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Fall 2010 Schedule / Get Updates via Email
The theme of this year’s rides is a take on the Chicago hosted World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, dubbed THE CHICAGO BIKEXPOSITION 2010. As with our previous rides, Ross Felten will be designing all of the posters, influenced by World’s Fair poster art. This year we are also on the ball enough to have a meeting place planned out for each ride, instead of figuring that out the month beforehand.
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Join Lee Diamond of BIG SHOULDERS REALTY and CHICAGO VELO as he leads you on a bicycle tour of Chicago’s neighborhoods, exploring the history and architecture of the many communities that together tell the story of Chicago. These aren’t tourist trap tours. These are tours that enlighten and entertain. They aren’t sales pitches for real estate or other products. These are rides that will teach you a side of the city you will never see anywhere else, whether you are visiting for the weekend, or a life-long resident. Touring the city on bicycle provides a full-overhead and 360° view at a comfortable speed that still allows riders four times the ground of a walking tour, providing the healthiest way to get around, for participants and the environment.
This March marks Big Shoulders Realty’s third season of doing architectural bike tours, and below is our first ride, and the entire schedule. This season, we are excited to be working all year long with our partners, the 
West Garfield Park is community area #26, sitting 5 miles west of The Loop. It's eastern neighbor East Garfield Park is community area #25, and sits a mile closer from eastern border to downtown Chicago. This is an area with a storied past, and many brilliant examples of amazing residential architecture. Garfield Park itself, formerly the Central Park of the West Chicago Parks Commission three major parks, features brilliant landscaping by Jens Jensen and William Le Baron Jenney, a gilded-domed fieldhouse, formerly serving as district headquarters, and a brilliant Conservatory, which Jens Jensen designed and filled with exotic plant specimins, very different from his prairie-native planting design philosophy.
Humboldt Park is community area number 23 and sits four miles west of the Loop. Humboldt Park is a community area, a neighborhood and a huge city park, all three named for Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist. The neighborhood extends from Western to Pulaski and from Armitage to Chicago leaving half of the total neighborhood, and half of park in the community area of West Town. The community area begins at Sacramento/Humboldt on the east and is otherwise bordered by rail-lines; the Bloomingdale Line and Street on the north, the Union Pacific at Kinzie on the south and the Belt Railway on the west, just east of Cicero avenue. The area known as West Humboldt Park extends from Pulaski west to the other borders of the community area.
Community Area #31, the Lower West Side is 3 miles southwest of the loop. It is bounded on the south and east by the South branch of the Chicago River and on the north and west by the Burlington Northern Railroad. The oldest section is known as Pilsen, named for the city in Bohemia, where many of the earliest settlers to the area immigrated from. The initial popularity of the area was as a place for Bohemians to rebuild after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The area west of Pilsen was known as the Heart of Chicago, and soon became as popular as Pilsen, and as immigrants from different countries came to America, many of them settled in Heart of Chicago. Many of the residents of both main sections of the Lower West Side were laborers and worked in the city’s factories, in the nearby stockyards or meat packers, or as tradesmen. The housing is most often modest brick worker’s cottages and practical multi-unit housing, and the area is dominated by several monumental churches, whose influence and congregation’s popularity helped bring population and development to the area, including St. Paul’s, St. Pius and St. Adalbert. Beyond the churches and residences, the Lower West Side also includes grand treasures by the biggest luminaries of Chicago architecture. Some of the scheduled stops will include visits to the Daniel Burnham designed Fisk Power Plant, the Pond and Pond designed Gad’s Hill Center, the William Carbys Zimmerman designed Dvorak Park Fieldhouse and the Schmidt and Garden designed Schoenhofen Brewery. Join us for a day on your bike digging the Lower West Side.
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