Our presentation from the DBQ project this morning was very informative. While I have heard of DBQ prior to today’s presentation, I have never had an in depth explanation of the theory and process behind it. I liked that they had us work through one of the exercises to see how they function. I REALLY wish that we would have been able to each get one of the folders. We have been brainstorming ideas amongst ourselves on how we could obtain one or two.
In the afternoon I was on the walking tour for Old Town Chicago which was very nice. Our guide “Dick” had so many wonderful stories and a lot of information to pass on.
Just hearing the history of the area and his explanations as to why certain houses look a certain way, was great. For example, the streets of Chicago were a muddy, marsh like substance. So they put sewer lines down and then covered them with rocks and gravel, and built the streets up eight feet above where they used to be. This was obviously a problem because many of the business entrances were much lower than the new level of the street so they would actually come and lift the buildings, build a brick story underneath and then put the original structure down on top of it. Pullman was one of the 1st to figure out a method to do this on large structures. I believe it was the Belmont Hotel? Many of the houses were rebuilt after the fire and had very large (or long) stairways on them. Since people didn’t know where the new street level would be, they had these longer staircases and then they could take away stairs as needed, to be at street level.
We also were able to see St. Michael’s Church, which was absolutely beautiful.
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I also liked how Dick explained how and why they raised the buildings.