Results tagged “grantpark”

Every great movie eventually leads to two responses: "Gee, I really ought to see that," and "Gee, I really ought to see that again." The summer is winding down, so seize the moment:

If you didn’t get tickets for the midnight showing of Harry Potter, there’s other ways to tickle your film fancy than seeing Daniel Radcliffe fight Voldemort for the sixth time. The Chicago Outdoor Film Festival opens tonight, and each following Tuesday, Grant Park will become Chicago’s very own drive-in, minus the cars and backseat make-out sessions.

Crain's Greg Hinz - who's all over the place today - reported today that plans to move the Children's Museum to Grant Park hit a financial obstacle.

The annual Taste of Chicago fest doesn't start until Friday but street closures in and around Grant Park have already gone into effect. According to ABC 7, Columbus is closed between Balboa and Monroe while Jackson is closed between Michigan and Lake Shore Drive. Also, Congress is closed between Michigan and Columbus. Plan accordingly. For CTA bus reroutes, be sure to check the CTA's alerts page.

“WTF is that?!” you ask? Well, it’s exactly what it looks like. A huge-ass Obama head separated from its huge-ass Obama bust. Seriously. The whole statue is 20 feet tall, weighs three and a half tons, and is taking up residence at Grant Park starting tonight.

Chicago SummerDance begins its 13th season this evening in the Spirit of Music Garden in Grant Park.

Next door to this year's Taste of Chicago the Nike 6.0 BMX Open will be underway from June 26 - 27 in Grant Park. While the image of BMX bikers butting heads with stout suburbanites wielding oversized turkey legs is enough to set our phasers on "gleeful irony" we've learned a little piece of news that makes the event all the more awesome.

• Amid the latest controversy for Sen. Roland Burris comes word his counterpart, Sen. Dick Durbin, will not support Burris in the 2010 election.
• A judge ruled that residents near Grant Park who oppose the new Children's Museum were given proper notice of the new plans.
• Strange story out of Gary where four bodies were found in a vacant funeral home that was recently sold at a tax sale.

             

In case you didn't notice, the Chicago skyline has been showing its Irish pride like everyone else by wearing its finest green outfits. Every few weeks a few brave individuals travel to the tops of the city to change the colors of the lights on the tops of our skyline, but how do they do it? "Magic and pixie dust," he said. Of course, Randy Stancik, building manager of the Sears Tower, was joking. It is actually a manual process, Stancik said. It takes two men about two hours to change the colors, attaching theatrical gels to the tops of the 22 spotlights that illuminate the antennae.

The Chicago Park District has invited landscape firms to submit their qualifications and ideas to rebuild the north end of Grant Park, transforming 25 acres that includes Daley Bicentennial Plaza, and two smaller areas known as Cancer Survivors Garden and Peanut Park.

               

Thanks to everyone who contributed photos to our Flickr Pool from last night's historic event. We'll be going through more of these as the day goes on.

Grant Park and the surrounding areas are packed with people with and without tickets to witness history. We've got several staff members and readers down at the park and we'll be keeping you as up-to-date with happenings at the park as we can via texts, twitter, flickr, and other updates.

We're under four hours away from the first polls closing but the news is still going fast and furious.

Days after Mayor Daley invited everyone in the entire world down to Grant Park for Tuesday's Obamapalooza, the City is now saying people will be turned away if things get too crowded. Ray Orozco, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, said, “If Grant Park reaches capacity, people will be turned around. This is for public safety.” According to Crain's:

On-street parking will be banned between the lake and the Kennedy Expressway, from the river south to Cermak Road (22nd Street) after Tuesday’s rush hour.

Intermittent “rolling” closures are likely on Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue, and sections of Balbo and Columbus drives will be shut as early as Saturday. Buses will not be allowed to drop off passengers on Michigan Avenue.

Anyone with a ticket to the party should enter on Congress, walk east to Columbus and then south. Anyone else will be turned north on Columbus, until the park reaches capacity.

Well, this is interesting. Even as the Obama campaign has limited the number of tickets and is focusing on security concerns, our benevolent mayor has invited any- and everyone down to Grant Park next Tuesday night, tickets be damned!

         

The Sun-Times had a nice semi-overhead shot of the rally site in yesterday's paper, but we figured we'd go check out the rally site from locations that will look more familiar to any of the estimated million-plus people that are going to show up to Hutchinson Field in a little under a week.

We're six days from Election Day and we're finally starting to get some of the details nailed down as the City Parks District released the permit application for the event. They include:

In news that will surprise no one, The Swamp is reporting that all the tickets for Obama's election night event in Grant Park have been snapped up. A message on the wait-list website reads "Thanks for your interest. There are no remaining tickets for this event." Sorry, Charlie. So what if you still want to be there? Unticketed folks are going to have to hang out around the perimeter and probably won't be able to see much of anything, unless they set up some big-ass TV screens. Time to dig out that old transistor radio and tune into NPR.

Now that security has been hired, we can go about looking at some of the details about Obama's Election Night rally in Grant Park. Emails are being sent out gradually to supporters directing them to this site where they can apply for tickets (at a limit of one per applicant).

Going to Sen. Barack Obama’s election night rally in Grant Park? Well, Chicago officials say Neil Sullivan’s got your back. The retired security expert is getting paid $100 an hour, with a $60,000 cap, to make sure no one raises the roof too high. Sullivan previously worked with the city by revising its emergency and evacuation plans, which hopefully weren’t the same plans used in The Dark Knight (yes, everyone exit the city on Michigan Ave. while cons are bused to Navy Pier). Sullivan was originally hired in the event that the Cubs and the Sox made it to the playoffs and possibly the World Series (HA!). Since that dream didn’t come true, city officials gave him the Obama rally.

City firefighters and paramedics have been asked to take home their gear so they can speed deployment during any emergency that might occur during the election night Obama rally in Grant Park. The order begins next Wednesday, and continues through until two days after the election.

DeRo is reporting C3 Presents -- most famous in our fair town for staging the yearly Lollapalooza concert -- will be handling all the deets for Barack Obama's election night spectacular in Grant Park. And to those of you afraid of catching a chill in the early November air as you wait hours upon hours to gaze upon the face of Obama, have no fear ... the heat generated by Barack's halo should keep you warm and toasty.

It doesn't matter that his campaign was able to wrangle a whopping $150 million in September; Barack Obama is going to make media members dig deep into their pockets to attend Obamapalooza on Election Night. While logistics as to whether or not attendees will need tickets is still being sorted out, one thing is for sure: the media will be paying high prices to attain their passes. Depending on what amenities are needed, media members will pay from $715 to $1,815 for access. In addition, the media will have to pony up another $935 just to get access to the press tent to talk to campaign officials. There will be a free access area, but the press release from the Obama campaign describes it as, "outdoors, unassigned and may have obstructed views...standing room only.” So kind of like those shitty seats way up in the first level of Wrigley where you can't even see the scoreboard.

In the last decade, the Chicago World Music Festival has gone from an nascent underfunded gathering of a few groups from around the world, to a huge, weeklong celebration of global sound featuring dozens of venues and group after group of performers and musicians...and though it's still underfunded, the city and sponsors have come together once again to put on a tour de force of world music.

O.K., not really, but he did sort of join the band during their set in Grant Park last week.

City Council this afternoon voted 33-16 in favor of the plan to put the Children's Museum in a hole in Grant Park.

The City Council's Zoning Committee approved the Children's Museum's move to Grant Park today by a 6-3 vote after six hours of testimony. Next up, the whole City Council votes on the plan next Wednesday, and Mayor Daley says he has all the votes he needs to get the plan approved.