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Travel America’s highways from Maine to San Diego and you’ll find
almost universal agreement that no urban road compares to the
stunning beauty and charm of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. For
more than 19 miles it edges the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago
providing one spectacular view after another. It cuts through four
city parks, adjoins five major museums and one zoo, and is the
home address of Chicago’s cultural, business and political leaders.
If you live in Chicago it is the road you boast about. If you are a
visitor to the “City That Works,” its magnificence takes your breath
away. Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
architecture critic, says simply that he’s “never seen a more
beautiful urban highway.” His interview in the book provides clarity
and insight about the brilliant roadway.
Words alone cannot tell the story. The book is beautifully illustrated
throughout its 220+ pages with more than 250 black and white
duotone and color photographs representing the past 150 years of
the roadway’s progress from a pleasant horse and buggy pathway
in front of the Gold Coast mansions of Potter Palmer and his friends
to the eight-lane hybrid boulevard of today. Page after page of the
book contains the pictorial history of how the road was carved from
swampland and lakefront using a combination of sand, landfill and
debris from the remnants of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire.
Over the years it would become the exceptionally designed asphalt
and concrete guardian of stunning public parks and sandy beaches
along uninterrupted mile after mile of lakefront. No wharves,
no docks, no industry were allowed by the citizens to be built on
the city’s eastern border despite Chicago’s reputation of industrial
might. What a delightful and handsome contradiction it presents
to those who still think of the city as “Hog Butcher” of America.
The book includes interviews with more than 20 well-known
Chicagoans in addition to Blair Kamin, including Abner Mikva,
former U.S. Congressman and Federal Appellate Judge, U.S.
Congressman Janice Schakowsky, Irma Tranter, President of
Friends of the Parks, Daniel Walsh, President, The Walsh Group,
businessman, Potter Palmer, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill
architect, Philip Enquist, Thomas O’Gorman, noted Chicago author,
Daniel McCaffery, President, McCaffery Interests, Neil Hartigan,
former Illinois Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor, and John
Norquist, President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
An added treat is a first person account by rock composer, Skip
Haynes, about his wild trip on the Drive one early morning that
led him to write his famous ode Lake Shore Drive.
The authors are lifelong Chicagoans. Co-author Neal Samors has
published or authored 17 books about the people and places of
Chicago, while co-author Bernard Judge is a media consultant who
was a reporter, editor or publisher at three Chicago daily newspapers
and the fabled City News Bureau.
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