A fascination with Marina City, Chicago


As I was looking at some old photos, I stumbled across one of Chicago, and it jogged my memory of my fascination with Marina City. I've never seen it IRL (In Real Life), but it's one of my earliest memories of getting excited about architecture.

And no, I never became an architect (I couldn't do the math), but I became a graphic designer, and I still have a fascination with architecture, both old and new. And I sometimes wonder if it was the parking garage of Marina City that fascinated me so much, because I collected Matchbox cars when I was a kid.

For the record, Marina City is just north of the Chicago River between State and Dearborn Streets. Hang on, I'll go look up when it was built. Wikipedia says that it opened in 1963, so it would have been the latest thing back when I was a little kid, in the mid-sixties.

As you've probably guessed by now, I was a nerdy little kid. I had View Master reels of cities like New York, and Chicago. The only other building in Chicago that I remember was the John Hancock Building, which I visited in 1976. I had recently purchased my first car, looked at a map, figured out how to get to Chicago (I lived in Minneapolis), and drove there. I went to the top of the John Hancock Building, but apparently I forgot to go visit Marina City at the same time.

And I think the fact that it was called "Marina City" was what really fascinated me. I imagined that it would be like living on a spaceship, where you could live, work, and play. The closest I ever got to that feeling was working in a tower in downtown Phoenix, which had things like a post office, a couple of restaurants, and even some shops. Of course, it wasn't residential! It was called Valley Center at the time, and is now known as Chase Tower.

Anyway, getting back to Marina City, if you're old enough to remember the original Bob Newhart Show (the one from 1972), you may recall that he walks over the State Street Bridge and Marina City is very visible behind him. I loved that show as a kid, and I went wild over the view of Marina City!


If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more