Saturday exploring

This time, it was Jeff's turn to pick a spot. His agenda was Marktown and Calumet Fisheries. After a day of chores around the house, we headed north on Calumet Avenue at about 4 pm to find a tiny little subdivision surrounded by steel mills in East Chicago.

This geographical spot has a place in architectural and industrial history, and a lot of people who are interested in the story it has to tell. Here's a site with more information about the planned community of Marktown. We stopped to play at the park for a few minutes, then took the 3 minute driving tour of the area, and decided it was too chilly for the walking tour. Most of the houses were in serious states of dilapidation, but you can tell it was once a very interesting and beautiful place to live.

While we were on the topic of planned industrial communities, we decided to drive through the Historic Pullman neighborhood. But first, it was suppertime! Jeff had noticed that a little smokeshack in southeast Chicago, called Calumet Fisheries recently won a special James Beard award for being an American Classic. It is the tiniest little white building perched on top of the 95th street bridge over the Calumet River.

This bridge has some fame for being the one that was jumped by a car while partially open in the 1980 movie called The Blues Brothers, which I have never seen.
No place to eat inside so we took our deep fried scallops and catfish dinners
a mile or so east to the lakeshore in Calumet Park, which is a huge lakefront greenspace that we have explored in the past. We ate in the car, parked up to the lakefront. This park is an interesting place because it has a view of Hammond and East Chicago shorelines, it has a Coast Guard station, it has a huge area for soccer players and baseball players, and it has its own beach. It is owned by the Chicago Park District, and its fieldhouse building has a very interesting field trip destination in the basement, a huge model train which is set-up and maintained by the LakeShore Model Railroad Association. They have work sessions on Wed and Friday evenings and they welcome visitors to come see this huge layout with several trains operating by live switch operators calling signals to one another, a more exciting and close-up model train experience than the one at the Museum of Science and Industry, in my view. The way we usually take to get to this park is to follow Route 41 along the lakeshore and turn into the park entrance at 99th Street or 95th street.

After dinner, we drove west to the beautiful boulevard of Martin Luther King Drive, past Chicago State University Campus and down south into the Pullman Historic District. We stayed in our cars again because it was nearing evening and too chilly for walking, but it was fun to see these very old housing structures in various states of restoration, rehabilitation, paint colors and landscape designs.

Then we tried driving as near as we could to Lake Calumet, which is bordered on the north by Harborside Golf Course, on the west by the Bishop Ford Freeway and on the southwest by a landfill and on the east by various industrial yards. There is one lonely road that goes along side the east of the lake but you can get only a few glimpses of this strange harbor/lake/swamp area. When we got home I did some internet searches to find out more about this lake, which is Chicago's largest inland lake, but it is a mysterious place. Maybe someday it will be more fully accessible as a public natural space, but someday is far away for this piece of land, I think. We drove through the parking lot of the links style Harborside Golf Course which is a beautiful spot. I was asking Jeff if we were weird to get so interested in exploring these less desirable locations of Calumet Region and he said it might have something to do with being interested in things that are generally labeled worthless, used up, past their prime, or polluted beyond repair. Does resurrection hope have anything to say about the defiled Calumet waters called Lake Calumet, Calumet River, Little Calumet River, Grand Calumet River? I think maybe so.