The Queen's Landing

 The Beatles thought she was a pretty nice girl, and not having a lot to say, is not such a bad thing when you are a symbolic monarch without the power to lop off anybody's head, and pretty well-behaved considering other members of her family who were often in the scandal sheets.

Her dad was that stuttering guy who overcame it and helped win WW II according to that movie, The King's Speech.  I don't remember him dying, but I do remember the hoopla when his daughter took the throne.  It didn't mean much to me, but my sisters got caught up in it with coloring books and maybe paper dolls, you know all that girl's stuff. (It suddenly comes to mind that all the great minds of The Institute grew up with sisters, we shall have to discuss that one of these days).

Princesses.  Back when I was subbing and the talk was all about what did the girls want to be for Halloween, they would say, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian chief, and I would lean down like the devil and whisper "Who wants to be a princess?" "Me, me, me, they would all answer all excited.

I never wanted to be a prince, it seemed like if you were one you would have to dress up all the fucking time.  And in the stories that we were told princes were never fighting wars or crimes, they were just the backdrop for drippy stories about yucky girls.

But the big story that I have been leading up to is that in 1959, she visited Chicago.  Not that surprising that the Queen of England would want to visit THE GREATEST CITY INNA WORLD is it?  I looked into it a little, and what she was doing was mostly visiting Canadian provinces along the Route of the St Lawrence Seaway, which as a kid, made me so happy because now ships would no longer have to drop off their goods in snooty New York, they could take them straight to Chicago, and who wouldn't want to do that, and it would just be a few years until Chicago took its rightful place as the biggest city in the USA.  I don't know why that never happened.

But anyway the royal yacht took a left not long after passing by The Freehold, and headed straight down Lake Michigan to the toddling town.  She dropped anchor just off Buckingham Fountain, took the Royal Rowboat ashore and crossed Lake Shore Drive to get to the fountain at what became forever known as The Queen's Landing. 

Some years ago some idiot, in the purpose of speeding up traffic on Lake Shore Drive, eliminated it, taking away the stoplight and putting up a fence.  But it turned out that pedestrians, to honor The Queen, or maybe just to save themselves a two block walk to the next light, kept braving the deadly stream of traffic, so after a few years they put it back the way it was.  There was talk at the time of putting up a bridge, stately, or cool modern, or whatever it would be a boon to the city.

The Queen is dead.  Long live The Landing.