(UPDATE: Thanks to everyone reading about my Foursquare journey through Chicago. Please feel free to follow me on Twitter at @chicagocarless, or subscribe to my blog or other social media presences via the neat little icons in my right sidebar!)

Until the past week, I didn’t give Foursquare much though. A GPS game you play with your smart phone, requiring that you “check-in” at businesses and landmarks around your city to earn points and “badges”? What am I, a boy scout? Nothing but a marketing gimmick, I assumed. And it is–business owners often offer discounts to Foursquare users who have checked-in often enough at their establishments to become “mayors.” But now I know it’s also a lot more. For one, it’s really addictive. For two, it’s fun. But most of all, it may be the most effective interactive tourism marketing tool ever.

My new friend, Uptown Boy, introduced me to the GPS game when his use of it got us in trouble at a concert last week. Since then, I’ve spent my time learning that almost every business, bridge, transit station, and most likely bird’s nest in Chicago has a Foursquare listing. First I didn’t see the point of it. Then to my surprise I became the “mayor” of a local park–and my competitive edge instantly decided that all bets were off. As I quickly became hooked on the game, I also tried to learn the etiquette of it–especially since your check-ins can be automatically posted to your other social media accounts. (And my Twitter followers don’t necessarily need or want to know every time I go to Jewel.)

But aside from the fun of the competition and maybe an occasional dollar appetizer or free drink at a local hoodie, I didn’t see much real worth of Foursquare for its users. It’s an insidiously addicting way for commercial interests to collect marketing-research data. But as far as offering anything of real depth to users? I didn’t get it.

And then Uptown Boy put me in charge of picking an adventure for our upcoming Saturday afternoon date. After several hours of wracking my brain (we’ve already been to every museum in town), I came across Explore Chicago’s Foursquare page, and my competitive Scooby Doo ears immediately went, “Hruh?” The brainchild of the Chicago Office of Tourism (find the backstory on Ragan.com), the city’s official tourism arm offers three Foursquare badges that visitors can earn by checking in at locations across town that have historic and cultural importance in the Windy City:

• A Celery Salt badge, for visiting famous Chicago hot dog stands;
• A Chicago Blues badge, for visiting historic sites and clubs associated with the history of Chicago blues; and
• An On Location badge, for checking in at places where scenes from famous Chicago movies were filmed.

Check-ins are required at any five locations chosen from a longer list of eligible destinations to earn each badge, so you get to tailor your own itinerary, and each location has one or more “tips” associated with it written by Explore Chicago staff.  (For a list of eligible destinations, follow the above links.) In addition, the On Location badge requires you to choose a specific movie category (The Blues Brothers, The Dark Knight, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, High Fidelity, or the cringingly named “Chick Flicks in Chicago.”)

Having a full day to spend, we decided to go for all three badges, with Blues Brothers as our movie theme. We figured if nothing else we’d earn a few Foursquare badges our friends didn’t have while passing the time on a sunny day. We started at Wrigley Field at 11 a.m. and ended at Muskie’s burger stand back in Lakeview at 7:30 p.m., eight-and-a-half hours later.  The day took us as far south as 47th Street (9.5 miles from our starting point at Wrigley), required 13 separate ‘L’ or bus journeys on the CTA, and a pit stop at a coffee shop to recharge our phones before we were done.

As it turned out, actually earning the badges was anti-climactic, though I did earn mine on the day. (Uptown Boy didn’t earn On Location until the next day for lack of following Explore Chicago before his first check-in at Wrigley.) No, our big surprise was how much we learned and how many unexpected surprises happened along the way. In order:

• At Wrigley Field (where we didn’t sample the hot dogs), having once lived in the neighborhood, I taught Uptown Boy how to elbow your way onto the Red Line on a game day;
• At the Blues Brothers’ fictional Ray’s Music Store on the corner of 47th and Prairie, Uptown Boy told me he’d never ventured this far south on the Green Line–and the Blues Brothers mural around the corner blew us both away;
• Neither one of us knew that the long-gone Illinois Central depot was once known as the “Black Ellis Island,” and our walk to its remaining stone markers had us talking about how much has changed along Roosevelt Road in the past few years;
  
• The decrepitude of the historic site of Vee-Jay Records at 14th and Michigan was sad, and made us both think about how precious our city’s architectural heritage is;
• While checking in outside the locked Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven Foundation at 21st and Michigan, former home of iconic Chess Records, an employee drove up and let us inside for an unexpected hour-long documentary and tour–at the same time  a woman from Indiana arrived to explore the history of a newly discovered relative–Willie Dixon, himself;
• The location of the old Maxwell Street Market’s nothing more than a student ghetto now–I’d been down that stretch of Halsted a hundred times and never knew that’s where it used to be–but Uptown and I both marveled at the Eastern European-inspired hot dogs from Jim’s Original around the corner on South Union as we scarfed down their grilled-onion goodness at the outdoor counter;
• A need for another hot-dog check-in brought us back south to U.S. Cellular Field, where I’d never visited before–I tried to imagine how atmospheric Comiskey must have been (see how the Chicago Baseball Museum tells it) as I marveled at how ugly and uninspired “The Cell” is up close;
• On the way back north, we watched a Chicago SWAT team spot check a Red Line train at Sox-35th and mused about racism and police mismanagement–but were brought back on track by a feisty little old black lady who regaled us with tales of the blues musicians she used to know, including none other than Muddy Waters;
  
• At Daley Plaza for a Blues Brothers check-in, after seven years I finally climbed up the Picasso, but it being a Saturday, no one was visiting the Cook County Assessor’s Office (another potential On Location check-in location);
• A check-in at the Blues Brothers location at Michigan and Lower Wacker nicely stood-in for the Assessor’s Office, and allowed me to drag Uptown into the Billy Goat Tavern–a friendly spot which I love but where he’d never been (apparently, for fear of venturing onto Lower Michigan thanks to a childhood viewing of Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer!);
• Walking into The Wiener’s Circle–and smelling the place–told us we’d never eat there;
• The walk through drunken holiday hordes of Trixies and Chads in Lincoln Park as we headed to our last stop in Lakeview told us why we don’t live there;
• And Muskie’s, when we finally got there, was closed, but I told Uptown all about the seasoned burgers–and how much I love Powell’s used bookstore just down the street.

As Uptown Boy and his graphical skills put it the next day, our journey looked like this:

Surprisingly for both of us, chasing the Explore Chicago Foursquare badges turned out really to be about traveling off the beaten path in Chicago, to experience the city and its people in unexpected ways. According to Explore Chicago, that was exactly their intention in creating the badges and selecting the destinations.

Uptown Boy and I both agreed the experience was an eye-opener. Besides being a lot of fun, we both learned interesting, at times amazing things about Chicago that we never knew before. Considering that he’s a lifelong resident of the region and I’ve been here almost eight years, that says a lot. Of course, we’re not alone. The Chicago badges have been pretty popular with locals since they debuted this year. I can only imagine how much fun it must be for a newbie Chicago visitor to go after them, or how much they find out about the Windy City that they might never otherwise have a chance to know.

I also wonder why other cities haven’t rolled out similar Foursquare badge hunts. The free-form tours seem to be a perfect, low-cost way for cities to engage visitors simply by leveraging the smart phones most of them carry around in their pockets and purses. After all, every city of any size anywhere has something cool to see somewhere.

And as our experience showed Uptown and me, the unexpected randomness that fills in the blanks between check-ins can be as fulfilling as the destinations, themselves.

(Photo: Forever lost view from the World Trade Center’s Top of the World observatory. Credit: terraxplorer2.)

The following is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline.

I’m happy to say this is the first time in eight years I didn’t see 9/11 coming. I forgot almost completely about the anniversary of that infamous date until a few hours before this writing. In previous years, I’ve commemorated the day by describing my part in the exodus from Manhattan and entreating my blog readers to reach out to those they love.

Not this time. Today my thoughts are preoccupied with the wonderful new and potential clients I’ve met in the past few weeks, my budding romance with a softer-than-he-seems ex-Texan, worry over my nine-year-old cat’s weight loss, and glee over finally ordering HD TV for my 11-month-old HDTV.

Some might call my perspective disrespectful. A few weeks ago, a Chicago Tribune editorial referenced the 9/11 attacks to mock the debut of video poker in Illinois. The same day, on his widely read Capitol Fax blog, Rich Miller called out the Trib’s editorial board for making light of a national tragedy.

I think the Trib had the right idea. As I commented on Capitol Fax, maybe it’s finally time to take this day lightly. You can hold onto the past only for so long until looking backward becomes fear of moving forward. Sometimes bad humor is just bad humor. Sometimes a day should just be a day.

I lost colleagues, my sense of safety and serenity, and ultimately my hometown on 9/11. I walked eight miles home frightened of airplanes, and have spent eight years making sense of it all.

It’s that last part that matters. The events of 9/11, tragic as they were, are distant memories to me now. I will never forget their impact on my life. But they happened a long time ago. I have become a different person. I have grown. My likes, dislikes, friends, foes, career, and capacity to embrace an uncertain world have all changed. It’s hard for me to identify with the man I was back then.

The man I have become is willing to allow the dead to rest and life to go on. Grieving is long over. I feel no guilt in letting go. In fact, I feel no differently today than I did yesterday. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

In fact, that’s how it used to be. It occurs to me what I’m feeling today is a sense of normalcy about my life that I haven’t felt in awhile. I remember it well, though.

From eight years–and one day–ago.

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

We live in a photogenic city here in the nation’s architecture capital. But there’s a subset of Chicago bloggers who prefer to snap shots of a seldom-seen Windy City. These photobloggers concentrate on the urban ruins, forgotten buildings, and unsung spaces well off of most people’s radar screens. Here are six local photoblogs that take a look at things from a decidedly different perspective.

City of Destiny
“Katherine of Chicago” takes us on a tour of Chicagoland’s abandoned factories, schools, and other structures, traipsing through off-limits, long-deserted areas to come back with interesting images of urban neglect seldom seen by anyone but squatters and demolition teams. For a good example of her work, check out her visit to this unnamed abandoned factory, and don’t miss her flickr page for more urban ruins in Chicago and beyond.

(Photo Credit: Katherine of Chicago.)

A Chicago Sojourn
Robert Powers finds the beauty in the built elements of Chicago others take for mundane: the building finery we miss by never looking up; the streetscape details we ignore by rarely looking left or right. See his historical photo essay on downtown Chicago’s Mather Tower, his tour of three South Side commercial streets, and his photo essay of the South Side’s St. Gall Catholic Church (pictured) to see exactly what I mean.
(Photo Credit: Robert Powers.)

Bright Lights Dim Beauty
Blogger “Didi” juxtaposes old photos and advertisements for long-gone Chicago businesses with images of the (generally less impressive) way things are now. Sure, many of the photos presented here were taken by others in earlier times.But seeing them all together in one place paints a powerful picture of a Chicago that is no more. See Didi’s look at the history of Pizzeria Uno, Due, and Su Casa, or visit the ghost of the Logan Square Woolworth’s.

(Photo Credit: Didi.)

Dumpsite
This is a great example of a buried lead: Noah Vaughn’s Dumpsite is the best urban-ruins photoblog in Chicago. No finer point to be put on that. Explore, for example: the post-Batman-blown-up Brach’s Candy factory; a snowy visit to Cicero’s abandoned Sportsman’s Park racetrack; the death of Harry’s Hot Dogs; that perilous, almost-demolished Westinghouse Career Academy tower; or this post-fire walk through the ruins of the old Washburne Trade High School. And if that’s not enough, Vaughn throws his B-side shots in a second blog, Rubbish Goes Here, equally as engrossing as his main site. (Photo Credit: Noah Vaughn.)

Looper (v.1) and Looper (v.2)
You might wonder why I’d include two revisions of a now-defunct photoblog from a blogger who skipped town to resettle in New York in mid-2007. Because while he was here, Devyn Caldwell (now photoblogging at 24gotham.com) captured some of the best shots of downtown Chicago since the mid-century work of the legendary Charles Cushman. Do explore the Looper sites, the body of work is outstanding.

Of most interest to today’s theme, however, is Caldwell’s comprehensive, months-long photo tour of Unknown Loop Streets, for a surprising look at those unfamiliar named alleys that have puzzled you every time you’ve looked at a Google map of the Loop.

(Photo Credit: Devyn Caldwell.)

Chuck’s Photo Spot
Finally, more of an honorable mention, Chuck Janda hasn’t updated his photoblog in some time. But if you can deal with smallish photos and clunky slideshow plugins, his Photo Spot offers a treasure trove of images of abandoned businesses and railway infrastructure from across Chicagoland.

(Photo: Next year’s Walnut Room Christmas tree? Original Credit: not Mike.)

This from fellow blogger Leigh Hanlon over at Thrillarama: a video podcast of this year’s (allegedly) animated holiday windows at Macy’s State Street, known to you me and every other Chicagoan as “the former Marshall Field’s.”

Last month after viewing the windows and feeling my heart sink from their abject suckiness, I wrote in these pages and over at HuffPost:

“Macy’s State Street has cost-cut its Chicago Loop holiday windows and Christmas tree so deeply this year, I personally don’t believe it’s worth bothering to make that time-honored family foray downtown to see them.”

In case you didn’t believe me then, take a look at Hanlon’s video and decide for yourself whether the firing of longtime window dresser Amy Meadows in January of this year was really such a bright idea. (If you’re reading, Macy’s honcho Terry Lundgren, here’s a hint: no, it wasn’t.)

“Macy’s Holiday Windows Suck” from Leigh Hanlon

(RSS subscribers click through to view the video directly on Thrillarama)

Chicago’s long-awaited Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was dedicated this morning just across the river from my house, on Lower Wacker Drive between Wabash and State. I shot a bunch of pictures of the ceremony as I was walking to work. There were many in attendance and the mood was appropriately respectul and somber. Except for the U.S. Cellular guerrilla marketing team that showed up in blue face paint (first on the Brown Line and now here, this company really needs to fire their advertising house). No word yet on whether Mayor Byrne’s original monument has ever been “un-lost” by the Daley administration, though.

And now for the morons. (What the hell were they thinking marketing at such a solemn ceremony?)

Also check out cool evening pics of the memorial at rachelleb.com.

The sheer horror of not being considered a modernist is almost too much to bear. I live in Marina City, for God’s sake. Mies sits across the street. I know fluorescent in the kitchen is my friend. I’ve already owned two iPods! But no matter. Open your mouth about the impending corporate murder–for that is what it is–of the Marshall Field’s nameplate by the evil retail overlords at Federated, and some heartbroken local will immediately insert their foot and wax on about childhood memories of shopping excursions with grandma to eat ice-cream-cone snowmen in the Walnut Room. To be followed with, “But the real Marshall Field’s is no more”.

Well, bunk.

As near as I can figure from my outsider’s perspective (I grew up in Gotham, not Hogtown, the one town where a Macy’s headquarters should and only should ever be) Marshall Field’s is alive and well in the minds and hearts of more Chicagoans than I care to shake a Frango at. Although habitual Target shoppers they may be (with all the Field’s-killing guilt that comes along with a kitchen drawer full of bullseye-festooned bags), that’s an allegiance built on the bottom line, not the seventh floor. Fifty years from now, you will not find these same people’s children waxing poetic about Christmastime buffalo chicken personal pan pizzas and toffee-nut lattes consumed by the glowing light of a red neon stripe. God willing.

As a native Gothamite, I know how my flatland friends and neighbors must feel. I mean, if I woke up tomorrow and found out that Macy’s Herald Square was becoming J.C. Penney, and henceforth November in NYC would be graced with the Penney’s Thanksgiving Day Parade…come to think of it, I doubt I’d notice. Retail genericism has been alive and well in Herald Square since long before they took the 25-cent hot-pretzel counter out of the Herald Square subway station. As long as they kept the wooden escalators, I’d let it go. We New Yorkers have a temper, don’t get me wrong. But it’s been a long time since Macy’s was Macy’s, and these days a real miracle on 34th Street would be not beating the crosstown bus on foot.

Is Field’s any different? That question I don’t give a fig for. What matters is how people still think about the store. And unlike we New Yorkers, Chicagoans still have a very present soft spot for their retail grand dame. In spite of economic reality and their own opposing shopping preferences, this proud, cornfed populace will go the grave jonesing for a short wait and early seating under the Christmas Tree and would be buried happily in a dark green shopping bag if it came to that.

“New Yorkers have short fuses but Chicagoans have long memories.” And there it is. Out of the mouth of an uncharacteristically incisive municipal functionary and out of left field, this comment today finally made Macy’s-gate make sense to my first-city sensibilities. See, back home, we’ll hold a grudge like nobody’s business, but we’ll be damned if we ever remember what for.

But the memory of a Chicagoan. Unyielding, like the Lake Michigan ice pack in January, or the tawdry new crust of an Uno’s pizza. My money’s on the perilously long winters that for two centuries have forced locals to cling desperately to remembrances of sunlight and the growing season, survivable temperatures and layerless dressing, to have some small sense of hope to get them from September through April. Or thereabouts. They’ve had practice in this.

Federated was born on Mid-Atlantic shores, where 20-degree temperatures are an excuse to stay in, not walk around with your coat open. They are not hardy souls. They could never understand the weight of Midwestern memory.

And in this, they are marvelously overmatched.