I wanted to get a picture of the Kirby Avenue sign. It shows you how many trees this town has. This could just as easily be about 90% of the street signs in town. Our new apartment is across Kirby from Hessel Park.
Now back to the old neighborhood. The old apartment sat about a block away from an insane asylum. It's called a behavioral health clinic, but we know what goes on in there. Straight jackets, electroshock therapy, trepanation. See how creepy it looks?
Just down Church Street from the old apartment and the insane asylum you find West Side Park. Champaign Urbana has 500 acres of dedicated park land within the city limits, giving it, according to some sources, one of the highest park land to developed land ratios in the nation. West Side Park covers 12.5 acres (Hessel Park across the street from our new apartment covers 26 acres) and has a band stand, several statues (including the Lincoln Statue whose nose I rubbed), benches, and crap for kids. City fathers originally zoned the land for the county courthouse, it spent some time as a public cow pasture, and in 1854 it became the first park in town.
West Side Park feature of the day: Memorial flagpole for fallen police officers and firefighters.
On the opposite corner from West Side Park is the Church after which Church Street was named. Built in the 1860s, the First United Methodist Church of Champaign is a good example of the Gothic Revival style.
On the same block as the Methodist Church, you see the Springer Cultural Center. Originally built as the 1904 Champaign Post Office in the Renaissance Revival style, it's now home to a community outreach program.
Moving East into downtown Champaign, the art deco City Building stands out against the skyline. It opened in 1937, a WPA project, and originally housed the Police and Fire departments. It has since become a symbol of Champaign, featured on post cards and the city logo.
Past downtown you'll find the Cattle Bank, built in 1858. It spent some time as Heimlicher's Drug Store, but now houses the Champaign County Historical Museum. We have not gone yet, but plan to do so soon.
We drove all the way over into Urbana to get a picture of the County Courthouse. It's a bit more grandiose than the standard small town courthouse back in Texas. You can find a long history of different courthouses built on this same site and how many times Lincoln visited each of them. The current tower dates back to the 1860s and has been struck by lightening four times. County officials added much of the rest of the building in the early 1900s and gave the facade a makeover in the early 2000s.
Outside of the courthouse they've built a veteran's memorial. Illinois loves its veterans. The first US veteran's organization started in Decatur. The Grand Army of the Republic (they were called) dedicated the site we visited at Greenwood Cemetery.
The bus makes a stop next to the courthouse. Here, a worthy citizen of Urbana informed me that, were I to bestow on him a largess of three dollars, his newfound purchasing power would grant him access to a delicious locally made sandwich. With regret I admitted that I carried no cash tender.
On the block behind the courthouse, we saw the old Lincoln Hotel. Built in 1924 in the Tudor style (technically it's a mixed Tudor/Gothic, whatever the hell that means, but it looks mostly Tudor to me), it used to be a fancy old hotel. It's totally defunct now with vegetation growing from cracks in the parking lot. In the 1960s, someone had the bright idea of building an enclosed shopping mall around and connected to the hotel. Still in partial operation, it's the second oldest mall in the US (Aine looked this up on her computer phone: the oldest mall in the US was built in Providence, Rhode Island).
From the parking lot of the Lincoln Hotel, I snapped a shot of the bell tower of the First United Methodist Church of Urbana. Even though it's also Gothic Revival, don't get it confused with the First United Methodist Church of Champaign. They sit two and a half miles apart.
Across Main Street from the courthouse, we saw this sign. It don't know what it means, but it looks ominous.
In downtown Urbana (a block west of the massive courthouse), we got a picture of the Cinema Cafe, a coffee shop. Mr. Busey named it Busey's Hall when he built it in 1870. He intended using it as a bank, but it made more money as an opera house featuring vaudeville acts and live performances. In 1915, to keep up with the times, a new owner transformed it into Princess Cinema to show moving pictures. The art deco facade you see here was added during a make over in 1934.
I couldn't find anything historic about Crane Alley. It's just an awesome bar where all the cool kids go to get a beer. They have a beer club I joined, mostly to keep up with the aforementioned cool kids. For every twenty different beers (you can't drink the same beer twice) you drink, you get a prize. After the first twenty, you get a mug. Sixteen beers to go.
I wanted to get a picture of this. Way south of downtown on Windsor Road. Built in 1979. It's Masonic Lodge No. 157. Or Centennial Lodge No. 747. Or Western Star Lodge No. 240. Or maybe all three because they meet on different days. Not sure which one to join.
And this is just down Windsor from the MultiLodge.
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