OUTDOOR WEDNESDAY: LINCOLN PARK

Welcome to Outdoor Wednesday hosted by Susan at A Summer Daydreamer. Be sure to visit Susan to see all the participants in today's event and be sure to visit them to see some beautiful "outdoor" pictures!
I have foraged through some of my old pictures to bring you something today that makes me think of summer. For me, the very good summer of 1985 when I moved in to my very first apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the Northside of Chicago. The picture above is a statue of William Shakespeare that sits in a little square on the corner of Clark and Hudson. It is a beautiful place to sit on a bench and read or eat lunch and feed all the pesky little pigeons!

The day these pictures were taken my mother had come to visit me for the first time. I was just so excited for her to see where I lived! Although my mother was born and raised in Chicago, I was living on the Northside as opposed to her neighborhood on the Southside, worlds apart theoretically. So she was very excited as well!!

We had such a great day, browsing the boutiques, bookstores and having lunch at a gorgeous sidewalk cafe. I have a picture of her that I can't for the life of me find, but I remember vividly. She is sitting at our table at the cafe, dressed for the city in her summer finest, the sun glinting off her long earrings as she raises her wine glass in a toast. I WILL find that picture!
My apartment was just a studio and the building is pictured below. Thankfully, I didn't need more than a bed and a little dining table and chairs and friends bought me dishes and glasses from Crate & Barrel as an "apartment warming" gift! I didn't even have a television, but that didn't matter. Every evening after work I went for walks and browsed the parks and shops, visited the Lincoln Park Zoo (which was free) and sometimes just sat looking out my window on the second floor at the children laughing and rollerskating up and down the block and people sharing a cool drink on their front porches.



The quality of this picture is poor, but this is in front of a garden next to my building. My building itself had once been a hotel and I never gathered much more information about it. The lobby was large and carpeted in dark burgundy with faded wallpaper on the walls. A winding staircase stopped at the second floor on which was my studio.
At the top of my street was Grant Hospital, now known as Lincoln Park Hospital, and at the bottom of my street was Augustana Hospital (great location to be if I ever broke a leg!). Thus, most of the buildings' residents were medical students. I rarely ran in to any of them, they must have all been studying or sleeping!!
So that is my contribution to Outdoor Wednesday, a wonderful time in my life and a beautiful day with my mother.

xoxo

Jane