The Coming of Fall

For the past month and a half or so my life's been overwhelmingly dominated by my final project to finish up my Master's in planning, but one of the cool things that's come out of that is I've gone out and taken some photos on beautiful fall days to use as analogies. Here's a montage I made of images of the pond in Humboldt Park, looking glorious with the turning leaves and prairie plants.

Back To The South Side

More images from the Riverdale community, taken for my Planning Workshop class. A couple weekends ago we held a town hall for residents and those involved in community issues as part of our planning process. Took another trip yesterday for more images.

These are some of my favorites from both of those trips. The man in the hat's name is Floyd, and he's a gardener on one of the farm plots along the Little Calumet River. The sailboat shot is from a marina on the south bank of the river, they were kind enough to let me in to wander around and get some shots of the other side of the river. While I was doing that I was struck by this older guy buffing the side of a sailboat, and the care he was putting into it. Seemed like a romantic notion.

Field Trip to Riverdale

This semester, my plan-making workshop class is focusing on the Riverdale community on the far South Side near Lake Calumet. Formerly home to the steel industry, it's seen hard times in recent decades, but there's no doubt it's a unique place with an unlikely mix of industry, waste facilites and wetland preserves. Part of the trip included Altgeld Gardens, a WWII era housing project, where we visited one of the laundry buildings. It was pretty nice and gave me a good opportunity to shoot Lamont, a community resident who served as one of our "tour guides". Other images are from Beaubien woods, a nature preserve in Riverdale.