Friday, May 21, 2010

Bridges at 16th and at Cermak

I can never remember this top bridge's name, I should probably call it the Canal Street Bridge, because there is another Cermak Avenue bridge for pedestrian travel. One of these days I'm going to take State Street up to 16th, where you can see the RR tracks that eventually lead to my favorite bridge--not sure why the green tarp is up, I might take a few photos before some other hipster building goes up--and I'll walk past that baseball diamond at Clark Street and backtrack a few blocks. I have photos of Chinatown and the old trainyards near 38th and Morgan, but these were stragglers at the beginning of one roll.

3 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I like the one with the brick wall and train track. Something kind of cool there. A setting for something.

David Niall Wilson said...

That last picture - it looks like there's a big index finger in the sky, either pointing or getting ready to squash something!

Rich Chwedyk said...

On Canal Street, not far from Cermak, there used to be a storefront fish place. Fish, shrimp, clams, oysters -- all breaded and deep fried and delicious. When I worked at Circle Campus occasionally we'd stop by there.

The enormous Cuneo Press building was right on the river not far from there. Amazing Stories and Weird Tales were both printed there at times. When the presses closed someone (some idiot) thought it would be a good idea to store old tires in the structure -- a good idea if you wanted to torch the place, I guess. When the inevitable fire occurred the black smoke could be seen for miles. At night the rubble of the massive building glowed like the world's biggest ember.

I'll bet they sold a lot of shrimp at the fish place that night.