Back in late May, my monitor suddenly died, and I had to buy a new one. The old one has been hanging out on the floor, in the way, ever since. No more!
The city of Chicago operates a household chemical and electronic recycling dropoff facility at 1105 North Branch Street, on Goose Island. For those who don’t know Chicago too well, that’s not very close to where I live. It’s also open weird hours: 7am to 2pm on Tuesdays, 2pm to 7pm on Thursdays. I finally decided it was time to make the trip, so I loaded the monitor into one of my rack-mounted grocery bags, and off I went.
The facility is run like a drive-thru, so I biked through instead. I didn’t take a picture, but it’s seriously overstaffed. There were about ten people there just waiting to help unload electronics. The city should extend the hours and reduce the staffing to pay for it, I think. Or, they could spend the money to fix the sign on the Streets & Sanitation ward office in front of the recycling center:
Of course, I didn’t haul myself all the way to Goose Island just to drop off the monitor; there was an ulterior picture-taking motive. It’s not everyday you see such a concentration of industrial buildings so close to downtown Chicago anymore. Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of the area is that there are rail sidings embedded in the streets and sidewalks. This leads to the interesting spectacle of partially-loaded train cars standing in the middle of streets, with cars and buses passing on either side.
There’s also a cool record storage warehouse that I nabbed a few pictures of, before realizing that I was being surveilled by employees.
The dire warnings they had posted convinced me to play it safe.
My unexpected favorite shot from the trip, though, is this weird collection of vents on an otherwise dull building:
I didn’t have time to check out the island north of Division Street, but I did take time to enjoy the rickety old Division Street bridge.
The bridge has inverted Y-shaped cut into the metal, representing the confluence of the branches of the Chicago River. It also has wooden sidewalks still.
I was thrilled to see a group of kayakers go by while I was on the bridge, too, heading south towards the Halsted Street bridge.
After that, I headed back into the Loop to catch a concert at Millennium Park. I snapped a few pictures here and there along the way, which I’ve posted too, but I’m trying to keep these blog entries a little more tightly-focused.
Check out more photos on my Flickr photostream, or on chicago-focus.com. Community areas I took pictures in yesterday: New City, Near North Side, West Town, Near West Side, Loop. Not too shabby!
