The big pink building

If you've ever driven all the way to the north end of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, you've seen it. It is that big pink building, otherwise known as the Edgewater Beach Apartments. It used to be even more pink around fifteen years ago -- obnoxiously Pepto-Bismol pink. Over the last five years, the facade has been restored, and the color has been toned down to a pale terra cotta, similar to what it must have been when it was first built in the early part of the last century.



The Edgewater Beach Apartments are the last remnant of the old Edgewater Beach resort complex, featuring the Edgewater Beach Hotel. If you've ever seen old posters promoting Chicago tourism, and they have a scene of a grandiose edifice rising out of the sand, with people in hats and funny-looking bathing suits frolicking on the beach, you might wonder what alternate universe this is supposed to depict. The scene is of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, once the place to play on Chicago's far north side.

I took the above picture this morning from a place that would have been well out over the waters of Lake Michigan back when the resort was in its heyday. Around 1960, Lake Shore Drive was extended north to Hollywood Ave, and the resort was in the way of progress. (If you look closely, you can see the highway in the foreground of the photo.) Once the road was built, the hotel, deprived of its beach, was no longer such an attractive destination. A decade later, it was gone.