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Food Festivals / Festival Travel / Chicago Travel / Food Travel / → All Tags

Find Popcornsicles and Celeb Chefs at Taste of Chicago, Opening Today!

The Windy City cooks up its super-popular food festival today, when the Taste of Chicago opens in Grant Park. It's the annual summertime fest's 30th anniversary, and there will be hip-hoppers, celeb chefs and, of course, lots of eats to celebrate.

There also will be lots of people looking to party; the event is the second-largest tourist attraction in the state, the Mayor’s Office of Special Events says. Making special appearances at the 10-day fest, which runs through July 4, are Iron Chef Mario Batali and Food Network darling Giada De Laurentiis, both of whom will hold cooking demonstrations.

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Music Festivals / Jazz Travel / Chicago Travel / → All Tags

Bebop Over To Chicago's Jazz Fest on September 4

People grudgingly celebrate the end of summer when Labor Day comes around, but the Windy City says goodbye to the season with its annual Chicago Jazz Fest. The free 30-year-old fest, the city's longest-running lakefront music festival, swings into Grant Park Sept. 4 to 6, setting up three stages where you can see Chicago and international jazz players jam on their axes. And for the first time this year, one performance stage will be dedicated to the up-and-coming generations of jazz-heads in high school and college.

The three-day event has a considerable line-up of musicians. Among the headliners is bandleader Muhal Richard Abrams, who will lead a trio Sept. 4 at the Petrillo Music Shell and the Arthur Hoyle Orchestra on Sept. 6. Abrams, a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, was commissioned to create a composition for the fest.

His work, titled "Spiralview," will be dedicated to hometown boy President Barack Obama and feature three soloist sections. The first section showcases George Lewis playing trombone, the next section pairs Ari Brown on sax and Harrison Bankhead on bass in a duet, and the last has Roscoe Mitchell on the saxophone.

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Architecture Travel / Chicago / ORD / Airport Art / O'Hare / Mies van der Rohe / → All Tags

O'Hare Airport Stars in Chicago Photography Exhibition

It just may be the original airport photoshoot: Chicago's Architecture Foundation is paying homage to O'Hare Airport, that great hub on the city's western fringes that usually only receives bad ratings for security wait times. The FREE show, "ORD: Documenting the Definitive Modern Airport," is displaying the vintage photographs from O'Hare's shiny past, before it became the bottleneck it is now.

On display through May 1, the exhibit wants you to get a feel for the buildings of O'Hare free of the departing flight bustle. Influenced by Mies van der Rohe (wasn't everything in Chicago in the '50s and '60s?) yet conceived by Helmut Jahn, O'Hare is known as "Chicago's Versailles," even though we think it's more akin to Chicago's Grande Arche de la Défense; something through which many people pass, but few stop to recognize.

Since nothing excites us more than the combination of free and vintage airport art, we recommend getting down to 224 South Michigan Ave. They've even got a pair of the Eames O'Hare tandem sling seats on display, as well as historical documents and an acoustic installation of airport sounds. Checking out the exhibit may not get you to your flight any faster next time you're at O'Hare, but perhaps it will make you look up and around, quieting your anxiety, and that makes all the difference.

Related Stories:
· ORD: Document the Definitive Modern Airport [Official Site]
· O'Hare Having a Party, No One Coming [Jaunted]
· Architecture Travel Coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: Hedrich Blessing]