to, especially one where I am simply photographing my surroundings, as this one was. That said, they ended up being bored out of their minds, which was not my intention. They stuck around for about half of the shoot, and then they went off to do something else for a while. I completely understood why they would want to do that, since they were basically just sort of hovering by while I did my thing, and moving around when I asked so as not to get in my shots. So when they asked if I minded if they left, I didn’t hesitate, since it was clear that they were bored. So they went off on their own for a while, and I would call them once I finished my photography. Elyse later remarked to me, “Why did you do that to your sister?” After all, Elyse knows what a photo shoot entails, and even though she’s a bit of a photographer herself, she still hates it when I pull out the DSLR.
I turned the corner and went down another alley.
Turning another corner, I was underneath the “L” tracks, and found myself walking through a small private parking lot.
On the other side of Lincoln Avenue, I found the planters from the original photo set. These were painted bright colors in 2000, and one had paint handprints on them, about which Galcik went into great detail. From what I could tell on Street View, those bright colors and handprints are long gone, having been painted out some time between 2000 and 2007. The planters were now plain white, and according to Street View, this was done fairly recently.
The original photo set on SpinnWebe featured Quality Optical, so I made sure to capture it as well. The SpinnWebe photo set focused on an advertisement in the window, so I did, too. I locked onto a small advertisement for an eyewear brand called “Lafont“, mainly because people in DC often tend to incorrectly pronounce “L’Enfant” like “Lafont”, so I got a kick out of seeing something actually written out that way.
And there’s the Starbucks.
I admit that in the process of doing this photo set, I started getting bored of it, myself. The day was partly cloudy, and I was getting annoyed with the need to wait for clouds to pass. Additionally, the irony of my getting bored while shooting this photo set was not lost on me. After all, the way that Galcik ended the set on SpinnWebe was pretty dramatic:
Argh! Goddamnit I can’t take this anymore! This was so frickin boring I wanted to spit on any random person just to get some kinda reaction to clear the cotton fuzz that was clouding my brain. How does he do it? How does he get the will to take 21 pictures of an average WalMart trip, and then come home and document it like a four-page special in Highlights?
Curse you, Ben Schumin! I wanted to beat you at your own game but I don’t have the will to carry on! Do you hear me, Ben Schumin? You win! BEN SCHUMIN, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD, YOU WIN!
And here I was getting bored while photographing the same subjects. But I still saw it through to completion. Though I was amused when I climbed on top of a planter in front of Starbucks to get some sign shots and then realized that I didn’t know how to get back down.
I took a selfie of my predicament, standing in the planters, making a face as if to say, “Well, now what do I do?”
Reaching Starbucks, I called Sis and Chris, and they joined me at Starbucks. I got a steamed milk, and finished the photo set with shots of my cup. Not bad. If I was being true to the original, the drink would have been a venti coffee Frappuccino, but (A) I can’t have coffee anymore, (B) I gave up caffeine in 2019, and (C) a Frappuccino has way too much sugar in it.
I gave the photo set the working title of “Walking to Starbucks“, and I ended up keeping that title for the completed page.
Oh, and here’s the inside of the Starbucks. Overall, it was a pretty generic location, with the most interesting thing about the place’s being that turret on the front of the building.
And apparently, the Starbucks people thought my name was “Pen”. Okay, then…
Finishing up at Starbucks, we parted company with Chris, and then Sis and I headed out to join Elyse and Kyle. They were at Transit Tees, which is a small transit-themed store in the Andersonville neighborhood. We took the 50 bus from Wilson Avenue to Ashland and Foster. Then it was just a matter of walking over to Transit Tees to meet Elyse and Kyle.
Transit Tees was an interesting store, with all sorts of transit-themed merchandise. All told, I wish that a place like this existed in DC, i.e. an independent store selling transit-themed merchandise. Elyse ended up getting a shirt.
The CTA shirt, showing drawings of the 3200-Series railcars that were manufactured by Morrison-Knudsen. Metro needs to offer something like this for their various car series.
We then went to a store called Raygun, which bills itself as “The greatest store in the universe.” It contained an eclectic mix of clothing, drinkware, cards, books, and various artworks across two levels, and had a certain “hipster” vibe to it. We also took a moment to figure out what dinner should look like via a look on Google Maps, but didn’t come up with anything that quite sent us, at least not based on a look on an app. Finishing up at Raygun, we went out in search of food.
On the way out, we spotted a truck carrying a searchlight machine, which would typically be used for events and such. I have no idea what they were there for, but all the same, it was pretty neat to see up close.
We ended up wandering around and stumbled on Cuckoo, a Korean chicken place on the next block south. That was agreeable to all of us.
Elyse’s french fries came in a tiny little shopping cart.
My meal. I had the Chicken Bibimbap, and I had some of that there, and saved the rest for later.
All in all, we had a good time at Cuckoo, and my sister adds a certain different and fun dynamic to our usual interactions. After that, we started heading back to Evanston, taking the 22 bus from our location to Howard. Curiously, the first bus, despite being signed for Howard, was only going as far as Devon Avenue, necessitating that we take a second 22 bus to get us the rest of the way. Go figure.
One thing that I’ve always found interesting is the way that Sis rides the bus. Get on, tap the card, and then go all the way to the back of the bus. No variation on this. All the way back, every time. Me, I prefer to sit in the front of the bus, particularly in the “interview seat”, i.e. the seat right next to the operator, in part because I like being relatively far from the engine and the noise that it makes. Elyse likes sitting right on top of the engine because she likes the experience of hearing the engine, but Sis does it more out of a sense of propriety, based on rider guidelines that the agency puts out. I try to get her to sit more forward so that I don’t have as much engine noise around me, but she won’t do it.
At Howard, we got into the station, and Elyse found the heat lamps on the platform.
Sis and Elyse stand under the heat lamps. Elyse is amused.
Those heat lamps are usually active starting November 1, and while it was a little early in the season, and not necessarily we-need-these-heat-lamps cold yet, Elyse appreciated them all the same.
We then took a Purple Line train from Howard to Davis, in order to return to our hotel.
Interior of car 5436, manufactured by Bombardier.
I also got a number of selfies on the train, with an eye towards making a splash photo out of one of these. I ultimately used that photo on the bottom right for February 2024.
At our hotel, we said goodbye to Sis, and then Elyse, Kyle, and I went off to do our own thing in the HR-V. Elyse wanted to check out some of the retail scene, and so we did that, heading out to Niles. There, we visited a Menards store. Menards is an interesting concept, as it appears to be a mashup of a Lowe’s, a Big Kmart pantry department, and Canadian Tire, but it all fit together fairly well.
The Menards in Niles, photographed from the upper floor.
The lighting at Menards consisted of high bay-style LED fixtures.
For what it’s worth, by the way, the nearest Menards to us in Maryland is out near Morgantown, West Virginia. So we could get there on a day trip (we’ve done Morgantown before as a day trip), but it would be a bit of a stretch to justify.
Finishing up at Menards, we headed over to a Jewel-Osco in Skokie. That was the local nameplate for Albertsons, much like how Safeway fills that role in the DC area. So we knew what to expect there for the most part, though, as is typical out here, there was a very large liquor department. It still feels strange that hard liquor is sold out in grocery stores, because that just doesn’t exist around me (but it should, even though I don’t drink). We ended up getting some milk and a tube of Burt’s Bees for chapped lips.
This was an unusual find for me. This is the arrow sign at the entrance to Jewel-Osco, pointing downward instead of the usual up. Note that the “IN” lettering is normal, i.e. this is placed correctly. I’ve seen arrows like this going sideways before at a Consumers grocery store in Rogers, Arkansas, but never down. It looks strange pointing that way.
Shopping list that I found on the ground in the parking lot. From the looks of it, this person was shopping for an event of some sort.
We also stopped at a nearby Culver’s for some ice cream before heading back to our hotel. And that was our day. Sunday would be another new adventure.