Chicago, city of poles

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Totem on left: (teeth chattering): "Oh, dear! The museum closes at 3 today for a women's board meeting. Should we tell him?"

Totem on right (smiling sardonically): "The early closing is right there on the Web site. Let the idiot read more carefully next time. And the schmuck calls himself an editor."

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OK, so all I got to see of the Field Museum this afternoon was the Stanley Field Hall, thanks to that early closing. But what I saw was impressive, including not just my two polish friends, but also Sue (John McFetridge will like this one.)

And Chicago's architecture is so rich that any excursion downtown is like a walk through a museum, so this was still a hell of a day.

This is what Rome must have been like when Raphael was sneaking into the Sistine Chapel to look at Michelangelo's still-in-progress ceiling frescoes and crib ideas for his own work in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura.

What other city has ever produced such a feast for the eyes? What combination of genius, imagination, and money made it happen? And why in Chicago?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The greatest intersection in the world: 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago

The excellent 57th Street Books.
on, er, 57th Street

The University of Chicago gave the world the atomic bomb and Milton Friedman. Its peacefully isolated campus in Hyde Park also contains what must be one of the world's most aesthetically elevating intersections, that of 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, whose northeast corner is home to Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, and whose southwest corner houses the Museum of the Oriental Institute.

Robie House, 1908-1910, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright was one of the twentieth century's great architects, maybe the greatest, and the Oriental Institute houses one of the world's best collections of Near and Middle Eastern antiquities. And it doesn't just show the treasures, it excavated many of them.  On top of all this dizzying cultural wealth at 58th and Woodlawn, you can get a terrific pizza just two blocks away. What intersection in what city can match all this?

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper, who will now get some sleep because he has museums to visit tomorrow.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detail from the decoration at the palace
 of Sargon II of Assyria

Hand-wringing Mesopotamian priest.