Brenda’s Neighborhood

Here: O'Donovan's, on Irving Park Road near Western, one of the surprisingly large amount of great pubs found on this stretch of street, seen here the other evening while stopping in for a pint and to celebrate a good long bike ride that day.

Here: The Long Room, on Irving Park Road near Ashland, just one of a surprisingly large amount of great pubs along this stretch of street. Seen here the other evening, after stopping in for a pint to reward myself for a good long bike ride earlier.

Here: For nearly a century there used to be a big problem in the Uptown neighborhood, where the CTA red-line elevated-train (or "el") tracks ran parallel and close to the eastern wall of the famed Graceland Cemetary; the resulting gap was too wide to be a mere alley, too noisy for residential construction, so instead was a trash-filled wasteland literally from from the 1890s to 1990s. Then the city finally turned it into what you see here -- Challenger Park (yes, named after the space shuttle that exploded), one of many ultra-specific kinds of parks the city maintains, which in this case contains a nicely landscaped soft-track half-mile running course, plus a fenced-in dog park at its center, and frankly not much else. It's a great addition to this neighborhood, a nice little exercise green space in what used to be a dirty, graffiti-filled apocalyptic space; I'm all for the city sneaking in more and more science-fictiony-looking "post-Industrial green spaces" around the city like this.

Here: The Uptown Theatre in Chicago, in a way not a lot of people see it -- from the backside, that is. Magnolia and Lawrence, Uptown neighborhood.

Here: One of the still-existing gateways of the old Essanay Studios, pretty much the most famous movie studio Chicago had, back befor the movie industry was based out of Hollywood. Believe it or not, from 1908 to 1915 this nondescript area of Uptown was where hundreds of America's first feature-length films were shot (back when this was little more than rural wilderness), including all the early films of Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Bronco Billy. The studio even built a luxury hotel down the street to house all these studio people, a shot of which can also be found in this 2009 bike blog; simply check out the placemark directly to the right (east) of this one.

Here: The Berwyn red-line el stop at dusk on a warm spring day.

Here: Epworth United Methodist Church, in Edgewater. Yeah, freaky and cool, right? People have been worshipping on this spot constantly since 1888; the unique Romanesque/Arts & Crafts building you see here was created in 1891, from a design that was donated to the church by noted architect Frederick Townsend. A bizarre and great addition to this odd, cool neighborhood.

I'm determined this summer and fall to finally finish up the series of customized Google bicycle maps I've been talking about doing for years, but only a handful of which actually exist at this point; and that's had me doing an overhaul of the entire plan in my head this spring, dropping some older ideas and adding some newer ones, and consolidating some of the previous ideas into bigger mega-maps. And lo and behold, tonight I finally put aside a couple of hours so I could sit down and make a new master map of it all! That's it you're seeing above, and of course to find links to all the maps currently available, you can simply stop by jasonpettus.com/maps. Anyway, here below is a description of all the routes I plan on covering by the end of the year...

1) Lakefront Path: Lincoln Park North. Part 1 of my five-part guide to Chicago's 18-mile uninterrupted lakefront bicycle path. This map details the northern half of the seven-mile Lincoln Park, one of the oldest and largest urban parks in the nation, built in stages from literally the 1860s to 1960s.

2) Lakefront Path: Lincoln Park South. Part 2 of my lakefront guide, this time detailing the older southern half of Lincoln Park, the location of its more famous landmarks including the zoo.

3) Lakefront Path: Lincoln Park to the Loop. Part 3 of my lakefront guide, this time detailing the sometimes tricky turns between the southern tip of Lincoln Park (at North Avenue) and the northern tip of the Loop (at Randolph Street, which is also the northern tip of Millennium Park).

4) Lakefront Path: The Loop to Hyde Park. Part 4 of my lakefront guide, this time detailing the newest section of the path, from the Museum Campus in the South Loop to Promontory Point at the northern tip of Hyde Park.

5) Lakefront Path: Hyde Park to the South Shore. Part 5 of my lakefront guide, this time detailing the Hyde Park neighborhood, Jackson Park (site of the Museum of Science and Industry), and the South Shore Cultural Center.

5B (blue): The Neighborhood Parks of the Chicago River. Part 1 of a related three-part guide to the hundreds of small neighborhood parks on Chicago's northside. Here, a detailed look at the five miles of interconnected greenways spanning the Chicago River from Belmont to Peterson, a century-old plan originally conceived by the German and Swedish families who lived in this area during the Victorian Age.

6) The Pre-City Parks of the Far North. Part 2 of my three-part guide to the northside's hundreds of neighborhood parks. This map looks at the large parks on the far north edge of the city, most created long before this area was officially a part of Chicago, containing such surprising elements as lagoons, sledding, prairie wild-growth experiments, and an official city zoo that hardly anyone even realizes exists.

7) The Neighborhood Mini-Parks of the Northside. Part 3 of my three-part guide to the northside's hundreds of neighborhood parks. Here, a day-long trip that meanders among the dozens and dozens of tiny "mini-parks" and designated playlots on the northside -- some created by activist locals in the Victorian Age (long before the city provided official parks), some created out of vacant slum lots in the 1960s and '70s using federal aid. Plus detailed instructions for joining up with the lakefront path at its northern terminus.

8) Burnham's Boulevards and the West Side Parks. As part of the "City Beautiful" movement in the early 1900s, it was recommended by legendary city planner Daniel Burnham that Chicago create a "green ring" of connected extra-wide boulevards through what at the time was the city's most congested working-class neighborhoods, creating not just a city-spanning avenue for pedestrians and bicycles but also a swath of nature within what at the time was a very polluted urban area. This was then combined with a series of grand public parks on the city's west side, some of the first urban parks on the planet to be landscaped in a unstructured, wild-growth manner. My map covers the northern half of this still-existing green network, starting at Diversey Boulevard near the lakefront and ending at the Garfield Park Conservatory. (The brown part of the route shown above, then, is technically the southern half of this boulevard/park system, but is not recommended: it not only passes through several high-crime areas, but the parks along the way are badly maintained, part of the pervasive inequality in city resources between the north and south halves of Chicago that has existed since the city's founding.)

9) Historic Neighborhoods of the Near South. Did you know that there are half a dozen nationally important historic neighborhoods all butting against each other in Chicago's Near South Side? There are! Here, a map detailing them all, including the IIT campus (home of a dozen architecturally famous buildings), Bronzeville (Chicago's first rich black neighborhood), Prairie Avenue (Chicago's first rich white neighborhood), the Museum Campus, Chinatown, Printers Row and the South Loop.

10) The Bike-Friendly Southside. A look at the bike-friendly areas of what is sometimes a sketchy Chicago southside. The route starts at the Douglas Tomb on 35th Street, traveling south down Drexel Boulevard to Washington Park (proposed site of Chicago's possible 2016 Olympics bid), then through the University of Chicago campus to Jackson Park (home of the Museum of Science and Industry), then across the old World's Fair Midway to the 55th Street el station.

11) The commuter bike lanes of the northside. The city is constantly encouraging downtown workers who live on the northside to actually bicycle to their offices in the morning instead of driving or taking the bus; in that regard, they've created a series of clearly-marked, extra-wide urban bike lanes among a multitude of streets from Rogers Park to the Loop, including nearly the entire lengths of Clark, Southport, Halsted, Elston, Lincoln Avenue and more. Here, a collective look at all these inner-city paths, along with tips for making these rides as safe as possible.

12) Chicago's Downtown. The four neighborhoods making up Chicago's "downtown" district -- the Loop, the South Loop, River North and River West.

Anyway, as regulars know, I'm going out once a week right now and shooting photos for yet another section of yet another one of these maps; and like I said, hopefully by the the time 2010 rolls around, everything you see above will be finished and in the Google Maps database, for people to randomly stumble across whenever they do searches on specific places. (For those who don't know, Google now includes user-created placemarks in search results over at Google Maps.) Wish me luck!

Here: One of the benefits of the admittedly sometimes scary experience of riding in the Loop -- you get views like these while bicycling. Dearborn Street looking north, the "official" northbound street downtown for bicyclists (i.e. the one northbound street in the Loop with a designated bike lane). The city provides four streets like these downtown for bicyclists, one heading in each compass direction.

Here: The locally famous chess pavilion at the North Avenue Beach, which like Washington Square Park in New York is constantly filled with semi-pro players battling it out over small wagers. It was built in 1957 from a Mid-Century Modernist design by Maurice Webster, including Modernist king and queen sculptures on either end by Boris Gilbertson; the whole thing was paid for with a $90,000 donation from Laurens Hammond of the Hammond Organ Company.

Here: The infamous "open gate" in the east wall of Wrigley Field, where one can technically watch Cubs games for free from the sidewalk outside, down at the actual field level. Ironically, although the whole thing is designed to look like some nostalgic historic quirk from the century-old stadium, the Cubs only made this a doorless gate three years ago.

Here: The north wall of Wrigley Field, four blocks from my apartment, technically the back side of this historic stadium; but since it's one of the only sports arenas left in the United States still located in a residential neighborhood, technically all four sides of the structure receive regular foot traffic at all times.

Here: Although they're becoming rarer by the year, you can still randomly spot all the time here on Chicago's northside a plethora of retail stores that still have their original Art Deco signage from when the place first opened in the Early Modernist era, and with the signage still in pretty good shape too. Here, Granville Pictures, at the corner of Granville and Broadway, with signs that according to their website first went up in the early 1940s and have never been replaced.