Weekly Shooting Excursion XIII: Uptown/Argyle St.

This is the latest in a series of posts documenting a series of weekly photo shoots I made this past summer, to keep me sane while living under a pandemic. This was my thirteenth summer shooting outing, and I chose Uptown, a neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago. I spent a few hours on a humid Sunday afternoon shooting and shopping in the numerous southeast Asian groceries in the neighborhood, narrowly avoiding the strong rainstorms that blew through when I was on my way back home.

Uptown is one of those neighborhoods that has gone through many changes. Historically, it was a big nightlife area, with numerous ornate theaters and jazz clubs. Many live music clubs still exist there; the area is still known as one of the big entertainment districts in Chicago. It has also seen some not so great times. Before I moved to Chicago, back in the 90’s, I had a guidebook to the city, and I remember it referring to Uptown as a 'classic skid row' neighborhood. Like much of Chicago, however, there has been gentrification in recent years. There are still some gritty areas, and the area as a whole hasn’t gentrified nearly as much as other Chicago neighborhoods, but it’s no longer a ‘classic skid row’ either. 

Uptown is also home to a small southeast Asian commercial area that most locals just refer to as Argyle St., although it is sometimes called Little Saigon. About four blocks of Argyle St., along with a couple blocks of Broadway St. either side of Argyle is home to many Vietnamese restaurants, southeast Asian groceries, bakeries, etc. I always enjoy shopping in these groceries, while I know nothing about cooking any southeast Asian cuisine, there is produce and other items I find in these stores that I can’t find anywhere else.

I shot along Argyle St., wandered along Broadway a few blocks as well, and explored a few side streets. There were more people around than I encountered on most of my other summer photo shoots, probably because I was shooting on a weekend. Some restaurants in the Argyle St. area were doing outdoor seating, and it looked like social distancing was a little iffy, so I avoided the busier spots for the most part. Still, more people appear in the photos I shot this day than in most of the photos from my other summer shoots.

Here are my favorites:

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion XII: Tinley Park

 My 12th summer shooting excursion was out in the suburbs. I had a couple errands to run in the southwest suburbs, and decided to combine that with a shooting trip. I chose Tinley Park, a suburb in the southwest corner of the Chicago metro area. Tinley Park has a small downtown-like area, and while I’ve driven through and shopped in the more typical strip mall parts of the town many times, had never set foot in the downtown area. I don’t shoot in the suburbs often, and the differences between the suburbs and the city made for a nice change of pace, even if I find it a bit more challenging to creatively engage with the landscape.

It was an enjoyable shoot, overall. While a downtown area, there weren’t a lot of people around. Most of the people I saw were congregated close to a couple of restaurants, and easy to avoid to maintain social distancing. This was late July, and it was hot, but not so hot as to be overly uncomfortable. Large, fluffy clouds in the sky made for nice backgrounds in the photos I shot. I wandered around for a little over an hour shooting various things. Here are my favorites from this shoot:

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion XI: Archer Avenue, Bridgeport

For my 11th summer shooting excursion, I shot on and around Archer Ave. in the south side Chicago Bridgeport neighborhood. Bridgeport is an interesting neighborhood with an interesting (although not always nice) history. I’ll save that for a later post; I returned to the central area of Bridgeport for a shoot in early September (the one I’m posting today was in late July), and will touch on history when I get around to posting about that shoot. The Archer Ave. area feels different from the rest of the neighborhood anyway, so I’ll focus on the Archer area now.

Bridgeport these days is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the city. Nearly 40% of the population in Bridgeport is Asian, and Chinatown sits immediately to the northeast of where I was shooting. Archer Ave. is one of the infamous diagonal streets in Chicago, and for much of it’s length, is paralleled by the I-55 expressway as it runs out to the southwest suburbs from the city center. It’s an arterial street, and I’d bet that most Chicagoans’ only experience with Archer comes from using it as an alternate route when I-55 is a gridlocked nightmare.

Where it runs through Bridgeport, Archer is pretty grubby and run down looking in places, but the area doesn’t feel grubby. Bridgeport for years has had a kind of simmering under the surface, almost gentrifying, almost hipsterish feeling, but not quite. The people who were out in the streets when I was shooting were mainly a mixture of young adults and middle aged Asians, and the area felt, if not quite vibrant, stable and calm (traffic aside). I walked along Archer for maybe a mile and a half, popping down side streets when things looked interesting. The cloud cover was steadily increasing while I was shooting, and on my way back home, some strong storms blew through. Here are my favorite shots.

Mosaic made from three separate shots with a 4-lens Nishika camera.
 

Weekly Shooting Excursion X: West Loop

This is my tenth ‘get out of the house and go shoot something’ excursion.  I was on a roll with these shoots by now, and usually slipped into ‘photographer mode’ pretty easily when out on these day trips. This shoot was in mid-July, and while it was definitely hot, it wasn’t excruciatingly hot and humid as it was for the previous few shots. On the edge of unpleasant, but manageable. 

I chose the West Loop for this shoot. This is the area directly west of Chicago’s downtown core (the Loop to locals). The West Loop is an interesting neighborhood, and one that feels completely different than it did when I moved to Chicago 22 years ago. Back in the late 90’s, it was at the beginning stages of gentrification, and still more grubby than polished. It’s an old meatpacking district, and the aging warehouse buildings made good, inexpensive studio space for artists. Artists moving in led to galleries opening, and for several years the area was the home for the newer, more daring gallery scene in town (there are still galleries left, but the new, hot gallery scene is shifting again to an area northwest of the West Loop known as West Town). Condo conversions were next, then the establishment of restaurant row, a stretch of Randolph St. that’s home to several of the best known and highest rated fine dining establishments in the city. Oprah Winfrey’s studios were in the area when her tv show was in production (the lot where her studios were is now McDonald’s world headquarters). The latest addition to the area is several new high rise residential towers, replacing low rise warehouse buildings. It’s now considered one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city. A few meatpacking places and warehouses still exist there, but the vibe is more upscale urban than grungy light industrial these days.

Given how much it’s changed, it’s a surprisingly pleasant neighborhood. The side streets are pretty quiet, and while the new condo buildings aren’t as attractive as the old warehouses, it’s still a nice place to wander. It feels a lot like Chelsea in New York, although less self consciously trendy. I don’t get to this area often anymore, I used to hit the galleries every month when the exhibits changed, but haven’t done that in several years. I also have a good friend whose painting studio was in this area, on the third floor of a crumbling building that housed an industrial machine repair service on the first floor (that building is now gone, replaced by one of the newest residential skyscrapers in the neighborhood). Walking around and shooting was enjoyable, and because I hadn’t spent much time there in quite a while, with all it’s changes it felt like a brand new place.

I must have found the area photogenic, as this was my longest shoot so far, and also the one where I shot the most photos. Going through them all took much longer than expected. 

Here are my favorites: