Chicago, New York

In fall 1999, Eddie and Craig spent a week in Chicago and a week in New York, bridging the distance with an overnight train trip on the Lake Shore Limited. Here are some excepts from their photo album.

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Streeterville
The area of town where Craig and Eddie's hotel, The Holiday Inn Chicago City Centre, was located -- and where today stand numerous high-rise office buildings and condos, not to mention the sturdy gray buildings of Northwestern University -- was once nothing more than landfill. A notorious scalawag named Mr. Streeter set up house atop the city's refuse and, because the landfill didn't appear on any survey maps of the day, proclaimed the area his own city.
Two blocks east of the hotel is the southern stretch of the Magnificent Mile (1.7 miles of high-end shops), and a couple of blocks west is Lake Michigan and Navy Pier. Although the nearest subway stop was a 10-minute walk away, the hotel was otherwise perfectly located. Craig and Eddie's room was plain and functional in the Holiday Inn manner but had a powerful air conditioner and views of both the lake and the city.	The Wrigley Building on the Chicago River is the white building rising directly behind the boat.

The City
Craig and Eddie began each day with coffee and pastry beside the Wrigley Building (1924), which is made of gleaming white terra-cotta. Teams of maintenance workers toil year-round to keep it looking its best in the face of pollution and harsh weather. It's really more like two buildings joined by a bridge. At night a blazing row of lights on the opposite bank of the Chicago River illuminates the building. Wrigley made his initial fortune selling soap; he included a stick of gum with each bar as an incentive. By the time ground was broken for this building in 1920, his name was already synonymous with chewing gum.
Chicago abounds with great architecture. In this respect it's even more dazzling than Manhattan, which has some stunning buildings but mainly teems with mediocrity. Craig and Eddie boarded a boat in the newly emerging neighborhood of River East near their hotel and enjoyed a 90-minute architectural cruise on the Chicago River.	Craig takes night photos using his Pentax SLR's bulb ("B") mode, which lets him set the number of seconds the shutter stays open. Two secs work for most urban night shots. Absolute stillness is a must, so Craig props up the camera on something and uses the infra- red remote to trigger the shutter. He'll never buy a camera that doesn't have these features.
The city has made great strides cleaning and reviving its river, once one of the nation's most polluted urban waterways. Now some cafes line the banks, and numerous boats cruise up and down. It's like a little slice of Paris in the Midwest, and indeed the Michigan Avenue Bridge (1920) and the riverside double-decker expanse of Wacker Drive were modeled after the bridges and roadways on the Seine.
Craig and Eddie sipped Starbucks and listened to the jovial tour guide as the boat floated by the art deco NBC Tower (1989), the twin corncob apartment towers of Marina City (1967), the Chicago Tribune Tower (1922), and on and on. The late-afternoon light bathed everything in a warm glow and made the glass facades of the new buildings gleam while showing off the intricate stonework and detailing on the old ones.

Cows!

Zurich, Chicago's sister city, put on an unusual public display of decorated cows sometime last year, and a Chicago businessman brought the idea home along with 300 plain fiberglass cows. Each cow was sponsored by a local merchant for $2,000, and local artists were commissioned to decorate them. Many could be found along Michigan Avenue, but they were all over town. No two were alike. One was painted like the globe; another had the Alps on her back; another was covered in pieces of mirror; another was dressed up in a pink gown, high-heels, and a diamond necklace. Cows on Parade lasted from June 15 to October 31, 1999, after which they were auctioned for charity.

"Juicy Jammer" by Peter Van Vliet (Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co., patron).

Pizza
Craig and Eddie's first Chicago meal was -- fittingly -- a deep-dish pizza with the works at Gino's East (160 E. Superior St., 312/943-1124), a Windy City institution that claims to have invented the deep-dish. So does another local place, Pizzeria Uno (29 E. Ohio, 312/321-1000), where Craig and Eddie ate their last Chicago meal. Both restaurants make excellent pizzas with plenty of delicious sauce, toppings, and cheese and that stupendous Chicago-style crust.	Chicago Cameras Click the links below to go to live views of the Windy City. The Loop Lakefront Wrigleyville Lakeshore Dr
Which was better? Pressed to choose, Eddie would pick Gino's, for it had the most abundant sauce, which is key to his enjoyment of a pizza. Gino's has been voted Number One seven years in a row by Chicago Tribune readers. In the egalitarian spirit for which Chicago is known, Craig would give the nod to Uno's, not necessarily because it tasted better but because it was just as excellent and not served in Gino's rather spooky old three-story house.
Throughout the meal it was hard to get used to Gino's black walls covered from floor to ceiling with white graffiti. It was benign, silly graffiti scrawled by thousands of good-natured diners over the years ("Tom & Nancy '98," "Go Bears"), but nonetheless Craig was put off by it. It extended from the floor to the ceiling and even spilled onto the vinyl booths. Every few years they paint the walls black and it starts all over again.

The Chicago Chop House

Ah, that Midwestern beef! It really does taste different than beef on the West Coast. The flavor imparted by the aging process is more pronounced, for one thing, and some of the cuts tend to be more marbled (fatty). The Chicago Chop House (60 W. Ontario St., 312/787-7100) specializes in a grilled prime rib. They take the prime rib cut and grill it like any ol' piece of meat, which completely changes its taste and texture. Craig, who prefers roasts to steaks and who was expecting all the juiciness, all the tenderness that the term "prime rib" signifies, would order the famed pork chops next time instead, but Eddie was delighted. The restaurant seems like a three-story house. It's clubby and has excellent service.

"Diamonds Are a Cow's Best Friend" by Victor Skrebneski (Salvadore Ferragamo, patron).

Lawry's

Now that's prime rib! Craig and Eddie love going to the original Lawry's in Los Angeles, which opened in the '30s and serves the definitive prime rib tableside from sleek stainless steel carts. The decor is like a sumptuous English manor complete with a blazing fireplace. In Las Vegas the Lawry's is splendid art deco, with light woods, shiny metal, and glass. It's Craig and Eddie's favorite in the chain, like eating in the middle of a '30s MGM movie. The Chicago restaurant has a somewhat dated '60s decor that no one's going to rush home to emulate, but the food is every bit as fantastic and the service is generous and efficient. Craig and Eddie can't praise Lawry's highly enough. It's simply a guaranteed-perfect dining experience in every way and oh, oh, that prime rib!

"Hey-Diddle-Diddle" by William McBride (McBride & Kelley Architects, patron).

Beach

When people talked about how Midwesterners treated the shores of the Great Lakes like dwellers on the coasts treated their ocean beaches, Craig assumed it was a quaint, pathetic exaggeration. He pictured a sad, narrow strip of pebbles beside still green water and chubby, ghost-white people wading in it and thinking wistfully of Malibu. Lo and behold, Chicago's north end features a bona fide beach. It was beautiful. Swimming was prohibited in the absence of lifeguards, but Craig and Eddie did venture out into the small waves to dip their hands for the first time into Lake Michigan. Fit, tanned young people played volleyball nearby, and families picnicked.

It was strange to be beside so much seemingly infinite water and not smell brine, hear seagulls, see seals. Throughout the trip, Eddie and Craig continually caught themselves referring to Lake Michigan as "the ocean." They've never seen so much fresh water in one place. In Los Angeles such a site is limited to really big swimming pools. Craig and Eddie were dazzled by the abundance. There were no miserly L.A. showers taken in that Chicago hotel, let them tell you!

Natural History

In the world-famous Field Museum of Natural History, Craig and Eddie were fascinated by the vast taxidermy collection, which affords you the closest view you can have of these animals without (a) visiting a zoo or (b) getting eaten. No documentary on PBS can adequately convey the size of polar bears, Northwestern wolves, or rhinos.

On display were the two fearsome Lions of Tsavo, whom Africans called The Ghost and The Darkness. They are two maneless male lions who killed nearly 130 railroad workers in the late 1800s near Tsavo, Kenya. The killings were cunningly choreographed and unprovoked, giving rise to the legend that the lions were possessed by evil spirits. The story was turned into a motion picture in 1996 starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.

Aquarium

Craig and Eddie spent a morning at the Shedd Aquarium. There were dozens of fascinating creatures on exhibit, but unfortunately the Oceanarium was closed, where Craig and Eddie could have seen Beluga whales and penguins. Still, it was possible to watch the rambunctious dolphins play. One fellow kept swimming up onto a rock and wiggling around. Maybe he was scratching his belly or just showing off.

The Buckingham Fountain, modeled after one at the palace of Versailles, was the world's largest when it was built in the late '20s.

Science & Industry

The Museum of Science and Industry is the only remaining building from the great Chicago World's Fair of 1893. It came about when the chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co. visited the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which Craig has also visited. He wanted to create a similar center for "industrial enlightenment" in America, and he succeeded when the museum opened in 1933.

Craig and Eddie enjoyed the old-fashioned exhibits the most. They took a guided tour of the Coal Mine, complete with a ride through a dark tunnel in a mining cart. Illinois encompasses some of the most coal-rich land in the nation. Craig and Eddie were surprised to learn that the demand for coal has increased exponentially over the decades, not decreased as they supposed.

They "rode" the beautiful, shimmering Pioneer Zephyr, which rocks from side to side as you take the tour through it. The Zephyr set a record in 1934 when it traveled from Denver to Chicago in just 13 hours.

America captured a German U-boat (from unterboat, "under-boat") off the coast of Alaska during World War II. The U-505 Submarine is moored at the museum. On the tour, Craig and Eddie learned that the average temperature endured by the vessel's crew was 115 Fahrenheit! Only the captain and cook were permitted to shower daily in fresh water. The officers could bathe weekly in cold saltwater. At the bottom of the hierarchy was the crew, who had to make due with a dip in the ocean every few weeks. Fans mounted along the narrow corridor did their best to keep the stench from flowing up to the officers' quarters. Underway, they practiced what's known as hot bunking, where one mariner climbs into the bunk to sleep the instant another climbs out. You were glad to be exhausted from the hard work onboard. How else could you fall asleep in such a damp, smelly bed with the roar of the diesel engines in your ears?

Our Hotels
Chicago	Manhattan
Chicago City Centre Go site (Holiday Inn) 300 E. Ohio, (312) 787-6100 Functional, well-located Holiday Inn in Streeterville. Just two blocks from Mich. Ave. and a quick walk to Navy Pier, River East, or the red line stop. Our room had both lake and city views.	The Woodward Go site 210 W. 55th St. (at Broadway), (407) 740-6442 Great Midtown location in a beaux arts building; 5-minute walk to Times Square in one direction and Central Park in the other. The guest rooms are plain but large.

The Lake Shore Limited

Craig and Eddie boarded Amtrak's modern, upscale Lake Shore Limited at Chicago's Union Station. Unlike the double-decker superliner they'd ridden from L.A. to Seattle in 1997 (click here to read about that trip on the Coast Starlight), the LSL was single-story with high ceilings. It had the same smooth, quite ride.

The line originates in Chicago and travels east along the southern shores of the Great Lakes. It takes about 20 hours, leaving at 7 p.m. and arriving at New York's Pennsylvania Station around 3 p.m. the next day.

As they did in 1997, Craig and Eddie reserved a Deluxe Bedroom with a vanity, a toilet, and a shower. It's like a cabin on a cruise ship. The cabin is tiny, but on a train it qualifies as a luxury suite. There are climate controls, music controls, and a video monitor that plays a few Hollywood releases in the night, when there's nothing much to look at out the windows. Best of all, it's your private space on a bustling train.

By day you have a sofa running the length of the cabin and a chair opposite. You can slide out a table between these sitting areas to support cocktails, a card game, or whatever. The outside wall of the cabin is pretty much all window. How wonderful it was to sit back and relax and watch the New England autumn scenery speed by! At night the cabin attendant comes in and extends the sofa into a twin-size bed and folds down a bunk from the wall. Both beds have their own ducts and controls for air conditioning.

The other sleeping option isn't nearly as nice, but it beats riding in the airline-style seats of Coach. For much less money than the cabins, you can reserve a sleeping compartment. They line either side of a car, with a passageway running down the middle. By day there are two seats facing one another. The compartment is only as wide as a seat, so it's not for the claustrophobic, although the window helps. A toilet is concealed under a padded tabletop (this is something the Coast Starlight, a slightly older train, didn't have). You have the same big window as in the cabins. At night the seats collapse and join into a bed and a bunk drops from the ceiling. You can pull the curtain so people in the passageway can't see you through the glass wall.

Three free meals are served to first-class passengers, which are any passengers with sleeping accommodations. Eddie and Craig both ordered the sirloin medallions with new potatoes and a green salad. They sat with a middle-aged man and his mother who were on their way to a wedding in Vermont. The next day they chatted with a nice woman from Boston over cheeseburgers at lunch.

New York City

Before they knew it, the train was leaving behind the verdant banks of the Hudson River and slipping into the creepy old tunnels of New York City. Penn Station was Bedlem. It was afternoon rush hour. The time between disembarking the train and climbing into a cab is a blur. Soon Craig and Eddie were checking into the Woodward Hotel at 55th and Broadway.

A few months earlier in San Francisco, they had the delight of seeing Dame Edna Everage in the American debut of the show that had knocked 'em dead in London and Sydney, "The Royal Tour." The show made it to Broadway, and Craig and Eddie saw it again on their first night in New York. It was another tremendous night at the theater, with Dame Edna keeping her audience in stitches from start to finish. A few weeks later, the show set a theater sales record for a single day, with over $90,000 on, of all days, a Tuesday.

Two nights later they returned to Broadway with friends from Connecticut to see the musical "Chicago" starring a sparkling, age-defying Sandy Duncan. If only Sandy's performance had been preserved alongside the stellar Bebe Neuwirth on the soundtrack! Instead, the role of Jazz Age murderess Roxie Hart is played by Ann Reinking, who sounds like Oscar the Grouch.

The Brooklyn Bridge
Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began in 1873. Ferry operators and the politicians they paid off said it would collapse. Today, of course, it's a historic monument. Craig and Eddie rode the subway to the base of the bridge on the Manhattan side and exited the station directly on the promenade.
The wooden promenade down the center of the bridge was the first of its kind -- and the last. On it, pedestrians, cyclists, and roller skaters are elevated above traffic for safe crossing and grand, unimpeded views of the city. A stroll across takes about 10 minutes and is a terrific way to reach Brooklyn Heights, a tony residential area where Craig and Eddie had coffee and watched the subdued street scene.	The Brooklyn Bridge and downtown Manhattan as seen from a greenbelt in the new neighborhood of Dumbo.
The Brooklyn Heights Promenade runs along the East River. Craig and Eddie sat on a park bench and admired the downtown Manhattan skyline. The skyscrapers seem to float on water. You can see the South Street Seaport and the Fulton Fish Market, which Craig and Eddie would later spend an afternoon exploring. Both are historic districts in the shadows of the World Trade Center. The Peking (1911), registration Hamburg, is docked at the Seaport. It's the world's second-largest sailing vessel. But for the 1967 designation as a historical landmark, the Seaport and its turn-of-the-century townhomes, shops, and cobblestone streets would have been razed for more downtown skyscrapers.
North and downhill from Brooklyn Heights, between the Brooklyn Bridge and the steel blue Manhattan Bridge, a neighborhood is emerging among the old brick buildings, warehouses, and factories. Some cafes and pubs are open on otherwise bleak, winding streets where a few patches of cobblestone can still be glimpsed on the edges of crumbling asphalt. Craig and Eddie, in search of the subway station, asked a local woman for help and learned that the area is known as Dumbo, for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Construction workers were busy all around, repairing and refurbishing. In the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, one of New York's most talked-about restaurants, the River Cafe (1 Water St.), has opened, yet another sign of emerging prosperity.

The '21' Club

What started as a speakeasy in 1929 is today arguably New York's most famous restaurant. Every American president and just about every star of Hollywood's Golden Age has eaten there. It was Joan Crawford's favorite restaurant in town. The formal service, strict dress code, and steep prices make it all the more surprising to find the main dining room festooned with toys. Dozens of antique model air planes, hot rods, and freight trains dangle on fishing line from the low black ceiling, as do baseball bats, lacrosse racquets, hockey sticks, and other distinctly masculine artifacts.

Craig and Eddie, who had made reservations nearly a month in advance for a Thursday night, were delighted to be seated at the banquette at the rear of the main dining room. It was a perfect vantage point to enjoy the meal. It's said that if you don't measure up at the door, you'll be led ever so politely to the far-away dining room nicknamed Siberia.

Eddie started with a Beefeater martini ($11), and Craig had Johnnie Walker Black and soda ($9). The meal proceeded at a glacial pace, as it is known to do. After two crisp, intricately constructed specialty salads ($14 each), Eddie enjoyed the best filet mignon of his life ($42). Its tenderness was almost indescribable in terms of beef. It was as if it had come from a different species of cow. Craig couldn't resist trying the famous '21' hamburger ($27). The beef and veal patty is seasoned with goose fat, a practice Craig and Eddie first encountered in Budapest.

White Castle

Eddie and Craig got hooked on White Castle cheeseburgers by way of their L.A. grocer's freezer. The twin-packs of frozen little burgers come in handy for a quick lunch or an early evening snack. They expected to see plenty of White Castle branches in Chicago, the birthplace of White Castle, but there were none to be found. The concierge confirmed what the white pages seemed to indicate: all the Chicago branches were in far-flung, seedy neighborhoods.

What a happy surprise it was when Craig and Eddie, on their taxi dash from Penn Station to the hotel on the day they arrived in New York, caught a glimpse of a White Castle joint in the Garment District. They returned two days later for lunch, each enjoying four gooey, oniony cheeseburgers and a cup of fries. Each burger is only about two inches square. The patty is steam-grilled on a bed of onions and then stacked on a steamed bottom bun, which lends a White Castle its unique feel and taste. Creamy French dressing is Craig and Eddie's favorite condiment for them.

At home, Craig has experimented with the frozen White Castles and landed on a decent way to heat them. He takes out a casserole bowl with a lid and places a ramekin half-filled with water in the center. He then stacks six or eight frozen cheeseburgers around the ramekin, covers the top of the bowl with two paper towels, and puts on the casserole lid. They're done after about three minutes on High in the microwave. The water in the ramekin steams the buns and keeps them from getting dry and chewy from the microwave.

Empire State Building

Eddie and Craig had gone to the very top of the Empire State Building (1931) on their last trip to New York, but this time they did so just before midnight. It was cold and windy. They couldn't go all the way up the dirigible landing this time, but the views from the main platform were spectacular enough. You can easily spot the stainless steel spire of the Chrysler Building (1930), the epitome of the art deco skyscraper. The other bright white building (just left of center) is the Gumby-headed Citicorp Center (1978). Its distinctive wedge top, cut at a 45-degree angle, was ostensibly done for the collection of solar energy. The bright red light on the left edge of the picture, midway up, is likely one of the lights of Times Square.

Craig used an extended exposure for this shot. He rested the camera on the balustrade and released the shutter by remote control.

Union Square Cafe

This bright, serene bistro at 21 East 16th Street has been voted No. 1 by New Yorkers for four years running. Not only are reservations required, but they must be made far, far in advance. Four weeks, to be exact. The dress is city casual. The service is friendly and seamless.

Eddie had a spicy Asian-influenced salad as a starter, while Craig had delicate spinach gnocchi. They'd never seen loin of lamb on a menu before, so Craig chose that as a main dish. It was terrific. Eddie had a shell steak, which out west we call a New York steak. They shared a mini peach pie for dessert.

Thanks for stopping by. You can read about Craig and Eddie's previous trip to New York City here.