Forgotten Chicago, Museums

I moved to Chicago in 1982 from Dayton, Ohio and going to university in Athens, Ohio. So, yeah, Chicago was the big-time. I immediately set out to explore the city. I remember every weekend depositing my token into the turnstile and hopping a train to downtown to walk around or explore a museum.

The museums opened up whole worlds to me.

Museum of Science and Industry

The Museum of Science and Industry in the early 80s seemed super corporate. For instance there was the General Motors Gallery and the AT&T Gallery. Nowadays this is somewhat standard. You can’t even build a stadium without naming it, not for a benefactor but a business. The Ramen Noodle Arena. Quicken Loans. Remember the Enron Stadium until they went belly up, taking investor money with them. I believe the AT&T Gallery had a display of telephones, a concept so far in the past that it now belongs in the nostalgic Main Street display, the one with “gaslight” lamp posts and the ole Walgreens Pharmacy, where remedies were devised from caffeine syrup and sold as elixir along with malts and open-face corn beef sandwiches.

What I remember most is getting lost. The stairways were color coded, but yet I couldn’t seem to connect one floor to the next in a straight line. I kept ending up by the chick hatchery or more creepily in a somewhat darkened stairwell with slabs of crosswise-cut kidneys and hearts pressed air-tight between two pieces of glass and sealed inside. It was the kind of thing that would amaze a future doctor, not someone simply trying to find the Fairy Castle. I was grossed out. Not the least by the babies floating in jars. There was a display of fetuses in different stages of growth on up to pre-birth preserved in formaldehyde on one of the top floors.

Of course there was the WWII German submarine, the flight deck, and the coal mine for an “interactive” experience, but the lines were so long I didn’t feel like waiting to get in. The mere act of getting to the MSI from the northside was enough of an interactive experience for me, at least a train and a bus—it took a couple of hours both ways to get there and back. We didn’t go more than a few times.