'Chicago From The Air' Offers Birds-Eye Views Of Suburban Sites

CHICAGO — A new public television special takes viewers on a soaring trip through the air around the Chicago area while offering tidbits of history on the region's landscape, architecture and industry.

Premiering 7:30 p.m. Thursday on WTTW-TV, "Chicago from the Air" is the first of host Geoffrey Baer's roughly 30 documentaries for Chicago's PBS station about the city's history and architecture to be filmed entirely from a drone.

This spring, Baer and longtime producer Eddie Griffin were considering ways to put together another special exploring Chicagoland — past collaborations have included traversing the area via the Chicago River and the CTA — when they came upon the idea to shoot from above.

"Talk about making lemonade. We were like, 'Well, a drone, that's the ultimate social distancing, isn't it?' It's not a concept I had thought of previously," Baer told Patch. "It's this great idea that kind of grew organically out of the need, but it would have been a super-great idea even if we weren't in a pandemic."

Baer's script divides the special into three sections. The first, "On and Off the Grid" examines the city's roads, rail and lost paths, including the stories behind some exceptions to the city's "right-angle rigidity," and the country's first planned suburb.

Next, "Doin' Work" shows how industry has shaped the Chicago area, taking the viewer on a flight above the vast, shimmering Exelon City solar farm in the Pullman neighborhood, around the circular pools of the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant and into the Thornton Quarry.

"Some of the industrial stuff is actually oddly beautiful and mesmerizing," Baer said, recalling his first look at the footage from the quarry, just south of Chicago. "You jump off a cliff and you just start floating down — like you're falling down 450 feet along this rugged limestone wall — and it just was so heart-stopping to watch."

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Part three is named after the city's motto, "Urbs in Horto," meaning "city in a garden" in Latin. It focuses on the area's natural and man-made beauty. The third section takes the audience around parks both private and public, and also includes footage from flights above of the houses of worship of several local faith communities.

Baer, a North Shore native and Evanston resident, said the footage of Baháʼí House of Worship in Wilmette and North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe was some of the most compelling of the documentary.

"The thing about the Baháʼí House of Worship that you can't understand except from the air is that all the gardens around it are perfectly symmetrical," he said. "They're slightly different from each other, but arranged in a perfectly symmetrical way around the grounds.

The drone's approach to the 1964-built synagogue designed by modernist architect Minuro Yamasaki also produced one of the host's favorite shots of the special, he recalled.

"They flew in from the lake looking straight down," Baer said. "So first you just see the water then you see the kind of rubbly shoreline there and then some trees and then, all of a sudden, this accordion roof of North Shore Congregation Israel."

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Baer and Griffin, who directed the show, teamed up with local drone photography company Soaring Badger Productions to capture striking images of the city and the suburbs from above.

Together, they put together the 53-minute documentary with just 19 days of shooting over the summer. While longer Chicago history specials have taken up to a year to write and research in the past, Baer said, "Chicago from the Air" was completed in about four months.

Baer's script and narration offers historical context, while leaving more space to let the visuals speak for themselves than in past specials. On screen, the host himself appears only briefly.

At the beginning and end of the show, Baer is shown on the balcony of a 73rd-floor unit in the recently completed NEMA Chicago tower, the city's tallest apartment tower that Soaring Badger owner Colin Hinkle's real estate connections helped secure.

"That was the one day I really got to see the drone people in action," Baer said. The crew set up about a block away to maintain line-of-sight with the drone, while producers used a phone in his back pocket to time the shot. "I'd be out there waiting for my cue and this little buzzy thing would come out and be floating just off the edge of the balcony — where I couldn't go or I would fall to my death, you know — and I would open a door and walk out on the balcony and the drone would fly away."

"Chicago from the Air" is scheduled to premiere at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 on WTTW, Chicago's PBS affiliate, with an accompanying interactive website set to go live simultaneously.