Results, checkpoint locations, and photos from Sunday’s Tour da Chicago have been posted. Stumping the messengers was fun if exhausting — setting up the checkpoints took about eight hours, and even once they were off I logged 38 phone calls from lost riders.

Some ideas for another race, some thanks to Lucky and Jon:
– slots at the East Chicago casino
– exploiting Easter Sunday craziness, which I did not do this year
– something involving now-worthless, cast-off Kryptonite locks and keys, maybe also involving a coffin filled with prizes

I left the manifesto off the manifest, but the sites were chosen from a menu of locations I’ve collected over the years — primarily leftovers from anti-urban, street-phobic Modernist planning ideology. One strange thing I noticed in setting it up, though, was that even though the planners of Illinois Center, the Circle Campus, etc. had the opportunity with their giant superblocks to consign the grid to the ash-heap, they instead still lined up many of the structures along the old grid lines. Hence, “Beaubien Mall” in Illinois Center, the Federal Center mezzanine pedway running exactly along the line of Quincy Place, Sandburg Terrace raised above the old alley between Clark & LaSalle, or UIC’s walkways lining up with what was Green Street.

Another group of checkpoints were tucked away inside quasi- or actually gated residential compounds from the 1990s: the odd pedestrian walkways in University Village, parks hidden inside Kinzie Park and Central Station.