Cicero Avenue Field Trip

I was fixing some nits in a posting I have spent hours writing about a Sunday field trip up Cicero Avenue researching the Belt Line Co. of Chicago RR. The posting probably had close to 100 pictures, most of them small and medium sized. And then when I did a Undo command, the whole thing disappeared! And the autosave made it permanent before I could close the edit window. I'm not going to spend more hours on it. But one picture is worth uploading again. I stopped in the shopping center that was developed on the land of the old Western Electric's Hawthorn Works. I had remembered that they had torn down all of the old factory buildings except the tower. I think it is neat how the new shopping center building pays homage to the tower. (Too bad I got a light pole in front of the tower.)

And there is an I&M Canal visitor center on 65th Street just after you turn East from Archer Avenue. I was not able to find anything on this center on the web. They mentioned that there server was down. They had more info on the portage and the Santa Fe Prairie than the I&M Canal. When I approached a bridge on Il 171, the sign said I&M Canal. But when I looked over the edge, there were double railroad tracks. So that would have been the GM&O right-of-way. Just a little north, I-55  goes northeast and crosses the new canal and then uses the old I&M Canal right-of-way the rest of the way to town.

Mazon Creek Fossils and Tully Monster

While researching strip coal mining in the northern Illinois, I noticed Mazon River on the maps. I remember when we would take Member's Night tours at the Field Museum that we would see discussions of the fossils they had collected from the Mazon River area. They were especially excited about the Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium) fossils.

Tully monster fossil and model at Chicago Field Museum; photo by Brian Smith
n Flickr (noncommercial use permitted with attribution / share alike)

A video explains that it was discovered by Francis Tully in 1958, described in 1966 by Dr. Richardson of the Field Museum, and declared the Illinois State Fossil in 1989 because it has been found only in Illinois. (The video says 1958, one of their captions says 1955. The Illinois State Museum agrees with the 1958 date. A YouTube copy of the video in case the Field Museum breaks their link.)

I quote the entire section on the Mazon Creek Fossils in their history page because I'm coming across several links to the Field Museum that no longer work. For example, they changed their name from www.fmnh.org to www.fieldmuseum.org.

The Field Museum and Mazon Creek Fossils

Mazon Creek fossils are exceptionally well-preserved remains of Middle Pennsylvanian (~300 million years old) animals and plants that lived along a subtropical swampy coastline.   The fossils are preserved in sideritic concretions (round to elliptical ironstone nodules) found in the Francis Creek Shale Member of the Carbondale Formation. This type of preservation preserved soft-bodied animals and plants not normally preserved in the fossil record. The Mazon Creek fauna and flora are known for their diversity. This diversity of fossils is partially due to the large number of specimens that have been collected.

The history of study of the Mazon Creek can be divided up into four overlapping phases. The initial discoveries of plants and associated arthropods and amphibians were made in the mid-nineteenth century (Dana, 1864; Cope, 1865; Lesquereux, 1866; and Meek, 1867). Until about 1928 most collections were small and gathered from the classic exposures along Mazon Creek itself. The Field Museum collection grew gradually over this time. However, collecting activities and the number of accessible localities increased dramatically with the era of strip-mining in this part of Illinois from 1928 to 1974.

The work of Langford, Richardson, his colleagues, and many local collectors from 1945 to 1980 broadly constitutes the second phase of study. During this period, large numbers of taxa were discovered and described, and hypotheses were developed to begin to resolve the paleoenvironments represented by different parts of the Francis Creek Shale Member. Intensive collecting by Richardson, Johnson, and his students, and associated local collectors at Pit 11, west of Essex, Illinois, led to the description of a marine -influenced faunal assemblage that sharpened scientific interest in the Mazon Creek Biota as a whole (Johnson and Richardson, 1966; Richardson and Johnson, 1971). The Field Museum consequently became the center of Mazon Creek study (Langford, 1958, 1963; Richardson et al. 1945-1983; Nitecki, 1979; and many others). During this time the growth rate of the collection grew dramatically.

In the late seventies and early eighties these studies expanded into the third phase, through the research of Gordon C. Baird and his colleagues (Baird, 1979; Baird et al., 1985a,b, 1986).  The Field Museum hired Baird in 1976 as a Curator of Fossil Invertebrates and he began a large, detailed Mazon Creek census program.  Baird and his group of collectors were the perfect collecting machine. They collected at 350 strip mine, deep mine, and surface outcrop localities over a 200-square kilometer region in the northeastern Illinois Basin. Collecting trip after collecting trip, the group filled up burlap sacks with Mazon Creek nodules transporting them back to the Museum in Baird's heavily overloaded car. At the Museum Baird put his nodules in plastic buckets filled with water and set them on the Museum roof over winter. The freezing and thawing of the water all winter long split the nodules, revealing any fossils. This method was far superior and more efficient then the traditional splitting of nodules with a rock hammer. Baird's collections were so large that the heavy buckets of rocks and water caused structural damage to the Field Museum's roof! Baird's collecting had to be scaled back a bit. In total Baird and his group collected over 285,000 Mazon Creek nodules.

This project resulted in more-rigorous quantitative analysis of the paleoecological hypothesis first developed by Richardson and Johnson. Baird's results indicate that the Mazon Creek biota contains three major fossil associations representing three different paleoenvironments: (1) a euryhaline estuarine fauna inhabiting river distributary-influenced coastal marine waters (Essex assemblage), (2) a freshwater association comprising a low-diversity autochthonous fauna, and (3) a terrestrial biota including allochthonous plants and animals from swamp, levee, and floodplain environments. The terrestrial and freshwater associations together (2 and 3) constitute the Braidwood assemblage as recognized by Richardson and Johnson. The census sampling conducted by Baird has revealed in detail the distribution and correlation of different biotic and lithic paleoenvironments within the Francis Creek Shale Member. These models have aided the interpretation of comparable nodule biotas in North America and Europe (Baird et al., 1985, 1986).

The 285,000 specimens collected by Baird and his fellow collectors represent the peak in the growth of the FMNH Mazon Creek collection. During this time major collections were also donated to the FMNH by local collectors including: Fagan, George, Greene, Herdina, Klocek, Lietz, Roubik, Sobolik, and Wolff.

The last phase is the gradual decline in collecting due to the end of strip mining and the loss of many collecting localities. The few remaining areas available to collectors today are generally over-collected and overgrown with plants.  After the untimely death of Richardson in 1983, the department needed to deal with the large backlog of specimens that the former intense period of collecting had generated. Scott H. Lidgard was hired as a Curator of Fossil Invertebrates in 1984. He and collection manager Mary Carman, and Mazon Creek Coordinator Bret Beall took on the task of transforming a series of private collections, research collections, and Baird's census collection, plus just large piles of unidentified Mazon Creek nodules into a single, well-curated, systematic collection of Mazon Creek fossils fully available to the research community. This involved sorting, identifying, and organizing tens of thousands of specimens, then cataloging and labeling them, and entering the data into a computer database.  The results are that today the Field Museum's collection of Mazon Creek fossils is the definitive resource for researchers studying the Mazon Creek.

The golden age of Mazon Creek fossil collecting may be over, but there are still new, important finds being made and research about these fossils continues today. There are three fields for which Mazon Creek fossils have special research significance: diagenesis and taphonomy, systematics, and paleoecology.

 The Illinois State Museum better explains the geology of the Mazon Creek Fossils and Deposit.

The Francis CreekShale

Approximately 300 million years ago (during a time geologists call the Pennsylvanian Period) Illinois looked nothing like it does today. Much of it was not even dry land. Much of the area that we now call Illinois was a mixture of swampy lowlands and shallow marine bays.

From the northeast flowed at least one major river system. The river(s) built large deltas through the low swamps and into the shallow bays. The mud that the river(s) carried was deposited in these deltas and bays. This mud turned into a rock called the Francis Creek Shale.

In some ways the area might have been similar to southern Louisiana (USA) and the adjacent Gulf of Mexico. However, the plants and animals would have been very different from today. They were different for at least two reasons. First, many of the plants and animals that are common today had not yet evolved at that time. Second, the climate would have been tropical. The tropical climate was a result of continental drift; 300 million years ago the area was just a few degrees north of the equator.

How the Mazon CreekFossils Formed

Many animals lived in the shallow marine bays. More plants and animals lived in the swampy areas along the rivers. As animals in the bay died they fell to the bottom of the bay. They were joined by plants and animals that died along the river and were washed into the bays.

When the remains of these plants and animals sank to the bottom of the bays, they were rapidly buried by the mud washing in from the river(s). This process protected the remains from being destroyed. Bacteria began to decompose the plant and animal remains in the mud. The action of these bacteria produced carbon dioxide in the sediments around the remains. The carbon dioxide combined with iron from the groundwater around the remains forming siderite (ironstone). The siderite protected the remains from further damage.

The combination of rapid burial and rapid formation of siderite resulted in excellent preservation of the many animals and plants that ended up in the mud.

 
The ISM has a page for many of the plants and animals in the Mazon Creek Deposits. The page for the Tullimonstrum is extensive since it is now the state fossil. Of note is that more recently the fossils have been found in open-pit coal mines in central Illinois. Scientists still have not determined to what other animals they are related.

Downers Grove Tivoli Theater -- Tour

The DG Tivoli Building conducted tour groups through the building every 15 minutes from 9-12am, Saturday, September 13, 2014. The following line was for the tour, not a movie.

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It was too dark to take pictures in the lobby and the auditorium. Which is just as well because I found a 360-view of the lobby and a virtual tour of the building that do a better job of depicting the wonderfully restored interior than I ever could. Plus they no longer take tours into the projection room because the tour groups are too big.

The history of the building and theater are described in a museum exhibit,  the Classics Cinemas web site, and the stage crew's web site. The stage crew site has a link for their HPS4000 equipment. When I followed that link, they had a picture of the Tivoli Theater as their cover page. I reproduce it here in case their cover page is later changed.

HPS4000

I can attest that a movie can get uncomfortably loud. But they enforce an average sound limit of 98dB (C weighting) with peaks not more than 103dB (C weighting) to protect their antique and delicate decorative plaster. (TechSpecs)

When they still used 35mm film, they would receive a feature film in a bunch of "cans," each can contained 20-min of film. The manager would spend hours splicing them all together and making sure the picture played with no glitches. If there were glitches, she would have new copies of the appropriate 20-min segments shipped and then repeat the splice and check cycle. Take a look at the picture of their 35mm projector in the projection booth of the virtual tour. The three white platters held the spliced film as one continuous loop. It would be about a mile long. The room was not air conditioned and the projector used a 4000 watt light bulb, so the room got very hot.

A projectionist used to be highly paid because it was a very risky job. The film was very flammable. The room was lined in lead and each opening had a lead door held up over it with a rope along the ceiling. If a fire started, the ropes burned, the lead doors dropped, and the fire was sealed in. Unfortunately, the projectionist was also sealed in.

Now the room is air conditioned because of the digital equipment in the room. They get a disk drive with the contents and a USB drive with the keys to unlock the contents. No more hours are spent splicing and checking film.

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The theater lost it original theater organ. But it now houses a Wurlitzer 3/10 organ owned and maintained by CATOE, the Chicago Area Theatre Organ Enthusiasts. 

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I took a closeup of the entrance to show the ornamentation that they have preserved. The theater has a 65-foot tall fly tower with a 19-foot stage and its original light control board to support live entertainment. Scroll through the stage crew's photo gallery to see some pictures of the light control board. Over 1000 hours were spent restoring the light board. The dimmer rheostats are over a foot in diameter and are controlled by the little white and red knobs. The big levers control a preselected set of the rheostat levers. The big wheel down below and between the big levers can control everything. It gives a literal meaning to "crank up the lights."

They use the fly tower to store the movie screen. For movies, it is lowered and 3 speaker stacks (center and right are shown below) are rolled behind the screen.

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I've seen many pictures of the front part of the Tivoli Building, but none of the back. I include a photo of the back to show not only the vast auditorium part, but the fly tower.

Judging from the brick colors, it has had to be "patched" a few times. You can also see more of the ornamentation on the main part of the building.

I took a picture of the backstage area after the tour moved on to see the dressing rooms with a wide-angle lens to try to get a feel for the height of the fly tower. But the top part was too dark. You do get a good view of the 3 speaker stacks used during the movies. Below is four of the lanes of the bowling alley in the basement. I did not get pictures of the pin setting equipment because it was too crowded. Unfortunately, the virtual tour does just the theater so I don't have any pictures of that equipment.

I include their party room because one of my daughters used to work there. So it has sentimental value. I could get just a half of the room in the picture. They also have an adult party area with video games,  a big TV viewing area, and pool tables.

 

Update:

Michael Styles posted
Vintage Tivoli!
Rick Hardman I think I took that picture

Downers Grove Tivoli Theatre -- Museum Exhibit

If you didn't guess already, DG in a title means Downers Grove, IL. Tivoli uses the "Theatre" spelling on their web site. But I'll use the more traditional spelling of "theater" in the body of this posting.

 

AIA Illinois posted
Today we visit the Tivoli Theater, which opened in 1928 as the second theater in the world designed for sound motion pictures. Designed by Van Gunten & Van Gunten, the building occupies a full block and also contained a bowling center, a game room, a residential hotel, stores, and offices. The French-Renaissance-Style theater originally held 1,390 seats on one floor without a balcony.

John McCracken shared

 

Classic Cinemas - Tivoli commented on AIA Illinois' post
[Tivoli] continues to be a one screen theatre today and still shares the space with 

Tivoli Bowl

. A full restoration took place in 1992 after the roof blew off! Here it is today!

The Downers Grove Historical Museum currently has a temporary exhibit until Dec 20 "celebrating 86 years of the Tivoli Theatre."

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It is in their annex building, which probably was the stable for the old house that now contains the museum. The exhibit was primarily a time line that spread across two walls of the exhibit room. Below are pictures of the text and most of the pictures that were on display. Please click one of them to get a larger, readable version of the pictures.
































After I looked at the exhibit, I mentioned to the curator that I was disappointed that there wasn't any discussion about their support of sound. She did tell me that it was the first theater designed and built to support "talkies," but it was the second one to play talkies because another theater had already converted to sound. And I remember that it was the first theater in the Chicago area to upgrade to a new surround sound system to uphold their tradition of being on the leading edge of sound support. The most reliable date I have found for that upgrade was 1984, and I remember it as a 7.1 channel Dolby sound system. After the upgrade, for a while, they played a demo just before the main attraction that aurally ran a locomotive through the auditorium, etc. Since then, upgrading has become a standard practice. In 1994 they installed an HPS 4000 Dolby Digital Surround Sound. Today they have 11.1 channels of surround sound. And in 2006 they added a 48-channel sound system with a control booth at the back of the auditorium to support live performances (book signings by celebrities (Alan Alda, Julie Andrews, and today is Jason Segel), Michael Jordan and Michael Philips on the Golf Channel (they closed the theater for a week to prepare for that show), theater organ recitals, dance recitals, school talent shows, Halloween Happening, West Towns Chorus, etc.). During the tour, they said they have installed 4 new digital systems in the last four years. They now support both 3D and Enhanced 4K. Also, the owner's presentation mentioned that the claim for being the first theater designed for talkies was probably just PR. But it was certainly one of the first.

While I was in the annex, I took some pictures of the permanent exhibit that is behind the garage door in the first picture of this post. In the middle of the room is a preserved fire truck. I didn't notice that they had the hood up on one side until I uploaded the pictures. I would have taken a picture of the engine if I had noticed that the hood was up.

Along one wall was an exhibit concerning the old plank road -- Ogden Avenue. The sign did not mention that it was originally a toll road. The reason for planks was to facilitate transport when the ground was muddy. Unfortunately, the planks deteriorated and/or sunk into the mud in just a few years. Since plank roads were the best road technology at the time, their problems is one reason why railroads became so popular so quickly in the 1850s.

I had a hard time getting a picture of the plank because the fire engine pretty well filled up the room.

Steve Winike posted
Ogden Avenue formerly known as “The Old Plank Road” in 1909. Photo courtesy of the Berwyn Historical Society.
Brian Hanson: Who else remembers the sounds and smells of cattle trucks heading to the Union Stockyards on Ogden Avenue? We lived near Main and Ogden when we first moved to DG.
Brian Hanson: I don't know if there was connection to an actual toll gate on Plank Road, but Tollgate Nursery was on Ogden just east of Belmont road in Downers Grove. It became Wannemakers many years ago. Lisle's website says that the Beau Bien Tavern was at a toll gate.
Ogden Avenue History: Ogden Avenue is part of U.S. Route 34, which is an east-west highway that runs from Chicago to northcentral Colorado. Ogden Avenue was originally completed through Lisle in 1850 as  Plank Road, which connected Chicago with Naperville and originally served as a trade route from Fort Dearborn to Naperville. This road included tollgates at five mile intervals. One  stood at Mark Beaubien’s Tavern/Inn in west Lisle, a convenient day’s journey from Chicago. In  1872, Plank Road was renamed Ogden Avenue after the first mayor of Chicago, and later became part of the U.S. Highway System. 

This 1804 map is a reminder that before the railroads were developed, the waterways were the main mode of transportation. I never thought of the East Branch DuPage River as being an important waterway. I'm reminded that Downers Grove and Naperville were not founded until the 1830s. You can buy a higher resolution copy or go with a black&white copy.

Growing up in Chicago posted
Map of American Indian trails and villages of Chicago, and of Cook, DuPage and Will counties in 1804.
Map by Albert F. Scharf, 1900-1901. Villages highlighted in green; principle trails in red and waterways in blue.
Paul Rinella: Some of those trails are now major roads like Archer and Milwaukee Avenues.
[There are lots of comments concerning the use of the word "Indian."]

Using the higher resolution copy, I see that 1830s must have been an incorporation date because it is marked on the map. I presume the east/west trail became the plank road. I wonder what the north/south Buffalo Trail became.

WTTW, cropped

They also displayed a couple of historical pictures. The ladder in the second photo is distorted because the photo paper had bent.