I was able to power up an old phone and find an old album walk for this #wednesdaywalk
My ancient samsung was never backed up to the cloud so I had to find a new battery for it and power it up and scrape the photos off. Here are a few from the winter of 2016. This was during a brutal polar vortex where the whole river froze over.
Thankfully the water taxi was strong enough to break the ice. Every few decades this river gets frozen over solid enough to walk across. This winter of 26 is a medium cold winter so no frozen lake at all.
I'm a bit nostalgic for this side of town as my old office used to be here.
Here is an office/condo building where my boss used to rent a one bedroom. They thought it would be good to be close to the office but their rental only lasted for a month before they went back to the suburbs. Too much downtown is too degrading to the spirit lol.
Some vintage 2016 era stickers where most of them were music bands vs strange astroturfed political statements of today.
Here is a different view of the city from the Field Museum. The surrounding areas by the Field museum are sketchy so you don't want to get caught taking the El around here.
I used to work in the Wrigley building on the right side. The building to the left used to have a decent cafeteria in the basement good for lunch. Now it is closed and most cafeteria food is value engineered after covid so not even worth eating out anymore.
Here is a night shot from the riverwalk where the ice is thick. In the distance on the right you can see the Merchandise Center which used to be one of the largest buildings in the world by square footage. Now various huge factories dwarf the size of this building.
Here is a shot from near the shoreline looking back at the Wrigley Building nice and lit up.
This used to be my view going back to the train station while waiting for the water taxi. Now I can just rush to the train station by foot in a more sterile financial district of the city.
That's all for now, it was worth finding the old battery to my phone and scraping these photos of the internal memory. Thanks for looking :-)