Tag: aerial photography

The high rises of the Bronzeville lakefront

3600 S King Dr

I shot this aerial photo yesterday from the 3600 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

The “towers in the park” are three groups of apartment buildings (none are public housing).

From north (background) to south (foreground):

  • Prairie Shores (5 identical buildings that are very hard to see)
  • Lake Meadows (4 identical buildings behind the associated one-story shopping center plus multiple buildings to the east, closer to the lakefront)
  • T.K. Lawless Gardens (3 identical buildings, that appear the tallest because they’re the closest, 746 units, and 54 townhouses not seen)

John Warren Moutoussamy (an architecture graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology who studied under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) designed Lawless Gardens, according to this IIT Magazine article.

Elevated above the ‘L’

Blue Line going down into the subway towards the Logan Square station.

This shot was slightly difficult because there are two controls on the remote control that I have to handle with the same hand: The first was the camera tilt and the second was the rotation. I think I can move the camera tilt function to the other dial. I only tried this shot twice, and this was the second one. It’s not perfect; there’s a hiccup after the rotation has finished and I didn’t tilt the camera up as soon as I would have liked.

The hot air balloon I used to get this shot is the DJI Mavic Pro.

Logan Square - the square from above

360° spherical photos of Chicago from 300 feet in the air

This rad app called Hangar 360 captures a spherical photo from 300 feet in the air. If you look at them on your phone the picture takes advantage of your phone’s sensors and the image moves as your phone moves.

Click on the linked location to view the spherical photo.

Plazas at 150 N Riverside and River Point (444 W Lake St)

Wolf Point – this launch site can no longer be used because it became an active construction site for the second of three skyscrapers a couple of days ago.

Providence St. Mel and downtown Chicago

Garfield Park – one of the city’s grand parks and part of the boulevard system, or “Emerald Necklace” that connects the Northwest Side boulevards to the West Side parks of Humboldt Park and Garfield Park to the South Side parks of Douglas Park, Washington Park, and Jackson Park.

Former Ickes housing site and its relation to downtown

Ickes redevelopment site and National Teachers Academy – this site used to have over 1,000 residences owned by the Chicago Housing Authority and is going to be redeveloped into just under 1,000 units for a mixed-income community.

Smokestacks at a former incinerator in Humboldt Park

West Side incinerator – these two smokestacks remain from one of the city’s four trash incinerators, and are the subject of an upcoming story from City Bureau.

See how Chicago is a low-rise city from this 360° photo

Smokestacks at a former incinerator in Humboldt Park

Smokestacks at a former incinerator in Humboldt Park – click through to see the 360° photo.

I love the new perspectives that taking photographs from a DJI Mavic Pro quadcopter is showing me.

Chicago is a very large city, by land area, and has a low average neighborhood density. This 360° photo, taken from the corner of Ohio Street and Kilbourn Avenue in Humboldt Park, shows the cityscape five and a half miles west of downtown Chicago. It shows the cityscape west of this point, and north and south.

A little southwest of the center point is a small group of mid-rise buildings at the west side of Garfield Park. One of the buildings, the Guyon Hotel, has been abandoned for a while, and another is a residential building for senior citizens that’s undergoing a complete renovation.

Chicago’s “four tallest skyscrapers” are easily visible in the background; from north to south you’ll see the John Hancock tower, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, the Aon Center, and the Sears (Willis) Tower.