Why I Oughta...

I go through Union Station everyday that I'm downtown for work, but I very rarely go through the Great Hall.  Most of Union Station is gross, but it is slowly improving - starting with the unveiling of the renovation to the Great Hall.  I took this photo last week showing off the new (costly!) skylight and you can see a little bit of scaffolding in the upper reaches of the Hall.  From the Tribune : Union Station’s Great Hall, a stopping point for millions of travelers since 1925, is a lot brighter this holiday season, thanks to a $22 million renovation of its skylight and decorative walls and ceiling.  The centerpiece of the Great Hall is the 219-foot-long skylight rising 115 feet above the floor.  For almost a year, the skylight has been obscured by a suspended working deck as Berglund Construction and architect Goettsch Partners repaired it and added another modern, protective skylight 5 feet above the original. Natural light in the Great Hall has no...

So...here's something that I'm a bit ashamed to admit:  earlier this year when Ken Griffey Jr. was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Tribune ran this piece you see above featuring Griffey and Tim Raines (who I don't think made the cut). What I was startled by was the last line:  Chicago AL, 2008.  Meaning....he played on the South Side.   I had to go back into the Googles and flail about to try to jog my memory .  Then it clicked:  this was a prototypical Kenny Williams deal.  Griffey got hurt and didn't play a ton of games for the White Sox, but for me?  Once a White Sox.  Always a White Sox.   Just look at that sweet swing .

Photo from the Elmhurst History Museum's Facebook page Yesterday's post about the Elmhurst History Museum's archives being used for economic development purposes by the City of Elmhurst got me to poke around the Elmhurst History Museum's site and Facebook page.  I ended up coming across this piece in the Chicago Tribune by Steve Johnson that covers his Top 10 picks for Fall Museum Trips . Included in there at $6 was the Elmhurst History Museum and their new Beer exhibit.   From the story : 6. "Beer Chicago: The Refreshing History": Lots of institutions these days do beer-themed events. This is all well and very good. But the Elmhurst Historical Museum had the bright idea to make an actual exhibition based on the sudsy stuff. The show's menu includes a beer-making station and the history of the city's beers, beermakers and taverns. There's also a tie-in with the Sept. 19 Elmhurst Craft Beer Fest, on the grounds of the museum. Sept. 18 to F...

Metromix going national ? Yup. There's no "official" announcement, but a blogger who works for the Tribune Co. is putting out the word that the company is turning Metromix, its online entertainment guide in Chicago, into a national site. It's up now in two other Tribune markets: Baltimore and Orlando.  In some ways this development harkens back to the dot-com boom, when major media companies thought the winning strategy was to create new national brands. (At Knight Ridder, where I was new media director for the Miami Herald, we rolled out an entertainment guide called JustGo in all of the company's markets.) This created internal tension at the papers and also some consumer confusion, since those papers already had print entertainment guides with other brand names.  I see at least one important but subtle difference this time around: The Tribune Co. isn't abandoning the newspaper's traditional brand names in local markets. For instance, the si...