Grammy Award winner Jennifer Hudson performs at Marina City’s House of Blues, headlining a fundraiser for Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. At the sold-out event, former White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers looked around the room and said, “What do I see? I see Chicago. I see young. I see a little bit old. I see professionals. I see people that maybe don’t have a job. I see all of Chicago and this is really what the city is about. Having everyone here, everyone together, everyone pulling together to keep this city moving.”

The Dilemma, a Ron Howard film starring Jennifer Connelly, Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, and Winona Ryder, is released and Marina City’s Smith & Wollensky has not only made the cut but is the setting for the very first scene. Despite this, reviews are mostly negative and the film is released on DVD less than four months later.

Photo by Chuck Hodes

20 inches of snow falls on Chicago. This image was captured from the Dearborn Street Bridge, looking toward Marina City’s west tower.

Voting booths overlook State Street from the 20th floor of Marina City’s east tower. Voters in the 42nd Ward’s tiny 27th precinct, consisting solely of Marina City, picked winners on Election Day, including mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel.

Seven contestants in the 2011 Miss Bikini USA Model Search strike poses at Hotel Sax. At the hotel’s Crimson Lounge, the women competed in both swimwear and club wear for a shot at a TV show, calendar, and model-of-the-year honors.

Photo by Francis Son

Runners pass Marina City in the Bank of America Shamrock Shuffle, a nearly five-mile race that turns south onto State Street for ten blocks.

With the first glimpses of how Marina City will look in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a trailer released by Paramount Pictures shows an alien craft flying past a heavily damaged Marina City and a riverfront that is in the middle of an intergalactic war. The film opened on June 29.

Ryan Shafer of Horseheads, New York, starts to breathe again after bowling a perfect game at the GEICO PBA Team Shootout at Marina City’s 10pin Bowling Lounge. It happened in the first game of the day, a singles match between players representing bowling equipment manufacturers Storm Products and Brunswick. ESPN videotaped the entire event for broadcast starting on June 25.

As heavy rain fell in downtown Chicago on a Monday afternoon, a 29-year-old man was shot in the middle of the State Street Bridge. He survived, the suspect got away, and the west side of the bridge was shut down for about two hours. The victim, Todd Brown, was a dishwasher at Smith & Wollensky and had a “rap” sheet of criminal history 64 pages long.

Next door to a major exhibition of the work of architect Bertrand Goldberg, a collection of photographs of Marina City residents offers glimpses of what it is like to live at Goldberg’s arguably most famous work. Photographer Andreas Larsson and Iker Gil, an architect who lives at Marina City, had been working on Inside Marina City since 2009. Their first image released shows a resident gazing at the city from a balcony on the 35th floor of the west tower.

Photo by Andreas Larsson