Wrigley Field (Chicago, Illinois)

September 4, 2016 – our last day in Chicago, our 13^th wedding anniversary, and our visit to Wrigley Field (23^rd Baseball Park) to see the Cubs play the San Francisco Giants. (Of course we were hugely rooting for the Giants, and considered ourselves quite lucky to be in town for this occurrence!) The stadium was built in 1914 as Weeghman Park, but chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. acquired complete control of the Cubs by 1921, and by 1927 the park became known as Wrigley Field. Located on the north side of the city, in the Lakeview community (part of the Wrigleyville neighborhood), Wrigley Field is now just one of nine parks whose name isn’t reflective of corporate sponsorship.

Getting tickets was a little tricky; with none to be had from the Cubs website, we had to resort to third party sources. Seating capacity for Wrigley Field is 41,268 and attendance that day was around 41,000. We ended up getting a couple of good seats using StubHub, and although we paid more than normal, I guess you could say we got our money’s worth – the game went 13 innings! It looked like the Giants might win it, but at the bottom of the 9th, the Cubs tied it up at 2-2, finally wrapping it up in the 13^th inning with a final run. Call me superstitious, but might there have been any connection between this day being our 13^th wedding anniversary, and the game going 13 innings? Nah, probably not!  

Here are some fun facts about Wrigley Field:

• The famous ivy in the outfield was planted by former Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck in 1937
• No baseball has ever hit the Wrigley Field scoreboard (installed, like the ivy, in 1937)
• There’s a big gate in right field commonly called the “elephant’s gate,” because it was built to bring elephants into the field for the circus
• Wrigley was the first park that allowed fans to keep foul balls
• On June 13, 1956 a fan’s car, parked outside the ballpark on Waveland Avenue, was hit by by TWO home run balls. Cubs Eddie Miksis and Giants Willie Mays both hit the parked car—while the fan was inside watching the game.

 

U.S. Cellular Field (Chicago, Illinois)

The third day we were in Joliet we took the train into Chicago to catch the White Sox game at U.S. Cellular Field (our 22^nd ballpark!). Getting to the field was so easy using public transportation, with one of the stops directly across the street from the stadium. Not having any loyalty to the Chicago teams, and having more of a west coast persuasion in general, we were secretly rooting for the Seattle Mariners. But, this time the home team did win, with a final score of White Sox 4, Mariners 1. Still, it is always fun visiting each new ballpark, and learning a little about the teams. Here are some fun facts about the White Sox:

The Chicago White Sox franchise began in 1901 when the American League first began. The White Sox and the Detroit Tigers were the only American League teams to go through the entire 20^th century without changing their team name.

How did the Chicago White Sox get their name? In 1990 Charles Comiskey moved the St. Paul Saints to the South Side of Chicago. The team adopted the former nickname of its future rivals (the Cubs) and became the White Stockings, which was shortened to White Sox a few years after the club joined the American League in 1901.

The White Sox have won three World Series titles, two in the early 1900s (1906, 1917) and the third 88 years later, in 2005. They are often referred to as the “South Siders,” a reference to their location in relation to Chicago's other major league team, the Cubs.

Here are some pictures from our visit to U.S. Cellular and the game. 

Chicago, Illinois

The Windy City. Chi-City. Heart of America. My Kind of Town. These are just a few of the many nicknames for Chicago. Call it what you will (and over 2.7 million people call it “home”), there is none other like it.

Three hundred miles north of Cincinnati, this was our next stop as we continued our Midwestern tour of the country this summer. It seems the only news you hear about Chicago is the bad news. As the third largest city in the nation, murders are up 72% so far in 2016, and shootings surged more than 88% in the first three months of the year. While this disturbing trend is driven by gangs and mostly contained to a handful of pockets in the city’s South and West sides, these kinds of statistics are still troubling for tourists coming into the area. We chose to stay in an RV Park in Joliet, about 50-miles northwest of Chicago proper, and take the train into town for our visits. During visits to Boston, Washington D.C., and New York City, we have found the public transportation systems to be the best way to tour big cities, and this proved to be the case in Chicago as well.

Despite the dismal media depiction of this area, we found Chicago a wonderful, vibrant, and beautiful city, with some of the friendliest people we’ve ever met! Built on 28-miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, the city is famous for its bold architecture, a skyscraper skyline that can’t be beat (with some of the tallest buildings in the country), renowned museums, a hub for culture and the performing arts, and is a HUGE tourist mecca. In 2015 Chicago received over 52 million international and domestic visitors, a new record for the city, making it one of the top visited cities in the nation. If you want it, you’ll likely find it in this lively, energetic city in the American Heartland.

Our goal during our 10-day stay was to catch games with both major league baseball teams (the Cubs at Wrigley Field and the White Sox at U.S. Cellular); take one or more tours; get to a museum; and just use our own two feet to walk around the diverse and fascinating areas of the downtown. All this, we accomplished! In this post I am including pictures from our on-foot explorations; a hop-on-hop-off bus tour; our trip to the observation deck at the top of the Chicago 360 building (4^th tallest building in Chicago, and 8^th in the US); and a visit The Museum of Science and Industry.

(I will have separate posts for the two baseball games, and our Architectural Tour by boat on the Chicago River.)