Naperville
— — a river walk that built a downtown around it.
Not only on a wall.
“A river town in the western Chicago suburbs, with a brick-and-limestone downtown laid along a mile and a half of the West Branch of the DuPage. The Riverwalk was built in 1981 for the city's sesquicentennial and has shaped how the centre is met ever since. Couples cross the covered bridge in the evening. Centennial Beach holds a former quarry on the south end. Children feed ducks below the Moser Tower carillon. — from the studio
Naperville, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Naperville sits in DuPage County about forty-five kilometres west of downtown Chicago, on the West Branch of the DuPage River. Founded in 1831 by Joseph Naper, it is one of the oldest settlements in the Chicago region and has grown to roughly 150,000 residents, making it the fourth-largest city in Illinois. The downtown core has been preserved around the original settlement grid. North Central College, founded in 1861 as Plainfield College, anchors the eastern edge of the centre and the Riverwalk runs through campus.
The Naperville Riverwalk was built by volunteers in 1981 to mark the city's sesquicentennial and now extends about 1.75 miles along the West Branch of the DuPage. The path is paved in brick and limestone, with five covered bridges, a fountain at the western end, and Centennial Beach, a swimming pool fitted into a former limestone quarry first opened in 1931. The Moser Tower at the western end holds the Millennium Carillon, with 72 bronze bells, one of the larger carillons in North America.
The downtown is walkable end to end in twenty minutes. The Riverwalk is open from dawn to eleven at night and is free. Centennial Beach charges admission and runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Naper Settlement, the city's outdoor history museum, holds about thirty preserved nineteenth-century structures on a thirteen-acre site a block south of the river. Metra's BNSF line runs into Chicago Union Station in about forty minutes from the Naperville station, on the southwest edge of downtown.