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3/50 Project: Support Local Business, Keep Your Town Afloat
by Josh Clark | November 17, 2011
I came across a pretty cool nascent web-based social movement the other day, thanks, I must admit, surprisingly, to the Captivate, the elevator TV network. It’s called the 3/50 Project and it encourages patronizing small businesses as a means of sustaining the communities they serve. I’m not typically a frequenter for business blogs that have taglines like, “Success only runs in one direction,” and that feature FAQs where the author writes of herself glowingly in third person. They remind me that I tend to fail at chatting in conference rooms. Despite its roots in just such a blog I am struck by the 3/50 project as a pretty good idea.
On Friday, Chicago’s newest tourist attraction was unveiled on the Magnificent Mile — a 26-foot-tall, aluminum and steel sculpture of Marilyn Monroe. The sculpture, created by artist Seward Johnson, captures a familiar Marilyn moment: She stands over a subway grate, and a gust of wind from the speeding train below whips up her pearly-white skirt, revealing her legs.
Only this sculpture reveals a whole lot more.
Chicago’s version of the glass-bottom boat is a glass-bottom box suspended 1,353 feet above the city.
The Ledge at the Chicago Skydeck, Willis Tower, was inspired by all the forehead prints on Skydeck windows, according to the tower’s Web site — including those prints belonging to Ferris Bueller, Cameron and Sloane, and all their copycats …
This one has been in the news for a couple of years, but it’s news to me and it’s really cool. I stumbled across this story this morning via dayriffer.com – an article on motherjones.com details the life and work of a previously unknown photographer named Vivian Maier. She was an amateur photographer and professional nanny who lived in New York and France, but her work largely centers around Chicago in the 1950s and 60s. I’m a bit of a shutterbug myself. I love black and white, portraits/street life, and medium format (square) prints, so Vivian Maier is my new favorite photographer. Her eye and framing is amazing and her use of natural light and shadow is pretty breathtaking at times. But that’s not what makes this story so interesting…
Night (After Night) at the Museum
by Deblina Chakraborty | November 17, 2010
Kate McGroarty is just wrapping up an enviable journey. Over the past month, she’s gotten to sleep on a World War II submarine and in a cutting-edge home powered completely by solar and wind energy. She’s toured the Apollo 8 command module with astronaut Jim Lovell as her guide. She’s even done a handstand in a tornado. And she’s done it all without leaving her current hometown of Chicago.
Much of my travels have been of the armchair variety, so I’m pretty excited about going to Chicago for Lollapalooza next month. I’m hoping to get a little time to see the city, but it looks like I won’t be seeing the Sears Tower. Neither will anyone else — they’re changing the name to the Willis Tower.
Who’s “they”? The company that’s leasing more than a hundred thousand square feet of the building, London’s Willis Group Holdings.
After a great deal of speculation over the past several years, Tesla Motors has officially announced that it’s opening a Midwest Regional Sales & Service Center in Chicago, Ill.
Set to open this spring, the Chicago store will be located at 1053 W. Grand Avenue, near the Kennedy Expressway in the River West neighborhood. According to the latest Tesla Motors press release, “The location gives prospective customers the opportunity to experience Tesla’s best-in-class performance under a range of driving conditions, including highways and urban streets.”
To date, Tesla Motors has only two retail locations; both of which are in California — one in Los Angeles and the other in Menlo Park. The Chicago store is the first of seven new locations in the works for 2009. The other six cities that Tesla is targeting are London, Miami, Seattle, Manhattan, Washington, D.C. and Munich, Germany.
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