Geek Life: Chicago

I don’t get many chances for real vacations, and when I spent a full day in Chicago over the weekend I decided to give it the full treatment. Chicago is an impressive, industrious city, the city that invented the skyscraper. It works through the night, filling passenger train cars to standing room only at midnight. Just walking down the sidewalk can be overwhelming to someone who isn’t used to it, and even the Chicago River feels completely overwhelmed by the beautiful steel spires surrounding it.

Not everyone would find my method of tourism relaxing, or even doable. I tend to pack a lot into a day, though it is not about hurrying or keeping to a schedule. My favorite part comes when I get the chance to just wander the streets of a new neighborhood. By not driving I have a chance to experience the city at street level, poking my head in whenever something looks interesting.

Wrigley Field an hour before game time. Lake Michigan visible in the distance.

I started with a morning pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, home of Chicago Cubs baseball for nearly 100 years. This is the place to be for the fanatic who prefers their baseball love uncompromising, unabashed, and un-ironic. The outfield walls are still brick covered with ivy, and the scoreboard in center field is hand-operated and completely lacks a modern video board. The place comes close to selling out even for meaningless wind-whipped September games when the Cubs are already well out of contention, including the privately operated bleachers perched on the roofs of apartment houses across the street.

Not only are the Cubs popular, but their fans tend to be as geeky about baseball as you can possibly imagine. The program is written by the folks at Baseball Prospectus and breaks down the opposing team using obscure scouting reports and statistics. There is a dorky team song, as in many cities, but the difference at Wrigley is that the entire stadium sings along. Broad-shouldered, slightly intoxicated men throw their arms around each other’s shoulders, sway en masse, and sing lyrics like “Hey Chicago, what do you say/The Cubs are gonna win today.” It is a completely different experience from the Cleveland Indians games I was raised on.

Afterwards, I decided to head down to Millennium Park, an area that had been completely revamped since my last tourist-y visit to the city many years ago. Its most famous feature is a large reflective silver bean, called the Cloud Gate. It is certainly worth a visit, just because you’ve never seen anything quite like it. Even from a sheer optics perspective, the experience of standing directly beneath the “gate” is impressive. The park also includes the Crown Fountain, which includes two monolithic pylons onto which the faces of Chicago residents are continually projected. Children seem to feel obligated to run through the fountain in bare feet, even on days like Saturday, when the chilly wind of “the Windy City” set my teeth chattering. The park also includes an impressive, soaring concert venue designed by Frank Gehry, which any architecture geek should designate a must-see, and is just across the street from the Chicago Institute of Art, where Grant Wood’s American Gothic is housed. Most likely you remember it from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which is also a perfectly acceptable reason to visit.

I think what's happening here is the lego filmmakers are making a movie about a dinosaur stomping through Chicago. Either that or they're extremely dedicated documentarians.

Afterwards I went for a walk on the so-called Magnificent Mile. It’s basically Chicago’s answer to New York’s Fifth Avenue or Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive, with shops ranging from Gucci to the American Girl headquarters situated mostly in the bases of skyscrapers. Did you know that the iconic Hancock building has a Cheesecake Factory and a Best Buy on the bottom floor? This may not sound like geek territory, but there is plenty here worth checking out. I found a Lego store with many large lego sculptures, including a life-size Darth Vader made out of Legos. And who doesn’t like the Hershey store?

Speaking of food, It was near this area that I found Pizzeria Uno, one of the most famous pizza restaurants in the world (it has become a chain, possibly available in your local mall). It’s the original home of deep dish pizza, and oh man is it good. I actually ate at the somewhat less busy “Pizzeria Due” a block north, which many folks think is some sort of knock-off but is actually part of the same restaurant. The difference is that the waits are twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half on a Saturday night.

Afterwards I walked back across the river and past a couple glittering theater marquees (“CHELSEA HANDLER SOLD OUT”) to find the Gene Siskel Film Center. If you’re one of the many American film lovers for whom the very idea of movie criticism comes from Siskel and Ebert, this will be another kind of pilgrimage. I somehow managed to buy a ticket to an obscure French film about another obscure French film, but I actually had a great time. There aren’t many frills, just great movies that you most likely won’t find at your local multiplex and a minimalist bar where you can buy beer, soda, coffee, cocoa, and/or popcorn.

A century after the skyscraper was born in Chicago, the Chicago River is now completely lined with towering buildings.

The funny part is that I actually went to Chicago with some friends who were participating in a board gaming tournament, for a game, Diplomacy, that I actually introduced them to. The tournament was called “Weasel Moot” (you can tell something is geeky when they call a gathering a “moot”, like they’re a bunch of ents), and by all accounts was a great success. If you don’t play Diplomacy, suffice to say that it is high strategy and high tension, and lying and cheating is encouraged (they say that John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and Walter Cronkite were all closet Diplomacy geeks). That also perhaps explains why I didn’t find it the greatest activity for a vacation. The tournament is an annual event, so if you’re into the game you should check out the “Weasels” here. They’re even hosting the World Diplomacy Championships in 2012.

Chicago is one of those cities that you could live in all your life and yet still find new things to discover. Standing on the river at night, watching the lights play over the ripples, I was overcome with a kind of awe at what human beings could accomplish. The buildings are so large that they are hard to come to any sort of visual understanding of. However, cities are made up of people, and no matter what you’re geeky about, you’re sure to meet plenty of people in this great city who are geeky about that exact thing.

About Dan

Dan Joslyn grew up in Ohio but now lives in Las Vegas, NV with his lovely ginger girlfriend, Tiarra, where he works as an office monkey. He enjoys reviewing movies and television for the site, and over-analyzing such things. He may be the Chosen One… but he probably isn’t.

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