“Which Illinois Museums are Offering Free 2018 Museum Day Tickets?” by S.M. O’Connor

In Illinois, there are thirty-one participating institutions in 2018 Museum Day. I have added links to the 2018 Museum Day Webpages of those institutions.

Webpages for each institution. In Chicago, the participating museums are the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, the American Writers Museum, the DuSable Museum of African American History, Glessner House, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the Leather Archives & Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art, the Swedish American Museum Association of Chicago, and The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. Outside Chicago, the participating museums are the Aurora Regional Fire Museum in Aurora, the Barrington History Museum in Barrington, the C.H. Moore Homestead DeWitt County Museum in Clinton, the Galena & U.S. Grant Museum in Galena, the Geneva History Museum in Geneva, the Glen Carbon Heritage Museum in Glen Carbon, the Hoosier Grove Museum in Streamwood, the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, the Lincoln Heritage Museum in Lincoln, the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Elmhurst, the Mayslake Peabody Estate in Oak Brook, the National Museum of the American Sailor in Great Lakes, the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Peoria, the Poplar Grove Vintage Wings and Wheels Museum in Poplar Grove, the SciTech Hands On Museum in Aurora, the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures in Urbana, Stacy’s Tavern Museum in Glen Ellyn, the William M. Staerkel Planetarium in Champaign, and the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn.

Once you click “GENERATE TICKET,” you will not be able to change your museum selection. Participants are allowed to download one ticket per e-mail address. The ticket provides free general admission on Saturday, September 22, 2018 for two people. Note you are only allowed to download one ticket to one museum on Museum Day.

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.