Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey) 

The North Avenue Beach House reminds me of the background of those old Popeye cartoons. Not the lame ones from the 1950s and 1960s, either. I'm talking about the zany, rotoscoped Max Fleischer ones from the 1930s where the scenery looks real and Popeye's muttering wisecracks just under his breath while delivering serious Sonny Corleone-has-just-found-Carlo-on-the-stoop beatings to Bluto and others.

Anyway, why go the beach in the winter? I don't know. I guess I needed a good show of faith that it will warm up one day. Besides the beachhouse is a friendly, whimsical building, sitting there at the lake looking for all the world like an oceanliner. We spend so much time in Chicago building monuments and remembering Daniel Burnham, we sometimes forget to kick up out heels and have a good time. Even as bitter winds worked me over as I took these photos, I couldn't help but smile a bit as I walked around.

The building, completed in 2000, was designed by Wheeler Kearns Architects and is a faithful reworking of the previous beachhouse that sat on the site. Built in 1939, the earlier beachhouse was designed by Emmanuel Valentine Buchsbaum, which has to be the coolest name in Chicago architecture.