Tag Archives: rail travel

To go, or not to go?

I’ll be going to General Assembly, the annual gathering of United States Unitarian Universalists, this June. Many other Unitarian Universalists have decided not to attend this year, because General Assembly will be held at the Fort Lauderdale convention center — which, as it happens, is within the security boundaries of Port Everglades, a bustling port that requires government-issued identification for anyone who enters — which means that “for better or for worse, it will be the United States government that decides who can or cannot be with us — in worship, in community, and in our plenary sessions,” according to Rosemary Bray McNatt. That’s a pretty creepy thought.

I’ll be going, in spite of the creepiness of the United States government checking my identification before I can enter a worship service. I guess I have never believed that General Assembly is an open meeting. For more than half my working life, I have worked jobs where I would have found it difficult to find the money to pay to travel long distances and stay in hotels for five days while attending General Assembly — assuming that I could have even gotten the time off from work.

General Assembly has always erected huge economic barriers to participation by many (probably most) Unitarian Universalists. Every once in a while, that fact is mentioned in passing, but it is usually dismissed offhandedly. I find it harder to dismiss this fact. The central purpose of General Assembly is for duly appointed delegates from congregations to transact the business of the Unitarian Universalist Association in an allegedly democratic process. The economic barriers to attendance at General Assembly — barriers which keep many potential delegates from attending — mean it’s not a real democracy.

Then there’s the undeniable fact that having thousands of people travel each year to General Assembly releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the air. Other denominations, much bigger than ours, get along fine with general meetings every second year, or even every four years. With the latest projections that the Arctic ice cap will melt by 2013, how can I in good conscience get on a jetliner to attend a meeting that I feel does not need to be held every year? How can I in good conscience contribute to the desertification of central Africa and the flooding of Bangladesh, just so I can attend General Assembly every year? (I’ll be taking the train again this year instead of flying, which will cut my pollution enormously — about 990 lbs. of CO2, as opposed to about 1,930 lbs. if I flew, or 1,160 if I drove, according to carbonfund.org.)

So why am I going to General Assembly this year? For the simple reason that I volunteered to serve as a reporter for the UUA Web site. From a selfish point of view, this is a fantastic learning experience for me, a chance to hang out with geeks, videographers, photographers, writers, and editors who are all far more talented than I. Less selfishly, I feel that reneging on my commitment at this late date would be worse than tolerating the insanity of security checkpoints.

As for next year, I don’t know. The insanity of security checkpoints hasn’t stopped me this year, but the idiocy of an effective economic oligarchy and the heavy environmental cost may well keep me away from General Assembly next year.

On board train no. 174, eastern Connecticut

The regional train service offered by Amtrak from New York to Boston travels right along the coast. From New Haven to Rhode Island, the tracks are especially close to the ocean, at times passing over salt water inlets via causeways. Twenty years ago, I rode a train from Boston to New York along this route right after a hurricane, and in several places boats had been pushed right up next to the tracks — that’s how close to the water you get. I’m riding train no. 174, one of several trains bearing the dull name of “Regional Service”; twenty years ago, train no. 174 was called “The Mayflower,” which reminded you that you were going back to New England.

I had my head in a book from New York’s Penn station to New Haven. After you leave New Haven, it always seems that the leaves are not so deep a green color as they are in the middle Atlantic states. The change was enough to make me look up from my book, and gaze out the window. The green of New England is mixed with a measure of gold, and the trees and bushes look lighter and even a little translucent.

We passed through the port of New London. Two ferries to Long Island were at their dock, with a few cars on board. The Block Island ferry was just a little farther along the waterfront, and here again I could look right into the car deck as we passed by. Beyond the ferries, I could see cranes reaching into a huge red ship, unloading containers. I saw only a few fishing boats. The far side of the harbor was dominated by the huge General Dynamics building — mysterious in its blankness, forbidding.

The train pulled out of the station. We passed through salt marshes with their peculiar green-gold color, the ocean disappeared and we passed modest suburban houses, suddenly we were on a causeway with the water lapping at the rocks not far below the tracks. A beach appeared, widened, people lay in the sun and splashed in the water, the beach got hidden by a dune and then by scraggly pine trees, a boardwalk with people carrying towels and floats and coolers, they headed towards an underpass going under the tracks.

The ocean disappeared, woods and houses, then a small inlet with just one mooring and one small powerboat tied to it, woods and houses again, then a fair sized harbor with two marinas separated by jetties. At the far side of the harbor, huge houses looked down on the water, in which they were reflected.

Another salt marsh, but here the phragmites had invaded, driving out most of the native plants.

We climbed away from the water and passed through woodlands. Many of the trees closest to the tracks had turned brown; or if they weren’t entirely brown, the side facing the tracks was brown. Through more woods, a beaver pond with standing dead trees provided a brief opening, back into the woods. The woods ended at a sewage treatment plant, and the conductor announced that the next stop would be Kingston, Rhode Island. And through it all, the woman sitting in front of me lay sprawled out across two seats; her feet, clad in thick black socks, propped up on the window; she was asleep and unaware of all that we had passed.

Written 14 August on the train, posted 15 August.

Day hike: Louisa May Alcott and walking to Boston

When we were children, someone told us about the time Louisa May Alcott walked from her family’s house in Concord all the way to Boston. I no longer remember the details of the story, but it always seemed to me that walking from Concord all the way to Boston was something I would like to do. So today I did. I walked over to Porter Square to catch the 8:45 train out to Concord. When the pleasant young conductor got to me, I said I was going to Concord. “Round trip?” he asked. “No, one way,” I said.

I walked from the train station though Concord center to get to Louisa May Alcott’s house out on Lexington Road. I stopped to talk with Pam, the owner of the Barrow Bookstore. She was just opening her store. “How’s business?” I asked. “Not as good as last year,” she said, “not as many foreign travelers this year.” We laughed together at some of the more ridiculous airline security precautions we had heard about.

Lexington Road was originally called the Bay Road, because it led to Massachusetts Bay. The first English settlers followed the course of the Bay Road when they first went out to Concord in 1635; no doubt parts of that road are older still, and were once paths trod by the Massasoit Indians. Not that you need to know this history; my walk wasn’t a historical re-enactment, it was more of a literary pilgrimage.

It was another perfect summer day, maybe seventy degrees, sunny, a nice breeze. Lots of cars passed me on the roads, but I saw very few people. Many of the houses I passed were perfectly painted, their yards perfectly landscaped — Concord is a very wealthy town now — but many of the houses and yards hardly looked lived in. I wondered how many people you would have seen out and about in Louisa Alcott’s time.

The Alcott family moved frequently, and lived in several houses in Concord. Two of them are right next to each other: Orchard House, the current site of a house museum devoted to Louisa Alcott and her family, and the Wayside which is now more famous as the house where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived. I don’t remember where Louisa Alcott was living when she walked to Boston, but I figured those two houses would be my official starting point.

Soon I got to the Battleroad Unit of Minuteman National Historical Park. The Battleroad Trail winds for five miles through the woods and fields of the park, connecting the towns of Concord and Lexington. At times I was walking along an unpaved road between two old stone walls, with grass growing between the road and the stone walls with open fields beyond. This, I thought to myself, must have been a little bit like what Louisa Alcott saw on her walk to Boston. But not really, for the fields were just rough grass and weeds and not planted with crops, there were no cows or horses or sheep grazing anywhere, no kitchen gardens thriving near the few houses I passed. Nor did Louisa Alcott see any bicyclists in spandex shorts, tourists with cameras around their necks, and park rangers dressed up in tricorn hats, breeches, and waiscoats.

At the end of the Battleroad Trail, I walked on the sidewalk along Massachusetts Avenue, up over Concord Hill in Lexington, through a neighborhood where the old 1950’s ranch houses are gradually being torn down so that McMansions can sprout up.

In Lexington Center, I crossed the Battle Green and passed Buckman Tavern, a historic museum where a man dressed up in 18th C. garb played a tune on a fife. Maybe, I thought to myself, I should have planned to follow in the footsteps of the Minutemen as they chased the Redcoats to Charlestown on April 19, 1775. But I was committed to my Louisa Alcott walk. I bought a sandwich to carry with me, and stopped to talk with Marianne, whom I knew when I worked at the Lexington church.

From Lexington Center, I followed the Minuteman Bike Path all the way to Somerville. The bike path follows an abandoned railroad right of way that roughly parallels Massachusetts Avenue, which is the modern name for that same old Bay Road that goes all the way to Concord. About two miles from Lexington Center, the bike path passes next to Arlington’s Great Meadows. I followed a little path in and found a knoll with a picnic table. I sat down to eat my lunch, gazing out at an expanse of marshland covered with Cattails, and Purple Loosestrife in full bloom. Away on the far side of the marsh, I thought I saw a few red leaves just starting to show on some Red Maples.

As I approached Arlington Center, two men passed me, one riding a bicycle and one on rollerblades. “Downsizing you car saves a lot of money,” said one. “Yeah,” said the other. “…Gas, insurance,” said the first. “Yeah,” said the other. Two women followed them, one woman on a bicycle and one on rollerblades, and they too were deep in conversation.

I stopped to rest in Arlington center. I wasn’t in a hurry, I wasn’t trying to set any speed records, and I had a cramp behind one knee. I sipped some iced coffee and read a newspaper.

On the other side of Arlington center, I came around a corner and there was Spy Pond. The pond was so beautiful — trees and house lining its shores, a small sailboat lazily moving along near the far shore, glints of sunlight on its surface — that I caught my breath. I left the bike path to walk along the pond’s shore. Children and dogs splashed in the water, a large extended family gathered around a picnic table, a woman typed on her laptop, a man sat reading. Regretfully, I rejoined the bike path.

After a while, when you’re walking for a long time, you tend to reach a state of mind where you don’t think about much. When I got to the Alewife subway station in Cambridge, where the bike path officially ends, I had to think because it wasn’t obvious how to get to the extension of the bike path that gets you to Davis Square. That’s all the thinking I did from Spy Pond to Davis Square.

I walked a couple of blocks over from Davis Square to Mass. Ave. and then followed Mass. Ave. to Harvard Square, and then I walked over a couple of blocks to the path that leads along the Charles River. I still wasn’t thinking about much, except that one knee hurt. I crossed over to the path along the Boston side of the Charles. Lots of people out sailing on the Charles. I watched one person sailing a Laser, a small fast sailboat, pushing the boat to its limit, coming about at the end of each tack with losing headway, heeling over until the lee gunwale was covered in foam.

Then I headed up Beacon Hill to Louisburg Square, and stopped for a moment in front of number 10, the house that Alcott bought with the money she got from her writing, and the house where she died when she was just 55 years old. Maybe I didn’t follow the exact route that she did when she walked from Concord to Boston, but that felt like a good ending to a good walk.

About 25 miles in nine hours of leisurely walking.

On the train, 6/26-27

From notebook and memory:

Still dark when I get on the train at 4:30 a.m. As we roll across the Mississippi River, the sky has lightened, and the Gateway Arch catches glints from the east.

North of Springfield. Young man behind me answers his cell phone. Drowsily, I hear the end of the conversation, which to my New England ears sounds like this: “Yahp. Bea raw nair. Bah.” He’s saying: “Yeah. Be right there. ‘Bye.”

Downtown Chicago, 65 degrees, cool and cloudy, the locals wear windbreakers or light jackets. In the Art Institute, two young men look at a painting: “I like that. I don’t know why I like that, but I like that.” They walk away from me, still talking about the painting. They burst into laughter for some reason.

The train is late coming out of the yard. While we wait, Robert and I joke about waiting. He’s on the same sleeper as I, except when we get to the train our sleeper is gone (toilets don’t work), they give us a coach instead. We talk and figure out how to make the best of it. The sleeping car attendant gives us blankets: “Brand new,” he says; they’re still in plastic wrappers. “Keep them, you deserve something for this.”

Robert’s a rail fan and a model railroader. In the dining car, we talk about trains and model railroads.

The sun awakens me somewhere in Pennsylvania. Six hours of sleep.

At lunch, Robert and I eat together for the third time. The two other people at our table talk about being in St. Louis, and I figure out we’re coming from the same event, but I’m tired of talking about religion and move the conversation in other directions. Later: “Look at that,” I say, pointing to a beautifully restored locomotive. Robert looks and says, “An F-7. Nice job on the New York Central colors.” The couple is only politely interested.

I doze some more.

At Rochester, the train is stopped by federal agents from the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service. We sit and wait. Robert and I and some others get out to stretch our legs. At the end of the platform, everyone from the last car is off the train, with their bags. They start herding people back on the train. As we pull out, I see a police car driving down the platform. Later I overhear: “They arrested two guys.”

The whole way through the Berkshires, I sit in the cafe car and talk with Bob from Chicago. We look at the scenery. We talk about snowmobiles, we talk a lot about how much we like Chicago, I point out a beaver lodge next to the track, we talk about Geneva, Illinois, where I lived last year, he mentions his wife who died a decade ago and his Navy buddy who has cancer, we talk about our favorite fishing expeditions. After an hour: “Nice talking.” “See you.”

It gets dark after Worcester. I doze. At last we make it to Boston.

From Ohio to St. Louis

The alarm went off at six. Indiana is outside the train windows. Sun just touching the fields outside the window, a play of gold light on green shoots. We’re in flat country now.

I got to the dining car right when it opened at 6:30. Two Amish couples in plain dress came in just after I did. I was seated with a long-haul trucker, a woman who didn’t say much at all, and a retired man. The retired man asked the trucker to pass the sugar, then started to put sugar on his Frosted Flakes.

“You sure you want to do that?” said the trucker. “Those already got plenty of sugar on em.”

“Oh, yes.” The retired man smiled. “I’d put more on if I was at home. It’s just habit by now.”

When the trucker got off at Elkhart, the retired man told me about his hobby: visiting every major league ball park in North America. “I was just in Boston, but I couldn’t get seats at Fenway Park.”

“No,” I told him, “they sell out just about every game. You want decent seats, you have to buy them in March.”

He’s visited twenty parks so far. I asked him which he thought were the best.

“San Francisco and Toronto.” What about Baltimore, which everyone raves about? “Oh, that’s a good one too.” He was able to describe the park in satisfying detail: the old B&O warehouse that was integrated into the park; the plaques set into the ground showing where home run balls hit.

“The worst was Tampa Bay. It’s a domed stadium. The dome doesn’t open, though. And it’s so low that sometimes a pop fly will go ‘thunk’ off the ceiling. When you hear the crack of the bat, you don’t want to hear ‘thunk.’ ‘Crack, thunk.'”

On one of his first trips, to Cincinnati, he shared a taxi from the airport with someone. It turned out this other fellow was also visiting all the major league ball parks; he had two left: Cincinnati, and then Toronto. “I asked him how long it took him to do it, and he said five years. But I didn’t want to hear that. I don’t have five years.”

On this trip, he’s going to see Milwaukee, and the Chicago White Sox. But he couldn’t get a ticket to see the Cubs.

*****

A four hour layover in Chicago. I check my pack and my uke, and head out onto the streets of Chicago.

Across the Chicago River, and it starts to sink in: buildings, people, vitality of the streets. The people are the best part: I like watching the people hurrying by — in Chicago, they manage to hurry while still maintaining that relaxed Midwestern attitude; and everyone is so much more polite than in New England.

I walk to the Art Institute. It’s worth twelve bucks just to see Georgia O’Keefe’s huge painting Sky above the Clouds IV. I look at a few other familiar art works, see a few fine paintings by Ren Yi, a Chinese painter whom I am not familiar with, and head out.

Down Michigan Avenue to the Fine Arts Building. The elevator operator is sitting on his stool looking out into the lobby. “Performer’s?” he asks. “Yup, 904,” I say. He nods, and closes the outer door, but doesn’t bother with the inner door. We stop with the wood deck of the elevator just a few inches above the floor. He leans forward, opens the door, and lets me out. I buy some Renaissance-era sheet music, and decide to walk back down to the lobby. I pass three architect’s offices, three art galleries, a psychotherapist’s office; on one floor I can hear a violinist practicing; I pass offices with obscure titles on the doors, pass a piano store, through an open gate that says “Do Not Open Alarm Will Sound” (but the alarm isn’t sounding), the steps are now marble, down another flight and out.

Last stop: Prairie Avenue Bookshop, where I buy some books including one on the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Frank Lloyd Wright’s design of Unity Temple.

It’s time to head back to Union Station. I walk slowly, admiring the city.

*****

On the train from Chicago to St. Louis, I wound up sitting next to Rob. Rob lives in Tewksbury, was heading to Arkansas to see some friends. He asked me where I’ was going, and to save lengthy explanations I said, “To a conference in St. Louis.” The young woman across the aisle leaned over and asked me, “GA? That’s where I’m going, too.” Her name was Heather, she was from Nashua, New Hampshire, and the three of us wound up talking for the rest of the six hour ride.

As night was beginning to fall, we came around a bend. “There it is,” I said, and pointed out Rob’s window. The Gateway Arch was still visible against the pale blue-green sky, beautiful against the handful of skyscrapers that make up downtown St. Louis. “Wow,” said Rob. “It looks like a good place to visit. You see a place like this and you think, I’m going to come back here someday. but you never know if you’re going to see it again.”

Aboard Amtrak 449/49

Train no. 449: a coach class car, a cafe car with tables and bench seats, a business class car, and that’s all.

We sit just out of Back Bay station waiting for a signal. The conductor announces there will be 40 mph speed limit after one o’clock; CSX owns the track and has this speed restriction when temperatures go up over 90.

Winding in among the hills of central mass, we follow the courses of streams and rivers. Sometimes there’s a highway too, but seems like there’s almost always a river or stream nearby. The rivers are not the rivers I grew up on: these are swift and shallow, with rocky bottoms, class one and two rapids at least; a few flat millponds behind dams; not the flatwater, navigable rivers I learned to canoe.

In some tight (but not very deep) valleys, we pass flat ground beside the river with agricultural fields: corn not quite up to your knee; hay fields with bales of hay; markers of the season.

The man who was talking on his cell phone about “alternative radio” gets off at Springfield. quite a few more people get on, and now the train is nearly full.

We get into the Berkshires. The hills get higher and steeper; they stand out against the sky now. Going through one rock cut, the small wild pink rhododendrons in full bloom cling to the top of the rock face right where the soil starts. Some trees are not yet in full leaf. The streams keep getting smaller until what we’re following is nothing more than a brook flowing back the way we’ve come.

At the high point in the road, we pass along the side of an extensive swamp. Newly dead trees mark where beavers have recently come; then sure enough the beaver lodge, then their long dam. Blue flags blooming in clumps in the midst of the swamp. Red-wing blackbirds perced on cattails about to bloom. The beginnings of a stream winding convolutedly through the marsh. The marsh passes out of view. We go through a village, then the stream returns, bigger now, and flowing in our direction.

A line of blue mountains glimpsed through the trees, barely visible. Now I can see them over the buildings, over a lumberyard, over houses spread down the slope beside the tracks. Then trees hide that blue line of mountains.

The pittsfield station has been rebuilt since I last rode through here, in winter of 2003. Now there is what looks like a big parking garage labeled “Joseph Scelsi Intermodal Transportation Center.” It’s ugly.

After Pittsfield, pockets of decayed industrial landscape, woodlands, a shopping strip, more woods, glimpse of a big house, more woods. Always hills around us. The sky gets dark, darker, wind bending over trees (we whiz through a tunnel), the sky even darker, almost as if it’s night out, no rain yet, then I see dimples in a stream (the stream looks black in the gloom), a trip of bright sky for a moment between the lowering clouds and a line of dark hills, then all is dark. Drops on the window, steady rain now, dark enough that I can watch the computer monitor of the person sitting in front of me reflected in the window (he’s playing a video game). A strip of lightning. Thunder. Behind me the young man says: “Hey babe, you dropped out of service… yeah… there’s a big storm overhead…can you hear me?… hello?… ok. I’m about to switch trains in Albany, I’ll call you… I – I love you.”

Another hour to Albany, where we transfer onto train number 49, the Lakeshore Limited out of New York. The hills get smaller and smaller as we head west.

It all begins…

Forth Worth, Texas

Amtrak’s “Texas Eagle,” train number 21, arived in Fort Worth from Chicago almost on time. Almost, because somewhere in Arkansas, some idiot threw something on the tracks, and we had to wait for nearly an hour for the tracks to be cleared then checked. We made up most of the lost time, but not quite.

Yesterday evening, I was sitting in the dining car, chatting with a fellow who had grown up in Texas, gone to Chicago for a couple of years, and was moving from Chicago to return to college in Austin. It was just after the sun had gone below the horizon, we were pulling in to St. Louis, and we were just getting up to go — when we came around a curve and saw the gateway arch at the entrance to the city. A spectacular view at that hour of the day — we gazed at it in silence for a few minutes.

“That’s just about perfect,” I said to him, “coming on that arch at just this time of day.” It really was incredibly beautiful, all blue and silver and pink against the deepening blue sky, with a hint of pink at the western horizon.

“Before I went to Chicago,” he said, “I never saw any reason to go anywhere else. But then I lived in Chicago — seeing things like this — it’s having experiences like this….

Fort Worth is certainly an experience for me. A New Englander born and bred, this city feels like a foreign country to me. It’s both a Western city and, in some ways, a Southern city, with subtly different social cues that I’m not sure I understand. And I do have a hard time understanding what people say at times, just like in a foreign city.

At the same time, the influx of Unitarian Universalists has begun. I was sitting in a Starbucks, checking out their wifi connection (they wanted too much information from me, so I did not take advantage of the 24 hour free Web access) — sitting there sipping my iced coffee — when my advisor from Meadville/Lombard Theological School came up and sat down to say hi. She’s in town for interim ministry training, since she is leaving Meadville/Lombard and heading off to Ithaca to be the interim minister there.

The clerk at my hotel was looking harrassed when I checked in. He had just gotten off the phone with someone who wanted to make sure her room would only be cleaned with vinegar and water, and from what I could hear of his end of things, it was not a pleasant conversation for him (the word “entitled” comes to mind). Not surprisingly, he had been talking to someone coming to General Assembly. As he checked me in, he asked, “How many of you will there be at this conference?”

“Oh, a few thousand,” I said. He took that stoically — I’m sure every large conference has its share of pushy, entitled people. I just don’t like it when the pushy, entitled people are a part of my religious movement.

A final note to those of you who are coming to General Assembly — you can get free wifi Internet access at Billy Miner’s Saloon, on the corner of Houston and Third, about six blocks from the convention center. Which is where I’m sitting at the moment. Good cheap burgers, $1.50 draft beers, and free wifi — what more do you need from life? Although a quickie Web search reveals that Billy Miner’s got 16 demerits from the city health inspectors at their last visit (30 means things are so gross you probably don’t want to eat there) — so if you’re fastidious, you won’t like it here. Personally, I feel right at home — and the burger was pretty darned good, too.

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Millenium Park in Chicago

We were coming back from the Seminary Coop Bookstore’s annual members-only sale last night. Eco-freaks that we are, we took the train to Hyde Park rather than drive. So when we got off the South Shore electric line at Randolph Street Station with half an hour to spare before catching the train out to Geneva, Carol said, “Let’s go look at Millenium Park.”

I had heard a good deal about the Pritzker Pavillion, the stage designed by Frank Gehry, and I had seen it from a distance, but I had not walked through it. In a word, it was disappointing. The curvy stainless steel proscenium arch around the stage was typical Frank Gehry, except more banal than usual. At first it looks wild and new, but pretty soon you realize he’s using a centuries old architectural vocabulary. Basically it is just a proscenium arch that’s not much different from Baroque arches — except in stainless steel, and without the rich detailing of Baroque architecture. After a few minutes, I started laughing sadly at it because it has such an unfortunate resemblance to the hair styles of late-career Elvis — the bloated, sweating, drug-hypnotized Elvis. And after a few more minutes, I began to see the lack of attention to details, which made it look like one of those Western store fronts that looks really big from the front, but which turns out to be a sad, tiny building from the back.

Worse is the trellis of stainless steel pipes over the lawn seating area. Designed to support loudspeakers, the trellis has the unfortunate side effect of making you feel as if you are in a cave. One of the reasons Chicago is such an extraordinary city, architectually speaking, is that buildings in the Loop soar to the sky, taking your spirit with them — it’s the opposite of a cathedral where your spirit soars only to be stopped by a roof, because in Chicago it’s the open sky over your head. But Gehry’s trellis stops that feeling of soaring dead. The trellis hovers oppressively over you, controlling your spirit and channeling it the same way a closed shopping mall does.

Next we walked over BP Bridge, also designed by Gehry. The bridge is almost quite nice — almost. The problem is, Gehry tries to be sculptural, but can’t quite pull it off. The bridge looks kind of cool from a distance, but when you get closer you see there are dead spots in the curves of the bridge, places where the curves are interrupted by an unintentional flat spot, or where the curves don’t quite flow right. Other details of the bridge are badly done, too. (Maybe the architect did not adequately oversee the building contractor?) It’s covered with what looks like stainless steel shingles on the outside, but as you walk across it the walls lining the walkway are dead flat — which is incongruous at best, confusing at worst. And ultimately, the massing of the bridge just curves around and doesn’t say much of anything.

The worst thing about Gehry’s contributions to Millenium Park is that they seem to completely ignore the incredible wealth of architecture to their west, and the glorious natural beauties of the lakeshore to their east. There is no sense of place, no sense that you are in CHICAGO! — instead, you could be in any generic city center or shopping mall from Bahrain to L.A.