Thursday evening, October 11th, from 5:30 - 7:30 P.M., marks the opening of Intersections: Views Across Chicago, a new exhibition, at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 South Michigan, of images taken by Chicago Surface Lines staff photographers of the streets and cityscapes through which the company's streetcar routes traveled.CAF CEO and President Lynn Osmond is scheduled to speak, as are the authors of Chicago: City on the Move - Michael Williams, Richard Cahan
and Bruce Moffat, from which the photos were taken. The book is a follow-up companion volume to Cahan and Williams' critically acclaimed Richard Nickel's Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, released last year.Chicago: City on the Move is another remarkable collection of previously unpublished photographs that's both a portrait of the Chicago's public transit lines and a time capsule of the city's past. There's a view down Randolph Street in 1931, the inky blackness of the night defeated by the glow from proud signs eulogizing a vanished world - The Oriental, the United Artists, the Garrick, Henrici's, the Apollo (Fannie Brice appearing live). Only the Oriental survives. There's a shot of the site of
the IBM Building and Marina City when it was nothing more than open rail tracks, and a stunning picture of Chicago's first electrically powered railway running through a doll house array of buildings at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Snippets of text on the city from works of writers from Theodore Dreiser to Sandra Cisneros accent the book, and the foreword is by writer Stuart Dybek, recently recognized with one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants.Chicago: City on the Move is another invaluable collection and an entertaining read. If the CAF's Intersections is anywhere near as good, it'll be well worth a visit.
1 comment:
As the co-author of a new book, "Downtown Chicago in Transition", I think that readers will greatly appreciate the scope and depth of our publication in terms of Chicago's architecture and transportation. In fact we selected the photo from the CTA collection of State and Randolph in 1933 before Williams and Cahan did. We have a variety of other photos that readers will find evocative, especially the ones done by my co-author, Eric Bronsky, covering the changes in Chicago's transportation system. The book also includes interviews with 20 Chicagoans that give a broad view of downtown's development and transitions from the Great Chicago Fire until today.
Neal Samors
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