O My Northside Home: A walk down Wilton and up Fremont.

For the first time in 16 years, I'm moving on August 1st; and although I'm going to try to stay in the same neighborhood, I might not be able to afford to, so this spring and summer I'm trying to get a bunch of photo essays done of various walks through the Uptown/Buena Park/Lakeview/Wrigleyville areas I live sort of in the center of. Here, an errand I had to do over at Waveland and Halsted, so took the little side streets of Wilton and Fremont there and back, starting with the historic St. Mary's Of The Lake Catholic Church you're seeing in the first photo below, which I live just a couple of doors down from. I don't really have much to say about the rest of the images, so I'll just let them run without comment, which is sort of the whole point -- I want these to be reminders that why I liked living here for so long is precisely because there's nothing particular special about it, just a pleasant and clean urban neighborhood full of architecture from the Victorian Age to the 21st century, dotted here and there with historic buildings and hipster bars and interesting graffiti and humongous brick-like public schools. I spent the majority of my college years desperately fantasizing about living in this kind of neighborhood, and I have to say that two decades later it still remaining the deliriously fulfilling experience I always hoped it would be, so I like being able to do these photo essays about nothing particularly important at all, that nonetheless remind me of why I love living in Chicago so much.

Oh, and a tech note: I was going to color-balance these, like I do with most of the photos I post online, but then I thought there was something nice about these reflecting the gray, cool, rainy day it was when I took these. So many of my memories of the Uptown and Lakeview neighborhoods are associated with such gray rainy days, it's nice to occasionally have faithful photographic records of them.

O My Northside Home: A rainy walk to Wrigley Field and back.

I'm moving! On August 1st! For the first time in 16 years! My tiny, shitty studio apartment has served me fine for a long time; but now that I need a place where I can hold CCLaP parties and fundraisers on a regular basis, and especially now that I'm going to start dating again later this year, the time has finally come to get a place both bigger and nicer. I'm hoping to stay in the same neighborhood, but I might not get to; so I thought while I had a chance, I'd get some photo essays done of just everyday walks in my neighborhood, nothing spectacular but just normal looks at the reasons I have so enjoyed walking the streets of my area for all these years now, which if you think of it is almost as long as I lived in Missouri with my parents while growing up.

I live literally one block north of the border between the Uptown and Lakeview neighborhoods, so really call both my "home," although both of these areas also have more specific names too; so my side of the border is also known as "Buena Park," which was the original name of this smaller area when it was first settled in the late 1800s, and which it was known as until the city decided to start referring to the entire general area as "Uptown" sometime in the mid-20th century. And then the area south of me is not only officially known as "Lakeview" but also informally as "Wrigleyville," because of Wrigley Field being located within its boundaries; this is not a historical precedent, I think, but just an invention of realtors and residents.

I had a walking errand to do in the neighborhood this cool, rainy April day; and it started with a walk through Kelly Park, which for a long time was this weird little half-block-wide strip of abandoned land, falling strangely between (on one side) a residential neighborhood and (on the other) first a Jewish cemetery and then a Catholic convent of all things. In 1979 the city finally turned it into a nice little green space, and in 1995 added the playground. This is one of the many reasons I like Chicago so much, is that they've come up with all kinds of cool little workarounds over the decades for various little odd places in hyperlocal neighborhoods, to turn what would've otherwise been a dirty, dangerous, extra-wide alley into a green-filled benefit for the whole community.

At the end of the park, then, another one-block walk through a parking lot, and suddenly you're at the famed Wrigley Field, today suffering through a rain delay that got called right as I was walking through the area. I complain a lot about the drunken frat boys that Wrigley Field attracts literally three times a week all through the warm weather every year; but the fact is that this is one of my most treasured experiences of living in Chicago, is living in such a unique environment (Wrigley Field is one of the last sports arenas in the entire United States to be located literally within the middle of a residential neighborhood), and to have a kind of life where such a big and historic place is just an everyday part of it, something I have walked by literally thousands of times now in every possible weather and situation you can imagine, including nationally televised playoff games, a Bruce Springsteen concert and more.

This was the destination for my errand, so afterwards I decided to walk Sheffield Avenue back home, which as you can see has the same kind of vaguely London-looking Edwardian middle-class feel as most of the other streets in my neighborhood. Although this area was first settled in the late 1800s, most of its development took place from roughly 1910 to 1940, including plenty of examples of the "gray ladies" that Chicago is so known for city-wide. (For those who don't know, these were a hugely popular type of residential building here in the early 20th century, made from the limestone of a local quarry, and there are still hundreds upon hundreds of them found all over the city.) This is part of the quiet enjoyment I talk about when I talk about the enjoyment of walking around my neighborhood; nothing special, just interesting things to look at all the time, and in many cases like literally walking through a living history book.

Like take this building, for example, which by its material and style obviously must be from the late Victorian Age, still up and running as a residential building with no fuss or muss. It's hard sometimes to even find places in the United States where you can just casually go about your day and regularly come across buildings that are this old, and it's one of the things I like most about living here.

But there are plenty of modern additions to the neighborhood, too; here's one of my favorites, a preschool at Grace and Sheffield (on the left here in this panoramic photo) done in that great Postmodernist heavy brick-and-concrete style known as "Brutalism," so prevalent in the 1970s and '80s. I've developed a fascination all over again recently for the "Logan's Run" style of Brutalist architecture, because of the death earlier this year of Oscar Niemeyer, the man who singlehandedly created most of the city known as Brasilia; in fact, I think that's going to be the theme of the bicycle photo-map I make this summer, is trying to hunt down and show off a bunch of Brutalist structures all over the city. (For those who don't know, I pick a different theme about Chicago every summer and take a bunch of photos of that theme while I'm out bicycling, which I then put together as a map at Google; it's basically yet another excuse to be bicycling as much as I can.)

And of course there are still lots of typical Mid-Century-Modernist buildings that are still holding on unrefurbished, just old enough to be eyesores that are often getting knocked down these days, but not old enough yet to be historically quaint. Check out this building a block north of Grace, for example, which I would guess to be from the 1930s through '50s sometime, in that white tile that used to be so popular but has rapidly fallen out of style, currently holding a dive bar that does brisk business on game days (this is literally three blocks from Wrigley Field you're looking at), and with a sidewalk that is always covered with loud, staggering cigarette smokers.

And that gets us to the hub of the neighborhood, the Sheridan red-line el station, surrounded for a block on all sides by crass commercial places like liquor stores, convenience stores, etc., plus the hipster Holiday Club across the street, basically the only bar in my neighborhood known city-wide, and that people deliberately travel to from other neighborhoods on a regular basis. Like every other train-station area in a residential neighborhood, this little two-by-two-block area is the nastiest little spot in the neighborhood, a necessary evil for having the train station needed to make the neighborhood such a convenient one in the first place.

And then a block past that, and the view turns again to what it's been before, pleasantly Edwardian and middle-class, filled with buildings that rarely get above three or four stories in height. Then one more block after this and a side alley, and I'm home!

Anyway, so that was it for my rainy-day walk today; and like I said, I'm hoping to get more of these up as the year continues, just little reminders of why I enjoyed living in this area of the city so much for all these years now, just in case I have to leave it later this year. As always, check by here again soon for the latest, especially now that the weather is turning warmer again and I have an excuse to be updating this "I Am A Camera" blog much more often.

Second Life Redux: Terraforming in a nutshell

(In August 2012 I re-joined the "gameless" virtual world Second Life, for the first time since being active there in 2006 and writing an arts-and-entertainment web magazine about that unique universe; I'm there this time instead mostly to get a new prefab housing and furniture company up and going, so I can make actual money, although undoubtedly I'll still be exploring a lot of places and attending a lot of events. I'm documenting the entire thing here at this blog, and especially exploring all the sociological issues that come with this city-sized uncanny valley and the millions of daily-visiting citizens there. Youcan click here for the very first entry in this series if you want, describing my past, my new company, and my goals in a lot more detail.)

So, greetings again from the virtual world Second Life, where I am now the proud owner of 2,048 square meters of beachfront property in the beautiful and mysterious Linden Sound; as regulars know, this is to serve as my first workshop and retail space for FABB, the prefab housing company I'm specifically in Second Life again for to open. This is going to involve me building things from the ground up for the first time; so I thought for the next several weeks, I would document and explain the process to serve as a tutorial of sort, both for other new players and just non-SL people who find this stuff interesting.

But first, let's do a little terraforming! Because like I've mentioned before, the whole secret to Second Life (and why it can attract millions of players despite having no traditional game play) is each and every element -- every step, every detail -- can be either adjusted dramatically by a person or created whole-cloth from scratch, everything from constructing a castle to changing your eye color. And that goes for the land you own as well; except for certainly ridiculously high and low extremes, you can pretty much terraform it into whatever shape you'd like it to be, and so it's good to get that done before you bother starting to build something on it. So here, for example, you're seeing the northwest corner of my property, which the previous owner left awkwardly built up right next to two of my neighbors' terraformed water; so to be neighborly, plus give myself more water area of my own, I thought the first thing would be to sink all the land under the sea level and create a little communal pool of sorts.

And here it is, now sunk, but not very realistic to true life, therefore not much of what's considered a good terraform. Or at least if you're trying to live an "immersive" life in SL, which I'm trying to do. And that's simply what comes with using the big bulldozer-type tools that are available to you here as a player, when doing giant radical shifts over a large parcel of land.

And so that's when you switch over to some more fine-tuned controls, like you're seeing in this literal screenshot of my laptop screen; for those who don't know, SL comes with its own screenshot capability that acts as if your avatar literally had a camera in-world, so that none of the menus or voice balloons show up in them, which is usually what you see here when I'm illustrating these essays. As you're seeing above, that amorphous set of arrows trails around the landscape in this wireframe 3D way when you move your mouse around; and depending on what setting you have it on (lift, lower, smooth, etc), it'll do subtle work on the terrain every time you click and hold your mouse over a certain bit.

And so once I was done with the heavy lifting, that's exactly what I did, was take my smoother and make a nice pristine beachfront line for myself again, only this time with a lot more water space beyond.

And so when all is said and done, here's how my land is now looking, compared to how it appeared when I first took over the deed. Which, granted, is not much of a change, which was one of the reasons I bought this plot to begin with, that it was nearly ready as-is.

But then here's the big change that most people don't see; all that flattened underwater land you're seeing above is mine as well. And that's because you can build and move underwater in Second Life just as easily as you can above the water, which I find really charming and fascinating, and one of the things I really want to do with FABB is build a series of cool Mid-Century-Modern sci-fi underwater homes (which now that I think about it, will work pretty well as sky homes as well, which is a hugely popular thing in Second Life), so I needed to give myself lots of space in order work on such homes. But a WHOLE lot more coming about that over the coming months.

So that's it for now from here in Quilassito; and coming next, my first building lesson, as I start the process of building my very first prefab home from the ground up. Talk with you again then!