“Chicago Literacy Alliance to Hold Trivia Night Fundraiser”

Are you a know-it-all? Do you like promoting literacy? Literassociates Trivia Night will be on Saturday, July 21, 2018 at the Literacenter from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Tickets cover food and drinks. Guests can form teams of four or more. All proceeds will benefit the Chicago Literary Alliance (C.L.A.), an association of over 120 organizations that promote literacy.

One can purchase tickets for Literassociates Trivia Night (stylized LITERASSOCIATES TRIVIA NIGHT) through Eventbrite at this Webpage. There are four days left to purchase early Bird tickets for $30 (plus a $2.54 fee), after which tickets will be $40 (plus a $3.04 fee). One raffle ticket is $5 (plus a $1.27 fee) and a group of five raffle tickets is $20 (plus a $2.03 fee).

The Top Prize is two tickets to a Chicago Bulls game and a Chicago Bears autographed picture. Other prizes include items from Butchers’ Tap, Corridor, Goddess and the Baker, and Escape Game.

Literassociates (stylized LITERASSOCIATES and LITerassociates in advertising) is the associate board of the C.L.A. The C.L.A. opened the Literacenter in May of 2015 with eighteen member organizations as North America’s first non-profit shared workspace devoted to literacy. It received the 2016 Library of Congress Literacy Awards Best Practice Award.

The 27,000-square-foot workspace has couches, armchairs, communal tables, private carrels, group workstations, and open lounges. The fifteen meeting rooms and conference rooms can accommodate anywhere from two people to 100 people. There are two large event spaces for parties and celebrations. The LitLounge has foosball, shuffleboard, ping pong, Rock Bandm Wii, board games, televisions, movie projection, kitchen, and two pianos. There are five Literascooters for getting around the place.

The Literacenter is one block east of 90/94, three blocks west of the Ogilvie Transportation Center and four blocks west of the Chicago River, and four blocks north of Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. The address of the Literacenter is 641 West Lake Street, Suite 200, Chicago, Illinois 60661. The phone number is (312) 690-4227.

The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.