Crosswalks to Nowhere

I was watching an old episode of Northern Exposure and discovered this scene of Shelly talking with her as-yet unborn daughter.

Fans of The Big Bang Theory on CBS will recognize the little girl as Kaley Cuoco, "Penny" on the show.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

31 years ago a snowstorm began in Chicago. It ended three days later, and by that time 21 inches of snow had fallen. And this was on top of the 7 to 10 inches that were already on the ground from a storm on New Year's Eve.

I was in high school at the time, and that's my red 1974 VW Super Beetle under the white blanket. While VWs weren't the best cold-weather cars (mostly due to their lack of heat), I will say that I was able to crawl through the streets while friends of mine in their rear-wheel drive cars cut donuts in the snow.

These photos were shot between January 12-14 1979 and give an idea of just how much we had to deal with.

This is one of my favorites: my sister Marybeth looking eye-level at our dog, Nicky. Nicky was "playing in the yard."

So far, Chicago's had a cold winter with a fair amount of snow, but I hope these photos will help the complainers keep perspective.

Here's another photo from my archives.

This is an abandoned Shell gas station that was somewhere near the Wisconsin Dells. I wish I had put more of the building in the photo, but as I recall it had almost entirely collapsed.

I took this photo one morning in August, 1983 with a Pentax K1000 and Kodacolor VR (probably 200 ASA) film. This was scanned from the original print.

On a related note, I sent over 2000 images (color photo negatives and slides, as well as some black and white negatives) to be scanned at ScanCafe.com. Some of these go back as far as 1976. Within the next couple of months you can expect to see those, including a cleaned-up version of this shot.

I took the photo above sometime in 1983-- probably in the Spring. This is a view looking north on Halsted around Jackson Blvd.

A couple interesting points about this shot: the Greek Islands restaurant had just moved to their new location at Halsted and Adams, and they were in the process of painting a new mural on their building and water tower. There was previously a mural for a Danny Boy / Texaco station (see here for an interesting article about Dan Terzakis, the Danny Boy mogul) on the wall, so the interim message turned out kind of funny.

That mural and water tower weren't touched again until the past couple of years, when they sandblasted the Greek Islands mural. The water tower still has the 1983 paint job.

Here's a view of (almost) the same spot in January 2010:

It's interesting to see the changes that took place in 25-plus years: the streetlamps are upgraded; there are trees on the sidewalks; the transient hotels (the "New Jackson" is on the right) are gone, as is the Currency Exchange. Roditys Restaurant, on the left side of the street, is still there and doing grand business.

Some technical notes: the original photo was shot with a Pentax K1000 on Tri-X film. I was a student at UIC at the time, and I developed and printed this photo myself. I scanned the print for this blog entry. The 2010 shot was taken with my Canon PowerShot A720IS digital camera.