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Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Route 66: The last (or first) 300 miles in Illinois
Our Route 66 road trip ended at the beginning, at East Jackson Boulevard and South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where a brown sign hanging 12 feet high on a light post tells people they've reached the venerable road's threshold. On a hot and windy Saturday evening in June a large group of well-dressed people stood on the steps at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, between the museum's famed bronze lions and below a sign advertising an exhibit on Frida Kahlo's time in Paris. Members of a mariachi band weaved through the crowd of pedestrians walking along Michigan. Few people stopped at the Route 66 sign. Those that did, did not linger long. They pointed, noted its existence, and continued on their way. While the route often conjures images of quaint small towns, its foundation, said historian and author Jim Hinckley, has always been rooted in Chicago. The existing roads and trails that would eventually become Route 66 nearly 100 years ago largely followed the railroad, with Chicago as its hub. 'Chicago's part of Route 66 is a huge part of the Route 66 story,' Hinckley said. 'It is a cornerstone.' About 300 miles southwest of Chicago, different alignments of the route leave St. Louis and cross the Mississippi at three different bridges. The northernmost iteration once spanned the river at the milelong Chain of Rock Bridge. Constructed three years after the route was commissioned, the bridge makes a 30-degree turn at its midpoint between St. Louis and Madison, Illinois. The bridge closed in 1968, replaced by a new one 2,000 feet upstream. Today, the original structure carries pedestrians, cyclists and, on a Thursday in June, one dog. The road climbs north toward Springfield, where a former Texaco gas station from 1946 a block from the route now houses the Route History Museum, which documents the Black experience on Route 66. Public health researchers by trade, museum founders Gina Lathan and Stacy Grundy spent more than a year collecting stories of Black homeowners and business owners — some found in The Negro Motorist Green Book — who provided safe havens along the route at a time when vast stretches of the highway passed through sundown towns. Museum visitors are given virtual reality headsets to help bring those stories to life. 'They want to be a part of the story of Route 66,' Lathan said of the families she and Grundy interviewed, 'and be recognized for not only what their family and the community brought to that whole travel experience, but what they as a people did to not only persevere but make these phenomenal economic engines in these communities that were oftentimes forgotten.' Continuing north, stretches of the route lie nestled between Interstate 55 and farmlands. In Atlanta, population 1,637, a group of international journalists and media buyers from at least a dozen countries snapped photos of towering 'muffler man' fiberglass statues — once used to advertise businesses along the route — collected at the town's American Giants museum. The group trip, organized by the state's tourism office, followed the International Pow Wow (IPW) travel trade show in Chicago. Illinois has invested millions over the last few years on Route 66 redevelopment and promotion, said Eric Wagner with the state tourism office. 'Route 66 is huge for us,' he said. 'People want to see America.' Follow our road trip: Route 66, 'The Main Street of America,' turns 100 About 50 miles north, Pontiac also appears to have capitalized on its position along the route. Among its attractions is the Route 66 Association Hall of Fame & Museum. There, visitors can find a school bus-turned-land yacht and a Volkswagen van belonging to Bob Waldmire, whose family opened the Springfield, Illinois, institution Cozy Dog on Route 66 and claims to have invented the corn dog. Waldmire became a legendary figure of the route's lore with his hand-drawn postcards, maps and murals. Both he and the van he took on his frequent route trips served as the inspiration for the character Fillmore in the Disney Pixar film 'Cars.' Waldmire died in 2009 of cancer, before he could finish painting a map of the Route 66 stretch through Illinois on a wall of the museum. 'He was very friendly, that's why he never got the mural done,' said Rose Geralds, 87, who has worked at the museum for the last 18 years. 'He stopped and talked to everybody. He didn't care. He just wanted to talk to the people. Just such a nice man.' Forty miles north, artist Robert Ryan, 61, stopped to inspect a detail in the mural he's painting on a storage building along Route 66 in Wilmington's South Island Park, next to the town's famed Gemini Giant, a 30-foot-tall fiberglass 'muffler man' recently relocated to the park after once facing destruction. Ryan's design, picked out of 20 or so entries, covers three walls of the building. One side shows a large Route 66 shield behind a yellow convertible driven by the original owners of the Launching Pad restaurant where the Gemini Giant once stood. Nearby, the town's football team waves to viewers. A mural on another wall has the giant standing in front of an American flag and behind the town name painted in block letters. A third wall mural depicts motorcyclists on the route. 'The best part has been talking to people who stop to ask about it,' Ryan said. Leaving Wilmington, the route heads past farmlands now broken up by massive logistic centers amassed on the outskirts of Joliet, where the country's largest inland port is located. It cuts through Joliet's downtown, past Stateville Correctional Center and into Romeoville and Bolingbrook. It's briefly absorbed by I-55 before returning as Joliet Road. Near Hodgkins, the route is forced to detour around a quarry where a stretch of the road has been closed for decades. It links up with Ogden Avenue in Berwyn and takes motorists through Cicero and into Chicago, through North Lawndale, Douglass Park and across the Eisenhower Expressway, named for the president who commissioned the interstate highway system that led to its demise. Route 66 then hits Jackson Boulevard and runs to its eastbound end. A block north of Jackson, a similar brown sign on a light post at Adams Street and Michigan marks the start of Route 66 for those heading west. At 8 a.m. on Sunday in June a family of three stopped to pose for pictures in front of the sign. This was not the start of their journey but, rather, a seemingly good photo opportunity. But a mile west at the unofficial start of the route, the 102-year-old Lou Mitchell's diner, Eleonora Tomassetti and Chiara Voceri took the last bites of a pancake before heading to pick up their rental car. Originally from Rome, the pair, both 27, first got the idea for a Route 66 road trip in high school. Earlier this year, they decided to turn that idea into a reality. They planned a two-week trip: Stops in Joliet, Atlanta and Springfield. An overnight stay in St. Louis. Another in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Two nights in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stops in Winslow and Flagstaff, both in Arizona. Detours to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Said Tomassetti: 'I think it's the perfect example of the American adventure.'
Winnipeg Free Press
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Mass tourism a modern ill
Opinion When I went to Paris in 2012, I skipped the Louvre. Sacré bleu! Don't get me wrong: I notably love an art museum and try to go to one in every city I visit. From the Tate Modern in London to the Art Institute of Chicago to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to the Denver Art Museum, I've had the absolute privilege — and it is that — to have seen many amazing works by incredible artists at world-class institutions. But the Louvre gave me a particular kind of crowd anxiety. I'd seen the photos of sweaty throngs of people jockeying to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa which, in addition to being famous, is famously not a large painting; Leonardo da Vinci's Renassiance-era portrait is 77 by 53 centimetres. Thibault Camus / The Associated Press Seeing Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa seems to be on a lot of bucket lists. Our girl draws 30,000 visitors a day, which means actually getting anywhere close to her is all but impossible, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse with the advent of selfies and content creators. I just took an exterior photo of the Louvre Pyramid (itself a cultural landmark) and called it a day. On Monday, the Louvre, which is the world's most-visited museum, closed its doors, leaving long lines of tourists stranded outside. The temporary closure was the result of a so-called wildcat strike, an unauthorized work stoppage by unionized employees. Staff are exhausted, trying to work at a crumbling institution that cannot handle the staggering crowds. And 80 per cent of visitors to the Louvre are there to see the Mona Lisa. I'll admit that I don't quite understand this. I get making a pilgrimage to see a masterpiece — Vermeer's The Milkmaid, Kent Monkman's The Scream and Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte are all works I've written about travelling to have a moment with — and I agree that the Mona Lisa is a masterpiece. But why this masterpiece — so reproduced, parodied and pop culture-fied — is harder to parse, especially since the gauntlet one must pass through to see it looks so miserable. The Louvre has what New York Times arts critic Jason Farago dubbed a 'Mona Lisa Problem.' 'No other iconic painting — not Botticelli's Birth of Venus at the Uffizi in Florence, not Klimt's Kiss at the Belvedere in Vienna, not Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — comes anywhere close to monopolizing its institution like she does,' he wrote in 2019. That one artwork, he argued, eclipses all the others in the museum, including others right near it, and it needs its own dedicated space outside of the Louvre. I do wonder if the Mona Lisa is, for many people, simply a box to be checked, something people feel they have to do (and I'm using the word 'do' intentionally, as though it's on a list, instead of 'see') because that's just what you do when you go to Paris. In other words, you can't talk about the Mona Lisa without talking about mass tourism, of which this kind of bingo-card box ticking is a symptom. Also this week, Spaniards in Barcelona and Mallorca sprayed tourists with water pistols to protest an oversaturation of visitors they say is contributing to both an erosion of their communities' character and a housing shortage. It's not just Spain. You don't have to search far to find similar complaints about overtourism in Japan, Iceland or Switzerland. The advent of Instagram Tourism, where influencers visit places just to take perfect photos for social media — coupled with the proliferation of short-term rentals — only adds to the pressure on these places, many of which hold humanity's greatest achievements. People are unlikely to stop visiting these hyper-popular locales, even though I think we can agree that mass tourism, at the level it's at now, is unsustainable socially, economically and environmentally, which no one likes to talk about because, well, people want to travel. Travel can be enriching. It can change your perspective. It can give you a better understanding of the world and your place in it. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. But is throwing elbows to see the Mona Lisa really a meaningful cultural experience? Does 'going for the 'Gram' really allow one to have real interactions with a place where, by the way, actual people live? The good news is, there's a whole big globe to explore. Going off the beaten path might yield more discovery of out-of-the-way local economies where you could spend your tourism dollars. Might I suggest Winnipeg? I realize I am probably mostly preaching to residents, but I'm serious. Maybe not while there are wildfires burning in the province, but any other time. We've got history. We've got nature. We've got A+ restaurants. If it's art you're looking for, we've got that, too, and it's not an abject nightmare to go look at it. We've even got a Seine. Just as there are other artworks in the Louvre, there are other cities in the world. Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
The Advertiser
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
There's always a good season to visit the US's most under-rated city
HOW: It's cold outside, so stay indoors. There are more than 80 museums - try one of the largest science museums in the US, the Museum of Science & Industry, or the Chicago History Museum. Art aficionados will love winter. Check out one of America's oldest and largest art museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Museum of Contemporary Art. Though there's art all over: entire neighbourhoods, like River North, are full of it in former warehouses. And there's a diverse theatre scene with many Tony Award-winning theatre companies, not to mention the options for comedy fans who'll already know the Second City spawned America's greatest comedians, like John Belushi and Bill Murray. Winter's the perfect time to spend entire afternoons at the city's steakhouses. The best of them is Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse, a Chicago institution - take a seat at the bar and enjoy the human traffic. And try another icon, Tavern On Rush, just across the road in Chicago's most fun neighbourhood, the Gold Coast. The bonus here is it's in Thompson Chicago, an underpriced, over-delivering hotel right at the heart of the best action in the city.
Chicago Tribune
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
17 arrested as Chicago protesters march against Donald Trump's immigration crackdown
A massive demonstration by thousands who marched through Chicago's Loop in protest of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown briefly snarled Tuesday evening traffic and resulted in several confrontations between protesters and police as crowds surged into downtown streets and DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Chicago police arrested 17 people over the course of the hours-long protest, which began at Federal Plaza and wound as far north as West Grand Avenue in the River North neighborhood, walking among stopped cars and buses on several main arteries, including DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Multiple city vehicles could be seen with anti-CPD, anti-ICE graffiti. Four of the people arrested were charged with felonies ranging from aggravated battery to a police officer and criminal damage to government property, police said. They were all set to appear in court on Wednesday. Of the others arrested, 10 people were charged with misdemeanors, including battery, reckless conduct, criminal defacement and resisting arrest, police said. One person was cited for possessing a paint marker with the intention of using it for graffiti and charges were still pending against two more people, police said. Police helicopters hovered as marchers wove between vehicles. Police detained two people around 6:15 p.m. at South State and East Monroe streets as protesters yelled in the intersection. As officers detained people and cars waited in traffic, a woman who was told to drive west on Monroe had a brief, shouted exchange with an officer. After making a noise of apparent frustration, she drove across the intersection down a street filled with marchers. People screamed and scattered. A few moments later, an officer knelt in front of a woman seated on the sidewalk, holding a little girl in her lap, shaking her head. Although no one appeared to be injured immediately afterward, police confirmed Wednesday morning that a 66-year-old woman who had been standing in the street had broken her arm. She was taken to Northwestern Hospital for treatment and no one was in custody as of 1 p.m. Wednesday, police said. Around 7 p.m. on Tuesday, as the protest passed the Art Institute of Chicago, four people in black could be seen spray-painting anti-ICE slogans on the building's walls. As the march made its way up North Clark Street, many of the people dining outside raised their phones to capture some of the chants and signs, some of which read 'We the people have had enough' and 'No human being is illegal.' Many in restaurant staff uniforms held their phones aloft and pumped their fists to marchers going by. After a brief stop in Daley Plaza, the march appeared to split into two groups. One group briefly stood off with CPD at the intersection of North State and West Washington Streets, chanting 'who do you serve? Who do you protect?' As more officers ringed the intersection with helmets and batons. It was not immediately clear whether people were detained following that confrontation. If you're arrested by ICE in Illinois, what happens next? Legal experts explain the short confrontations erupted back at Federal Plaza, where a squad car sat covered in anti-ICE graffiti, and at the intersection of South Michigan Avenue and East Jackson Boulevard just before 9 p.m. The march had been moving south down Michigan Avenue when an officer appeared to confront a protester. The protester, dressed in all black, hit the ground and a supervisor pulled the officer back. Other officers quickly surrounded the protester as he crawled toward the traffic median. Protests that sprang up in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement raids and prompted President Donald Trump to mobilize National Guard troops and the Marines have begun to spread across the country, with more planned into the weekend. From Seattle to Austin and Washington, D.C., marchers have chanted slogans, carried signs against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and snarled traffic through downtown avenues and outside federal offices. While many were peaceful, some have resulted in clashes with law enforcement as officers made arrests and used chemical irritants to disperse crowds. In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker has been a loud opponent of Trump's enforcement campaign. And Chicago has long been a 'sanctuary city' that prohibits its law enforcement from inquiring about residents' immigration status or cooperating with federal immigration officials. Trump's 'border czar' Tom Homan pledged just before the new administration took office that sanctuary cities such as Chicago would be epicenters for Trump's promised crackdown on immigrants in the country without legal permission. But the city hasn't seen major unrest related to the raids so far, besides a June 4 clash between immigration authorities and advocates and some City Council members outside an ICE field office in the South Loop. Earlier on Tuesday afternoon, about 40 people gathered with signs and drums outside a building where immigration court takes place, located at 55 E. Monroe St. 'ICE belongs in our coffee, not in our communities,' a sign read. The group expanded to about 200 protesters, and briefly blocked traffic outside the office before marching down to a second ICE outpost, at Ida B. Wells Drive and South Clark Street, but found the intersection taped off by the Police Department. They turned to march north and east through the Loop, carrying Mexican and Palestinian flags. 'No fear, no hate, no ICE in our state,' they chanted. Benjamin Milford commuted to the city from Wheaton to voice his opposition to deportations of families, particularly children of unauthorized immigrants who were U.S. citizens and in need of medical care. About 3:30 p.m., he was sitting on the sidewalk outside immigration court adjusting the rollerblades he'd worn to give him easier movement around the march. 'With ICE raids happening every day across the country, it needs to end,' said Milford, 30. 'I hope this sends a message to Trump and his administration that we won't put up with this in Chicago or across the country.' Then he got back on his feet and skated off into the chanting crowd.
Chicago Tribune
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Ferris Bueller's iconic vest goes up for auction 40 years after famously skipping school
Few films have done more to cement the city of Chicago's reputation in American culture than 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' the 1986 teen comedy classic that follows Ferris and his two friends as they skip school in the suburbs to explore everything the Windy City has to offer. Now, 40 years after cameras first rolled, an iconic piece of the film's wardrobe is jumping off the screen and into one lucky fan's closet. Starting today, Sotheby's will be auctioning off the signature sweater vest worn in the film by Matthew Broderick, who starred as the teenage slacker Ferris. The vest is featured in some of the movie's most memorable scenes: Ferris electrifying the Von Steuben Day Parade audience with his performance of 'Twist and Shout,' the gang taking in a Cubs game at Wrigley Field and the trio making a trip through the Art Institute of Chicago. ''There are few costumes in Hollywood history that are instantly recognizable and this is undeniably one of them,' Darren Rovell, Emmy Award winner and the vest's owner, said in a statement. Rovell said that the piece has been not only photo matched to the vest seen on screen, but also has been inspected by costume designer Marilyn Vance before being made available to the public. The film was Vance's fourth collaboration with John Hughes, the man behind the Chicagoland-set classics, 'The Breakfast Club' and 'Pretty in Pink.' As the entire film takes place over the course of one day, Vance wanted to ensure each lead had a costume that told viewers everything they needed to know about the characters in just one look. Early on, she decided Ferris should wear a sweater vest, as Vance felt it would quickly demonstrate his disregard for the conformist style rules of the adult world of the decade. Her search for the perfect vest eventually led her to a Chicago institution: Marshall Field's. There, she picked up an off-the-rack cardigan, trimmed its sleeves and created one of cinema's most iconic looks. The vest manages to be retro, weird and cool all at once — perfect for the vision both Vance and Hughes had of the character. 'Bueller's vest is emblematic of the character's most exciting quality,' Sotheby's said in the statement, 'the ability to blend in anywhere, while standing out just enough to get exactly what you want from the world around you.' As Ferris Bueller turns 30, Northbrook invites the world to sit and look at his favorite water towerThe winner of the auction will go home with more than just the costume. Three pieces of baseball memorabilia are included: the baseball Ferris catches at Wrigley Field and tickets from both baseball games featured onscreen (though the scene takes place over a single game, footage from two games was used in the final film). A pair of movie tickets from the film's original run are also included: one from a Showplace Cinema and one from a theater in Japan. The bidding for the vest opens today, June 5 — the day Ferris himself left the suburbs and headed downtown, celebrated across the country as Ferris Bueller Day — and doesn't close until June 24. For more information about this and other auctions, check out .
