Spring forward, FORWARD, FORWARD!!!!

Chicago needs spring so badly. It needs spring more than I’ve ever seen it need spring before.

We got to go on a bus tour after our last class on Saturday. We went to go see all the things a WASP from the north side never gets to go see. The IIT campus designed by Mies, the under the L student union by Rem Koolhaas, the University of Chicago with like…everyone designing for them. So it was really neat.

But the problem began around Jackson Park and continued on with our tour guide. As we’re driving past Jackson Park and our tour guide for the day is expertly telling us of the fair and how beautiful and amazing it was this glimmering white city in the May spring air. And our tour guide tells us to look out at Jackson Park and see the beauty that they must have seen.

Is she kidding? As the incredibly nerdy and geeky architect students turned to look outside….all we saw was brown grass, brown-gray trees, and freezing pedestrians trying to rush out of the sleet/snow that was beginning to form.

We traveled further down the “midway” of the fair, how lovely it must have been. How horrifying ugly it is. I have never seen Chicago look so dead and lonely as it does right now. I hesitate to say ugly, cause even in it’s last stages of death, Chicago is a beautiful city, imposing Mies buildings look even statlier in a gray snow storm.

BUT COME ON PEOPLE FOR PETES SAKES.

Hurry spring, please hurry, my little brain can only take so much more ugliness. Show me one sprout, one sign that Persephone is coming home to be with her mother, one sign of hope that indeed the world (or my world at least) will be beautiful again.
Thank god for “Starlet”