My magnificent town, part one

I just finished reading The Devil in the White City, a book presenting the true stories of the buildup of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the simultaneous workings of a serial killer just outside the expo grounds itself.  It was a really good book; maybe not perfect, but very captivating.  It wasn't written as a history lesson, but rather a narrative.  It probably took some artistic license here and there, but it told a story, not just presenting facts.  And while I found the cold emotionless acts of the killer to be very creepy, I was drawn in much more by the story of the fair, the lengths to which the architects went to achieve something incredible.  Most of the buildings in the White City stood for less than a few years, yet they were gorgeous works of art.  And the book described them so vividly that you could just imagine their grandeur.  As a probably vastly inadequate sample, here is a view from the Grand Basin, courtesy of the University of Chicago's very informative website.

Oh, to have been there and seen it all.  The buildings alone cost more than $8 million, and the total fair was estimated to cost over $27 million... in 1893 dollars!  But they did it so they could create something magnificent.  It's not a very prevalent mindset these days; maybe wise, maybe not; but it seems in the modern era of pinching pennies, few even dare to dream of such fantasy.  I started to think about it, and realized that I've likely never witnessed anything to compare with the spectacle of the White City.

But then I began to think about how simple grandeur can really be.  A snowflake, for example, or a flower blossom can truly be fantastic but on a different scale, with a different mindset.  So I probed my mind for some of the magnificence I have seen.  I thought I'd look at each place I've called home, and think about the beauty of each.

I haven't lived a lot of places, but the first was the Chicago suburban village of Carol Stream.  We must have moved before I was 6 or 7 years old, so my memories from this era are foggy, mostly reinforced by places we've been back to since.  Here are some of the best parts of magnificent Carol Stream.

1) I loved our house here and have many pleasant memories of it, but I don't know if I can truly call it magnificent.  This picture isn't of our home, but it was very similar.  A small townhouse, big enough for our family of four, with a cozy kitchenette I remember eating lunch at, a sandbox in the backyard, and pretty landscaping along the side of the lot.  My favorite memory is just the carefree feeling of summer at this house: warmth in the air, birds singing, the smell of cookout smoke throughout the neighborhood, and me pedaling my Big Wheel along the narrow walk that ran alongside our house.  It was great, but admittedly, probably not magnificent, at least not in the usual sense.

2) You think that anything you can imagine is available on the interwebs, until you search for something from your past that has since been replaced.  Such is the case for Stratford Square Mall, pre-renovation.  Stratford Square was the mall closest to home, so we were there fairly occasionally.  In many respects it was a typical mall: the usual stores, a food court, a movie theater.  But there were some aspects to its design that I with were still around.  Specifically the water features.  Many malls have water fountains or waterfalls of some sort, but the Stratford Square one was... special.  It fit into a corner near the escalators, was golden-hued, and comprised of individual triangular spikes routing the water down in some sort of aqueous plinko game.  It surely wasn't designed with the architectural forethought of the World's Fair, but there was something mesmerizing about the water movement down that one ramp that I loved to watch.  Sadly, it has since been removed as the mall was redesigned into some prairie-school design for which it wasn't needed.

3) This is probably the most truly magnificent item in Carol Stream, which gives you some idea how fancy a town it truly is.  ;)  Actually, all kidding aside, this location forms some of my most enduring childhood memories, and is a place I always try to go back to when I'm home.  Portillo's Hot Dogs in Bloomingdale.  Here it is from the outside.

Wait, what?  This is supposed to compete with the White City?  No.  No, it's not.  But in a small sense, the inside is.  For when you step through the doors to this restaurant, you are transported to a different world, not unlike the new world of the Columbian Exposition.  You walk in and suddenly find yourself on a cobblestone street, staring up at a blinking stoplight and a revolving barber pole.  As you look around, you see the street ahead of you leading toward the counter, past the glass windows behind which workers feverishly assemble hot dogs and Italian beefs, through the dim little beer-selling cubbyhole, and past the pasta line back to the stoplight.  Up from the curbs lining the streets are seats reminiscent of park benches, and faux storefronts line the walls.  It may sound kitschy, but to a 5 year old kid who loves burgers, it's a fantastic new world.  Not that pictures do it justice, but here's a view looking back toward the traffic light and the entrance, along the "road."

As I said, I only lived in Carol Stream for a handful of years, so I didn't have time to gather that many memories.  There was the pond my Dad and I fished at a couple times, the nearby grocery store I used to love going to (Busy Bee or something like that), my brother's room with the antique car wallpaper on the walls.  And though I'd never even try to pick favorites amongst my memories of this time, I know the place that I thought was the most magnificent was that Portillo's.  Sure, I may have never seen the White City, but no one who saw the White City lived to see my favorite Portillo's.  And it may not have drawn millions of visitors, but while my family ate dinner there, it let us all in to a unique and different world.  Those times really were incredible.

After we left Carol Stream, my family moved to Elgin, where I lived for many years thereafter.  Next time, I'll look at some of the places in Elgin that rose above the standard suburban fare, to really be something spectacular.