Tag: Chicago

Our Desire To Believe in A Metaphor was uploaded to Flickr

eggplant0 comment

Kinzie St Bridge aka Chicago & Northwestern Railway Bridge

Located just north of the Loop, the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Bridge is an early example of an overhead counterweight bascule bridge based on the patents of Joseph Baermann Strauss. Strauss was a prominent engineer who later achieved fame as the designer of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The Chicago & Northwestern Railway Bridge was reported to be the world’s longest and heaviest bridge of its type at the time of its completion. The single-leaf bridge is made from heavily-bolted steel girders and plates whose superstructure consists of a fixed tower and an overhead counterweight comprised of concrete, reinforced with a steel skeleton. The leaf’s axis of rotation, the main trunnion, is located about halfway up the tower and power is provided by a pinion which engages a rack on the operating strut to raise and lower the leaf. Today, the bridge is no longer in service, due to the rerouting of passenger traffic and dwindling freight traffic. It is locked in a raised position creating a massive steel silhouette familiar to residents of the Near North side and commuters on Brown Line and Metra trains.

via
http://webapps.cityofchicago.org/landmarksweb/web/landmarkdetails.htm?lanId=13091&counter=52

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/Q2acgn

I took Our Desire To Believe in A Metaphor on April 25, 2014 at 01:22PM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on January 15, 2017 at 12:27PM

Declaration of Immigration was uploaded to Flickr

eggplant0 comment

18th St., Pilsen, Chicago

“We Are a Nation of Immigrants
No Inhumane Treatment
Deportation
Family Separation
Detention
No Wall
No Human Being is Illegal
National Security is used to foster Inter Ethnic Tension”

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/KAE2Wp

I took Declaration of Immigration on June 23, 2013 at 12:12PM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on August 25, 2016 at 11:02PM

Moorish Science Temple of America inc was uploaded to Flickr

eggplant0 comment

Temple Nine, 1000 N Hoyne, Ukrainian Village, Chicago.

Read more about them:
http://ift.tt/1EBxB6G

embiggen the photo by clicking here
http://flic.kr/p/LnY9pX

I took Moorish Science Temple of America inc on June 16, 2013 at 01:55PM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on August 24, 2016 at 01:42PM

((Sometimes, not all times, but more than half of the time, these automatic IFTTT posts are created twice. Too lazy to troubleshoot, so this is an apology for all the future times it will happen))

Darling Lauretta Duerrstein is dead

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Our Darling Lauretta
Our Darling Lauretta

I was randomly browsing my undeveloped photos, as I frequently do, and ran across a photo I shot at the Saint Boniface Catholic Cemetery a few months ago.1 Googling the name of “Lauretta Duerrstein” to make sure I was spelling it correctly, ran into this essay written by Julia Crowe, from 1990, that begins:

Darling Lauretta Duerrstein is dead. She died before her eighth birthday. Nearly a hundred years later I sat on her grave trying to sketch her stony likeness. She holds a headless dove on her left arm, while her right hand rests on a petrified stump. A bonnet and flowers lie strewn at her dainty stone boots. Her eyes stare beyond the shadows that shift across her long hair.

As the city’s past is torn down and paved over, I can still find remnants of its history in the cemeteries. But my pencil is too slow to trace the wind-worn inscriptions of immigrant names before they recede into the stone. I sat in the scratchy grass not knowing where to begin my drawing.

(click here to continue reading Cemetary Boy | Our Town | Chicago Reader.)

When I visited the cemetery, the grave had a fairly new toy monkey. Who put it there, I wonder? A relative? A sympathetic parent? 

Footnotes:
  1. January, 2016, to be precise [↩]

MCMXXVIII was uploaded to Flickr

eggplant0 comment

The Civic Opera House, 1928

(note for the photography purists: I removed a bit of another building in the lower right corner using Photoshop’s “content aware fill”. In other words, this photo is not photojournalism)

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/H33zQA

I took MCMXXVIII on March 31, 2012 at 01:03PM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on June 08, 2016 at 10:47AM

Jesus is π was uploaded to Flickr

eggplant0 comment

or whatever that says.

Of course, in the Old Testament, Pi=3, as Isaac Asimov points out:

"The exact function of the “molten sea” is not stated, though it seems most likely that it was a container for water used in the various rituals. The interesting point is that its upper rim seems to be circular in shape with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits. This is impossible, for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter (a ratio called “pi” by mathematicians) is given here as 30/10=3, whereas the real value of pi is an unending decimal which begins 3.14159… If the molten sea were really ten cubits in diameter it would have to be just under thirty-one and a half cubits in circumference.

The explanation is, of course, that the Biblical writers were not mathematicians or even interested in mathematics and were merely giving approximate figures. Still, to those who are obsessed with the notion that every word in the Bible is infallible (and who know a little mathematics) it is bound to come as a shock to be told that the Bible says that the value of pi is 3. “
via
Asimov’s Guide to the Bible

embiggen by clicking
http://flic.kr/p/GUMdmA

I took Jesus is π on May 28, 2016 at 09:04AM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on June 04, 2016 at 02:18PM