Chicago Update

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Here is a picture of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry recently. It is located at 57th street (south) and Lake Michigan. I recently visited it, to see the Da Vinci exhibit (more on that later). It is also only 4 miles from the two houses where my great grandparents on my father's side raised the family, at 52nd and May Street and 55th and Racine Avenue. I never knew of those addresses, even though my parents and I lived with my grandparents at 72nd and Wentworth until I was four years old.

Although I had been advised by wiser heads not to enter that neighborhood, I did anyway. Last Sunday, I drove Big Ride through at 10:00 am, first to 5238 May and then, two blocks away, to 5427 Racine. This is the Sherman Park area, south of the old stockyards.

I will tell those stories shortly, too, but let's jump ahead one week to Sunday, 8/27/2006 - yesterday.

For the first time since I arrived back in Chicago in June, I bought a Sunday Tribune newspaper. I really liked the Tribune, even when I delivered it in Chicago's cold winters of 1956 through 1959. The headline story concerned the terrible rape and attempted murder of a young white woman not long ago at 51st and Wentworth, a neighborhood the article called "the worst crime area in Chicago."

I crossed Wentworth at 55th on my way to the family houses.

Whoa!