Snowdon

Ask any kid raised in England in the 1970s what the tallest mountain in England and Wales is and I guarantee you 90% or more of them know it's Mount Snowdon in Wales. Guaranteed. 

We planned to spend nine nights in Wales and our first stop was the seaside town of Llandudno, which is located about 30 miles or so from Snowdon. We had to get to the top of this mountain on one of our eight full days in Wales. Had to. I mean how many times in your life do you get the opportunity to travel to the top of the highest peak in a country? 

Those first two paragraphs are loaded with rabbit holes and I'm going to venture down a couple of those right away. 

First, there are some strange things I remember from my childhood education in England and highest mountains in Britain is one of those (I discussed this same issue a few years ago on this blog about the year 1066...). The highest mountain in Britain is Ben Nevis in Scotland. Every '70s English kid should know that information. In fact, the highest 22 mountains in Britain are in Scotland (I did NOT know that as a kid). But as if to not let Scotland be the best at anything, my teachers drilled into our heads the highest mountain in Britain AND the highest mountain in England / Wales. There's where Snowdon becomes a household name.

Second, a mountain in Britain is not like a mountain in most other countries. Climbing the highest mountain in the the United States means expedition-ing up Denali to a height of 20,310 feet. Mont Blanc in France is 15,766 feet and you'd need some similarly professional gear and guidance. Same for Kilimanjaro, Everest, and any country in the Alps, Andes and other large ranges. Mount Snowdon? 3,560 feet. It's a hill. It's about a third of the height of Haleakala in Hawaii and you can drive up to top of that mountain. Snowdon? Mountain? Barely. This should be a piece of cake.

One last thing before we get to the meat of this post. I don't remember any teacher in school ever making us memorize the tallest mountain in England. I haven't looked it up and I have no idea what it is. I find that strange, assuming my memory is correct. 

Time to climb Mount Snowdon.

The path to Snowdon's summit.

The walk up and down Mount Snowdon takes pretty much all day. We knew this before we arrived in Wales because my cousin (who has made the hike) told us. We are no strangers to long walks while on holiday. Over the last 13 years, we'd done some pretty epic hikes. Delicate Arch in Utah. Machu Picchu in Peru. Gorilla trekking in Uganda. Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto. A couple of others maybe. We can get some steps in while we are traveling the globe.

So how does the hike up Mount Snowdon compare to those other walks we have taken on other continents? Honestly...I have no idea. We didn't walk up Snowdon. Or down for that matter. We don't see everything that CAN be walked up or to or around as a MUST walk up or to or around. And we just had too darned much to do on Snowdon day to spend the whole day walking. So we didn't hike it.

But we did make it to the peak. Only we took the train most of the way there. We did walk to the peak itself, like the last 50 to 100 feet or so.

Our chariot to the peak.

I can't imagine there are too many mountains in this world where you can take a train pretty much the entire way to the top. I mean I know there are some peaks in the Rockies and I'm sure in various other places all over the world that you can drive to. But train? Can't imagine there are too many. But there is one at Snowdon.

According to the quick briefing before we got before we boarded the Peris (that was the name of our train) for the summit, we were told that folks started visiting Snowdon for tourism purposes at about the end of the Napoleonic Wars. That would be at about the first or second decade of the 19th century, or the 1810s or so.

A few decades later, someone figured out it was possible to build a railway pretty near to the top and so they acquired the land (I guess...we were told no public lands were used for the railway) and went ahead and did it. The railroad took just 14 months from 1894 to 1896 to build. Voila! Tourist access to the top of the tallest mountain in England and Wales (but not Scotland)!

Stopped at a passing place part-way up the mountain.

I know what you might be thinking...isn't a mountain a little steep to be building a railroad on? I mean, isn't there like a maximum slope that you can really run a railroad? And not just up, but down too? Isn't this a recipe for failure? 

Well, yes, it would be. Last summer I wrote about this exact same issue with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway after our visit to the Canadian Rockies. Railroads don't operate very well on sloped ground. The ability to move is based on the friction between the train's wheels and the tracks and the steeper the track is, the harder it is to move. Or stop.

So the builders of the railroad to the top of Snowdon designed it to be different. Take a look at the picture above. Not at our train but at the other track. That track has two outer rails like a typical railroad, but it also has two inner rails which are notched. It is these two inner rails that allow the engine to pull the cars of tourists to the top of the mountain. It's called a rack and pinion railway or a cog railway and the notched or toothed rails in the center of the track are matched with a gear on the engine itself. It's that mechanism that allows the train to ascend and keeps it in place so it will never descend uncontrolled in the event of some sort of emergency situation.

When you are being pulled up that railway you can feel the gravity working against you. The carriage shakes on the steepest portions of the hill as those teeth interlock with the track. You can also feel the whole train being held on the track on the way down. Like it's waiting to break loose but can't.

The rack and pinion railway in situ and in mockup form.

The original trains that took tourists up to the top of Snowdon were all steam powered. Today, the Snowdon Mountain Railway operates both diesel and steam trains on the same route. We wanted to take a steam train but they were sold out when we made our reservation for this mountain climb six months in advance (!!!!) so we settled for the diesel. I'm not sure the experience is much different. The hour long trip to the top and descent of the same length was still impressive and gorgeous and filled with views of sheep in fields. 

If there was a concern I had about this trip, it was the length of time we were allowed at the top of the mountain. The turnaround time between arrival at the top of mountain station and departure back down the slope was just 30 minutes. 

I shouldn't have worried. On the other hand, I could see myself worrying if I ever were do to this again.

The final push for the summit (I know I'm making it sound like we had done a lot to get close...) is not a huge effort. It's a quick walk up some steps to a monument at the top with a gold disc on top which points out what you can see in the distance from the summit. The queue to the top was slow, mostly because people were taking pictures of themselves or their traveling companions, and the way down was actually pretty treacherous, particularly if you have issues descending irregular rocky slopes like I do. After we got done with that, we made a quick stop at the souvenir store and we were back in plenty of time to make the return train.

However, that plenty of time scenario came with absolutely no view because the mountain was completely fogged in. It was so foggy that we could barely see five feet without the mist obscuring our view. I honestly would have liked to see the view from the top of Snowdon, particularly if you can see all the way to the Isle of Man or the Lake District. And I think if i had been able to see all that way, I would have been rushed.

The fog made it not an issue. 

Proof we made it to the top.

But the fog also made a huge impression on me.

I remember watching Ken Burns' The National Parks and being told that Denali (North America's tallest mountain) in Alaska was so massive that it created its own weather. I thought that made sense at 20,000 plus feet all the way in Alaska, even if it was embedded within a mountain range. I'd heard or read similar stories about flight paths that avoid the Himalayas in Asia for the same reason.

I didn't consider Snowdon a real mountain before we visited this year. Even considering when I visited Snowdon as a kid in England and had a snowball fight in June somewhere up the slope. I mean the top elevation of the mountain is about half the elevation of the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In my mind, I couldn't see Snowdon having any real effect on the weather. I took a jacket, but I almost didn't. And I only took a jacket because I thought it might rain because it can rain at any time in Britain no matter the current conditions.

But here's the thing. It was warm and sunny at the base of the mountain that day when we boarded the railway. It was also warm and sunny when we got back to the base of the mountain, as it was when we were about maybe a third of the way up. But at the top, a mere 3,500 feet or so above sea level, it was not. The weather was completely different, including a dense layer of fog that somehow the sun seemed unabel to penetrate when you were standing (or training) just a couple of thousand feet lower. How is it possible that a hill affects the weather that much? It honestly elevated my respect for Snowdon.

We visited Snowdon because we wanted to get to the top of the highest peak in England/Wales. We thought it would be a comfortable journey to the top along a standard railway and that we'd get a great view of the Welsh countryside. We didn't get that at all. We came away impressed by the railway and how different it was from anything we'd ridden before. 

But we came away more impressed with Snowdon. The Mountain named Snowdon. It was obviously wild and inhospitable despite it being late May and despite the Mountain not being really that tall compared to some other mountains we'd visited. It's not all about size, I guess.

Snowdon done! Maybe the next mountain we come to we'll walk. Or not. Maybe.

Of course there's a pub called The Snowdon. In Llandudno.

Train Kept A-Rollin

How great an idea are national parks? Whether it's in the United States or Canada or anywhere else around the world, what could be more inspiring than a country's government setting aside areas of absolutely outstanding natural beauty within its borders for the use of its population in perpetuity? No development. No farming. No settlement. Just open space preserved that way. Awesome, right?

I certainly think so. I love these places. 

But things don't always start out the way they seem today. 

So, sure, in 2025 it is amazing to be able to visit six Parks Canada National Parks just west of Calgary. I honestly loved every bit of the country and the scenery and the gorgeous natural wonders that we explored in late June and early July of this year. And full disclosure...I want to go back. Both to Banff and Jasper and Yoho and beyond. Way beyond. I'm all in on Canada's National Parks. How the heck have we never explored these places before this year? 

And yes, we already have our next Canada vacation booked. And there is at least one National Park on the itinerary. 

How could you not want to go back and see this sort of view? Glacier National Park.

There was a time not too long ago (let's say 150 years or so...) when it was pretty much about impossible for any sort of regular person on this planet to get to Banff and everywhere else we visited this summer. 

4-1/2 hour flight to Calgary? Forget about it. Calgary as a city? Not yet. Not then. In fact, no Calgary at all. Not then. No city. No town. No village. No hamlet. Nothing.

If you even had the time and money to travel (and let's face it, it hasn't been that long since a large portion of the population on Earth could really do much with their lives than struggle to stay alive), how would you get there? On foot? Are you crazy? In some kind of horse drawn wagon? Probably not. Not in that country. On horseback? I guess. If you can live off the land and manage maintain good relations with the people and wildlife already there. 

What about the railroad? Didn't that exist in the 1870s? The transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed in 1869. Couldn't you ride the rails out to what is now Banff? 

Nope. No you couldn't. No railroad in Canada back then.

But the idea was out there. When British Columbia agreed to join Canada (and not the United States) in 1871, they demanded a railroad. One that would connect Canada's newest residents to the rest of Canada on the eastern side of the continent. So Canada embarked on a national project to connect the two coasts of the country by train. 

It started out great, meaning with mass bribes to government decision makers; generous to insanely generous land grants to the awarded contractor; required approval of additional funds when the project was in a "we either pay what we shouldn't or let the whole thing just end up as nothing" status; and generally seemed like a huge gamble for everyone involved but of course really ended up being gigantically profitable (on like a generational wealth basis) for those same people. All of them. The people getting paid and the people authorizing the funds.

Oh...and it eventually it paved the way for Canadians to visit their nation's first National Parks, complete with luxury hotels at the stops along the line. And of course, those hotels were built and operated by the same folks who secured the insane but insanely rich contracts to build the railroad in the first place. Of course it did. 

Rogers Pass. Glacier National Park.

So putting aside all the grift and bribery and overcharging the Canadian government and corruption, building a railroad across Canada was a monumental achievement that is still evident today. And nowhere was that achievement tougher and more costly on a number of levels than the portion of track spanning the Canadian Rockies. But it happened. 

How tough was it to build through the Rockies? Well, maybe we should start with how easy it was building a railroad across the prairie. Easy if setting up a mobile camp that was supposed to be alcohol free but which rarely was in the middle of nowhere with potentially hostile people and wildlife staffed by lots of imported labor divided racially with plenty of white resentment towards the better organized and more effective but lower paid Chinese workers that is. 

The Canadian Pacific Railroad started their work on the prairie. They did that so that as much land and money could convey to them for making progress as quickly as possible. On a good day, over six miles of track could be laid on the flat open prairie. I know that might not seem like a ton of progress but in the mountains it was significantly more difficult. On some days, 2 meters of progress was made. And that was using heavy quantities of dynamite. 

And that progress in the Rockies could only be made after a path through was found. Today, it looks simple because the job is done. You just drive it. But back in the second half of the nineteenth century, finding the right pass through the mountains that could also work with the required maximum grade for locomotive travel was a giant endeavor. It was so complicated that the CPR had to pay someone to do it for them. That finders fee payment to one A.P. Rogers came with a contractual requirement to name the pass after him in perpetuity. 

This summer, the railroad was very visible to us as we drove through Banff, Yoho and Mount Revelstoke National Parks and in the town of Golden. Heck, we had to wait on more than one occasion for a very long train to pass in front of us in the way to or from dinner in Golden. It was not an unexpected sight to see trains rolling along the tracks as we drove through that gorgeous landscape west of Calgary. All of that track is on solid ground, on fill which I am sure is engineered and compacted to provide the most stable and safe ride.

It wasn't always that way. In the first draft of the railroad through this area of Canada, there were places where the ground was too steep for a train in the late 1800s to climb. So the engineers that built the original railroad used elevated sections of track on wooden trestles (in the 1880s) that were eventually replaced with stone masonry piers (in the early 1900s). Some of these tracks on trestles are piers were really steeper than the rules would allow and so because of the importance attached to an operable coast-to-coast railroad, some corners were allowed to be cut. They could fix it later, right? And what were the odds things would go wrong in these steep sections? Oh...that also happened to be banked so the train could go up them fast to make the grade and not fall off the track. That's all OK, right? 

I'm sure someone felt it was safe enough. The odds of someone dying in a train falling off an elevated track were certainly lower than the risk of death to someone placing dynamite into a drilled hole in rock and then swinging away in a chair on a rope before the dynamite exploded, right? Of course that person was getting paid, not paying. 

Eventually, the elevated tracks got replaced. The deteriorating condition of the original wooden trestles sort of forced the railroad to move to masonry piers. The move away from those piers was likely driven by fears of trains flying off tracks than by the stone piers collapsing but eventually it got done. 

But there is still one place where you can see evidence of how it used to be. It's a trail called Loop Brook Trail in Glacier National Park. And it's super simple and amazing at the same time. 

But first, let me say how incredibly gorgeous this Rogers Pass in Glacier National Park is. I know the Pass was selected for its relative (I guess) ease of passage through the Rockies but it also is just spectacular. There's a picture above. Since we got back from Canada, I've looked through photos again and again that we took in and of those mountains and I'm not sure there's a place of more supreme beauty than Rogers Pass. Yes, there's a road going right through it but I don't even care. We actually stopped on the way back to Golden on the side of the road and took more pictures of this area even though we already had the exact same pics looking the opposite way in the morning. Just stunning.

And after our second pass through Rogers Pass, we got to Loop Brook.

Loop Brook Trail starts maybe 100 feet or so from the parking lot. Want a trail with very little hiking to get there? Loop Brook may be the trail for you. And right at the beginning of the trail are five of the original 1906 stone piers that used to hold the railroad tracks aloft. They are just standing there in the forest next to a furiously bubbling stream, relics of some past age when people did things differently and traveled differently. After more than 100 years, they are standing solidly still tracing the curve of the original railroad route. They are just incredible to see, still there after all this time. 

We have spent time over the past 12 years hiking all over some places we have been to discover ruins hidden in the middle of nowhere. Mayan ruins in Guatemala. Incan cities in Peru. Ancient stone circles in England and tombs in Ireland. The list goes on. And here in Canada in the Rocky Mountains is the same sort of stuff. Only a lot more recent. It reminds me of Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring passing giant statues of bygone kings in the woods on their way to Mordor. That's what this felt like to me. These are modern day remnants engineered to hold train tracks and they are just incredible.

The trail helps you appreciate these relics. It loops around to the top of the western-most pier so you can see them from above. And it does the same on the other end, admittedly after you pass the one pier that has collapsed in the 120 or so years since it was put in place by men whose names are probably not even known to this day.

The collapse, by the way...a combination of erosion from the stream undermining the foundation followed by an avalanche to really knock the thing over. Impressive that four of the five are still standing up as they were intended given those kind of threats. 

Those five stone towers along Loop Brook Trail are not the only masonry railroad piers still standing. As you drive into the parking lot for the Trail, you pass eight others, all proudly present as you drive the road to the trailhead past and between these mighty stone structures. We stopped on the way out to admire, to look at them from every angle we could and to touch them and feel the solidity that is still there. 

This whole experience took less than a half an hour. But the symbolism associated with this stop was immense for me. I know these kinds of things mean more to me than they do to some others because I'm an architect and have actively been engaged for over 30 years in designing and seeing things built that are supposed to last. Seeing stone structures that were built effectively in the middle of nowhere more than a century ago that still feel enormously there to the touch is just fantastic. 

This was also our last real stop in the western Rockies. We visited Takakkaw Falls in Yoho the morning after and did a little impromptu birding at Vermilion Lakes and at a bathroom stop in Banff later in our drive to Calgary, but in our real exploration of Parks Canada's National Parks, this half an hour with these stone giants sticks out as the culmination of our 2025 time in the mountains. I think it's fitting that we stopped and admired part of the railroad from the 1880s that brought so many people to this area for the first time all those decades ago. I couldn't have thought of a better ending. 

For now. If I have my way, we'll be back some day.

The first cross-country journey on the Canadian Pacific Railroad departed Montreal on June 28, 1886 and arrived in Vancouver on July 4 that same year. We arrived in the Canadian Rockies on June 27 of this year (149 years later) and departed on June 3. If we'd only done this trip a year and a day later...

No regrets on the schedule. I loved this trip. Like really loved it. What's up next? I'm thinking South Africa is nice this time of year.

The "L"

My Southeast Asia blogging is about 2/3 done. OK maybe a tiny bit more. Time for another domestic travel story break. I'll finish up Singapore, Malaysia and everywhere else we went in February after this post.

2024 is going to be an extremely unusual travel year for me. For the first time in my career (and only like 30 years in...), I'm doing a significant amount of work travel. In an average work year before last fall-ish, I'd take one or at most two trips somewhere requiring an overnight stay in some city that I didn't call home. This year? Lots of out-of-town trips. When this year is over, I'm guessing maybe 10 or 12 total. Primarily New York, but not just New York. 

To make it even weirder, my wife is doing the same thing. So when she snagged a coveted speaking spot at a conference in Chicago with a hotel room covered entirely by her company in April, I had to tag along. This is the stuff I live for. It combines two things I love most of all: travel and mooching (free hotel!). Now I just had to figure out what to do in the Windy City for a couple of days while the love of my life was busy speaking to an audience of hundreds and listening to others do the same.

I'm very proud of her accomplishments at this conference, by the way.

This was not my first visit to Chicago. I think it was number six, although I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. But I'd never been faced with getting to the city by myself and keeping myself busy for a day plus on a Friday and Saturday all by myself. Complete freedom is daunting sometime. What to do?

As an architect, one of the things I've always admired about the city of Chicago is the way that they have sold architecture as a tourist attraction for visitors. So I looked at the Chicago Architecture Center as a source of inspiration for this trip. The classic Chicago architecture tour is a boat ride down the Chicago River, but I was pretty sure I'd be familiar with most everything they would show us on that trip and I wanted something more obscure, more architect-y. There are a lot of choices.

Buried deep in their tour list is an architecture tour conducted from the "L", Chicago's mass transit rail system that connects the downtown to all sorts of points within and outside of Chicago. I have been a longtime lover of mass transit so this instantly appealed to me to dig into a little more. Plus I had to get to the city from Midway Airport somehow and yep, the "L" serves the airport too. Seems like there was a theme developing here. And if I love anything more than mooching on travel, it's themes.

OK, so that's not true. I love mooching way more than pretty much anything.

First view of Chicago. On the "L" from Midway Airport.

This would not be my first time riding the "L". I did it on my first visit to Chicago in 1995 and honestly, it was not a good experience. I actually feel comfortable saying I hated it. We took it from wherever it was in the city we were staying down to whatever blues club we were headed to for the night. It was dirty. It was noisy. It was smelly. And it felt unsafe; the station we boarded the train at was deserted except for one or two sketchy-looking characters and somehow there is something stuck in my head about a vicious-looking dog. We cabbed back. I've never been on it since. 

But 1995 is a long time ago. I like to think I've grown a lot since then. 

Friday morning. 8 a.m. Midway Airport. Not O'Hare. Southwest goes to Midway. 10 minute walk to the "L" station. $5 day pass which gets me anywhere and everywhere on this magnificent mass transit system. Time to go to the big city!

So why is it called the "L" and why do I keep using quotes around the letter? First of all, I'll stop doing the quotes thing. Second of all, L is short for elevated. And it's short for elevated because Chicago's downtown transit rail line is unlike any other system in the world that I have experienced: it's elevated 20 feet or so above the street. If you want to board mass transit in New York or Paris or Washington or Singapore or Boston, you are generally heading underground. Not in Chicago. You are walking up a set of steps.

And just to get the whole New York perspective out of the way...yes, I know there are elevated train tracks in the Subway system and yes, I also know New York is the best city in the United States and quite possibly the world, but there are no elevated trains in most of Manhattan. Downtown Chicago: elevated trains. Downtown New York: underground trains.

The L running right down the middle of a street in downtown Chicago. Check out that steel!

Mass transit in Chicago didn't start with the L. In fact, it didn't even start with trains. The L is really the fifth generation of mass transit in the city. The first public use train tracks were laid by the Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad in June 1892. The track was just 3.6 miles in length and it connected downtown Chicago to Jackson Park to the south. That section of track is still in use today on the Green Line of the L. 

Before 1892, Chicago had gone through several iterations of private mass transit, starting with horses pulling carts, then horses pulling trains, then cable cars, then electric street trollies before finally moving to electric train service (although there were admittedly a couple of years of steam). These modes of transportation definitely overlapped in their service life but ultimately the train won out because it was faster by a factor of two and much safer. Apparently pedestrian fatalities were a bit of an issue for the street trollies.

It's perhaps worth spending a little bit of time on some history here. I mean, why is there even an elevated train in downtown Chicago in the first place? And isn't it kind of inconvenient for property owners to have a train running past their second or third floor windows making all that noise and blocking the light? Not to mention the atmosphere at street level with some giant train track supports covering up most of the facades of the buildings and blocking the light from the street level, like someone put a ceiling on the street?

Well, yes, there is all that. The quick answer to the why is the track elevated is that it was cheaper to elevate than tunnel. Why did people permit it to run right in front of their buildings? That's a little murkier because for sure when you've just built a brand new fancy building in the late 1800s (remember Chicago burned to the ground in 1871 so everything was pretty much brand new when the L started to be built). the last thing I think you'd want is a train track 20 feet off the ground running right in front of it. 

There may have been some cajoling and payments involved on this one and maybe a little more pressure than just simple cajoling, particularly in Chicago's downtown or Loop area, where a financier who was convicted of larceny and somehow got out of jail through blackmail (sketchy, right?) named Charles Yerkes worked some kind of magic to get the bare minimum of property owners to sign off on his building an elevated rail line in the heart of the city. 

The restored to almost original condition Quincy Station on the Loop, including the reconstructed station house.

The entire L system in Chicago started out as a bunch of independent operators sometimes using the same tracks (particularly Yerkes' Loop) to get people from point A to point B around the city. It was apparently a risky business because it seemed like there were a lot of bankruptcies over the decades. To clean all that up, the State of Illinois created the Chicago Transit Authority, which was given a mandate to purchase all the equity in the various independent private rail operators and bring the whole system under one banner. That happened in 1947 and when they did it, they closed a whole series of stations. There was a station about every other block, built that way to compete with the street trollies, which were long gone in 1947.

Today, the L transports Chicagoans and visitors alike over a network that is 224 miles long and features 145 different stations on a total of eight different routes. It is the fourth largest transit system in the United States and one of only three transit systems worldwide to operate 24 hours per day (along with New York and Copenhagen). In 1994, the CTA extended the Blue Line to O'Hare Airport. Nine years later, they extended the Orange Line to Midway Airport, which is how I got to downtown Chicago on time for my 11 a.m. L tour with the Chicago Architecture Center.

The Willis (neé Sears) Tower. The brick warehouse in the center of the pic is a Daniel Burnham design.

The idea behind an architecture tour on the L is that you can get a good sense of a lot of Chicago's architectural history by stepping off at the some of the Loop platforms and taking a look around. We spent about 90 minutes on the L itself and covered just about two miles (there are only eight stations in the loop) but we certainly could have spent a lot more time; there's a ton to see.

We didn't get what I would consider Chicago's most publicly consumable architecture on this tour. The L doesn't go anywhere near SOM's Willis (Sears) Tower or the former John Hancock Building. Nor does it pass by Marina City or the Chicago Art Institute or the Tribune Tower. You also can't see any of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive apartments. True, you can see the Willis Tower from the Washington/Wells station platform, but you are not really that close at all. 

Was that disappointing? Not for me it wasn't. There's more to architecture than signature buildings and there were a lot of very fine architects practicing architecture in the late 1800s, not that every building we saw was of that vintage. But I do especially love that period of architectural history, when architects were exploring new technology and materials that had been produced and discovered (or re-discovered when it comes to concrete) during the industrial revolution. In places like Paris, that exploration and struggle brought about Art Nouveau and ultimately Modernism with a capital M. In Chicago, it helped with building higher and higher. 

Daniel Burnham's magnificent Fisher Building (1896).

I'm not going to blow-by-blow the building list but I will give the superlatives in a few categories along with the station where we saw them.

The most instantly-recognizable-by-a-non-architect building we saw was the Willis Tower. Yes, it was at a pretty good distance but SOM's and particularly structural engineer Fazlur Khan's revolutionary bundled tube design that allowed this building to be the world's tallest when it was built under the Sears name is always worth a look. Incredibly, it is now the world's 25th tallest building. Station: Washington / Wells.

The most important building from a history of architecture standpoint was the Monadnock Building. When it was built in 1891 according to the design of Burnham and Root, it was the tallest load-bearing brick building in the world. It still is. This was about the limit that traditional masonry construction could be built vertically. The Monadnock building was the last of its kind. Nobody ever tried to build a masonry load-bearing brick building that tall after this. Its achievement is both being the tallest of its kind and also making architects and engineers realize there was a better way to build tall buildings. The "most important" designation here is mine. Disagree if you want. Station: Harold Washington Library.

The building by the most important architect was the Jewelers' Row Building by Adler and Sullivan. I am once again personally assigning a "most important" label based on Louis Sullivan's innovation and influence over the profession and history of architecture. I'm not a huge Sullivan guy personally but he was clearly influential, even if for no other reason than Frank Lloyd Wright came out of his shop and Wright acknowledged Sullivan as a mentor. Personally, I think Wright succeeds with or without Sullivan but that's just me. Sullivan clearly erected some significant buildings in his life and move us towards modern architecture in ways that I feel are beyond debate. Station: Washington / Wabash.

The standout building for me on the tour was Daniel Burnham's Fisher Building. I think architects today sometimes don't appreciate Burnham enough. I think it's because of his significant involvement in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago that legitimately set the public appreciation of and attitude to what good architecture could be back a few centuries. But there were times he got it right and the light and elegant, 20 story Fisher Building is just spectacular. I know there are some neo-gothic touches towards the top of the thing but they are less heavy-handed than the more famous and also neo-gothic Tribune Building across the river. I think the Fisher Building as an early high rise building has aged well. Station: Harold Washington Library.

Adler and Sullivan's Jewelers' Building (1881). It's the red brick and stone building.

The best thing about exploring Chicago's architecture on the L, though, was not the variety of buildings we got to see, although the selection was pretty impressive. The best thing was the different perspective you get on the buildings that are visible from the station platforms, particularly those that are super close up when you are standing waiting for the train. 

Plain and simple, the designers of most of these things never intended for their architecture to be viewed that way. And given the 100 plus years that have passed since some of these things were conceived and built, the results are surprisingly good. You can get a fantastic look at the brickwork, detailing and particularly the terra cotta panels that were in vogue in the late 1800s and early 1900s on some of these structures. Terra cotta just is not a popular cladding material in the twenty-first century so to see these prefabricated units up close literally 10 feet or so in front of your face is pretty spectacular. We were never supposed to be this close to some of these buildings because there was no L in place when they were built. This phenomenon is purely accidental. 

There is some irony, therefore, in walking along the south platform of the Harold Washington Library and looking close up at some of the details on the station's namesake building. You can get a fantastic look at the midwestern-inspired details on the facade of the building at just about platform level. The corn stalks above and below the face of Ceres are both whimsical and exactly appropriate. Good thing the details can be seen from the station because there's no way they could have been seen from the street. But the Washington Library wasn't built before the L was in place like the Fisher Building. It was completed in 1992. The designers either ignored the presence of the L entirely, or were opting to match the building's neighbors. I can't see either one making much sense.

Terra cotta panels (top); Harold Washington Library detail (bottom).

Remember that whole theme thing I mentioned earlier? I found a way to add to it. I'm a bit of a completist (or close to it) that way. So the day after my ride in from Midway and my time on the CAC tour, I thought I should get back on the L and head up to the Chicago History Museum to learn a little more about the history of Chicago's downtown mass transportation. 

Brown Line, if you must know.

So, why the Chicago History Museum? Well, it seemed like a good place to pair with my Friday time on the L because they have in their collection one of the original L cars that transported people from the Loop to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It's located on the second floor of the Museum right at the top of the main public stairs. It is quite different from today's L cars. Train travel has come a long way in the last 130 years.

This train car was clearly built for a more refined time when going to work or just downtown probably involved wearing your finest clothing and you likely expected the accommodations inside the train to match your dress. No hard plastic seats in the 1890s. Cushioned fabric all the way arrayed across a choice of seating configurations, including some benches facing each other that looked to me like there was precious little knee space between you and the person you'd be facing. 

The appearance of the car also likely reflects the attitude toward the manufacture of train cars used by the public and probably didn't differentiate between long-distance train travel and local mass transit. What does that mean? Well to me in addition to the comfort expected in the seats themselves, the majority of the cabin both inside and out is made of wood. That likely means hand assembled with care which took a lot of effort and time. The result is something softer and warmer to the touch than the stainless steel used in L cars today. It also likely meant more wear and tear and a deteriorated appearance far sooner than today's L cars. 

1893 L car, Chicago History Museum. You can see some of the interior in the bottom photo.

I honestly hoped for a little bit more out of the L Car exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. There are other exhibits in the Museum which shed light on Chicago's history and culture but if I'd gone only to see the 1893 L car, I'm not sure I would have thought it was worth the $19 admission charge. I'm not putting down the whole museum, just cautioning future visitors like me who ONLY want to see the L.

I thought my trip up to the Museum was worth it. I needed something to do; I wanted to see as much as I could about the history of the L in my two days in town; and I had my first Chicago dog ever on the way up there. I'm not sold on the Chicago dog in total. I'm still preferring mustard and sauerkraut and leaving it at that hot dog-wise. 

But I also got something else on the L ride up there.

The Monadnock Building, 1891.

The hour and a half or so I spent inside the L system on Friday late morning and early afternoon had me standing on elevated train platforms looking at buildings while a lot of trains passed by. Multiples lines run through the Loop and it was a business day. We didn't have to wait at all for the next train because it seemed like they were passing through every station we visited at least every two or three minutes.

My trip up to the Chicago History Museum was on a Saturday. On Saturdays, trains don't run as frequently as they do on Fridays. On the way up there, I tried to enter the station at an entrance that didn't sell fare cards so I had to retrace my steps and go in a different entrance. I then fumbled around with the fare card machine and just missed a train headed north. The result of all my confusion, misdirection and not hurrying, combined with a Saturday train schedule, had me looking at a lot more on the way into the station and had me standing on the platform a lot longer with nothing to look at other than what was around me. 

And that made me notice one or two things. 

First of all, you might have heard it gets a little windy in Chicago from time to time. And it certainly was that way when I was standing on the Brown Line platform waiting for a train to take me north. To shelter from the wind, I found a three sided enclosure towards the middle of the platform that seemed like it would provide me a little relief from the cold. It did. If it had been 21 days earlier, I would have been able to get a lot warmer by hitting the heater button. These things are heated on demand from November to March. Cool. Or hot. Never seen this before. Probably because most all stations most everywhere else are underground and protected from the wind.

The other thing I noticed on my way into the station was a north arrow on the ground at the bottom of the stairs to the station. If I have a pet peeve about most mass transit systems, it's that you can't tell which way is north when you exit the station and there's nothing to help you out. It's especially bad in New York. I cannot for the life of me figure out which way to walk when exiting a New York City Subway station half the time. The perfect solution is what the CTA does: add a north arrow for people at the point where they enter the city. It's genius and very helpful. And I did not just see this in one spot in Chicago. It's like a thing. 

Now if there's a bit of an irony here, it's that I don't find the L disorienting direction-wise precisely because it's NOT underground. I feel the same way when I'm moving around the above ground stations in other cities, most recently in Tokyo. It's just a lot easier to get turned around below the surface of the Earth. Nonetheless, I appreciate the gesture and there are some L stations which are not above ground and I'm sure I'd love this helpful sign in some other spots throughout the city.

Sometimes I pick activities when I travel that have a high ceiling but often fail to deliver. When that happens, I don't spend time blogging about them. Maybe there's a post on Instagram but that would be about it. This 2024 re-introduction to the L for me was definitely worth the few hours spent on a couple of spring days exploring the history of the system and where it can take us, even if we end up spending 90 minutes getting on and off at various stations seeing what we can see and and end up getting off at the exact same spot we got on. I know next time I visit to Chicago, I'll be all about getting on the L and going wherever I need to go that it takes me.

And in this crazy travel year that has a ton of work trips, that next time would be later this month. No blogging about that trip. I'm there on that one for work, not as a tourist. I think my tourism trip to Chicago is going to end up being more satisfying than this upcoming work trip. Hey...you can't have everything you want all the time.

North arrow. Sometimes it's all about the details.

Pullman

In the year 1880, George Pullman started building a town just south of Chicago. By that, I don't mean that he built the first building in a remote location hoping others would follow and settle in a similar spot. I mean he started building a whole town from scratch. With his own money. And not so he could sell those properties to others at a profit or something like that. He intended to hang on to every last building he built.

In the 20 years or so before 1880, George Pullman had a pretty good run in business. In the late 1850s he had an idea that folks might need a comfortable rail car to ride around in for days while exploring the United States by means of the rapidly expanding railroad network. He was right. That first car, the Pullman Old No. 9, featured a wood-burning stove, some comfortable seats and a series of bunks for sleeping overnight. The success of that first car allowed Pullman to start his own company, which he named after himself. 

Pullman rolled out a new and improved version of the Old No. 9 in 1865. The Old No. 9 was an adaptation of an already existing railroad car. The 1865 Pullman car, The Pioneer, was built from scratch as an overnight sleeper car. Gone were the wood burning stoves and added were folding bunks that allowed more space for traveling in comfort during the day. 

He kept working. An improved, longer Pullman sleeper car was rolled out in 1876. 

They kept selling. The railroads were expanding quickly. The amount of track in this country tripled between 1870 and 1890 from 53,000 miles to more than 160,000 miles. That translated into a booming business for George Pullman. Very booming. 

It is difficult to understand in the year 2021 how successful these sleeper cars were. While Amtrak still has overnight accommodations on their trains today, I can't believe they drive anything about the industry. But in the 1860s, Pullman sleeper cars were a significant and important mode of transportation. So much so that when The Pioneer was introduced with a wider body than all previous rail cars, platforms were re-built and bridges widened so The Pioneer could serve stations and fit under bridges. Pullman was a mover.

1955 Pullman Car.

So sometime in the 1870s, Pullman decided the next step for the company was to build a new factory and headquarters. Since he was going to all that trouble, he decided he may as well build housing for all his workers while he was at it. And supply them with all the conveniences that they may need in life to live in a town at that time some travel distance from the city of Chicago. After all, they would pretty much need to move out of town to keep their jobs. Welcome to Pullman!

Reaction to Pullman's gesture of building a town for his workforce was mixed. Pullman himself saw his endeavor as altruistic, giving his loyal workers a safe, family oriented community free of danger and temptation. Others saw it as a method for Pullman to exercise an unnatural level of control over the people he employed to build his sleeper cars. There is perhaps more than a kernel of truth in the latter point of view. 

In some ways, Pullman was doing for his employees just what medieval landlords and former plantation owners had done to serfs and freed slaves: giving them protection and a place to live, but setting the cost of that lodging (Pullman did charge his employees rent to live in his company housing, after all) and certain conditions about their lives. After all, you could only do in Pullman what George Pullman had put in his town. Church? Yes. Library? Sure. Stables and railway station. Umm...yeah. How else are you going to get in and out of town? Shops and a theater and a hotel? Yes and yes and yes. Saloon? No. Hard pass on that one. Pullman didn't believe in it.

Still, as long as Pullman was profitable and happy and everyone (mostly) agreed with him, I suppose it could have worked out fine forever. I mean, how badly do you need a saloon if your boss is like the ultimate philanthropist and greatest guy in the world?

The Pullman headquarters, now the Pullman National Monument Visitor Center.

Greenstone Church, Pullman.

Of course, that's not what happened. Eventually all booms bust, at least a little. And sure enough, the boom times for the Pullman Company eventually hit a snag.

In 1893, a nationwide depression hit, and demand for Pullman's sleeper cars dropped. For the first time in a long while, George Pullman was faced with a losing business situation. And his reaction was not good. 

You'd think someone who could afford to build an entire town with the profits from his company and who saw himself as a father figure of sorts for the people that he employed might be inclined to bend over backwards to keep those people who had built him a fortune safe and secure. Not so much. Not here. He decided he needed to lay off some of his workforce (who at this point lived miles from any other real viable source of employment, remember). For those that remained, working hours would increase and wages would be cut by 25%. 25% is a lot. I guess it's better than not having a job but, let's face it, it's a big cut.

And rent? Well that didn't change. George Pullman was going to pay you less to work in Pullman but still charge you the same amount to live there.

Now maybe I don't know all the factors that drove Pullman's reaction to this downturn in business but I do know this: in 1898, just half a decade after he made these decisions relative to his workforce, the Pullman Company was valued at $63.5 million. That's $2 billion in 2021 money. I have to believe Pullman had enough in the bank to ride this one out a little without taking it out of his employees. But then again, this was also the 1890s. 

Hotel Florence, named after George Pullman's daughter.

The former stables, Pullman.

The reaction to Pullman's cost cutting measures was a strike, with the American Railway Union (ARU) supporting Pullman's employees. And then things really devolved from there.

Pullman doubled down on his decision and refused to give an inch, which predictably resolved nothing. Eventually, the ARU extended the strike in support of Pullman's workers to include no longer staffing any trains nationwide that pulled a Pullman car. Some of those trains also served the United States Postal Service so not moving Pullman cars meant not moving the mail. That got the federal government involved. Troops were deployed in 1894 (on the side of Pullman, of course), a few incidental deaths happened and eventually the strike was busted. 

I can easily imagine George Pullman thought he had won, but in many ways the strike of 1893 was the beginning of a series of events that ultimately spelled the end for the Pullman Company. George Pullman died in 1897, just one year before the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the charter issued to the Company allowed the construction of company offices, factories and support buildings but not housing. That decision forced the sale of the housing in Pullman, and not all sales were to employees of the company.

The 20th century brought more trouble for the Pullman Company. Antitrust legislation. Another labor dispute, this one with the porters who worked on Pullman's cars (we'll get to that...). The decline of the railroad and the rise of the automobile and of air travel. Despite all of that, the Pullman Company rolled out a new Pullman sleeper car model at least once a decade all the way through the 1950s. But ultimately, it was too much and then end came on January 1, 1969.

George Pullman and the company he founded are long gone. But Pullman still exists. Or at least a lot of it does. Sure, the factories are gone or abandoned; the market building is burned out; the railway station has been replaced; and the community center called the Arcade that housed the library, theater and shops is no longer there. But Pullman is not abandoned. It's a living, breathing neighborhood that carries the legacy of the Pullman Company and its founder, but has also moved well beyond George Pullman. And it's well worth a visit. We penciled it in on the last day of our recent Milwaukee to Chicago via Iowa swing over Labor Day weekend.

Now as luck would have it, it was the grand opening weekend of the Pullman National Monument on the weekend we visited. The former Pullman administration building and what's left of the adjacent boarded up and burned out factories form the initial stage of the National Monument created by presidential decree by President Obama way back in 2015. Being there for the grand opening was a blessing and a curse. While it was awesome to be a part of the event, access to both the Visitor Center (they moved us through in 15 minutes total, including the gift shop) and the Hotel Florence (we couldn't get in at all) was extremely limited.

I'm assuming the restoration of the factories may be on the horizon somehow as funding becomes available, although that's honestly a bit of a guess. Otherwise there's not a whole lot to see there beyond the Visitor Center (on the ground floor of the administration building); a landscaped plaza near the old rear erecting shops; and the Hotel Florence just to the south. Admittedly, we would have spent at least twice as much time in the Visitor Center if we weren't on the clock and being reminded every five minutes of how much time we had remaining.

If what remains of the company part of the town of Pullman is pretty cool (and it really is), the rest of the town blows it away with both quantity and quality. While the Pullman Company was in decline, the town itself was anything but. The factories are shells of what they used to be and most of the buildings built by Pullman to serve the community are gone, but the houses are (to the untrained eye at least) all still there and gorgeously cared for by people who seem to love living there.

The details of these Victorian houses are incredible and they don't look any worse for wear for the 140 years since they were built. This was not a community built with expediency and the lowest cost in mind. It is a testament to the people who built the town and the people who have lived there and cared for it that there are this many perfect looking residences in one place. There are literally blocks upon blocks of these things. It's impressive. If you can stand to walk around a town and gaze at and take pictures of strangers' houses (I clearly can), I would highly suggest a walk through the neighborhoods of Pullman in addition to visiting the National Monument.

Then before you leave, make one more stop, please. At the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum on the north end of town. In a lot of ways, the story of the Pullman Porters is more remarkable and important than that of the company that hired them.

Back in the 1860s when you purchased a Pullman sleeper car, it came fully staffed. Call it a service contract, if you will. A way for George Pullman to offer a consistently high level of service that was expected of the Pullman brand. No matter where you traveled on a Pullman car, you would received the exact same level of personal attention and pampering that you would on any other Pullman trip. It provided Pullman a lot of control over his customers' experiences, while at the same time bringing a consistent stream of revenue to his bank account.

To staff his cars with porters, George Pullman turned to a group of people who in the 1860s had little economic opportunity. He decided he would only hire black men to perform this job for him. Another altruistic move from the Pullman Company? Maybe. Or like the housing he built for his workers miles away from anything else, maybe not. Pullman had a very specific thought process when it came to hiring black men (including many recently freed slaves) for these positions. He knew he could pay them very little, could work them long hours (up to 400 hours a month in some cases) and could expect an appropriately servile attitude likely ingrained in their psyche based on their standing in mid-nineteenth century American society. I am also sure that all sorts of abuse came with the job, which he also needed someone to take well.

Now, despite George Pullman's motivation for this decision, he did end up giving unprecedented opportunities to a lot of men. At a time when few employers would even consider hiring people of color, the Pullman Company did it regularly. In the early 1900s, they were the largest employer of black men in the nation. And the opportunity did allow some men to live lives that they couldn't have imagined 20 or 30 years prior. At a time when there were few other opportunities other than sharecropping, with its cycle of perpetual poverty, out there, being a Pullman Porter was not the worst employment opportunity to take.

The Pullman Porters display in the Pullman National Monument Visitor Center.

Having said that, they were clearly separate from the other employees at the Pullman Company, and that separation extend to union representation. When Pullman's workers went on strike in 1893, they were welcomed by the American Railway Union. But...not the porters. They were excluded, not that it would have done them any good if they had joined that strike anyway. If the Pullman Porters were waiting for an invitation to join the ARU after that, it never came. Not 10 years later, not twenty years later. Never.

So in 1925, A. Philip Randolph and Milton P. Webster helped the porters form their very own union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), to start to advocate for the rights of the underpaid and overworked porters. It didn't work. Not at first, anyway. But the union kept at it, particularly Randolph, and eventually, 10 years after the formation of the BSCP, the Pullman Company recognized the union and began negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement that was signed two years later, improving working conditions for the union members.

The Pullman Porters had genuine status within their communities. They represented a different career track and a way out of what was pretty much no more than legalized ecomonic slavery that came in the wake of the end of the Civil War. But come 1937, they were also civil rights pioneers. 27 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a major manufacturing company negotiated better working conditions with a union set up specifically to represent the rights of black employees.

If you are in Pullman, don't visit without stopping at the Pullman Porter Museum and understand their story a little better. It won't take you long to walk through and read every word (not kidding) in the Museum but it's well worth a stop. Their story includes a significant step towards being closer to equality for people of color. Although let's face it, we are not really close to being all the way there some 80 plus years later.

No pics allowed inside the Pullman Porter Museum, so I had to be satisfied with this exterior shot.

Now on a regular visit to Pullman, our day would have stopped there. We would have headed back to Chicago to eat at one of Rick Bayless' restaurants or go look at Edward Hopper's Nighthawks in the Art Institute of Chicago or hit up a blues club. But opening weekend offered us a different kind of Pullman experience: we got to walk through some genuine Pullman sleeper cars. 

Visit today and you won't have that opportunity, but to celebrate the Grand Opening, Amtrak hitched three privately owned cars to one of their engines and brought them to their birthplace for a weekend. I can't express how fortunate we were to have this opportunity, not to mention the foresight we had to get up early and get in line for some tickets that were all gone before 9:30 in the morning. I have never been in an overnight car of any train, whether historical or modern or built for sleeping or not. To do this in this place was special.

The three cars we walked through that day (in the order we walked through them) dated from 1953, 1955 and 1927. All three are privately owned and are all available for rent for short or long distance travel. All you need to do is pay a little money and make arrangements for Amtrak to hook up your rental car to one of their trains. I'll assume they don't come with porters.

The lounge area of the 1955 Pullman sleeper car.

Tight quarters: bunkbeds from the 1927 model.

I think it's fascinating to understand a little bit about how people used to travel. These days we hop on a plane or in the car (or both) and head out to where we need to go. We don't (generally) sleep in our cars and if you are a budget traveler like me, I'm sure you've had the pleasure of sleeping sitting up in a seat in coach on some overnight flight somewhere 30,000 feet or more over the globe at one time or another. But a multi-day journey over land without staying in a hotel? I've never done it. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Just that I've never done it.

But even if you have done it, I'm sure it's not quite like riding the rails in a Pullman car. Each car is like a mini bed and breakfast of sorts. Although one that, practically speaking, you can't really leave until you get to where you are going. In the meantime, as you travel across the country, you are sequestered in a cabin with (in all likelihood) a group of folks that you don't really know and can't really get away from. Days most likely would have been spent in the communal lounge areas of the cars (like the one in the second photograph above) because the bedrooms are too tiny to do anything other than sleep.

It's a bit of a crazy way to get from one place to another. But I guess considering the alternative would have been either wagon, horse or foot, all of which take a lot, lot, lot longer (and are a whole lot less comfortable), the Pullman cars probably represented absolute luxury that if you could afford, you did.

It's also like something out of an old movie. I could imagine as I sat in the lounge area in my cheeseburger shirt and J. Crew shorts, a cast of characters all dressed in their best clothes to travel across the prairie or some other place in the American west for days with nothing to do except get to know your fellow passengers or look out the window at countryside that you don't likely see very often. I guess air travel was around in the 1950s but this impression for sure applied when the 1927 Pullman car was first pulled across the country.

It is unlikely I will ever travel in a Pullman sleeper car. While I would love to take a rail journey across the United States someday, it would have to be when I have way more time than my current employer's time off policy allows on my hands. And of course, it wouldn't be in anything like a Pullman car, I'm sure. 

Like everything else we went through during the Pullman National Monument grand opening (except walking through the town, of course), we were rushed through these things. There was barely enough time to register exactly what you were looking at, but I guess in the end there was enough. I loved the 1927 car the best. Maybe it was because it was the least modified of the three or maybe it was because, for a few seconds, we got to step out onto the back platform of the car and imagine we were riding across what would be (even in the late 1920s) a country that was largely undeveloped west of the Mississippi River. It must have been pretty amazing, even if it might have tried my patience. I think we were quite fortunate to visit exactly when we did. Sometimes things work out like this.

More tight quarters. Maybe people weren't as big back then?

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How We Did It

Pullman is about a 20 to 30 minute drive south of downtown Chicago. There is tons of street parking and the town is super walkable. I appreciate all the "hellos" and "thank you for visiting" comments we got from residents while we were walking around the neighborhood. Maybe it was just because it was the grand opening of the National Monument but I kind of think it was more than that. This is a community worth being proud of and it shows.

The Pullman National Monument Visitor Center is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for New Year's Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, when the National Monument is closed. Check their website for full details of what there is to do on site. I am sure our visit was as atypical as it gets. 

The A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum is open from Thursday to Saturday. I would check their website to make sure these hours hold. Like I mentioned in the post itself, it's not going to take that long to walk through but supporting museums like this one that tell these sorts of stories is important. Just like in the main town, we found parking plentiful near the museum.

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