Museums and other cultural sites are places that tell us real stories about the real world. Some are predictable, but the most memorable are exhibits and shrines that surprise and astonish.
Chicago and the surrounding area are full of the unexpected, the ironic, the peculiar. Here are a few that may be worth a visit. If you are a connoisseur of popular culture, local history or the eccentricities of others, you may enjoy them. You also may be inspired to go out and find others. Nothing pleasures the museumgoer — even the serious culture vulture — like a real head shaker that you can tell your friends about.
Big top in the sky
Cemeteries recall human dramas that might otherwise be lost — such as Woodlawn Cemetery and the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train wreck of June 22, 1918.
The Hagenbeck-Wallace was no fly-by-night. It had 22 tents and something like 1,000 persons on the payroll. And of course the show always went on — except the day after their 26-car train was stopped between Michigan City and Hammond to check an overheated axle. Not far behind, an empty military troop train missed all signals and plowed clear through three wooden sleeping cars of the circus train and most of a fourth.
More than 80 performers and roustabouts died, and 56 of them were buried at a plot at Woodlawn purchased by the Showman’s League of America. The graves are guarded by five stone elephants with trunks lowered in a gesture of mourning.
Today, Showmen’s Rest, as it is called, is still burial ground for circus people who choose to spend eternity with their comrades of the big top.
Woodlawn Cemetery, 7600 W. Cermak Rd., Forest Park, 708-442-8500. Open dawn to dusk every day.
The Heaven Room
If Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center can’t capture the spirit of American evangelicalism, what can? This museum does it expertly, and its galleries contain one of the most striking historical exhibits in the Chicago area.
The museum’s story begins with Martin Luther; it includes the Great Awakening in New England; it covers the career of Billy Sunday and concludes with Billy Graham.
The final portion of the museum is its “Walk Through the Gospel,” beginning with a lifelike mural of the Crucifixion and ending with a gallery affectionately known as the “Heaven Room.”
It’s aptly named. A bright, back-lit mural of blue sky and cumulus clouds, floor and ceiling of mirrors, gentle but insistent strains of Handel’s “Messiah” from wall-sized speakers — they combine to create a space that soothes the spirit so completely that you simply don’t want to leave.
Billy Graham Center Museum, 500 E. College Ave., Wheaton, 708-752-5909. Open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission free; $2 donation recommended.
The Palos Pile
Is there a place where nuclear scientists and environmentalists may one day picnic together? Maybe. It’s the burial ground for Chicago Pile 1, the world’s first nuclear reactor. It was essentially a mass of graphite bricks embedded with uranium and other materials. With it Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction in 1942.
Within a few months, Pile 1 was moved from Hyde Park to the Cook County Forest Preserve’s Argonne Woods. In the decade that followed, it and successor piles constituted the beginnings of Argonne National Laboratory. The lab later moved to a site near Lemont, and the remains of Fermi’s Pile 1 were buried and properly memorialized with a headstone in what is now Red Gate Woods.
Today, the shrine is anything but hands-on. Environmentalists protested earlier in the ’90s, and the area was fenced off. The Department of Energy may embark on “remediation” to remove traces of various pollutants. Happily, relations between government and watchdogs have been good, and there’s talk that the nuclear graveyard may someday be the site of a new museum — a monument to the achievement of atomic power and the vigilance of the environmental movement.
Red Gate Woods, off Archer Avenue, Willow Springs, 708-839-5617. Open dawn to dusk every day. (Chicago Pile 1 monument not currently accessible.)
Faint praise
It goes without saying that the surgeon’s task, even in the modern age, is not for the weak of heart. Nor, frankly, is a trip through the International Museum of Surgical Science. Located in a Lake Shore Drive replica of a French palace, its splendid interior is in stark contrast to the activities that it describes, sometimes with knee-weakening impact.
This museum speaks well for the International College of Surgeons, headquartered here. It makes a vivid show of the profession’s brutal origins, suggesting that surgeons have a sense of history and that past procedures such as trephining (drilling holes in the skull to relieve pressure) and bleeding (based on the theory of balancing humors) no longer burden their collective conscience.
In the exhibits, ancient Roman gynecological instruments appear scientific but hardly reassuring. Proctology is told in depth. Other chapters of the story are shown through a surprisingly large and historic collection of paintings and reproductions — such as a Renaissance depiction of an early gallstone operation and a 17th Century amputation requiring the work of four assistants to hold the patient down.
There are encouraging milestones such as the 19th Century discovery of a remedy for childbed fever. And there is an iron lung — which looks like a cross between a Jules Verne creation and an Edsel — which saved the lives of many a polio victim still alive today.
International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore Drive, 312-642-6502. Open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission free; $2 donation encouraged.
The Aspirin Age
The Art Institute, with its idyllic images of Impressionism, also mines the aesthetic migraine in a current exhibit titled “Affinities: Chuck Close and Tom Friedman.” Among works by Friedman is a self-portrait carved from an aspirin tablet.
Both Close and Friedman make use of the most ordinary images and materials — they create by heightening or celebrating objects no closer to high art than a can of soup. From a Polaroid picture to a surplus of toothpicks, surprise and irony are naturally their stock in trade, though curators often find the deeper message.
Art Institute curator Madeleine Grynsztejn says in her essay on the exhibit, “Through these works we witness the pure pleasure of making, and experience the sheer pleasure of looking.”
The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600. Open 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays (late closing at 8 p.m. Tuesdays); noon to 5 p.m. weekends and holidays. Admission is $7 for adults and $3.50 for children, students, and seniors. Free to all on Tuesdays. (“Affinities: Chuck Close and Tom Friedman” remains open through July 28.)
Museum of a mind
Some people are sufficiently notable to have museums dedicated to their memory. Others are memorable because they lived in what can only be called a museum. Fabyan Villa Museum is the latter.
Col. George Fabyan and his wife, Nelle, established Riverbank Estate on the banks of the Fox River in 1905, and the spread eventually grew to 325 acres (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). They needed the space. Whether the colonel had too much money or too much time, his hobbies included keeping a menagerie that included bears and kangaroos. He also liked windmills, and the Dutch Windmill is still across the river from the house.
Fabyan developed an interest in cryptology — inspired by his belief that Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare and left clues to his authorship in code in the texts. Work at Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories grew more scientific and it became a center for decoding enemy messages during World War II. (The laboratory’s work diversified and it is still in operation, now by the Illinois Institute of Technology.)
Fabyan’s strangest hobby was buying unclaimed freight from railroad warehouses to see what surprises turned up. Some of the results are in the house-museum, which was remodeled for the Fabyans by Frank Lloyd Wright. A fake mummy, probably from a circus sideshow, was one such bit of booty.
Fabyan Villa Museum, 1511 S. Batavia Rd. (part of Fabyan Forest Preserve), between Geneva and Batavia, 708-232-2631. Open 1 to 4 p.m. Wednesdays and 1 to 4:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, May 15 through Oct. 15. Admission free.
Having a wonderful time
You could call them the raw nerve of American photography — postcards. The pictures are forgettable and the cards disposable, which is what makes them eminently collectible. And so the Curt Teich Postcard Archives at the Lake County Museum in Wauconda is one of the most unusual repositories of American culture anywhere.
The collection became an archive in 1982 when heirs of the defunct Curt Teich Printing Company of Chicago, once the nation’s largest printer of postcards, trucked copies of nearly every card it ever made (nearly 400,000) to the museum.
Postcards depicted America as America saw itself. There’s the Empire State Building, naturally, but equally prominent in the archive is the Pagoda Restaurant, an ersatz Buddhist temple in Reading, Pa., and the “Lucy, the Elephant, Hotel,” with one wing of this cozy inn shaped like a gigantic pachyderm. Floods, fires and other disasters were also a natural resource for Teich photogs.
Curt Teich Postcard Archives at Lake County Museum, Illinois Highway 176 and Fairfield Road, Wauconda, 847-526-8638. Open 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays; 1 to 4:30 p.m. Sundays. Admission $2 for adults, $1 for students, free to all on Mondays. (The museum has a permanent exhibit of a selection of postcards, and the postcard archive is open for research by appointment.)
Foot power
Museums do not always require an audience ready and waiting. Sometimes a passion, or perhaps an obsession, is enough — which is what was behind “Feet First,” an exhibit about the foot and foot care at the Dr. William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine.
“Feet First” is a handsome and informative exhibit that chronicles the career of the original Dr. Scholl, entrepreneur, physician, and a man who promoted good health from the ground up.
Scholl built a worldwide empire by selling the salves, pads, powders and orthotics of foot care. “Feet First” tells how he did it. The exhibit tells the history of podiatry and also Scholl’s knack for marketing. Some of its most entertaining aspects include a sales training film from the 1930s, when treating the female customer as a countess was the route to success at selling corn and bunion remedies. The exhibit also has old recordings of songs sung at Scholl conventions to whip employees up into a selling frenzy — such as the classic “John Brown’s Baby Has a Bunion on His Toe.”
“Feet First” at the Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine, 1001 N. Dearborn St., 312-280-2487. Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays (until 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays). Admission free. School tours and other organized tours by appointment.
A king in Libertyville
The onion domes of St. Sava Monastery rise above a copse of pines on land that would otherwise be a farm in Libertyville. And inside is buried the last King of Yugoslavia.
King Peter II, born in 1929, was king but not yet a teenager when he was forced from his country at the beginning of World War II. First he went to England, then to the United States — Chicago and later Los Angeles — where he died. The exiled monarch was buried at the most important Serbian Orthodox monastery in the United States, St. Sava, in the handsome church built in 1925 by the church’s first bishop in North America.
It’s a fascinating past, but true to Balkan history, the dramas did not end in 1970 when King Peter was laid to rest. In the ’70s, a schism rocked the church. Priests at St. Sava were loyal to Belgrade church authorities. Serb-American dissidents believed they were too cozy with Communists, and they tried to take possession of the monastery, church, and the king’s earthly remains.
The courts turned down the dissidents, who then built a new monastery a few miles north in Lake County. The factions have now reunited. And no one is waiting from the new regime in Belgrade to call for the return of Serbian royals, either living or dead.
St. Sava Monastery, 32377 N. Milwaukee Ave., Libertyville, 847-362-2440. Church is open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. Admission free.
Body Slices
It is a relatively well-known exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry — “Anatomical Sections,” also known as “Body Slices.” They have been in the museum since the late 1930s when two cadavers were frozen and sliced (one horizontally and the other vertically) for illustrative purposes.
The male and female who reside along the southwest stairwell in formaldehyde-filled frames have acquired familiarity — so much so that they are the subject of urban legends. The most romantic of these is that the two were a married couple in life who vowed to remain together in death, as they are today and with plenty of company.
There is no evidence that the legend is true, though it could be pointed out that when it comes to cadavers, especially those of earlier periods in medical science, provenance was not important or even, in many cases, desirable.
Also at the Museum of Science and Industry, the exhibit “Fantastic Machines,” which runs through 1997, proves a maxim that some technical minds would prefer to conceal. It is that the line between the genius and the crackpot is dangerously faint. Among disreputable devices on display is the Phrenology Machine, designed to measure the bumps on the head of a man or woman. Thus did early 20th Century “geniuses” attempt to profile the personality traits inside.
The Museum of Science and Industry, 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive, 312-684-1414. Open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily (through Labor Day). Admission $6 for adults, $5 for seniors, $2.50 for children (5-12); free to all on Thursdays.
The ubiquitous spider
How close are you to a spider, right now? The answer, according to the Field Museum, is that you’re never more than 3 feet from a spider. If that’s an unsettling thought, perhaps it would help to lighten up and think of spiders as “nature’s first bungee jumpers” — as does the Field, which is presenting a summerlong exhibit called “Spiders!”
Visitors can crawl across a giant fiberoptic floor web or can see a live Carolina orb weaver sitting on her enormous web. There’s also an animated video titled “Tallulah Tarantula Tells All.”
The tarantula, as a species, is actually more threatened than threatening, which is how some live ones became part of the exhibit; they were illegally shipped here to become part of the pet market and were confiscated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
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“Spiders!” runs through Aug. 24 at the Field Museum, Lake Shore Drive at Roosevelt Road, 312-922-9410. Open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Admission to the museum is $5 for adults, $3 for children (3-17), students and seniors, $16 for families, free on Wednesdays. Admission to “Spiders!” is an additional $3 for adults, $2.50 for children, students and seniors, $14 for families.
