To: The 13 International Olympic Committee evaluators
From: Some die-hard Chicagoans
Re: The real Chicago
After four days, you’re probably worn out from all the official presentations and glad-handing celebrities trying to persuade you to choose Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games. But, in your remaining 24 hours, we’d like to suggest that you get out of your hotel rooms, escape your handlers and take some time on your own to experience the city we know and love.
1. Take a stroll from the Board of Trade Building at Jackson Boulevard over to Dearborn Street and then down to Randolph Street, and revel in an unparalleled concentration of outdoor sculpture by modern masters, including Alexander Calder’s “Flamingo” and Marc Chagall’s “Four Seasons” (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
2. Visit the former Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor at 1400 E. 53rd St. (soon to be a Subway sandwich shop) where, on the curb in front, a couple of lawyers — Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson — exchanged their first kiss in summer 1989. “It tasted like chocolate,” Obama reported.
3. Dine on a delicious version of the famous Chicago-style hot dog at Hot Doug’s at 3324 N. California Ave. While there, you can bone up on Chicago’s sophisticated culinary past, including the City Council’s 2005 ban on the sale of foie gras, made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese. Before the repeal of the ban in 2008, Hot Doug’s owner Doug Sohn was fined $250 for serving a foie gras-garnished sausage named for the alderman who spearheaded the ban.
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4. Laugh in the face of death in the basement of Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home at 201 N. Northwest Highway, Palatine. More than four decades ago, Roger Ahlgrim decided to put the f-u-n in funeral homes by building a miniature golf course with various spooky obstacles, including a coffin, a graveyard, a crypt and a red-eyed skull. Warning: No games are played when a funeral service is under way in the parlor above.
5. Stand at the corner of Lawrence and Kedzie Avenues in the Albany Park neighborhood and eavesdrop on conversations in Urdu, Polish, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hindi, Romanian, Cambodian and other, more obscure tongues. Amble down these streets and take in the store signs in Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and more. This diversity is Chicago’s past, present and future.