From 1929 – 2009, there was a rather quaint little amusement park at the corner of North Avenue and First Avenue in Melrose Park called Kiddieland.  It was sort of a kid’s first amusement park, if you will.  The first taste of roller coasters and bumper cars before the children got old enough (and tall enough) to go to Great America.  Everyone who grew up in the Chicago area ended up at Kiddieland at some point in time or another and it was genuinely sad to see it go.  Especially since it was replaced by a Costco.

The most notable visual of Kiddieland was its two story tall sign.  The sign was a boy and a girl hanging off of what looked to be a candy cane, all of which were outlined in neon.  It was a fairly iconic landmark in the Chicagoland area.  There were two problems with the Kiddieland sign: 1) There was so much neon on it, that some of it was always out; a problem that intensified the closer Kiddieland got to closing, and 2) the background of the sign was horrible; there were so many power lines, viaducts, billboards etc. behind it that, if one were to shoot the sign during the day, it would look horrible.  You can see that here.  Frankly, there were a lot of angles where it looked horrible at night too.

I wanted a nice photo of the sign, but was working with a lot of ‘buts’ and ‘howevers’.  The only way around them all was to keep getting closer and closer to the sign.  Unfortunately for me, when I shot this, the neon of the girl worked on one side, the neon of the boy didn’t.  He worked on the other side, where the girl’s neon didn’t work.  I thought there might be the possibility of flipping the boy’s neon in post and getting them on the same side together, but that was not possible.

In the end, this was not only my favorite photo that I got of the sign, but also what ultimately turned out to be the best.  It’s not often that I wish I’d shot something in 1996, but that was definitely the case here.