Chicago Vacation 2009

Thursday, July 9, 2009

(Thursday, July 4, 2019; Chicago Sun-Times - 3 stabbed, 14 trampled at Navy Pier after Fourth of July fireworks)

Reprint from ten years ago. I still hate 'Taste' and Navy Pier on the Fourth of July.

I picked the July fourth weekend to visit Chicago because somebody in my family always had a big party on that day, and I figured I could knock out a lot of family visits in one quick stab. What I didn't figure in, was the fact that it is probably the most crowded and congested weekend in Chicago. First there was the 'Taste of Chicago'. An annual celebration of food, where people fight huge crowds so that they can stand around in the dirt, eating over priced samples of restaurant food, in close proximity to open trash receptacles. This is one of Mark's favorite Chicago happenings, and although he nagged me for days to accompany him on this food safari from hell, I held firm and spent the afternoon napping at the hotel.

After getting away with not traipsing through food hell with Mark, it was much harder to get out of being dragged to the second event of the day, fireworks at Navy Pier. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of people downtown for the 'Taste' as it is commonly referred to, about a million more pushed their way down to the lakefront to watch the annual fireworks display. Many had planned ahead and had staked out their viewing area earlier that morning. Our last minute decision to go down and watch the fireworks meant that we could only get a partial view, about a mile north and off to the side of where they were actually happening. So, wedged between a million other excited people, I did my patriotic Fourth of July duty, and oohed and ahhhed along with the crowd for twenty minutes. Yes, twenty minutes. That was the great Chicago fireworks display of 2009. Nineteen minutes of rather mundane and routine showers of colored sparks, followed by one minute of the 'Finale', meaning extra spark showers and explosions. I found it amazing that a million people would drag their asses downtown just to watch twenty minutes of fireworks. Even more amazing, is that Mark had talked me into it, and I was now being swept along with the rest of the rabble, like rats, as they swarmed away.