News Trend Chicago: Wells Street Bridge|Actual

What started out asa week's visit to my second-born in Columbus, Ohio,

somehow turned into a road trip to Chicago.

Not only did we squeeze an amazing amount of sightseeing into forty-eight hours,

but we stayed a mere block away from my former office and retraced

the streets and sights of my life in Chicago

all those many years ago.

Fueled by doughnuts and ready to take on a busy day of exploring, my daughter and I headed back toward the Loop. We paused, as sightseers and photography enthusiasts often do, on the Franklin Street Bridge to look east.

Perfectly framed by the Chicogo River and two long rows of towers, the double decker bridge charms the eye with a delightful look back into history. The Wells Street Bridge was built in 1922 and now, almost a hundred years later, still dutifully carries a never-ending stream of car traffic on its lower deck, and elevated trains up top.

We stood in the middle of the bridge, whipped by autumn winds, and drank in the scene. As the trains clickety-clacked back and forth over the water, we lifted our various cameras and snapped breathlessly away, hoping against hope that we could somehow capture the magic of this particular moment in time.

A yellow water taxi zoomed downstream. At first, I found the intrusion irritating, a wrinkle in time, disturbing the century-old vibe I was trying to capture. Then I broadened my gaze and laughed at my self. Surely the water taxi couldn't do anything worse than the hulking skyscrapers to remind me of the twenty-first century.

A man stood on the bridge near us, to our right. He smiled at us as he adjusted his tripod, checked his settings and waited for the next L train to shuffle by. My daughter and I traded her DSLR back and forth, pulled Instax cameras out of one pocket as we pushed our cell phones into another, and exchanged small talk with him. Kindred spirits.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, our fingers had iced over and surely we had captured at least a few decent shots out of the dozens we had taken. So we stowed our gear, tucked our hands deep into our pockets, and walked on.

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Read more stories about my long overdue reunion with the city with big shoulders:

The Bean

Italian Village

The Gorilla And The Flamingo

Doughnut Vault

Wells Street Bridge

The Rookery

Flamingo Again

Wabash Arts Corridor

The Berghoff

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