We are now in Madison, Wisconsin visiting our son, Sebby. We are staying at the historic Hotel Ruby Marie, across the street from Lake Monona in downtown Madison

The original hotel was built across from a railway depot in 1873 by August Ramthun. It was named the Ramthun Saloon and Rooms.

Within ten years, the hotel, now named the East Madison House, was bought by John B. Drives, who did major renovations and encased the building in brick. He added an addition, creating the courtyard.

The hotel has changed names 5 times and has had 14 proprietors since it opened. In 1899. 148 trains passed through Madison each day creating much business for hotels in the area. With the invention of the automobile, passenger trains decreased. Milwaukee Road shut down its Madison east side depot in 1952 and the C&NW stopped passenger service in 1965. Nightly room rates went down and a seedy aspect of culture sprang up. Bar brawls, prostitution, and heavy intoxication marked a very rough era for Wilson St. until the 1980’s, when Robert Worm bought and opened two restaurants on the block. In 2000, with historic preservation grants and a vision, Robert Worm brought new life to the hotel that had become a dark and dingy place of ill repute. He renamed the hotel Ruby Marie after his mother and turned 30 small rooms into 15 good sized rooms and restored to it’s original victorian elegance.

I encourage you to check out the Hotel Ruby Marie if you are looking for accommodations in the heart of Madison downtown.

According to Wikipedia, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (also spelled Point de Sable, Point au Sable, Point Sable, Pointe DuSable, Pointe du Sable^{[n 1]}; before 1750^{[n 2]} – August 28, 1818) is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois, and is recognized as the “Founder of Chicago”.^[7] A school, museum, harbor, park, bridge, and road have been named in his honor. The site where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.

Point du Sable was of African descent, but little else is known of his early life prior to the 1770s. He may have been born on the island of Haiti around 1745 to a French mariner and a mother who was a slave of African descent. During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times between France, Britain, Spain and the United States. Described as handsome and well educated, Point du Sable married a Potawatomi Native American woman, Kitihawa, and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British on suspicion of being an American Patriot sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now St. Clair, Michigan.

Point du Sable is first recorded as living at the mouth of the Chicago River in a trader’s journal of early 1790. By then he had established an extensive and prosperous trading settlement in what later became the City of Chicago. He sold his Chicago River property in 1800 and moved to the port of St. Charles, where he was licensed to run a ferry across the Missouri River. Point du Sable’s successful role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century.

We were very interested in the many bridges in Chicago. They are called “Trunnion Bascule Bridges”; they rotate vertically about trunnions (axles) on the river bank and bascule describes a family of draw bridges that use counterweights to assist in the vertical movement of bridge leaf. You can see the huge concrete counterweight on the left in the above picture. The clear protective barrier under the bridge (to prevent anything from falling on pedestrians) is called an”eyelash”.

The bridges are opened twice a week in May and October to let people with tall-masted boats bring them to the lake since the river freezes in the winter. While many people think this is a bothersome disruption, the bridges, some of them 100 years old, used to be opened on demand.

After 1910, involvement from the Chicago Plan Commission and architect Edward Bennett improved the bridges’ architectural elements, including bridge houses. These houses represent many major architectural styles, including Art Deco, Beaux-Arts and Modernism. The modern building on the left was built around the bridge house.

As you might guess, we are in Chicago. We went on an architecture tour that was rich with Chicago history as well, so I will share several posts with interesting Chicago factoids we learned. The first is about the great Chicago fire of 1871 that destroyed much of the city.

The myth is that a woman named Catherine O’Leary was milking her cow when the cow kicked over a lantern, igniting the barn and starting the fire. So is it true? Nope!

In 1997, the Chicago City Council went so far as exonerating the cow and its owner

Published October 7, 2021 • Updated on October 7, 2021

Chicago seems to like to pin the blame for its misfortune on farm animals. For decades the Cubs’ failure to get to the World Series was the fault of a goat that was once kicked out of Wrigley Field. And for well over a century, a cow belonging to Mrs. O’Leary caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

But just as baseball fans know the Cubs’ pre-2016 shortcomings had nothing to do with a curse put on the team by a goat’s angry owner, historians say there is no evidence that the massive blaze that destroyed a huge swath of Chicago and displaced about a third of its residents began when Catherine O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern.

Indeed, nobody puts much stock in that story these days. In 1997, the Chicago City Council went so far as exonerating the cow and its owner.

“The family is still mad about how she was treated,” Peggy Knight, O’Leary’s great-great granddaughter, told The Associated Press on Thursday, a day before the 150th anniversary of the start of the fire. “She did not deserve that.”

How the immigrant from Ireland came to be blamed is a familiar story: She was a victim of prejudice and circumstance.

The fire started in or near her home and her family’s barn. And while it destroyed much of the city, it miraculously spared her own house.

More importantly, O’Leary was easy to blame because of who she was and what she represented

We stopped for lunch in Ann Arbor, college town extraordinaire. The similarities to Ithaca are striking.

One difference between Ithaca and Ann Arbor is that Ann Arbor already has sustainable municipal power. The Ann Arbor Sustainable Energy Utility According to their website, “the Ann Arbor SEU is a community-owned energy utility that provides electricity from local solar and battery storage systems installed on homes and businesses throughout the city. The SEU provides 100% clean, reliable, locally built, and affordable electricity; built by the community, for the community.” I am curious about why there is not much talk about battery storage systems in Ithaca.