Andersonville: Round One

A bonus post! To make up for being so late with Sunday's.

After yet another day of doing lots with very little to show for it at the end, I hopped back on the 22 Clark bus and headed down to Andersonville to meet my friend Heather. We've decided, you see, that as long as I don't have a job and she has Wednesdays off, we should make them date days. It's a great opportunity for us to spend some time together and to explore the city at the same time. Tonight, she had a rehearsal, and she spent the day recovering from her move, so we met up in Andersonville for a brief walking tour and dinner.

Andersonville has Swedish origins which bubble to the surface with places like the Swedish bakery and the Swedish American Museum. But it's also a fabulous little area for shops, restaurants and overall coolness. I had noticed it on the bus when we rode through on Saturday and knew I wanted to venture there eventually. I hadn't realized eventually would come so soon.

In researching what we might do there, I discovered that Andersonville has a website, which is not only where I discovered their farmers' market is on Wednesday evenings, but also that they've organized a civic effort to support all of the lovely little businesses in the area. Andersonville 20/20 is a community-based initiative in which residents are challenged to spend $20 a week in a local business. That's all. But if everyone who lives there does that, the whole area wins. According to the website, they've already brought $120K into the community that wasn't there before. Or at least not spent there before. That's the way to keep a neighborhood alive.

And thanks to the Andersonville website, I've also got a handy list of activities and locales I want to explore further.

Our first stop (once I got off the bus) was at the farmers' market. It's small, just one block, but they had some fantastic looking produce and some jam that was to die for. I didn't get any, but if they're there the next time I go, I definitely will. Chocolate raspberry, if you can even imagine, and that was only one of several. Heather tried the lemon blueberry and said it was yummy too.

I did, however, get some berries, having fore-armed myself with plastic tubs for carrying easily squished produce home with me. And they worked perfectly. Three pints of berries (rasp-, black- and blue-) fit easily into two large Glad disposable containers and made it home Just Fine. They're in the fridge now, waiting for their time tomorrow morning when they will become a crisp. Mmmm...

Speaking of food, dinner was at La Cocina de Frida, where I discovered the joys of cinnamon in sangria (who KNEW it could be so good?) and had tilapia on their gorgeous patio. It reminded me of the rooftop garden of the hotel I stayed in on my last night in Cabo back in 2002, when I went there to work on a sea turtle recovery program (one currently battening down the hatches in the face of Hurricane Jimena). Lush and green and alive, with falling water, it is the patio I dreamed of during the long years in Moscow where no such place exists.

And then we wandered back out onto the street and eventually ended up right next door at A Taste of Heaven for dessert. Where I had the raspberry brownie. Oh. My. God. So. Good. Also, too much for one person to eat in one sitting, I should not have, but I did. I also had coffee because it was Free Coffee Wednesday, which is a major selling point if ever I've heard one, even though the baked goods should bring you in all by themselves.

The Andersonville community has a really hip vibe to it which was even more charming on the street than it appeared to be from the bus. I'll be back to wander Andersonville again when I have a bit more time. Certainly I'll be back for the Farmers' Market. But I'll also come back just to explore Andersonville.

Two Worlds: Green City Market & Blackstone Branch Library

Originally this post was going to be solely about the Green City Market. I started writing it Saturday morning, on the Clark 22 bus as I rode towards Lincoln Park. But then my phone rang. My friend Rebecca wanted to know if I was busy that afternoon because she and her husband and mother were going to be traveling to Hyde Park to see some recently restored murals in a library there. I thought it sounded interesting, so I said yes. And then I went back to writing.

Green City Market
This seemed like a good place to begin my forays into my new life here. I mean, a girl needs to eat and all.

The Green City Market is, as the website says, Chicago's only year-round farmers' market. It's held every Saturday (7am -1pm in summer, 8am-1pm in winter) in Lincoln Park. In the summertime, the market is outdoors near the South Pond between N. Clark & Stockton Drive. In the winter, it's held in the South Gallery of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

This market is one of the top ten farmers' markets in the country, so you can imagine how excited I was about going. I was expecting to be impressed. Turns out it's not that different from Moscow's farmers' market, which surprised me. There's certainly more food available than in Moscow, and you can get elk, lamb, beef and pork there, as well as milk. I had some wonderful apple cider donuts fresh out of the fryer, but other than that, the diversity of the clientele and the lack of social awareness booths, it was pretty much like Moscow's market, right down to the live music. Just bigger.

The bus trip took an hour, and I had to carry back anything I bought, so I was fairly circumspect with the purchasing. I got an eggplant, some green bell peppers, some garlic and some onions. The soup I made yesterday and the spaghetti sauce I made this evening both have the Green City Market to thank for their existence.

In fact, I would have to say that the bus trip was the best part of the entire morning. I opted to go by bus rather than by train because I wanted to see more of the city. I need know how Chicago is put together, and the bus gave me a really great sense of what goes where, simply by traveling down Clark St. from Rogers Park to Lincoln Park and back again.

I do plan to visit the Green City Market again this Saturday, and I'm going to be better prepared. There were lots of berries that I couldn't buy because I had no way to transport them safely, but thanks to a suggestion from my mom, I'll be stuffing my backpack with tupperware wannabees to haul all those berries home. There are crisps to be made and fruits to be frozen for winter smoothies.


The Blackstone Murals
Chicago's first branch library, the Blackstone Memorial Branch Library in Hyde Park, opened in 1904. Its fortunes have fluctuated over the century plus since then. When it was built, the marble foyer, mahogany furniture and the Oliver Dennett Grover murals all attested to its importance to the culture. The original cost of the building was $250,000. Renovations and updates within the last 10-15 years have cost around $800,000. But there are some things that require that kind of monetary care, and a library this beautiful is one of them.

Don't you think every library should be lit this way?

That's my friend Rebecca and her husband, by the way. I don't know who the guy in red is.

You can already tell from the exterior, I think, that this library is going to be something special. And you know that for sure when you walk into the entry dome and look up.

The murals were restored just recently. In fact, there was a presentation on the process last night at the library. If I hadn't had stupid technical issues getting these images off my phone, you would have had advance notice about it. Sorry. Next time I'm taking a real camera. Anyway, bear in mind that these are indeed phone pictures while looking at them. And consider heading to the library to look at the murals in person. They're well worth it.

Science

Literature

Labor

Art

Everyone we spoke with on staff was very helpful. The head librarian even let us look at a scrapbook of the library's history. It's a beautiful place, a once upon a time temple to the importance of reading. Thank goodness someone thought it was worth preserving. And judging from how busy it was while we were there, half an hour before closing on a Saturday, the neighborhood thinks it's worth using.