I am on Amtrak train #1 bound from New Orleans back to Los Angeles. We are near the Texas border with Louisiana. My posts are up to Day 6 leaving Albany NY.

My favorite place to stay is a Holiday Inn Express on a high ridge on the east side of the Hudson River. This location is far enough out and far enough up to afford a spectacular skyline view of Albany in its entirety. The freeway path takes you far to the northwest before crossing the river only to head due south to the office. A local more direct westerly route takes you across and then down the steep ridges of the Hudson River Valley. Near the bottom is the main train yard that bisects Rensselaer restricting east/west traffic.

Many a time I crossed up or down the hill past the brand new Albany/Rensselaer depot without getting any closer. While working in Albany, I considered taking the train down to The City (New York of course). I lived in The City for two summers during college and lived nearby in Connecticut for three years so I know how to get around and have some idea where to go. However, I never took the train down river while in Albany. This trip will be my first time in The City, rather than NYC airports, for a very long time.

Pulling up to the depot on the Lake Shore Limited offered a kind of closure. I threaded the needle between my recent work assignment in Albany and my past to the south. My inbound train pointed to the south towards Manhattan where I was for a time and will be again in a few days. I stand in the crossover passage looking one way into the newest Amtrak station and the other way towards the bridge I so recently drove over. Fittingly my outbound train pointed north where it was destined to rise out of the Hudson River Valley heading east towards Boston.

Amtrak 48 curves around the tip of Lake Michigan and across northern Indiana to follow close to the southern shore of Lake Erie all through the night. Luckily this is just a densely industrial strip with no lake views. A sleep for over 10 hours this night.

The path in the morning runs parallel to the Erie Canal for awhile. The eastern canals look like straight rivers since they blend into the vegetation, have muddy bottoms, and brown/green water. They look nothing like the concrete ditches with metal scaffolding and sky blue water found in the west. Then again, the eastern canals were built for transportation while the western canals are for irrigating crops and people.

I am again counting off cities I worked in at some point in time. Chicago, South Bend, Toledo, Columbus in the center of Ohio, Cincinnati on the Ohio River, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. Most of my former clients in this area are not the dominant rust belt industries but many are manufacturers in stasis or decline. There cities are not sharing as extensively in the rampant renewal I witnessed in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago.

Rochester is a case in point. Home of both Kodak and Xerox, who have seen better days as their competitive advantages in image processing are eliminated as bits and dots replace chemicals and hardware, Rochester itself looks as seedy as it did when I worked here in the 80′s and the 90′s. Surely there is a newish suburban band around town but I firmly believe that a real city must have a vibrant core that’s alive with people and fueled by prosperity. What will it take for the good times to return to this region?

This will be the first time I travel in a single level coach car. A new experience awaits.

Three babies cry out incessantly. One from hunger, one from general irritability, and one from neglect. The latter was a sad example of generational malaise. A young mother told her teenage daughter to ignore the screams of the teen’s toddler strapped into a carriage. “She’s not hungry and she’s not wet. She just wants attention. Leave her be.” The baby’s out stretched arms clearly pleaded to be held as others looked on with disinterest or scorn.

I exchanged looks with the short, prim, well-dressed New Yorker in the front row of seats. Just hold her we agreed silently. This baby was not too old to comfort, too young to be spoiled. The teenager had the better maternal instincts as she winced in kind with her child but would not defy the commandments of her own mother. So we all suffered with them both.

When they finally called for coach boarding, The New Yorker and I were forced to stand up as everyone crushed in from all sides. The conductor called for over 65 and families with small children. This turned out to be 80% of the crowd that warmed around us. I stood downstream to keep her from being run over. She moved beside me to hold our place as first in line of what remained. “Don’t give another inch since we have been here the longest.” I’m impressed. We break through together hoping the masses in front of us will fill up some other car and leave us some peace.

The short lived bond is broken as she is directed to the New York City through car and I am told to follow the flow to the forward car. Ahead of me is a young man with week old clothes and a even more mature odor. Behind me was a more professional looking guy but I was not aware of this. The middle aged female coach attendant gave the young man a window seat and reached for the next stub. She looked behind me then looked me in the eyes. She smiles and I smile back. She tore off a new seat assignment slip putting me together with the career fireman from Wisconsin.

Small favors make all the difference.

This town is the home of many design innovations. My roommate during the last two years of the University of Chicago was a budding architect who knew the rich tradition and history of our adoptive home. (1) The first proto-skyscraper made possible by the twin inventions of the elevator and pump pressured water built with immensely thick brick walls. (2) The first real skyscraper supported by a steel skeleton that proud displayed its metal lattice work offering a move open core space. (3) The rise and fall of ornamentation leading to the first sleek glass-walled slabs with cantilevered floors. (4) Finally the world’s tallest building for most of my life built during my residence in the windy city.

Chicago is the best example of melting pot America. This is exemplified by what I believe is the widest choice in cuisine you can find anywhere in the world. All I need right now is the closest example of Chicago style pizza. My favorite is Gino’s east nestled on a side-street near the John Hancock building on Michigan Avenue; the Magnificent Mile. Unfortunately, I needed to limit my foray to the Loop bounded by the Chicago river on two sides and Lake Michigan on a third. The fourth side is delimited by the L (elevated train) that gave the Loop it’s name. Also inaccessible this day ware Uno’s and Dues’ facing one another catercorner across a street in the near north. Uno’s is the only one with a national franchise and thus is missable in any event.

That leaves Giordano’s makers of the true pizza pie. The classic Giordano’s pizza is deep dish with two differences from all the others. The bottom crust is raised high above the surface which appears to be an ordinary layer of tomato sauce but is in reality a soft coated upper crust. The added ingredients are just under this layer with a thick oozing cheese below. My 10 inch sausage pizza is complemented by two tall Blue Moon wheat beers for the most memorable meal on this trip to date. Yum.

After burning an hour and a half for dinner, I still have almost 4 hours before my next train leaves for Albany. So I wander. Nothing noteworthy till a turn south towards the bottom of the loop. Filling an entire city block and rising up over 100 feet is a brick plated structure with massive arched windows is a mystery building that, to my eyes, is obviously an homage to the world fairs of yesteryear. Crowning the corners and top faces are huge figures of Grecian gods in nautical themes. Though appropriate in Chicago’s architectural cornucopia, the cornices seem to be tacked on to an otherwise boring basic cube. Still, I find myself circling three quarters of the way around the edifice photographing these imposing features as the sunlight fades.

Only as I decide to move on, heading north again, do I find out the nature of this building. It is the Harold Washington Public Library. My buddy, my friend, this is how Chicago choose to remember you! Harold Washington gave me my first (accidental) exclusive that was the stellar scoop of my brief journalistic career. I was a spec photographer for the Hyde Park Herald assigned to do a family photo spread of our local city councilman. As fate would have it, word had just leaked out that Harold would through his hat in the race for mayor. I set down my camera and took out a narrow ruled college notebook to conduct an impromptu interview of the man who would become the first back mayor of Chicago.

State Street was the fashion shopping district during the first half of the last century. (Boy, I love referring to the 1900′s as the “last century”. It makes everything seem new again somehow.) By the time I came to Chicago in the late 70′s, the downtown was dead. The rehabilitation of the grand vaudeville era Chicago Theatre just served to emphasize the dissolution of the rest of the area.

Now the streets are full with people who linger awhile before going home at the end of the workday. This blend of people are new stir of the melting pot with a far higher portion of russians and pacific rim asians to complement the long standing polish and mainland asian population. They enter, leave and pass by a mix of old and new, of renovation and rebuilding in place, that proclaims recent and current investment.

Then I suffer the shock of my brief tour of downtown Chicago as I reach the river. River Plaza is gone. My first home after leaving Hyde Park was a 900 square foot one bedroom apartment on the 37^th floor of a 55 story building called River Plaza. Siting between the Wrigley Building and the black walled IBM Center, River Plaza was an unassuming block that was clearly younger than most everything else on the north side of the river. Now in its place is a green curvaceous form that looks like a plant growing before my eyes. It looked like a model set in a contextual photograph. Unreal. Synthetic. Even alien yet also beautiful. This replacement of my one time home is the clearest evidence of the renewal of Chicago.

The sunlight is almost gone and it started to rain. I head back to Union Station through the totally unfamiliar near west side of town.

My eastbound schedule allowed me 6 hours to roam around my old downtown home. First I had to unburden myself of the 60-70 lbs of gear I was lugging around. The train conductor had already confirmed the existence of new post-911 lockers at Union Station. He warned they were “a little pricey”. Boy was that an understatement. Gone are the days of quarters in coin slots. Each locker is big enough for two of those house-moving monster bags tourists are using this days. Access to a locker requires a roll of bills or a credit card and having your fingerprint recorded by on of the 3 kiosks serving the entire wall. Whether this device checks a national fingerprint database or not is unclear. Recovering your stuff requires a six digit code, a matching fingerprint, and $4 per hour up to $12 per day. Wow. In the end, it was well worth $12 for a few hours of freedom.

Ascending into the daylight through the old grand lobby on the west of Union Station, I have no point of reference to gauge the changes. Circling around to riverside, the first thing I notice is a stream of humanity coming at me from across the Jackson Street bridge. The lemming-like mass flow was intoxicating. I backed up against a corner pillar/lamppost on the bridge to watch this diverse stream of office workers pass inches away from me while performing one of their daily rituals; returning home on the train. I tracked individual faces while listening to scattered bits of conversation float by. The diversity of the crowd was underscored by the newspaper hawker calling out hellos and insults in what seemed like all the languages of America’s melting pot. I was transfixed for almost half an hour.

Then I got hungry.

I am on Amtrak 171 in business class at the Route 128 station just south of Boston on the way to New York City. Business class in the north east corridor is my one break from coach travel Clockwise Around America. The people and the sights along the way make it increasingly hard to stay current. I am now uploading the last of day 4 arriving and leaving from Chicago.

This was the second time we had been in the north. I spent the first three years of elementary school in Columbus Ohio while my father, a Navy reconnaissance officer, was assigned to work with North American Aviation. My understanding is he was testing a new bomb sight and photo recon package that would later be used in Vietnam. My father wanted to be an astronaut but the color-blindness that keep him out of the pilot seat also disqualified him to fly for NASA. What he never knew is that Lunar Excursion Module was being developed only three hangers away from his office. He died do what he loved best, flying off carriers, in 1964.

My arrival in Chicago was different. This would be the first time I left home. The first time I lived with people other than family. The first time in a big city. Alone. The reputation of the university and the quality of the students scared me. Soon though the city did not. Here is where I developed my love of trains. The Illinois Central suburban train ran on the eastern flanks of the university enclave but it was expensive and limited to only going downtown. The Chicago Transit Authority trains could get you anywhere in the city. Access to south side Dan Ryan line required a 20 block bus ride through the heart of the south side. For a white southern boy this was a whole nother experience. I loved it.

Now I was coming into Chicago again diagonally from the northwest. The skyline is barely recognizable. Surrounding the once isolated and majestic John Hancock Tower are more than 15 buildings over 60 stories deserving the term tower. To me they look like weeds desecrating the magnificent mile. Even the Sears Tower, for a long time the tallest building in the world, now has competition on the southwest corner of the loop.

Still it feels like home.