In and About the City

Turn of the 20th century Chicago maps

2012-02-14T14:08:00.000-06:00

I just discovered a web site called; Big Map Blog which features some fantastic 100 plus year old maps of Chicago.

Here's one with the Elevated lines of Chicago c. 1908.

Here is the Loop business district of 1898. Make sure you zoom in to see the fantastic renderings of the buildings, especially the late great buildings of the Chicago School of Architecture that barely any of us ever knew in person, especially Burnham and Root's Masonic Temple at State and Randolph Streets.

I could get lost in these views, maybe I will.

Surf city

2012-02-10T05:47:00.004-06:00

Early morning insomnia inspired me to do a little surfing, catching up on some of my go to sites:

Woody Allen gave us Paris in the 1920s. Now courtesy of Dave and his blog Pleasant Family Shopping, we have a glimpse into another city in a Golden Age of sorts; 1950s Los Angeles.

The gateway to North Michigan Avenue is guarded by two of Chicago's most iconic buildings, Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. Lynn Becker gives us two depressing posts about the fate of the companies that built those buildings, here and here.

Last month I linked to an article on the New York based writer Fran Lebowitz where among other things, she decries the damage done to our country by the paranoia following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From Robert Powers' blog A Chicago Sojourn; here is a perfect example.

In that article, Powers mentions the architect/planner Daniel Burnham. On a more positive note, here is a loving tribute to Burnham from Gregory Jenkins' wonderful site; Chicago Architecture in the Loop.

Yet another loss

2012-02-04T13:51:00.000-06:00

Photographing on the far South Side of Chicago the other day, I heard the report of a building collapse not too far away. In my younger days I would have made a beeline for the incident, especially equipped with my camera gear. Today, a bit older, wiser, and perhaps a little lazier, I avoided the area as the radio reports suggested I do.

I had a picture in my mind's eye about the building. I imagined it being your typical Chicago two or three story brick storefront, abandoned and boarded up like thousands of others in this city. Four passersby were injured in the accident and thankfully I believe they are all on the road to recovery. Reports later said that that the city had issued an immediate demolition order to prevent further injury. As these things go, I forgot about the incident until this morning when I saw this post from Lee Bay's excellent Chicago architecture blog.

It turns out the building was not your typical brick storefront but a very fine example of Chicago's dwindling collection of lavish terra cotta commercial buildings. It had indeed been abandoned for years and as you can see from a photograph on Lee Bay's post, proof of the neglect (and the inevitability of nature taking over when people let go), there was a small tree growing on the roof.

It also turns out that the building was on Preservation Chicago's orange list of endangered buildings.

Now it is off the list.

You might ask who was the deadbeat landlord who allowed such a beautiful building to get to that condition? It was the none other than the City of Chicago. The city took over the building, hoping to find a buyer about ten years ago in an attempt to revitalize the area. There were no takers and you see the result.

The building was at 79th and Halsted, a once flourishing intersection in the neighborhood of Auburn-Gresham. I wrote about that neighborhood a couple times on this blog, once about the renegade priest Father Michael Pflager, the pastor of St. Sabina Parish. Another post was about St. Therese of the Infant Jesus Church, known to its parishioners as Little Flower. That church closed and the building was purchased by another congregation and is now the Greater Mount Hebron Baptist Church.

As I pointed out in that post, the neighborhood which is predominantly African American, is also by and large middle class, struggling to be sure in this economy, but far from destitute.

We can point our fingers all we want but this unfortunate incident is just another example of the reality of once vibrant commercial streets all over the city. I wish I had a practical suggestion about how to change that, let alone a solution, but alas I don't.

If I did I'd run for mayor, or better still, king.

Time travel

2012-02-02T22:13:00.007-06:00

Walking to the train the other night, I was thinking about how much I'd love to step into a time machine and visit State Street in its heyday, if only for a few hours. By shear coincidence, when I got home, my wife suggested we watch Woody Allen's latest movie, the time travel fantasy; Midnight in Paris.

In case you don't know the premise, it's about an American named Gil who falls in love with Paris while on a trip with his fiance and her rich, staunchly Republican parents. He's a Hollywood screenwriter who would gladly give up his big salary to move into a garret in Montmartre and write novels. His dream falls on the deaf ears of his pathologically insensitive girlfriend. As she is wined and dined by her folks and by an insufferable professor with whom she openly has a crush, our hero wanders the streets of the city, losing himself in its charms. One night, at the stroke of midnight, a vintage Peugeot pulls up and out come some drunken revelers who beckon him to join them. The car turns out to be a time machine that takes him to a place he's always wanted to visit, Cafe Society of 1920s Paris. Two of his fellow passengers in the car turn out to be Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In fact the entire populaion of his destination is made up of a who's who of celebrities who set foot in Paris in the 1920s, Piccaso, Matisse, Cole Parter, Josephine Baker, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, just to name a few. Gil gets a few pointers on his craft from Ernest Hemingway, who refuses to read the novel the time traveller is working on, but suggests he take it to his friend Gertrude Stein for some ideas. I have to admit I had some difficulty with the fact that nowhere in this fantasy does Gil meet the likes of ordinary Parisians like Jacques LePlombier, but what the heck, it's Woody Allen's fantasy, not mine.

Anyway, the real star of the movie is Paris, the contemporary city that perhaps more than any other can equally serve as the setting for a movie set in the present, the 1920s, or the Belle Époch of the 1890s, a period the film briefly visits. Time hasn't exactly stood still in Paris, not by a long shot, yet there is a timelessness to that city, a seamlessness between the past and the present that I never experienced anywhere else. Paris is Paris, what more can one say, it's just as lovely as it appears in the photographs and paintings, perhaps the most photogenic city in the world.

Yet where London and New York are cities of endless variety, Paris is a city of almost stultifying regularity. I can think of no better illustration than the opening sequences of two Woody Allen movies. Midnight in Paris opens with a series of shots of the city accompanied by a song played the great Sydney Bechet. You can view it here. Lovely isn't it? Clearly Allen loves Paris madly.

Compare it to his love letter to New York City, the opening sequence of the film Manhattan, (in my opinion Woody Allen's one truly great movie). In Manhattan, Allen's voiceover as well as the images, reveal conflicting feelings about his hometown. I think it's one of the most beautiful opening sequences in all of film, in less than four minutes he does a masterful job describing the urban experience in all its flavors, from awe and wonder to the tawdry and decadent. By contrast, in the opening of Midnight... , every shot is more beautiful than the the one that came before it. If there is a darker side to Paris, we don't see it.

This is not the Paris of Sydney Carton or Jean Valjean. Of course that's not Woody Allen's fault, their city is long gone, destroyed by the mother of all urban renewal projects, Georges-Eugéne Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Much of the Paris we know today, the boulevards and traffic circles, the railway stations, the Bois du Bologne, the Opera, are a result of Baron Haussmann's plan which itself was a great influence on Daniel Burnham's plan of Chicago of 1911. Had the Burnham Plan been fully realized, Chicago today would look a great deal like Paris.

But I digress. Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to rebuild Paris. Ostensibly it was an attempt to modernize the city by introducing new technologies such as the railroad, improve the flow of traffic, and ridding the city of filth, disease and poverty. The old meandering streets from Medieval times and the ancient, dilapidated apartment buildings were replaced by modern buildings and systematically planned boulevards. In that vein the project was not unlike the urban renewal projects that took place in the United States during the mid twentieth century. Another, less publicized goal of the project was to improve the security of the government. The great boulevards served as conduits to facilitate the mobilization of troops in the event of insurrection, (an ever present threat at the time), and also reduced the number of hiding places for the insurrectionists. The effort accomplished all its goals, the old city was gone and with it went the filth and disease. Haussmann's plan solved the problem of poverty in Paris by replacing existing housing with middle and upper income level housing, thereby dispatching the less fortunate to the outskirts of town where they remain to this day. Depending on which side you are on, Haussmann either saved Paris, or destroyed it. An idea of what was lost can be had from checking out the work of photographer Charles Marville who was commissioned to document the soon to be lost city.

What cannot be denied is that Hausmann's genius triumphs, given that 150 years after the execution of his plan, Paris remains a charmingly beautiful city and, despite the notorious French bureaucracy, the old contraption still runs splendidly after all these years.

My first experience of Paris was in 1993, when I had the great fortune of being able to take my half sister Eva, an artist who lived her entire life in Czechoslovakia, for her first visit. Like Gil, she dreamed of Paris, but for obvious reasons, was never able to go. We wasted no time, after getting off the train from Prague at the Gare de l'Est, our first visit was the Louvre. You enter the museum through the contemporary I.M. Pei Pyramid then descend into an underground passage which takes you into the museum proper. Nothing prepares you for the jolt you receive when you emerge from the passageway and find yourself in a cavernous gallery filled with paintings by David, Ingres, Girodet and a slew of other great French masters, each painting about the size of a mid-sized room, hung salon style, covering the entire four walls of the gallery. Laying her eyes upon the room, my sister broke out in tears. Her dream had finally come true. I'll keep that moment with me the rest of my life.

Eva, right, with our friend Sabrina

My own dream would come true later that day when we visited heart of Paris, the Île de la Cité. For years I had an interest in Gothic architecture and yearned to visit the cathedrals of Europe, especially the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I had known at least theoretically, inside and out. But I did not know as well the jewel of Sainte-Chapelle, the high gothic chapel built for the palace of King Louis IX (Saint Louis) in the thirteenth century to house some of the most precious relics of Christiandom. The chapel proper sits in the middle of a complex of government buildings and the view of the exterior has been obscured in recent times (by Parisian standards) by those buildings. Since it's government property, you must pass through stringent security, no doubt much worse today than when we visited. But like entering the Louvre, the inauspicious start makes the payoff all the better. You enter Sainte Chapelle through the lower chapel which is devoted to the Virgin. Openings for small stained glass windows made possible by low vaulted ceilings held up with finely crafted columns, make for a space which defines the very character of Gothic architecture. Impressive as it is, the lower chapel doesn't come close to preparing you for what's to come. A blast of multicolored light awaits you as you ascend the narrow stairway that leads to the upper chapel. Here the stained glass windows extend from a few feet off the floor, up nearly five stories to the ceiling, and are divided by only the narrowest of columns. A magnificent rose window adorns the west wall. Opposite is the apse with its high altar also held up with only minimal support. The space is etherial, it's almost as if the whole thing were supported by angel dust, which for all we know, it very well could be. One of my distinct memories of the chapel was standing near the stairway and listening to the gasps of the visitors as they saw it for the first time. It was as if those folks, myself included, were catching their first glimpse of heaven.

When Eva visited Chicago about 25 years ago, she had a few surprises. One day she asked me with a straight face: "Where are all the gangsters?" There are no such surprises in Paris, you can find every stereotypical image imaginable, from a boy sitting on the back of his mom's bike carrying a baguette, to the guy wearing a beret, smoking a cigarette, and playing the concertina on the banks of the Seine. One of my most humorous moments was attending an organ recital in the cathedral and in between music by Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen the organist played, I'm not kidding, variations on the theme of the song Alouette.

Paris may be predictable, but that doesn't mean it doesn't wildly surpass your expectations. No photograph or description can capture its true beauty. For that reason I didn't take pictures inside Sainte Chapelle, there was simply no point. As you might expect, there's no better city on earth to fall in love, I did that at least twice during my first visit. Years later, my wife (whom I hadn't yet met before my first trip, in case you were wondering) and I had a very romantic few days there, sans kids. Any other place in the world it would sound trite to say: "this is a city where you fall in love with life." But not Paris, every cliché you've heard about the place is true, and with a vengence.

One needn't step into a time machine like Gil to visit the past, it's all around you, not preserved as a museum, like it is in Florence, but as much a part of life as the Parisian air or the wine they drink. You can dine at same the establishments that Hemingway and Picasso did in the 1920s, even the ones that Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec did in the 1890s. The servers, yes they're still predominantly men, wear the same uniform they did back then, and you still call them "boy" (garçon). And yes they still dance the cancan at the Moulin Rouge, although mostly just for tourists these days. In Paris you can worship in the same church where people worshiped over 1,000 years ago (the locals don't do much of that either), and the most impressive structure in town is still M. Eiffel's 120 year old Tower.

If you are searching for the soul of the city, short of going and seeing it for yourself, read Balzac, Zola and Hugo. For a more rounded cinematic experience than Woody Allen's postcard version, you have many choices. Since to me Paris will always be in black and white and set in the sixties, a good place to start would be with the French New Wave directors. Breathless, by Godard and the wonderful The 400 Blows by Truffaut are two classic films from that remarkably fruitful period. If you're looking for a more contemporary take on the city, by all means see the 2006 film Paris Je t'aime, an anthology of 18 five minute films each by a different director and each set in a different arrondisssement around town.

There may be other cities I prefer, still I can't help but think what a poorer place our world would be without Paris. In a famous scene from an old movie, Rick Blaine says to his beloved Ilsa as she is about to board a plane with her husband, leaving him and Casablanca behind for good:

"We'll always have Paris."

Thank God for that.

Another conspiracy theory put to rest...

2012-02-02T17:16:00.002-06:00

Here's a misleading article that appears in today's Huffington Post titled Creeps and Weirdos: The Auto Industry Agenda for Keeping You on Four Wheels.

The article was picked up by Nation of Change, a left leaning political organization who has without my permission added me to their mailing list. In other words they're spamming me. Anyway, the article starts out by mentioning a guy in LA who doesn't himself drive but parks his bike in his rented parking space. His building's management wrote and told him the spot's for cars only and to cease and desist with parking the bike in said space. To me that seems a trifle silly, but there probably exists a reasonable, amicable solution for both parties, not something worth basing an article on in a national publication.

Then the article brings up two print ads for GM that appeared in college papers at one time or other. One ad consists of a photograph of a bus whose destination sign reads "Creeps and Weirdos" with an inset reading "Luckily there's an alternative" and goes on to describe reasonable rates for purchasing a Chevy Cavalier. The other ad features a photograph of a guy on a bike shielding his face from an attractive woman in a car. The ad implies the sly smile on her face means she's smirking at him for riding a bike and not driving. The copy reads: "Reality Sucks, luckily the GM College Discount Doesn't", then adds details about buying a car and a pickup for low rates.

The Huff Post article excoriates GM for trying to use "shame" to manipulate consumers away from using means of transportation other than the automobile. It goes on to list all the obvious reasons why we should shun our cars in favor of those very alternative means such as bikes and public transportation.

Fair enough, I've been saying exactly the same things about alternative transportation on this blog for nearly three years. What the Huff Post article does not mention is that both ads, the bus one which appeared in Vancouver six years ago, and the bike one which appeared more recently in a few college rags in the US, were both roundly criticized by readers and the plug was pulled on both of them almost as soon as they first appeared.

Now I'm as much of an advocate of riding bikes and taking public transportation as the next guy, but frankly I don't take these ads at all seriously, nor am I offended by them in the least. To me they're just cheeky ads that are trying their best to get folks' attention and get them to buy their product. That's what advertising is all about.

After all, all's fair in love, war and advertising, and if people are dumb enough to let an ad convince them that they should get off their bikes and into a car, well shame on them.

All I can say is let the buyer beware and let's lighten up for gosh sake.

Sears Tower

2012-01-24T12:31:00.001-06:00

This post about the original Sears Tower, and the rest of the Sears Roebuck Complex in the neighborhood of North Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago, is from the excellent blog Blueprint Chicago, which I have just added to my list of go-to blogs.

My thanks to Gregory Jenkins for originally posting it.

Streetwise

2012-01-20T04:00:00.014-06:00

Berlin has the Ku'damm, St. Petersberg has Nevsky Prospekt, and New York City has Broadway. Great cities are defined by their iconic streets. Think of them - Bourbon Street, the Champs Élysées, Regent Street, the Via Veneto and La Rambla all evoke images of and are inexorably tied to their respective cities.

Chicago's iconic street is State Street.

Michigan Avenue is more glamorous, the money's on La Salle Street, and Dearborn is a veritable history lesson of American commercial architecture, but no street evokes this city more than State Street. It's been that way since before the Great Fire of 1871.

The view above, a 1907 hand-colored postcard published by the Detroit Publishing Company, looks south down State from Lake Street. The second building on the left is Burnham and Root's long lost Masonic Temple. Just to the south of that is the Marshall Field Building (now Macy's). Louis Sullivan's masterpiece, the Schlesinger & Mayer, (Carson Pirie Scott) Store barely visible, is two blocks south of Fields.

Below is how State and Madison, at one time called the world's busiest intersection, looked ten years earlier in 1897 footage shot, or at least credited to Thomas Edison:

In the clip we're looking north, the Masonic Temple towering over neighboring buildings, is visible in the distance.

State Street is one of the longest streets in Chicago, covering over thirty miles from its beginnings in Crete, Illinois to its northern boundary, Lincoln Park. It is the dividing line between east and west in Chicago's grid system. That significance is lost on North Siders as the Lake cuts into what would be the east side, just north of North Avenue. It's a much different story on the South Side where State is one of the major thoroughfares.

But its the one mile stretch of State, between Congress Street and the River, that gives the street its fame.

The credit for making State the Main Street of Chicago belongs to one man, Potter Palmer. In the 1850s, all the fashionable shops and hotels had Lake Street addresses, while State Street was a festering swamp. Palmer, who himself owned a dry goods store on Lake Street, bought up much of the property along that swamp. At the same time George Pullman devised a system of raising up buildings and sidewalks from grade level. A short time later, the streets themselves were raised out of the muck. Once dry, Palmer sold some of his State Street property to two former retail partners, Levi Leiter and Marshall Field, and developed much of the rest of State Street himself, most famously the hotel that still bears his name, the Palmer House.

In 1871 the Great Fire destroyed everything in its path, but in a few years, most everything was back in place, and State Street, rather than Lake Street, would reign supreme. With it, the major axis of Chicago changed from east/west, to north/south, from perpendicular to the lake, to parallel, much to the benefit of the city.

Before there was a Michigan Avenue north of the River, State Street was the shopping and entertainment heart of Chicago. All the local department stores had their flagship stores on the street, Sears, Montgomery Wards, the Boston Store, the Fair Store, Goldblatts, Wieboldts, Carsons, and of course, Marshall Fields. Smaller specialty shops as well as restaurants, night clubs and movie palaces filled in the gaps between the great stores. From early morning to well past midnight, the street was teaming with life. To this day, the marquee of the Chicago Theater proudly advertises itself and its city as the focal point of the view up State. The terms Downtown Chicago, The Loop, and State Street, were at one time, synonymous.

State Street's heyday as the preeminent Chicago street lasted around 100 years. I've written about the decline of the street here. Suffice it to say its fortunes were tied to the rest of Chicago. When the population of the city began its outward expansion after WWII, suburban shopping malls lured customers with the convenience of free parking, the perceived lack of crime, and that all important virtue, they were something new. Combine that with the massive commercial re-development of North Michigan Avenue in the seventies and eighties and the fact that State Street, with the exception of the construction of a half hearted mall, didn't adapt to the times, left the former Main Street virtually in the dust.

Yet there was a silver lining in that inertia. Eventually the suburban malls became old and boring and cities became hip. Unlike other cities that transformed their aging downtowns into clones of suburban malls which themselves became obsolete and barren, State Street remained essentiaily the same, physically anyway, and needed little work to get back to its original form. While it's a shadow of its former self, (it still has Michigan Avenue to contend with), there have been signs that the city and businesses are willing to gamble that there might yet be hope for State Street:

The Reliance Building, one of Chicago's architectural gems, was gutted, returned to its original splendor, and turned into the Burnham Hotel.
Bucking the trend, after a long absence, Sears opened up a new department store on State Street, in the building that once housed the Boston Store.
A major development was built on Block 37 bounded by State, Washington, Dearborn and Randolph, which was cleared 20 years before to make way for another more ambitious development that fell through the cracks.
Target announced that it will occupy the old Carson's store, (which was also restored).
The Hilton Corporation recently sunk 170 million dollars into a major renovation of the aforementioned Palmer House Hotel.

The restorations of Carsons and the Reliance Building in my book are unqualified successes.

Unfortunately as The Grateful Dead pointed out several years ago: "every silver lining's got a touch of gray." Architecturally, Sears is a welcome addition to State Street with its semi-circular awning that mirrors the curved entrance to Carsons sitting catty corner from it on State and Madison. But there's not much to say about the inside which is as lack luster as any suburban version of the store. Needless to say, because of its parent corporation Sears Holdings' interest in profits for its investors over that of its retail business, the future of the store is much in doubt.

Block 37 in my opinion is a wretched piece of architecture, perhaps the worst building in Chicago given its prominent site. As I've pointed out before, the empty lot that occupied the site after the wanton destruction of many fine buildings, was probably better than the building that replaced it.

Another disappointment is the Palmer House renovation. Granted this disappointment is not in the same league as the fiasco over at Block 37, it's just another project that could have been handled so much better. Last week I was involved in an exchange in the comment section of another blog. In a post, the author commented on how the replacement of a vintage Modernist storefront on the block (by the same developer that renovated the Palmer house) was justified. Here's the money quote:

While the old Bakers Shoes was a great piece of history, it was not preserved as such. If it was kept in pristine condition, people might have appreciated it. But the fact of the matter is that it was another dark, grungy, dirty storefront that didn’t fit into State Street’s increasingly squeaky clean image.

I wrote a comment on the post expressing my feeling that restoration of the storefront was preferable to the renovation of Baker's, and added my concern about the developers diminishing the Palmer House's State Street entrance to little more than a service entrance.

Original 1940s storefront shortly before its demolition

Of the two unfortunate choices by the developer Thor Equities of New York, I'm having difficulty deciding which is the greater transgression. Until last year, the entrance to Baker's Shoes (originally Chandler's) was one of the last extant examples of a vintage Loop storefront. "Dark and grungy" as it may have been, it didn't take much imagination to conjure up how beautiful it once looked and how little it would have taken to return it to its former glory. It was an original work with its undulating lines, asymmetry, and open display area that, in the words of Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin: "sacrificed interior square footage for a visual drama meant to suck pedestrians in the door." "Drama" is not a word often used to describe the storefronts of Chicago, nor are the terms "abstract", or "work of art" for that matter. This storefront was all three, to me on closer inspection it evoked the whimsy of the Catalonian Surrealist painter, Joan Miró.

Baker's renovation, January 12, 2012

Well it's gone now, the space has been divided in two, and even though it's a separate building, its public face will "fit in" with the Palmer House's new State Street arcade of storefronts. The photo on the right is how the building looked last week, still under construction, shortly after the barriers were removed. This is much the same view as the photograph taken in the late forties that opens Blair Kamin's article on the transformation of Baker's last February. From that sixty year old photo you see three Modern storefronts, Chandler's in the middle, the clothier Baskin in its own Modernist Building (by the same architectural firm) on the right, and another unidentified storefront on the left. The Baskin building was replaced about twenty years ago by the structure you see on the right of the contemporary photograph that houses a cooling unit that services much of the Loop. The storefront on the left was replaced I'm guessing in the sixties by the absurd clapboard facade of the Beef and Brandy restaurant. And while all traces of Modernist design are gone from this view, a replica of the old gaslight inspired lamp post, identical to the one in the old photograph, has made a triumphal return. The contrast between the the modern photograph and the one in Kamin's piece, clearly illustrates how little respect is given in this city to the Modern era.

Lynn Becker's post, on the subject, the inspiration for my original post about Baker's, includes a heartbreaking photograph of another long gone Modernist storefront on State Street, Alfred S. Alschuler's Benson Rixon store. See it and weep. *

Pictured on the left are some of the Palmer House storefronts that Baker's will soon fit in with. They're good enough I suppose, if not very interesting. Looking carefully at the photograph, click on it to enlarge if you have to, you'll notice that between the Aldo and Crocs shoe stores, is the new State Street entrance of the Palmer House. This is the current presence of the most iconic institution on the city's most iconic street, that I alluded to in my comment on the blog post.

The decision to re-configure the Baker's storefront was an economic and aesthetic one. The alteration of the Palmer House State Street entrance was a symbolic one. The hotel whose founder created what would become the most important street in the city, has turned its back on that street.

The author of the blog responded to my comment with a suggestion that did not occur to me. Perhaps the city may have cut a deal with the hotel to reduce its presence on State Street in order to discourage taxis from tying up traffic by dropping off, picking up passengers and queuing up in front of the hotel. The two major hotel entrances on Monroe Street and Wabash Avenue would serve that purpose (as they have for decades) and improve traffic on the major artery, State Street. It's a plausible theory.

Whatever the reason for diminishing the Palmer House's presence on State Street, it's a lousy idea as far as State Street is concerned. If the author's theory is correct and the city is responsible for the changes, it's clear that the city is more interested in improving vehicular traffic than in revitalizing State Street.

If the idea came from the hotel, then it's a clear message that State Street, with its mid to low level shops, (including the ones housed in the hotel building), predominantly targeted toward teenagers and young adults, is not worthy of the clientele the hotel hopes to attract. That point is even clearer from the interior of the hotel where before the renovation, there was a clear passageway between Wabash Avenue and State Street. Today you can still walk through the hotel between those two streets, but you do a double take as you approach State, where the passageway diminishes greatly and it's not altogether clear that the way to State is even publicly accessible. The Palmer House in no subtle way is directing its guests eastward, toward Michigan Avenue and Millennium Park, and away from State Street.

The streets I mentioned at the top of this post all owe their greatness to the fact that they attract people. When crowded, those streets are vital, they constitute the lifeblood of their respective cities. When they are empty, they're just collections of storefronts.

State Street is no exception.

Its life force is evident in the two pictures above from over one hundred years ago. That vitality was still very much evident in my childhood, it diminished throughout my teens, and all but died in my early adult years. In its heyday, State Street belonged to all of Chicago, its shops appealed to young and old, black and white, rich and poor. Goldblatts the workingman's emporium filled up its magnificent terra cotta building that stood only a few blocks from the upscale Marshall Fields. The street's culinary delights ranged from the continental Fritzels, to the lunch counter at Woolworths. Its entertainment ranged from live stage shows featuring Frank Sinatra and Count Basie at the Chicago Theater to live burlesque shows in the strip joints at the other end of the Loop.

State Street was the setting for all the great parades, most notably the St. Patrick's Day Parade, Chicago's version of the old May Day parade in Moscow's Red Square. Even when the holiday fell on a work day, it seemed that everyone in Chicago turned out for it. Never before in my life or since have I experienced the crush of humanity than at some of those parades, especially across from the reviewing stand at State and Madison. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

Nowadays there's hardly ever a big crowd on State Street, let alone a crush. All but two of the big stores are gone as are most of the old theaters, and the interesting shops. Fritzels is long gone and so is Woolworth's. The parades are a thing of the past. Not that there aren't worthwhile bits and pieces to State Street. The much needed and pathetically underutilized Harold Washington Library forms an anchor for South State Street. DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute have a strong presence and bring a much needed infusion of young people (read, the future), to State Street. The Gene Siskel Film Center forms another cultural anchor on the north side of the Loop. Of course the Chicago Theater and its grand marquee still stand as a reminder of what once was and what could be.

While it's a bit of a mixed bag architecturally, State Street does boast some of the greatest buildings in Chicago. It has also lost more great buildings than any other street in the city.

I think the biggest loss on State Street today is its complexity, that incredible mix of the elegant, the tawdry, and everything in between that defined the street for over 100 years. Today everything is neat and respectable, nothing too out of the ordinary, and certainly nothing offensive. But with the exception of a handful of great buildings, there's nothing outstanding either. That goofy Beef and Brandy facade is looking better and better to me every day. Of course that'll be gone soon enough, replaced by another tasteful, bland storefront.

State Street today is a little like a pair of dull ice skates where the edges are gone and all that's left is the middle which just doesn't grip the ice very well.

Clearly, State Street's importance to this city isn't merely as a conduit for traffic. The recent steps to bring life back to the street are a good beginning for the most part. The old department stores aren't coming back and State Street won't ever be what it once was. But I believe the city could do a better job of mixing things up by encouraging small and big businesses alike to open up shop, and integrating the old street, turning it back into the premier thoroughfare it deserves to be.

One way they can start is to bring back the parades.

After all as Sinatra and Mayor Washington famously sang:

On State Street that great street I just want to say,
they do things they don't do on Broadway.
They have the time the time of their life,
I saw a man he danced with his wife,
in Chicago, Chicago my home town.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

* The building that once housed the Benson Rixon store still exists in altered form but the storefront is gone. It is now a McDonald's.

A Chicago primer

2012-01-19T08:24:00.002-06:00

If you want to know something about Chicago, a good place to start is any local park on a spring, summer or early fall evening. There you will more than likely find a game that is practically unique to this city, 16" softball. The ball is ridiculously large meaning you can't hit it as far as a conventional 12" softball, although I've seen guys hit the thing far enough to clear the fence at a major league ballpark. Consequently you can fit two or three games into the same space you'd need for one conventional softball game, an important feature in a city with limited space for ballfields. The other unique aspect of the game is that it's played without gloves making it accessible to anyone willing to sacrifice their fingers.

If you want to know anything about Chicago, you have to know Mike Royko.

So I give you dear reader, Mike Royko, on softball:

Shepherd's Temple

2012-01-16T20:08:00.001-06:00

Here's a link to Lee Bay's website and a post about a magnificent Chicago building that more than likely will soon be demolished. Douglas Boulevard on the West Side is filled with a collection of former synagogs, a testimony to the neighborhood's Jewish legacy. The former temple, Anshe Kenesseth Israel, is perhaps the most stunning of all. AKI, like the majority of temples in the neighborhood was converted to a Christian Church when the population of the neighborhood changed from predominantly Jewish to predominantly African American. Martin Luther King visited the church when he briefly moved into an apartment on the West Side to protest housing inequality in Chicago. This particular building went through different hands over the years and unfortunately the last congregation who knew the building as Shepherd's Temple Baptist Church, couldn't make the bills and shuttered the church several years ago.

Shepherd's Temple is in decrepit shape and the city has issued an emergency demolition order for safety reasons. There are on-going eleventh hour attempts to save the building but at this time it appears unlikey that yet another link to this city's illustrious past will be saved from the wrecker's ball.

My kind of town

2012-01-10T23:25:00.000-06:00

Getting this blog back on track (at least the one spelled out in the banner), here is an interesting article on the urban experience, specifically on New York City, a place I have woefully neglected in the three years I've been writing this blog.

Ostensibly a piece focusing on her recommendation of five books on New York, author and talkshow guest, Fran Lebowitz provides an insight into the city, what it has been, and three recent events that changed it. New York has always been a refuge from the stifling mores and values of Anyotherplace, USA. The freedom it afforded its inhabitants inspired a cultural environment unparalleled in this country. The AIDS epidemic wiped out not only a significant proportion of the city's cultural elite, but also in Lebowitz's words, many of the consumers of that culture. In addition to the obvious horrors of 9/11, Lebowitz considers a lasting legacy to be the acceptance of New Yorkers (and the rest of America) of giving up their personal liberties in the name of security. And the administration of Mayor Bloomberg according to Lebowitz has gone to great lengths to turn the city into Anyotherplace, or at least a place that people from Anyotherplace would want to flock to.

It's hard for me to believe that the New York City of the 1990s (the decade where I spent the most time there), as portrayed in the novel Cheap Novelties by Ben Katchor, is now a bygone era.

Lebowitz is known for her mastery of the snappy one-liner and this article does not disappoint, here she channels the late Henny Youngman:

I said directly to Michael Bloomberg, “You know what sitting around in bars and restaurants, talking and smoking and drinking, is called, Mike?” He said, “What?” I said, “It’s called the history of art.”

One liner after another she hits the nail on the head about the urban experience, here she sounds a little like Jane Jacobs:

Density creates that (intellectual) dynamic. You don’t get that in Los Angeles, I don’t care who claims it. I don’t care how many rich people build museums in LA. To me, it’s not a city if people spend half their day in a car.

In the end, Lebowitz sees New York as tremendously resilient and the changes, temporary:

What is immutable about New York is that it’s always changing and it’s relatively hard to live here – relative to the places where people drive from mall to country club. It’s expensive, it’s not necessarily clean and you have to walk. So I think, in the end, the people who will be in New York are the people who deserve to be here – people like me.

The new Old Town

2012-01-10T19:44:00.003-06:00

A nice article by Blair Kamin about the new home for the Old Town School of Folk Music can be found here. The first paragraph alone is a testimony to good old fashioned common sense:

The architectural world has been so obsessed with iconic buildings in recent years that we've lost sight of the virtues of good, solid design that strives to fit in rather than stand out — and to serve its users rather than sacrifice their needs on the altar of a flashy, attention-getting shape.

On the other hand, Kamin goes on to point out that this building transcends what has passed for contextualism in recent years, as it does not merely imitate its surroundings, but responds to them in an original way, in Kamin's words:

a dialogue between past and present, not mindless mimicry.

Here's a link to an article I wrote a year ago in memory of a great proponent of conextualism done the right way.

I'll be spending a lot of time in the new Old Town School building as my wife works for that venerable Chicago institution and my children take music classes there.

I'll be sure to keep you posted...

2012

2012-01-04T00:03:00.001-06:00

Another year and another opportunity to write the wrong date on my checks. Only three days into the year and I've already taken that opportunity. As a child I could never understand why adults always talked about how quickly time passed, for me it moved at a snail's pace. No longer, now I wish that I could slow time down, if only just a little.

For the first time in a long time, I really celebrated the turn of the year, taking a deep breath and realizing all I have and how lucky I am for my loving family, for a roof over my head, food on the table, and for simply being alive. The older you get, the more you learn not to take those things for granted.

Another good thing about getting older is you learn to not worry so much about what other people think of you. My son is currently at the age where he would as soon die as be embarrassed. I remember those days well and completely sympathize with him. But at some point in life you begin to realize that other people are far more concerned about their own image than yours, and it's a very liberating feeling.

With that in mind, I give you a piece of music entirely appropriate for the New Year, a Central European tradition that for all its schmaltz and un-hipness, sends a chill up the Central European half of my spine. It brings me back to my grandparents and all those Germanic restaurants they took me to in Chicago and Milwaukee. It brings back the place where my parents met, a hole in the wall night club on North Avenue in Chicago called Stadt Wien, and the real Vienna, the charming city on the Danube that I visited with my half sister Eva almost twenty years ago. It does not evoke the dark, post war city Graham Greene and Corol Reed portrayed in their classic film The Third Man, but rather memories of my father's wiener schnitzel, of sacher torte and the coffee with whipped cream they used to serve at Café Vienna in the old Bismarck Hotel in the Loop.

The only disclaimer is the title of the piece which is a bit misleading. The Danube is neither blue, nor is it particularly beautiful.

Enjoy if you dare:

Happy New Year!

Blowing my own horn

2011-12-27T13:04:00.004-06:00

I feel terrible about Sears Holdings' announcement today that they plan to close 100 to 120 Sears and KMart stores across the United States and Canada. My heart goes out to all the workers who will be losing their jobs as well as the suppliers and all the other assorted businesses whose success depends on those stores.

But I question the judgement of the State of Illinois who bent over backwards earlier this month to lure Sears into keeping their corporate headquarters in Illinois by giving them unprecedented tax breaks and other incentives. Hard to believe but could it be possible that Governor Quinn and the State Legislature were unaware about the fiscal health of Sears Holdings?

Now my finger is hardly on the pulse of the economy, but I learned about the sad state of affairs over at Sears and KMart last month when I accidentally stumbled across this article in Esquire Magazine. The article inspired me to write this post, which compared the business giants who founded the two retailers, with the current management who seems intent to destroy two American institutions in order to profit off their vast real estate holdings. The very name of the corporation that owns the two retail giants alone should have given that fact away. I found dozens of articles that backed up the Esquire piece.

I'm pretty sure that the governor had good, solid reasons for his actions and that he's convinced all will end up rosy for Sears and KMart. But just in case he didn't, may I suggest to avoid looking foolish in the future, the next time he takes draconian measures to keep a business in this state, he have his people do a little research first.

Maybe they can start by reading my blog!

A man for all seasons

2011-12-25T12:44:00.022-06:00

War heros play a huge role in a nation's lore. Their images grace currency, stories are written and movies are made about them, pigeon covered monuments dedicated to them adorn parks and public squares. Be they great military leaders or regular grunts who perform heroic deeds, placing the lives of others above their own, they inspire us to greatness and serve as symbols of their country:

The Americans have George Washington, Audi Murphy and Chicago's own Milton Olive.
The Russians have Aleksandr Nevskii, Gyorgi Zhukov, and Ekaterina Mikhailovna-Demina
The Poles have Tadeusz Kościuszko, Casimir Pulaski and Wojtek the Soldier Bear.
The Czechs have Josef Švejk.

In case that last name is not familiar to you, don't search through accounts of Czech military history. The Good Soldier Švejk is the eponymous character of a series of satyrical novels written by Jaroslav Hašek, set during World War I. Not your typical war hero, this Josef was an incompetent ne'er-do-well of sorts, on the surface not all that different from the bumbling Marine, Gomer Pyle of the TV series of the same name. Unlike Gomer Pyle, Švejk was a subversive; crazy like a fox, his incompetence, whether intentional or not, served to undermine the military system and the society to which he belonged.

Much has been made of Soldier Švejk's being a symbol of the Czech people. The Czechs and their on again off again brethren, the Moravians and the Slovaks, are goegraphically sandwiched between major powers on the world stage. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and Russia, all occupied their small country at one time or other over the last several hundred years. The Czech character is built some would say, out of the years of subjugation under oppressive foreign regimes. Much the same can be said for their Slavic cousins the Poles, yet the temperaments of the two nations could not be more different. The Poles by and large are hot blooded, patriotic, and devoutly Catholic. As for the Czechs, well not so much. The Czechs combine irreverence with a strong sense of self-preservation, mixed with a hint of cynicism. The legendary but far outnumbered Polish Army valiantly fought against the Germans in the first days of September, 1939. The Polish Underground was a formidable force in World War II and as a result, their country was devastated by the War. By contrast, the Czechs understood the futility of standing up to the German war machine. Where the Poles were defiant, the Czechs like Soldier Švejk, were subversive in their resistance.

That's not to say that the Czech people did not suffer under Nazi occupation. In May of 1942, the Nazi administrator for Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Czechoslovak Resistance paratroopers in Prague. To avenge his death, Hitler ordered the annihilation of a town just outside of Prague whose inhabitants were suspected of anti-Reich sentiments and for aiding Heydrich's assassins. On June 9th, 1942, German troops rounded up all 173 men and several women of Lidice, and shot them. The children of the town who were acceptable racial specimens were taken away from their mothers and sent off for adoption to German families. The rest of the women and children were sent to concentration camps where most of them perished. Their town was burned to the ground.

All around the world, you will find streets and towns named Lidice in memory of that tragic city.

Save for a few blocks which were blown up by the Nazis in retaliation for various acts of resistance against them, the city of Prague was not physically damaged during the war. The same cannot be said for its populace. Tens of thousands of citizens of Prague, mostly Jews, were deported to Theresenstadt, the concentration camp that was created by Heydrich.

This was the world of Václav Havel's childhood. My father and Havel (who shared first names), were born in Czechoslovakia during a brief moment in history (between the two world wars) when their country was free and independent. The young Havel would know that independence for all of two years.

With the Munich Agreement of 1938, England and France handed over the western part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudatenland) to Hitler on a silver platter, and by March of the following year, the much weakened country became a protectorate of Germany. In 1940, a Czechoslovak government in exile was formed in London. That government led by President Edvard Beneš, was recognized by the Allied Powers and in 1943, signed a far reaching treaty with the Soviet Union which resulted in the agreement to nationalize heavy industry and create local people's committees in the country at the end of the war.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the KSČ, which was loyal to Moscow, had been in existence since 1921. The Soviet liberation of most of Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, combined with lingering resentment toward the West since the Munich Agreement, resulted in the KSČ gaining considerable support in the 1946 elections, during the brief existence of the Czechoslovak Third Republic after the War. For the three years the tenuous Republic existed, Czechoslovakia was the only neighbor of the Soviet Union that had a democratically elected government. Soon, under pressure from Joseph Stalin and the influence of the Red Army knocking at the door, President Beneš capitulated in February of 1948 (the month and year of my half sister's Eva's birth), and formed a new government with the KSČ squarely in control. By the time the elections rolled around in May of that year, there was only one party on the ballot, the National Front. The National Front would be the only political organization allowed in the country for the next 41 years.

In 1948, Vacláv Havel was twelve years old. As we read in his obituaries last week, he came from an influential upper middle class family in Prague. By the time he came of age in the 1950s, his pedigree did not prove favorable in the new worker's paradise of Communist Czechoslovakia, and his opportunities proved limited. College was not an option for him, so he left school at 15 and before his compulsory military service he worked in various positions in the national service primarily as a laboratory assistant. After the military service ended he enrolled in a correspondence course in drama which led to his next career as a playwright.

The fifties were a difficult time in Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote about the conflicting currents that defined life in those years. The revolution brought with it for some, excitement and hope for the future:

Building sites were swarming with tens of thousands of young enthusiasts of the new faith singing songs of socialist construction.

While at the same time:

In fifties there were enormous concentration camps in Czechoslovakia filled with tens of thousands of innocent people... There were tortures and executions, dramatic flights across borders.

In 1955, my father's departure from his country took place during one of those dramatic flights.

Havel wrote about the harassment Czech citizens endured at the hands of the Secret Police. Any number of excuses sufficed for this treatment but one of the biggest causes for concern were people with relatives living in the West. As we traveled from Paris to České Budějovice in Southern Bohemia in 1993 to meet her mother (my father's first wife), my half sister Eva described to me in great deal what the two of them endured after my father left for greener pastures. For ten years, Eva and her mother were harassed, usually with knocks on the door in the middle of the night by the police trying to glean information about my old man, but mostly to send a message. Even though our father and her mother were divorced and no longer in contact, the two women lived in constant fear as the continuous harassment lasted until her mother remarried. Eva and her mother paid dearly for my father's actions and benefitted nothing. This was a story that would be retold countless times for generations of Czechosloavaks.

As bad as all that was, Havel wrote that at the time, there was at least some sort of meaning to all the madness:

The songs of idealists and fanatics, political criminals on the rampage, the suffering of heroes-these have always been part of history. The fifties were a bad time in Czechoslovakia, but there have been many such times in human history. It still shared something, or at least bore comparison with those other periods; it still resembled history. No one could have said that nothing was happening, or that the age did not have its stories.

An idealist could argue that the atrocities against the people were merely the growing pains of a nascent society. They were after all driven by a powerful ideology, trying (in vain) to build an ideal society, one where there would no longer be poverty and everyone (theoretically) would be equal. The end justifies the means after all, at least in the mind of an ideologue.

That idealism still existed in the late sixties and came to fruition during the Prague Spring, a brief, wonderful period in 1968. Prague Spring was not at first a grass roots movement but a realization that the economic model set into motion from on high (i.e.; the USSR) did not work as a one size fits all solution. It particularly didn't work in a highly educated and industrially sophisticated Czechoslovakia. Alexander Dubček, a Slovak, was appointed president in early 1968 and immediately set into motion a series of reforms including the lifting of restrictions on speech and the press. He suggested the possibility of a multiple party system, and to bolster the stagnant economy, hinted at a limited free market. This was not meant to be a rejection of Communism. The goal in Dubček's words was:

...to build an advanced socialist society on sound economic foundations ... a socialism that corresponds to the historical democratic traditions of Czechoslovakia, in accordance with the experience of other communist parties.

In other words, again in Dubček's words: "Communism with a human face."

For one brief, shining moment, it was a tremendously liberating experience, as if a veil had been lifted over the eyes of the entire country. The works of many Czech dissident writers including Havel, previously banned, became publicly known in their own country. Dubček's reforms opened up the flood gates for everyone in society with a bone to pick about the government, especially the influence of the Soviet Union, whose leaders were all ears. On the pretext of its right to intervene if a Warsaw Pact nation were to embark on a path toward capitalism, troops from other Warsaw Pact nations, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Soviet Union, invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. Here is a link to a gallery of pictures of the invasion made by the great Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka.

The creation of Prague Spring may not have been a grass roots movement, but the opposition to its fall certainly was. As you can see from the photographs, young people took to the streets in a defiant, if quixotic stance in opposition to the invasion. In some cases, busses were overturned in the streets to prevent the tanks from advancing, other tanks were set ablaze. More creative tactics included the Švejkian removal of all street signs except the ones that pointed the way back to Moscow. 72 Czechoslovaks were killed in the invasion.

After the invasion, life did not exactly return to pre-Spring days. Here is Havel in 1987, contrasting the totalitarianism backed with an ideology of the fifties, with a totalitarianism whose only purpose was self-preservation of the post-Prague Spring:

... the powers that be really did learn a lesson from the Prague Spring. They discovered how far things can go when the door to a plurality of opinions and interests is opened: the totalitarian system itself is jeopardized. Having learned this lesson, political power set itself a single aim: self-preservation. In a process with its own, mindless dynamic, all the mechanisms of direct and indirect manipulation of life began to expand and assume unprecedented forms. Henceforth nothing could be left to chance.

The past twenty years in Czechoslovakia can almost serve as a textbook illustration of how an advanced or late totalitarian system works. Revolutionary ethos and terror have been replaced by dull inertia, pretex-ridden caution, bureaucratic anonymity, and mindless, stereotypical behavior, all of which aim exclusively at becoming more and more what they already are.

The songs of zealots and the cries of the tortured are no longer heard; lawlessness has put on kid gloves and moved from the torture chambers into the upholstered offices of faceless bureaucrats. If the President of the Republic is seen in the street at all, he is behind the bulletproof glass of his limousine as it roars off to the airport, surrounded by a police escort, to meet Colonel Qaddafi.

The twenty one year period between the crush of the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution provided most of the fodder for Václav Havel's diatribes against the Czechoslovak totalitarian state. Havel said that during those years. it was if time stood still.

Havel was no Soldier Švejk. He was as defiant as any Polish Cavalry soldier. The only difference was his choice of weapon was not a gun, but the written word. His plays and essays spelled out in no uncertain terms that the socialist government of Czechoslovakia was an absurd travesty. In an open letter to then President Gustáv Husák in 1973, Havel wrote that although the outward signs of prosperity were evident, the totalitarian system that Husák presided over, undermined general well being and human dignity:

The basic question one must ask is this: Why are people in fact behaving in the way they do? Why do they do all these things that, taken together, form the impressive image of a totally united society giving total support to its government? For any unprejudiced observer, the answer is, I think, selfevident: They are driven to it by fear.

For fear of losing his job, the schoolteacher teaches things he does not believe; fearing for his future, the pupil repeats them after him; for fear of not being allowed to continue his studies, the young man joins the Youth League and participates in whatever of its activities are necessary; fear that, under the monstrous system of political credits, his son or daughter will not acquire the necessary total of points for enrollment at a school leads the father to take on all manner of responsibilities and "voluntarily" to do everything required. Fear of the consequences of refusal leads people to take part in elections, to vote for the proposed candidates, and to pretend that they regard such ceremonies as genuine elections; out of fear for their livelihood, position, or prospects, they go to meetings, vote for every resolution they have to, or at least keep silent: it is fear that carries them through humiliating acts of self-criticism and penance and the dishonest filling out of a mass of degrading questionnaires; fear that someone might inform against them prevents them from giving public, and often even private, expression to their true opinions. It is the fear of suffering financial reverses and the effort to better themselves and ingratiate themselves with the authorities that in most cases makes working men put their names to "work commitments"; indeed, the same motives often lie behind the establishment of Socialist Labor Brigades, in the clear realization that their chief function is to be mentioned in the appropriate reports to higher levels. Fear causes people to attend all those official celebrations, demonstrations, and marches: Fear of being prevented from continuing their work leads many scientists and artists to give allegiance to ideas they do not in fact accept, to write things they do not agree with or khow to be false, to join official organizations or to take part in work of whose value they have the lowest opinion, or to distort and mutilate their own works. In the effort to save themselves, many even report others for doing to them what they themselves have been doing to the people they report.

Life in Czechoslovakia was in fact a lie, according to Havel.

And if the life of the dissident/playwright turned president could be summed up in one word, that word would be, truth.

Václav Havel paid dearly for speaking the truth. He was put in prison on numerous occasions and forced to work in menial jobs to support himself. Havel's work was banned in his own country and he was known to his own people mostly through the government's condemnation of him.

Havel gained international attention in 1977 when he and a group of similar minded political activists wrote and signed Charter 77. A Bill of Rights of sorts, Charter 77 was a petition, and later a movement that took the petition's name, to "call attention to the systematic violation of human rights and democratic freedoms" that had been already agreed upon during the Helsinki Accords of 1975 (and signed by the Czechoslovak government), the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and the Czechoslovak constitution.

The primary concern of the petition was the failure to afford its citizens the right to freedom of expression, and the fear of official retribution for expressing personal opinions. Citizens expressing points of view not in accordance with the government's, the charter claims, were routinely denied the right to education, the right to be gainfully employed in one's chosen occupation, and were ostracized from society.

Other rights enumerated by Charter 77 guaranteed in the Czechoslovak constitution but not in reality were:

freedom of information
freedom of religion
the right to legal recourse
freedom from unreasonable search
freedom of movement

Although Havel in his own writing made no bones about the fact that he did not suscribe to the tenets of Socialism, Charter 77 was not in any way a radical document and it took pains to point out that it did not quarrel with the basic premises of Socialism or advocate political change or social reform.

Still the government came down with a vengeance on the petition's creators and signers. The document proved to be prophetic. As if on cue, the government's reaction was spelled out in detail by the document itself. The creators and those with the courage to sign it were publicly vilified, lost their jobs, they and their children were deprived of educational opportunities, some were forced into exile, others were coerced into becoming secret service informants, and others including Havel, were sent to prison. His five year sentence was reduced by six months because of poor health.

Here is another quote from Charter 77:

In prisons, persons thus sentenced (for political crimes) are treated in a manner violating human dignity, their health is endangered and attempts are made to destroy them morally.

In Havel's case, all of that was true, but the attempts to morally destroy him were unmitigated failures. Nor did the government succeed in silencing him. Despite the perpetual threat of retribution hanging over him, Havel continued to write and speak out against the evils of totalitarianism, right up until the fall of the government and his ascendence to the presidency in 1989.

More words of his would prove prophetic when in 1989, once again in prison, he wrote an essay that was to be delivered at the award ceremony of the German Booksellers Association where he was to be presented with that group's Peace Prize. Appropriately enough, the essay was titled: "A Word about Words."

Havel said in the essay:

Yes, I do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions...

Just as Havel accepted the award in absentia in October of 1989, Havel's and others' words began the revolution that would be resolved in a little over a month, without one shot being fired. Months after being released from prison, Havel became the President of Czechoslovakia.

1989 was a watershed year in the history of the world as it marked the fall of Communism in Europe. None of the dramatic changes that took place in the old Soviet Bloc could have happened without the vision and courage of Mikhail Gorbachev who understood that the price of militarization due to the Cold War came at the cost of feeding its people. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union introduced a new openness (glasnost) and economic restructuring (perestroika), all to encourage a dialogue with, and encourage support from the West. Ironically it was the workers in Poland who brought an end to their "workers' paradise."The Solidarity Labor Union and Movement in Poland and its charismatic leader Lech Wałęsa, with the support of the influential Catholic Church of that country, became so powerful that it forced the government to negotiate with it. In 1989, Gorbachev discarded the Brezhnev Doctrine where the USSR reserved the right to intervene if any of the Warsaw Pact nations got out of line, just as they did in Hungary in 1956 and of course Czechoslovakia in 1968. Poland quickly fell and soon thereafter, Hungary did the same. However the governments of Bulgaria, East Germany, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia remained intent on staying the course.

The government that Husák and his cronies tried so desperately to save, crumbled overnight as there was nothing left to hold it up, its foundation built on a flawed ideology that eventually rotted to the core. In the end it only took a little push from the opposition led in part by Havel and it all came tumbling down on Novermber 28, 1989. Not a drop of blood was spilled, hence the term, Velvet Revolution.

In the following June the first democratic elections were held since 1946. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the Federal Parliament and Václav Havel was elected president.

Photograph by Martin Kozák

With impeccable credentials as a man of truth, Václav Havel was the moral compass for his country. Successful politicians need to determine which battles to fight, they need to understand the art of compromise, and they need to tell people what they want to hear. Havel was no politician. As president, he knew it was time to turn the attention inward and look at the Czech people themselves. Years of oppression had created what he called "totalitarian nihilism", the systematic dissolution of the public's ability to think, to dream, and to believe. It created a nation of complacent, indifferent cynics, and Havel would have none of that. He insisted that his fellow citizens take a stand and take ownership of their country. He also controversially rejected the movement to prosecute ordinary citizens who snitched on their neighbors to the police. Havel understood that no one should be punished for not acting heroically.

Havel saw his presidency as an obligation rather than a reward. During the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia when Slovakia split from the Republic to form its own government, Havel stepped down from office so as not to preside over the breaking up of his country. He was reinstated shortly thereafter and became the first president of the newly formed Czech Republic, where he remained until 2003.

In the press, Václav Havel was often the neglected stepbrother to his fellow leaders in the freedom movements of the late eighties, and early nineties namely, Wałęsa, Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa. All but Havel received Nobel Peace Prizes, and named in numerous lists as the most important people of the last century.

Even his death was overshadowed by the death on the same day (well, the official announcement of it anyway) of North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il. Death indeed makes for strange bedfellows. My guess is that never before had the two men ever been mentioned together in the same sentence, no two leaders could have been more diametrically opposed. It seemed to me at first that the ultimate indignity to Havel was being upstaged on the day of his death by the death of a tyrant.

Then came the images from their respective countries and it occurred to me that Havel got the last laugh. In Prague's Wenseslaus Square, (appropriately named after Havel's namesake, the famous good king and patron saint of the Czechs), and in cities all over the former Czechoslovakia, there were images of spontaneous gatherings of people who assembled to celebrate the life of the man who helped set the course for the future of their country. Tens of thousands showed up for his funeral in Prague.

In Pyongyang came the images of a clearly not spontaneous gathering of hundreds of North Koreans, beating their chests, some on their hands and knees, appearing like a casting call for the latest telenovela, all in hysterics over the death of their "beloved leader."

The contrast of the two images was stunning. The genuine show of love and respect for Václav Havel versus the absurd theater (which Havel the artist would certainly have appreciated) of a totalitarian regime propagating obvious falsehoods illustrated for me anyway, the victory of truth, morality and humanity over the false promises of ideology. That was exactly what Havel fought for throughout his struggles and his successes.

Now and perhaps for the ages, Václav Havel has replaced Soldier Švejk as the enduring symbol of the resiliency of the Czech people. He fought a heroic battle, defiantly taking on a formidable opponent and winning in no uncertain terms. He stood by his principles without flinching, even if it meant jail or even worse, disfavor from his own people.

He was a bright shining light in a time of great darkness, truly a man for all seasons.

Post script:

Today, Christmas Day, December 25, 2011, marks the twentieth anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev stepping down from power thereby declaring the official dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The battle over Christmas

2011-12-17T09:33:00.010-06:00

At work we eagerly await our annual Winter Holiday Party which will shortly be followed by a much needed Winter Break. Contrary to what that might suggest, we will not be hibernating through the coldest months of the year, just taking two days off work surrounding December 25th, the day we used to call Christmas. I've kind of become famous around the office for insisting on greeting people this time of year with a hearty "Merry Christmas", instead of an insipid (to my ears), "Happy Holidays." I imagine my adherence to the old fashioned term is more amusing than annoying to the people who know me, at least I hope so, as mentioning Christmas in public has become in some circles, politically incorrect.

As I get older, I'm becoming a little less strident and have taken on more of a live and let live attitude about the subject of Christmas. After all, people who don't believe in Christ, God, or anything for that matter, needn't be inundated by the belief systems of others, and Christmas is first and foremost a religious holiday right?

Well yes and no.

It may come as a surprise to some that in Christian tradition, Christmas isn't as big a deal as one might think. It is not the most important holiday in Christianity, that honor unquestionably belongs to Easter. The story of the birth of Jesus is sketchy at best in the Bible, most of it is to be found in only one of the four Gospels. It didn't even occur to early Christians to celebrate the birthday of Jesus, the first celebration of Christmas didn't take place until the late fourth century.

No one knows the year, let alone the exact date of the birth of Jesus. The only certainty, if we are to believe the biblical account, is that he could not have been born in late December. One theory for the choice of December 25th centers around the tradition that Jesus' crucifixion took place on the anniversary of his conception. Add nine months to that date, which is explicitly stated in the Gospels, and you get December 25th. Another theory is that the date was chosen, after Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire, to coincide with the ancient Pagan celebration of Winter Solstice, when the sun reverses its slow daily descent in the sky. There is a poetic synchronicity here as the figurative re-birth of the sun coincides with the literal birth of the Son. Many of the traditions that we associate with Christmas, gift giving, the Christmas tree, the yule log, holly and mistletoe, all-round merriment, and even Santa Claus, originate from Pagan rituals. These traditions are precisely the reason why many extreme Christian groups throughout history have downplayed and even banned the celebration of Christmas.

Of course today in mainstream Christianity, Christmas is a big deal. Throughout the world, the faithful are scrambling to take the holiday back from what they see as over commercialization and secularization. Hearing complaints about too much emphasis on consumerism, and not enough about the "real meaning of Christmas" is as predictable as hearing the song; "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas" played at the local KMart the day after Halloween. "Put Christ back into Christmas" is the rallying cry of regular church goers who are appalled by the merry-makers and the folks who only show up at church on Christmas Day and take their precious seats and parking spaces.

It's pretty much the same folks who complain that there is a "war on Christmas" going on, waged by non-believers who would remove all traces of religious symbolism from public spaces.

But we Christians can't have it both ways. If we want to take back Christmas and keep it solely as a religious holiday, we can't expect people of other beliefs to embrace it as a public holiday. Imagine the outcry among most Christian groups if there were to be a national observance of the month of Ramadan.

My feeling as a Christian, is simply let everybody celebrate Christmas in whatever way they wish. Who could possibly argue with the secular traditions of giving unselfishly, of spreading joy to others and letting others' joy spread to you. I don't have any problem with a little frivolity, of decorating homes and businesses with lights and ornaments, and the sounds of Christmas songs (most of whom written by Jewish songwriters) played on sound systems in department stores. Christmas is the time of year when life seems the most worth living, when people put their everyday troubles behind them, and simply celebrate life.

Familiar secular works such as Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life, How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss (who was also Jewish), and my all time favorite Christmas story by O. Henry, The Gift of the Magi, speak to the true meaning of Christmas at least as well as the chapter that St. Luke devotes to the birth of Jesus in his Gospel. Even the inescapable "jolly old elf" profoundly addresses the spirit of Christmas which is actually very simple, even in purely theological terms; generosity and above all, love.

You can call it Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or even the ho hum Winter Holiday, and the spirit is the same, on earth, peace and goodwill to all. Still in my heart of hearts I think it's a shame that we are fighting over calling it Christmas.

On the other hand, perhaps this is for the best. Back when everyone simply wished each other "Merry Christmas", it was more or less a perfunctory holiday greeting. Now, forced to give great thought to my choice of words, when I wish someone a "Merry Christmas" I'm saying: "I wish you peace, joy, and love, for now, and always." When I say: "Happy Holidays" I'm saying: "Enjoy your day off and don't drink too much egg nog."

As a subversive term, "Merry Christmas" actually means something. With that in mind please allow me to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a joyous New Year.

And may God bless us, every one.

Occupying Utopia?

2011-12-10T00:14:00.001-06:00

Over lunch the other day, a friend and I were discussing the Occupy Movement and its primary concern, the equitable distribution of wealth. I wondered aloud which communities throughout history have successfully spread the wealth around instead of limiting its control to a privileged few. My friend immediately brought up the early Christian community. As a persecuted minority their very survival depended upon the cohesiveness of the group. That cohesiveness in no small part can be attributed to Jesus' words to the rich young man who wanted to know the key to eternal life. He told the man to sell all that he had and give the money to the poor.

Christ's early followers did just that, they pooled their resources, and gladly gave to those who had not, just as Jesus had suggested.

Collective communities have existed throughout history, generally as small groups of people with shared beliefs who by and large separated themselves from the body politic.

In his blog Life's Private Book, the author, David T. describes the most successful collective communities in history, monasteries. His post; The Occupy Movement, Sin and the Monastery, asks the question: "Why do attempts at creating progressive utopias always fail?" His answer is basically that human nature always gets in the way. We simply don't accept the idea that life is not fair. Instead of grasping justice the author suggests monks "embrace injustice", not for others but for themselves:

Rather than fairness, the monastery demands obedience, piety, chastity and humility. The modern world, of course, sees in this nothing but the purest form of oppression. It pursues fairness through the assertion of rights and demands, the louder and more uncompromising the better. The active embrace of meekness and submission can only be understood by it as an invitation to slavery.

Well, for those of us who are not cut out to be monks, this seems like a pretty grim prospect indeed. For hundreds of years, the values of our Western society, with a few exceptions have evolved in the direction of personal freedom and individual rights. We vehemently reject slavery and oppression of any kind. Yet the essential requirement of the collective is that the rights of the community usurp the rights of the individual. Clearly, in order for a collective to work, everyone in the group must be in accordance with the plan and agree to subordinate themselves to the community.

That's difficult enough in a small group. In the case of a typical family, there is at least one parental unit keeping things in line, who is more equal than the rest. In a small group, any member not willing to play by the rules either gets punished, or leaves, willingly or not. The larger the group, the more complicated the egalitarian goal. Extended over an entire nation, a collective society must impose rigid rules, usually handed down from a central (more equal) authority, to insure that everyone stays on track. The most dramatic example was East Germany who was forced to build a fortified wall around Berlin to keep its people from leaving to the West.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is the indelible symbol of the failure of Communism.

So are the occupiers really seeking to turn our society into a utopian collective? Well the Movement is made up of a diverse lot and I'm sure a small minority sincerely believe in bringing a form of Communism to this country. Much fuss has been made since the movement began a few months ago about the 1 percent of the richest Americans controlling roughly 50 percent of the wealth in this country. But let's face it, how many would really care about that if the economy were robust and everyone was working? I think the 1% vs. 99% argument is merely a rhetorical bullet-point intended to rally people to the cause. Beyond that, there are plenty of meaningful issues that the movement has going for it.

For starters, our current economic situation is largely the result of wildly uncontrolled, unregulated markets. The Libertarian point of view to which I subscribe up to a point, suggests that markets should be self-regulating since their very success depends on control and restraint. Where the argument falls apart is the assumption that the players in the market are driven by long term success rather than mercenary short term greed.

Another issue is the trend in this country toward outrageous compensation for corporate executives combined with little if any accountability for mismanagement or malfeasance.

In government we have the partisan stalemate that has prevented Congress from taking any real steps to get this country moving in a positive direction. Then there is the regrettable Supreme Court decision that removed limits to campaign donations from corporations, citing them as a violation of free speech. From hereon it appears, those with the most money will have the most freedom of speech, at least as far as governmental representation goes.

The issue that we will be hearing about ad nauseum in the months leading up to the presidential election next year, will be taxes. No one likes to pay taxes, that is certain, Yet all of us reap the benefits of government in some way, even those who express disdain for it.. The money to pay for government has to come from somewhere and President Obama wants to raise the tax rate of people who make over one million dollars a year. One could argue that the people in the highest income tax bracket pay an unreasonably large chunk of the money they earn (35 percent) to the government. Well they used to pay a lot more. Couple that with the smorgasbord of tax breaks available to them and the fact that capital gains, which typically represent a significant proportion of income for the wealthy, are taxed at a lower rate than earned income, means that rich folks are often taxed at a lower rate than the middle class. The Republicans in Congress, not surprisingly are against raising the tax rate for the rich. The president would also like to extend the Bush era tax breaks for the middle class. Guess what? The Republicans are against that too.

One has to remember that no fortune, great or small, comes out of thin air, it is society that provides the means by which fortunes are made. Philanthropists believe it is their duty to give back at least part of their treasure to the society that made it all possible. For them, great wealth means great responsibility. Andrew Carnagie stated that a man who dies with his fortune intact, dies disgraced. For the great Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, it went deeper. Unlike Carnagie, Rosenwald was an active philanthropist for most of his working life, not just during his retirement. For him, giving his wealth back to the community was a moral imperative.

Since the opposition of taxing the rich has been taken on by many groups who claim to espouse Christian values, I think it's perfectly justifiable to bring up morality in the context of public policy. Christian “Fundamentalists" have a penchant for using biblical quotes to support their agenda opposed to big government, taxes, rights for gays and immigrants, universal health care, and the rest of the litany of right wing values.

Yet you seldom hear right wing Christianists quote the pasage I alluded to about selling everything and giving the proceeds to the poor. Nor do you hear what follows in that story found in the Gospel of Matthew. After the rich young man dejectedly leaves, Jesus tells his followers that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven.

Listening to the Christian Right, you'd think that Jesus was a gun-toting, white bread, all-American capitalist. Now I'm not in any position to tell anyone what they should believe, in my faith I'm taught not to judge others, lest I be judged. But it seems to me that the Christian faith is about community ("For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them"), more than it is about individualism. It was Christ afterall who said:“Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.” To the best of my knowldge he never said: "Show me the money."

Julius Rosenwald who was not a Christian, got it. So does Warren Buffet who is leading the call to raise the taxes on the very rich, himself included.

Higher taxes for the rich certainly won't solve all our economic woes. But I think that a willingness to contribute more to the public pot, along with a spirited movement of new philanthropy from the well off, would go a long way to help bring this country back together and move in the right direction.

Like I said, the Occupy Movement is a diverse group with many different agendas, some of them silly and irrelevant, others with tremendous merit. By and large they see this country, and the world as headed in the wrong direction and they are simply trying to right the ship. In that vein I liken their movement to mariners guided not by GPS, but a rusty old sextant on a cloudy evening. However as the movement grows, more and more people are there grabbing at the ship's tiller, slowly coaxing the old boat on a new course.

You won't see me camped outside the NYSE or the Chicago Board of Trade anytime soon. I'm a little like Groucho Marx who would never join a club who would have someone like me as a member.

But I'll be there on the sidelines cheering them on just the same.

A day of infamy

2011-12-08T18:14:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, December 7, 2011,was the seventieth anniversary of what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called seventy years ago today, “a date that will live in infamy.” This particular anniversary of the Japanese attacks on the United States Pacific fleet in Hawaii and elsewhere brings to mind many things.

First I think about my friend’s father who was aboard a U.S. destroyer docked at Pearl Harbor that day. His family knew little more than that until very late in his life when he finally began to speak of the horrors of the experience. I also think about my uncle who enlisted seventy years ago today, and my recently widowed grandmother who was suddenly forced to raise my ten year old mother alone.

More than two thousand American servicemen and women died on that day. 400,000 plus would follow them in the coming four years in places like Guadalcanal, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Ardennes, and Corregidor. But that number was paled by the number of people from other countries who perished. Russia alone lost over 23 million, almost 14 percent of its population.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened had there been no Japanese attack. I think about the terrible injustice that took place in this country after the attacks as Japanese American citizens were rounded up and forced into concentration camps. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton more than forty years later addressed the issue with official apologies. The United States’ presence in WWII tipped the balance of power and ultimately turned the tide in the war. Had we not entered when we did, it’s difficult to say what the world would look like today. One could say that the events of that day changed the course of human history as much if not more than any other day in history. Perhaps the most significant direct result of the attacks was that it lead to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the dawn of the nuclear age.

But mostly on this anniversary, I think about the passage of time. When I first became aware of World War II, I learned about it first hand from people who lived through it. Those folks were for the most part the age I am today. Yesterday at the anniversary ceremony at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, there were about 120 veterans who survived the attacks. Doing the math you realize that all of them are now around 90 years old, if not more. Sooner than I care to think about, there will be no one left in that austere group.

Twenty years ago yesterday, on the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, we celebrated my Aunt Gertrude's 91st birthday. Driving to dinner, the subject of the anniversary came up and Gert said: "Fifty years ago, gosh it seems like yesterday." We all laughed. But twenty years later, that moment seems like yesterday and now I'm beginning to understand what she meant.

Which reminds me of this from the poet Henry Austin Dobson:

Time goes, you say? Ah no!

Alas, Time stays, we go.

A day of reckoning

2011-12-07T09:22:00.003-06:00

Today is the day that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich gets his comeuppance. He is about to learn what if any time he will be serving in prison for the corruption charges for which he was convicted earlier this year. As a lifelong Illinois resident, I take absolutely no joy in that. Yet I will take a 180 degree turn from my comments in a previous post and say that Blgojevich should go to prison for a good amount of time. This is not out of spite or personal vendetta. What the former governor did by soliciting bribes and kickbacks for everything from appointing a new senator to helping out a children's hospital, was a tremendous violation of the public trust. It set the cause of good government, (yes Virginia, there is such a thing), back at least fifty years, and only exacerbated the terrible movement of negativity and cynicism that plagues our society.

For his part, the former governor did not show a bit of contrition or admission of guilt, at least until very recently as his date with the jailer approached. His behavior during his two corruption trials turned the proceedings into a circus side show. Letting Blagojevich off with a slap on the wrist will send a clear message to the entire political establishment that there is no accountability whatsoever when it comes to malfeasance in office.

But there's little chance he'll get off. Just a couple of weeks ago, his former confidant and fundraiser Tony Rezko got ten years for corruption under the Blgojevich administration, so it's likely that Blago will get even more time behind bars.

The smart money says 15 years. Sad to say, I don't think that's unreasonable.

Post Script: Rod Blagojevich got 14 years.

A little landmark

2011-12-01T22:38:00.003-06:00

On a jaunt down to Hyde Park last month, I grabbed this cellphone photo of the oldest extant L station in Chicago, built in 1892. From the Landmark plaque visible at the left of the building:

Built as part of Chicago's original elevated line connecting downtown with the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park, this is one of the oldest surviving mass transit stations in the United States and is the last surviving example of the City's original "bow-fronted," Arts-and-Crafts-styled street-level stationhouses. The station and its accompanying ornamental street overpass spanning Garfield Boulevard also represent a rare example of graceful transit design intended to relate to the City's famed park boulevard system.

As you can see from the quite ungraceful roller doors on both sides of the canopy, this station has served a very different purpose from what it was intended for a number of years. Those hideous doors and numerous coats of paint can't disguise the care of the design that was common in the day when public transit was privately owned and had to compete with other conveyances for riders. Back in the early days of the L, the trains were pulled by noisy, soot belching, steam locomotives and it's not hard to imagine that it took some convincing to get riders to climb aboard those trains some twenty feet up in the sky. For those early riders it must have been an exhilarating, if not harrowing experience.

The station was designed by Myron Church, and was designated a city landmark in 2001, the same year that it was replaced by the new station across Garfield Boulevard. Here is Chicago-L.org's take on the station.

From the morning commute

2011-12-01T20:56:00.004-06:00

This homemade shrine was placed at the stretch of lakefront just south of Oak Street Beach this past summer, while Police and Fire Department divers searched for a man who was lost after diving into the lake from Navy Pier. It was a sobering sight, bicyclists, sunbathers and swimmers taking advantage of some of the most beautiful days of summer, sharing the lake with the divers and the family of the man who kept vigil.

After a week his body was recovered and the shrine, a humbling reminder that our beautiful lake gives life and takes it away, quietly disappeared.

Thanksgiving, Chicago, 1858

2011-11-26T09:54:00.003-06:00

Courtesy of the Chicago Magazine blog, this Thanksgiving article was published in the Chicago Tribune on November 25, 1858.

It's quite the historical document, not only does it provide a window into what was on the minds of Chicagoans at the time, but it is also a manifesto of the values the newspaper; Protestant, anti-immigrant (especially Irish Catholic), pro-temperance, and staunchly Republican, the latter of which it remains to this day.

Also of note is the image included on the post which depicts the raising of a block of buildings and the sidewalk of Lake Street between Clark and LaSalle in 1860. George Pullman (later of sleeping car fame), was one of the chief engineers responsible for devising the system of raising the buildings of Chicago, made necessary by the terrible drainage of the natural city. In the case of this particular block, it took six hundred men synchronously turning six thousand jackscrews to do the job. It took five days to raise the entire block four feet eight inches. Business was not disrupted in any way as the work progressed.

Imagine a major public works project today which could boast that.

Maggie Daley

2011-11-25T08:07:00.006-06:00

I had a sinking feeling in my heart last year, the moment Richard M. Daley announced he would not seek re-election for an unprecedented seventh term as mayor of Chicago. Some speculated that he lost interest in the job after the failed Olympic bid. Others thought at 68, he had enough of the pressure of the job, which intensified logarithmically during his last term. Still others believed he just wanted to serve long enough to break his father's record of days served in office, which he did on December 26th of last year.

I didn't buy any of that. Rich Daley loved being mayor and I think he would have gladly gone to his grave, dying with his boots on while still in office, just as his father did, if he could have. No my sinking feeling was that Mayor Daley was leaving office because he knew his wife was dying. Sadly last night, Thanksgiving night, Maggie Daley passed away at 68, after a long battle with cancer.

Here is the Tribune's obituary of Mrs. Daley, poignantly written by Rick Kogan.
Here are some comments and remembrances from Chicago Magazine.

Maggie and Rich Daley, Columbus Day Parade, c. 1990

She left behind her husband, three surviving children, and the City of Chicago, which she helped make a better place. Every one of us in this city owes Mrs. Daley a tremendous debt of gratitude. May she rest in peace.

In Dallas, Texas...

2011-11-23T00:46:00.017-06:00

That's how the most famous television news bulletin of all time began 48 years ago yesterday.

Great cities inspire impressions, mental images of themselves, the greater the city, the more diverse the impressions. For Dallas that image could be the neon sign of Pegasus, the symbol of Mobil Oil on top the Magnolia Petroleum Building. Or it might be the neighborhood of Deep Ellum, a cross between Harlem, Algiers and Bourbon Street. It could be the conspicuous consumption that was personified by the TV series named after the city, or Neiman Marcus whose flagship department store is on Elm Street in Downtown Dallas. It might be the quintessential American image of the cowboy, or the football team named for them, or more likely still, their cheerleaders. Or it could be the braggadocio that defines Dallas, a city whose aggressive pride of place makes Chicago look downright timid.

For me, Dallas will always be personified by the three words at the top of this post, and a place in the city that will forever be etched in the memory of anyone who was alive at the time, Dealey Plaza.

A few years ago, I read an article from a Look magazine my father saved that commemorated President Kennedy’s assassination. In the article, the author wondered how that event would affect the children around the country who witnessed it first hand on TV.

I am one of those children.

I was in kindergarten, not quite five years old that late November day in 1963. We had a TV in our classroom and it happened to be on at the time the reports started coming in from Dallas. There are indelible images from that morning, I remember my teacher frantically changing the channel to get more information, and the news becoming grimmer with each successive bulletin.

I don't remember the bulletin that finally announced the president was dead, maybe I've seen that clip of Walter Cronkite breaking down on camera so many times that I can't distinguish what I saw and when.

My grandmother met me at the school bus later that afternoon. I asked her who would be the next president. Like the rest of the country, our TV set was on non-stop for the rest of the weekend. I was transfixed. One particular image struck me, a man removing, as if ritually, the presidential seal from a podium. I learned many years later that this was the dais the president was headed to in Dallas to deliver the speech he would never give.

I visited Dallas my first and only time about fifteen years ago. It was during the midst of a cross country drive, bringing my parents home to Chicago from Phoenix. Since it was the middle of winter, it was certain that we would take the southern route, but I lobbied for an even more southern route, one that would take us within spitting distance of Mexico. Even though it would add several hundred miles to our trip, it would take us through some pretty interesting places. Mostly, I wanted to go to Dallas.

It was an amazing drive through southern New Mexico and Texas. We passed through the rough and tumble border city of El Paso, alongside rugged Big Bend National Park, then through some desolate landscape as we approached the oil fields near Odessa. Unlike many of my friends who are turned off by its conservative politics and religion, I've always been drawn to Texas and its people. Perhaps it was the folks in Beaumont who welcomed me so warmly into their homes when I photographed them as part of a documentary project. Or driving through the Panhandle with its wide open, wind swept landscape that seems to go on forever. Or maybe it was the girl who charmed my socks off thirty years ago in Houston. In any case, that drive which was completely tedious for my parents, was exhilarating for me.

Eventually we got to Dallas. I had no guidebook but it didn't matter, I recognized the place from the freeway. It looked just as I had remembered from the photographs, only much more intimate. It was raining and my parents humored me as I got out of the car to check it out. There it all was, the Book Depository, the pergola where Zapruder shot his famous film, the grassy knoll, the stockade fence, and the triple underpass.

I was alone, at least thought I was until I saw a solitary figure near the stockade fence. I turned my head away, then turned back and the figure was gone. To this day I have no better explanation other than I saw Lee Harvey Oswald's ghost. Well that's my story anyway and I'm sticking to it.

We all went up to the sixth floor of the Depository which is now a museum devoted to Kennedy and the assassination. You can look out the window from where the shots were fired. There are two x's on Elm street that mark the spots where Kennedy was hit. They are clearly visible from that window. I'm not a marksman but in my uneducated opinion, it didn't look like a terribly difficult shot, especially for a former Marine.

Afterwards my parents and I had lunch at a nearby steakhouse then went to check out Neiman Marcus for my mother. After that we went on our way. We had accomplished what we set out to do in Dallas.

To some it might seem creepy to seek out the site of a person's murder. Perhaps it is. I don't know why I was drawn to Dealey Plaza any more than why I'm drawn to John Kennedy and his assassination. All I know is the event that took place so long ago was a major milestone in my life, my transformation from babyhood to childhood.

On the morning of November 22nd, 1963, I knew what a president was, and who the president was, but in life, President Kennedy meant nothing to me. All would change that afternoon. It was not the first time I experienced death, but it was my first experience with sudden, violent death. John Fitzgerald Kennedy would from that day on become a revered figure in our household and of course for a while, all over America.

On that fateful day, the whole terrifying world opened up to me. Even though I didn't understand it at the time, the things that happened outside the boundaries of my own little world, all of a sudden mattered. Looking at my daughter who is the same age I was when JFK died, I realize how awfully young that is to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders.

No one knows what this country, or the world for that matter would be like had Kennedy lived. But I suspect that all of us died a little with him that day.

Funny money

2011-11-19T11:17:00.022-06:00

My contrarian nature makes me suspicious of movements, grass roots and otherwise. The current Occupy Wall Street movement is no exception, my feeling is this; throughout history, the few that are rich have always controlled most of the wealth, our time is no different. As the wise Mr. Bernstein said in Citizen Kane: "It's not a trick to make a lot of money if all you want, is to make a lot of money." Since I haven't devoted my life to the pursuit of personal fortune, I don't have a problem with other people having more money than I do.

On the other hand, there's always been a part of me that believes that people who have more money than they know what to do with, ("stupid money" as a friend calls it), could do a little better sharing it with those who have little or none. I also make a distinction between people who earn a lot of money, justly being compensated for building, creating and doing things that benefit society, (including those who invest responsibly), from those who make a great deal of money in any way they see fit, regardless of the consequences. It's an age old battle, but the following is just one case where the hard work and struggle of generations of Americans, rich and otherwise is being undermined by a few who may be about to bring down a couple of national institutions, along with thousands of livelihoods.

An article in the October issue of Esquire explores the sorry state of retail giants Sears and Kmart. The sub title of the piece; The End, Old Friend, by investment writer Ken Kurson spells it out:

The only value left at Sears and Kmart is the bet against them.

Sears played an integral role in Chicago's history. Richard Sears moved his watch business to Chicago where he met his future partner Alvah C. Roebuck who would help diversify the operation. Together they created the mail order business that would bring a whole new world to Americans, especially rural Americans, via the catalog. Sears was a man with vision but little practical sense. It was his penchant for example, to advertise impossibly attractive deals in his catalog regardless of whether or not he was able to deliver them. He had to rely on his suppliers several times to save his skin. The stress of the business made Roebuck resign in 1895.

Sears needed an infusion of capital to keep the business going and he got it from one of those suppliers who came to his rescue. Julius Rosenwald from the discount clothing trade, as was his nature, seized upon a good opportunity and bought into the company in 1895. As vice president, Rosenwald organized and further diversified the business, turning a successful operation into a national icon. Rosenwald was instrumental in taking Sears Roebuck public in 1906, which resulted in a windfall for both him and the company. He assumed the presidency of the company in 1908 upon Richard Sears' retirement.

Julius Rosenwald was a remarkable man who today is more remembered for his philanthropic work than his formidable business acumen. Feeling personally uncomfortable with the inequity of his immense wealth compared to those who were in his employ, Mr. Rosenwald sought and received ethical direction from the teachings of Judaism. He was deeply moved by these words of a rabbi from a Yom Kippur address:

As long as the weakest in humanity has not his own, civilization is only a sham and a pretender, and as long as civilization is a pretender, Judaism must stand alone as a historic protest against injustice.

Rosenwald took those words to heart and put his business skill, progressive ideals, much of his personal treasure, and most important of all, his time, to support initiatives that helped disadvantaged people learn the skills that would enable them to help themselves. He became associated with Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, as well as many efforts to establish schools for African American children in the South. He became a staunch supporter of racial justice and was equally swayed by Washington's ideological adversary, W.E.B. DuBois, who eulogized Rosenwald this way:

He was a great man. But he was no mere philanthropist. He was, rather, the subtle stinging critic of our racial democracy.

Rosenwald disliked perpetual foundations, seeing them as an attempt for their benefactors to achieve a kind of immortality. Instead he believed in giving his money away while he was alive. The foundation that bore his name was established in 1917 and lasted until its funds were purposely exhausted in 1948. In the words of Mr. Rosenwald:

I am opposed to the principle of storing up large sums of money for philanthropic uses centuries hence…. The generation which has contributed to the making of a millionaire should also be the one to profit by his generosity.

Not only is his foundation a memory, but you won't find Rosenwald's name on the company he helped build, or many of the institutions he founded such as the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, simply because he wanted it that way.

Kmart is another American institution whose company's origins date back almost as far as Sears'. Sebastian S. Kresge developed his business philosophy of hard work, thrift, and a disdain for credit, early in his career. As a clerk in a hardware store in Scranton, PA. he noticed that the store was falling behind on its bills because the customers were falling behind on their credit payments. He was diligent in keeping the place tidy, choosing to clean and polish up the store during his idle moments rather than just stand around. This attitude did not go unnoticed and his employer promoted him to the position of traveling salesman, where he remained for several years. One of his customers was Frank Woolworth of dime store fame. With $8,000 that he saved up while in that position, Kresge with a partner opened up his own five and ten cent store, first in Memphis, then another, later in Detroit. All transactions were cash only. In 1899 Kresge bought out his partner and by 1912, Kresge owned 85 dime stores under his name across the U.S. He took a close personal interest in his stores that extended to knowing all his managers by name, and hanging a picture of his mother in each store.

Kresge was notoriously stingy in providing for himself and his family. Despite being a millionaire many times over, he wore threadbare suits and refused to play golf because he lost too many balls. The penny-pinching did not however extend to his employees who were some of the first in his industry to receive paid sick leave and holidays, profit-sharing bonuses, and pensions. Nor did his parsimoniousness extend to charity. In 1924, Kresge with an initial gift of 1.6 million, established the Kresge Foundation; “to help human progress through benefactions of whatever name or nature.” Unlike Julius Rosenwald's foundation, the Kresge Foundation is alive and well today. It ranks as the 28th richest charitable organization in the world with an endowment of 3.3 billion dollars. Kresge lived to see much of the work of his charity as he died in 1966 at the ripe old age of 99.

The Kresge Foundation casts a wide net to provide grant money to a wide variety of causes, but one specific area that is near and dear to the heart of the Foundation is the city of Detroit which was the home of the Kresge Corporation and continues to be the home of the Foundation. From its mission statement:

We aspire to change the city of Detroit’s trajectory to one of long-term economic opportunity that advances social equity, promotes cultural expression, and re-establishes our hometown as the center of a vibrant region.

The corporation no longer resides in the Motor City but Kresge's name continues to be prominently displayed in Downtown Detroit at the top of the building that was at one time its corporate headquarters. Built in 1914 the Kales Building designed by Detroit's preeminent architect Albert Kahn, like Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building in New York City, continues to be one of the most prominent buildings in its city's distinguished skyline. To think, both magnificent buildings were built out of nickels and dimes, lots and lots of them.

Times changed and nickels and dimes didn't go as far as they once did. Dime stores eventually became known as "variety stores" and they would hang around urban commercial districts for most of the twentieth century. It was not uncommon for Woolworth and Kresge stores to coexist next to one another in downtowns throughout much of America. By mid-century the Kresge company began to change direction recognizing that the future of retail meant following the customers and their automobiles, to the suburbs. The old fashioned urban Kresge variety stores became suburban Kmart discount centers. Kmart may not have been the first "big box" store but it was the quintessential one that set the tone for what was to follow. It was the paradigm for competitors such as Shopper's World, Community, Zayre, Venture, Walmart and Target. It survived all but the last two.

Here is a blog devoted entirely to Kmart.

Unlike K(resge)mart, Sears transformed itself many times over in the twentieth century. In 1906, the year the company went public, Richard Sears wrote: "We do comparatively very little business in cities, and we assume the cities are not at all our field - maybe they are not - but I think it is our duty to prove they are not ." Shortly after that, retail stores began to open up in small towns all over the country, cutting into the mail order business and the company knew it had to adapt. In 1925, Sears opened up its first retail store located on the campus of its enormous headquarters on the west side of Chicago. Their "brick and mortar" stores quickly became successful, during one period in the twenties, a new Sears store opened somewhere in America on an average of one every other day. New stores kept opening despite the Depression and only the outbreak of World War II could stop the growth, temporarily. Sears pioneered the concept of one stop shopping, you could drive to Sears, get your car serviced, have your eyes checked, purchase insurance, get some investment advice, and put your house on the market, while your family browsed through the store which sold pretty much anything they needed. Sears also was the first company to feature in house brands such as Kenmore appliances, Die Hard car batteries, and Craftsman tools, all of whom were renowned for their quality and reliability.

Sears came the closest of any retailer in the United States to being all things to all people. In small towns they had catalog stores, limited retail establishments where you could order what they couldn't stock. In the suburbs, Sears stores were the anchors of shopping malls, and in urban centers, they coexisted comfortably along with their competitors, the other great department stores. For half of my life, the Sears department store on State Street between Congress and Van Buren was the largest and most comprehensive of all the great stores on that street.

Then there was the catalog which itself was an institution. Quoting myself; at one time all across America the arrival of the Sears catalog was anticipated with as much gusto as birthdays and Christmas. For many years the company's slogan was; "Where America shops." That was not hyperbole, Sears was so strong and powerful in the early seventies, it built as its corporate headquarters what would be at the time, and for many years to come, the world's tallest building. If any other retailer could legitimately claim to be the icon of Middle America, I certainly can't think if it.

Things began to change in the late seventies and that old bugaboo reared its ugly head, Sears and especially Kmart, didn't go with the times. Kmart during the last part of the last century was pleagued with extremely incompetent management. The company found itself caught in between its two chief rivals. On one side was Walmart with its efficient technologically driven distribution system, and its aggressively low overhead, high discount strategy. On the other side was Target which emphasized design while maintaining low prices. Kmart did not stray from its original template and as a result, could not compete with Walmart's prices, or Target's sense of style. Consequently it became irrelevant.

Sears also was beginning to show its age as well, its image as the store your parents and grandparents shopped at probably didn't help. The company let its stores become tired looking and run down. Here is a picture of the great Sears store at the Six Corners shopping district of Chicago as it looks today:

The building was built during the Great Depression at a cost of one million dollars. 100,000 people attended its opening in 1938. From the photo above you can just barely detect hints of the building's beautiful Art Deco facade. Compare it to this photograph of the same building from around the time of its opening. Amazingly, they covered up the building's most distinctive feature, its great display window, the largest in Chicago. Long ago they removed the stunning neon sign, replacing it with pedestrian illuminated plastic signs featuring the corporate logo du jour.

Of course the last forty years have been challenging for all retailers, many of whom have closed up shop entirely. In a way it's a small miracle that Sears and Kmart exist at all today. In 2002, Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection.

Enter hedge fund manager Edward Lampert. Lampert's strategy is to buy up old school, struggling retailers, shake up the management, then use their cash flow to buy up other retailers. In 2003, Lampert bought Kmart along with all its debt. Struggling as it was, Kmart was still taking in $30 billion per year in sales. In addition, Kmart also had plenty of real estate. Lampert closed several stores and sold off the property, further improving his cash flow.

In what seemed to the general public a case of the blind leading the blind, the Kmart Corporation under Lampert, bought Sears Roebuck. From an investors' standpoint, it was a brilliant move as Sears was even more real estate rich than Kmart, and as long as they could keep selling off property, the price of the stock kept going up. Lampert's group promised to revitalize both Sears and Kmart and did make a few token moves attempting to improve sales at Sears and Kmart, but little of the money eared from the sale of assets was reinvested into either store. Sales remained flat while stock in the combined companies gained in value. Given this it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the corporation that controls Sears and Kmart today is known as "Sears Holdings."

All was well with this arrangement, at least as far as stock value went, until the collapse of the real estate market six years ago. According to Ken Kurson's Esquire piece, since then the income of the company has decreased 84 percent. Sears for the first time has dropped to the tenth largest retailer and unlike every other retailer in its class, its profits have dropped consistently in that time. Kmart has dropped to a very distant fourth place among its big box competitors, Walmart, Target and Costco. Yet for the past six years, the price of the stock of Sears Holdings has remained fairly constant, quite an accomplishment for the current climate.

That is until now.

Kurson closes his Esquire piece with this: "The smart money didn't care if the retailers recovered. They liked the real estate."

This is not in any way illegal, it's business as usual in corporate America. But I think a good argument could be made about the lack of ethics in Lampert's actions. He acquired two companies, pledging in good faith to the employees, the general public and the shareholders to do everything in his power to return them to profitability. It's clear I think to everyone like me who has visited a Sears or Kmart lately to find two businesses that appear to only be going through the motions.

Then there's the issue of morality. Lampert's chief responsibility in his mind is to his clients, the stockholders, whose interest is the bottom line. As for Sears and Kmart, and the people who work there, well they're expendable in the eyes of the "smart money." Lampert's clients, who probably don't shop at Sears Holdings stores and definitely don't work in them, will just move on to other investment opportunities. Moving on will not be so easy for the folks whose livelihood depends on the stores.

One of the options to investors, as Kurson suggests, would be to short sell Sears Holdings stock, thereby profiting off the company's collapse.

Eddie Lampert may not be a bad guy. In the end he may like his mentor Warren Buffet, decide to donate all of his billions to charity upon his death. He's still a relatively young man so it's not at all fair to compare his legacy in terms of charity and good works to that of Kresge's or Rosenwald's.

But he does have a substantial track record in business, so I do think it's fair to compare Lampert's business legacy up to this point, with the men who created Kmart and Sears. Richard Sears, Alvah Roebuck, Sebastian Kresge and Julius Rosenwald, at great financial risk to themselves, built companies out of nothing but their own hard work and inspiration. Their companies which have been around for well over 100 years, have provided gainful employment to countless people over that time and both Kresge and Rosenwald at least, expressed deep concern for the well being of their workers. The companies in their own right served as engines that helped drive the U.S. economy for many years, as well as provided a very good return to their investors.

By buying and selling off the assets of Kmart and Sears, Lampert may very well have sealed the fate of the companies built by Sears, Roebuck, Kresge and Rosenwald. If that happens, he will be responsible for tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs, the loss of two American institutions, and the vacuum in the economy that their loss would entail. On the upside, he made himself and his clients richer.

As far as legacy goes, you can judge for yourself but in my book, it's not much of a contest.

George Eastman

2011-11-13T10:08:00.002-06:00

In my post about Steve Jobs and all the innovators, inventors and creative geniuses he is in company with, I forgot about poor old George Eastman.

Here is an article by Bob Greene that draws some interesting comparisons between Google and the company Eastman founded, Kodak.

Like Jobs, it was Eastman who brought his product, in his case cameras and photography, to everyday people. In the process he not only changed photography, which already had been around for a half century, but the world.

Today, photography like so many other fields of endeavor, is being transformed by the digital age. Greene makes an interesting point using traditional silver (film) based photography versus its digital based counterpart as a metaphor for our current society. In the old film era, (boy I'm really starting to feel old), you would have to wait to shoot an entire role of film, take it to the lab, then wait a few days more for the film to be processed. There was a sense of glorious anticipation in that time, wondering how the pictures would turn out. Opening that envelope with the prints, or a box with slides, would be akin to opening up a birthday present as, hoping for the best, you'd never know exactly what you'd get. All that's been lost with digital photography and its instant feedback, and gratification.

Unfortunately Kodak has not been very good at the instant gratification business. As everyone in the photography world, and the city of Rochester knows, the company has been floundering for quite some time, and may not survive. That would be a terrible shame.

Ironically, Google, the company that all but invented instant gratification, is no longer instant enough. Competition from Twitter, Facebook and others have forced Google to improve its search algorithm to make it even faster. *

Another lesson to all of us in changing times, either go with the flow or get off the boat.

* Which reminds me of an old Groucho Marx bit. While in a passionate embrace with a woman, she asks him to come closer to which he replies: "If I were any closer I'd be behind you."

In those days , they had time for everything...

2011-11-12T03:35:00.014-06:00

...could be a comment heard today about life before the age of e-mail, the internet, and multitasking, back when people weren't teathered to their electronic devices and required to be accessible 24/7.

Isn't it ironic that the more time saving devices we have at our fingertips, the less time we seem to have at our disposal?

That sentiment is actually from a novel and later a classic movie, set at the turn of the last century. Its inspiration was not related to the computer obviously but the electric streetcar which replaced the horse drawn streetcar. Life it seems was a trifle slower in the pre-trolley days when the car pulled up to a house:

A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. The previous passengers made little objection to such gallantry on the part of the car: they were wont to expect as much for themselves on like occasion.

In good weather the mule pulled the car a mile in a little less than twenty minutes, unless the stops were too long; but when the trolley-car came, doing its mile in five minutes and better, it would wait for nobody. Nor could its passengers have endured such a thing, because the faster they were carried, the less time they had to spare!

People in this way have been grumbling about the "good old days" probably since the invention of the wheel, if not before.

The "good old days." Chicago Loop c.1900

The words are taken from the novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. It was written in 1918 and chroicles the life of once the most prominent family of an unnamed Midwestern town.* It was the story that Orson Wells chose to be the setting for his second feature film. Like Wells' first film Citizen Kane, the chief protagonist of The Magnificent Ambersons, George Amberson Minafer is a flawed individual, arrogant with a supreme sense of entitlement, who is perfectly unwilling to change along with the world around him. His stubborn attitude that, for a person of his status it was more worthwhile - to be rather than to do, made him ill suited for life in a time when his prestigious family name had lost its relevance.

George's nemesis, Eugene Morgan, was the father of George's on again off again girlfriend Lucy, but also an admirer of his widowed mother Isabel. George eventually learns what we already know, not only was the admiration mutual, but it was in fact older than George himself, and were it not for a youthful indiscretion, Eugene may very well have ended up George's father, and Lucy... well you can figure out the rest. The stuff for great melodrama to be sure but the story takes place during the period of the most radical change in the history of this country, and that turbulent era serves as the story behind the story.

Although the film and novel center around George and the self centered existence that leads to his eventual "come-upance", the most compelling character is Eugene. He is a member of the new breed of do'ers rather than be'ers, an inventor and early advocate of the automobile. While he is a lifelong friend of the Ambersons, his world and theirs collide as the progress he is in part responsible for, crushes the old way of life that sustained the family and their significance. Yet George is the only Amberson who is threatened by Eugene; by his ambition, his newfangled horseless carriage, his self-made success, and mostly by his intrusion into George's family. One evening at dinner at the Ambersons', George's grandfather and uncle engage Eugene in conversation about the growth due to all the new roads and how it has been negatively effecting property values in their part of town. Eugene assures them that it will only get worse, that roads will soon be built all the way to the edge of town and the roads already in town will be widened to accommodate the automobile. At that point, George blurts out:

Automobiles are a useless nuisance. They'll never amount to anything but a nuisance. They had no business to be invented.

George's grandfather in the book, his uncle in the movie , admonishes him for his impertinence. Seemingly unfazed, Eugene in a remarkably insightful monologue says this:

I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles. With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure, But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of the automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"

Pretty glum words indeed, especially coming from one of the inventors of that infernal contraption.

Later in the story, George left for an extended trip to Europe. Upon his return five years later, he found that the familiar world he left behind, was gone forever. This is how Booth Tarkington describes George's town that had become a city upon his return:

He walked homeward slowly through what appeared to be the strange streets of a strange city... the streets were thunderous; a vast energy heaved under the universal coating of dinginess...All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried, under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly all seemed harried by something impending.

That dinginess and harried nature of life in this new world that Tarkington describes, is associated by the new people in town, with well being and prosperity. As long as the factories and mills were belching out smoke, people were making money and all was well.

Perhaps this is the "spiritual alteration" that Eugene so prophetically alluded to in his words.

It's funny, if we were to take Eugene's cautionary statement and substitute the word computer for automobile, and digital age for gasoline engine, his comments would ring true in our day.

Being in the middle of the digital revolution, we still may not begin to understand the inward change it causes in our souls. One thing is certain, computers are here to stay and they have inexorably changed our lives.

For better and for worse.

After all, as Eugene said in the movie:

There aren't any old times. When times are gone, they're not old, they're dead. There aren't any times but new times.

* It is said that Booth Tarkington based the unnamed Midwestern town that is the setting for The Magnificent Ambersons on his home town, Woodruff Place, Indiana, which today is a neighborhood of Indianapolis. For his part, Wells may have been influenced by the town of his birth, Kenosha, Wisconsin. In reality though, the town could be Anywhere, USA.

Armistice Day

2011-11-11T08:31:00.003-06:00

The late columnist Sydney J. Harris used to have a regular feature called: Things I learned while looking up something else. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about computers, automobiles and other inventions that have drastically changed our lives. This made me think about thumbing through dictionaries and encyclopedias and how making those serendipitous discoveries is practically a thing of the past. Today you just google the word you're looking for, click the button and boom there's your answer, no need to trod through all that useless information, and no chance to discover something you weren't looking for in the first place.

Well that's not entirely true. Here's a photograph I stumbled across just now while searching for something else. It's perfectly appropriate for today, November 11, 2011, Veterans Day, or what used to be called; Armistice Day.

It was taken from the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago on the first Armistice Day, or more likely the following day, after the signing of the peace pact on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, that ended World War I, 93 years ago today.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (yet another obsolete expression), it never ceases to amaze me how recognizable this city is after all these years. With the exception of one building, the light fixtures, and of course the people and cars, everything in that photograph remains today.

A man of his time

2011-11-01T12:42:00.028-05:00

The camera slowly climbs a wire fence upon which is mounted a "No Trespassing" sign. It is nighttime. We hear dark, foreboding music as a series of establishing shots show us a mansion and its grounds, deserted save for a few monkeys perched on the front gate. The enormous Gothic house looks sinister, it could belong to Doctor Frankenstein. As the camera approaches, we see light coming from one of the windows. The music builds in a crescendo, then suddenly stops and with it, the light is switched off. Cut to inside the room where we see the form of a person lying in bed. Dissolve to a snowstorm, then cut to a small house covered in snow. Camera pulls back to reveal this is the inside of a child's snow globe. Next we see the lips of a man as he says his dying word: "Rosebud." His hand drops the snow globe, it falls to the floor and shatters. In the reflection of the broken glass, we see a nurse enter the room. She checks for a pulse, then pulls the blanket over the lifeless body

Cut to newsreel: "NEWS ON THE MARCH". "Obituary: Xanadu's Landlord" opens the film within a film that chronicles the life and death of the great man, publisher of the syndicated Inquirer newspapers, Charles Foster Kane.

When the film short ends, the projector in the screening room is abruptly shut off and we realize this newsreel is still a work in progress. The producer wants more. "It tells us Charles Foster Kane is dead..." he tells the reporter, "I know he's dead, I read the Inquirer!" He says: "It isn't enough to tell us what a man did. You've got to tell us who he was." The producer and reporter settle on attempting to discover the meaning of his enigmatic last word, as perhaps that would be the key to unlock the secret of his life.

The rest of Citizen Kane features the reporter, Mr. Thompson, conducting interviews with friends, enemies and acquaintances of the deceased, deconstructing Charlie Kane's life in a series of flashbacks, all in the futile (for them) attempt to determine the true identity of Rosebud, and with that perhaps Kane himself.

This is pretty much how the last several weeks have played out as the media have been examining the life of the recently deceased Steve Jobs. Every day it seems, a new angle or twist on the life of the co-founder and CEO of Apple INC is revealed from a friend, enemy, former employee, or all three rolled into one, putting the pieces together of the life of a remarkable, complicated man.

Honestly I was not prepared for the tremendous outpouring of sympathy and grief following Jobs' passing, the likes of which I haven't seen since the death of Princess Diana. My own take on the guy was that he invented a lot of really cool stuff. Now my cappuccino machine is also really cool, yet I don't know who invented it, nor do I particularly care. Media pundits who expressed similar faint praise of Jobs, have been raked over the coals by those who hold him in high esteem as the man who changed the world.

Jobs' esteem has only meteorically risen in the last month. Since his death Jobs has been placed well within the hallowed halls of the Pantheon of the greatest innovators, creators and inventors this world has ever known.

Here is a New York Times piece that favorably compares Jobs with Thomas Edison. Jobs indeed made his presence felt in a number of industries. In addition to personal computers, he played a significant role in the motion picture industry with his involvement in the animation company Pixar, in the music industry with the development of Apple's iTunes, and in the communications industry with the iPhone. The folks who compare Jobs with Edison use these points to make the comparison, but consider this:

Jobs' role in the motion picture industry was to financially back a film company. Thomas Edison was one of the inventors of the motion picture camera.
Jobs' contribution to the music industry involved changing the way music is distributed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
Thomas Edison did not, contrary to popular lore, invent the incandescent light bulb, he was just the first to make it work. In order to make his light bulbs work, he first had to come up with a system to generate, then supply electricity to homes and businesses. He did that too.

In other words, if you were to pull the plug on Thomas Edison's most important contributions to society, every one of Steve Jobs' contributions would become very slick looking paperweights.

Here's a Forbes piece that claims Jobs is Henry Ford and Walt Disney rolled into one.

Unlike Disney, Steve Jobs' involvement in Pixar, was for the most part financial, not creative. Nevertheless, like Disney he demonstrated vision, in advancing a relatively new art form, and commitment to putting out a quality product. Pixar proved once and for all that it's not simply enough to wow the audience with technical mastery, but that good storytelling and humanity are really the most important aspects of the art of film making. The technical side should always be the servant to creativity, and the work that Pixar has produced to date, without fail, has demonstrated this.

I think there is even a more plausible connection between Steve Jobs and Henry Ford. Neither man invented the product(s) that made them famous. But each in his own way brought those products to the general public. Henry Ford was instrumental in developing the system of mass production that made automobiles affordable for the middle class. Steve Jobs, at the forefront of the development of the personal computer, gave us with a little help from his friends, the Apple II, a powerful (for its time) machine that people of average means could afford, and the Macintosh with its Graphic User Interface (GUI), a machine that the average person actually wanted to use. The Mac and the software that runs it never became the top selling personal computer system on the market, but the user friendly GUI, (Mac's version was often imitated, never duplicated), became the industry standard for the vast majority of personal computers, and enabled anyone who desired, to become computer literate.

It is impossible to downplay the effect of the automobile and the computer on society, Here I'm quoting myself from an earlier post:

The industrial revolution that Ransom E. Olds, Henry Ford and others started in Detroit is largely responsible for creating the middle class as we know it in this country. It was one of the first times in history where factory workers would build something that they actually could afford to buy. The automobile brought a kind of freedom, previously enjoyed by only the upper strata of society, to just about everybody.

The computer also brought a new independence to the general public, but like the automobile, not without a cost.

In recent months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought the issue of income disparity to our attention. Here is a graph that documents the percent of wealth controlled by the richest ten percent in the nation between 1917 and 2008. As you can see, the percentage of wealth controlled by the elite began to shrink at the outset of the Great Depression, but really took a nose dive at the end of World War II in 1945. This post-war period could be called the golden age of the Middle Class in this country, when American Industry was the most powerful in the world, when unemployment was relatively low, and blue collar workers, especially in big industry, made a very decent living. Things began to change in the mid eighties when big industry, including the auto industry, began to shut down or move their operations overseas. During the economic boom of the nineties, blue collar jobs continued to evaporate at an alarming rate, while the rich just kept getting richer. This is reflected clearly in the graph.

There are many reasons for the decline of industrial jobs in this country, but certainly one enormous factor is the loss of jobs to the computer. The upswing in elite control of the wealth of this nation in the seventies and eighties corresponds directly to the start of the high tech revolution. With the explosion of the internet in the 1990s, came the longest and steadiest upward trend in income disparity in ninety years, peaking at the Dot com bust in 2000. A few years later, around the time Steve Jobs started turning Apple around with his iStuff innovations, the line trends up again.

It may not be a stretch to say that while the automobile had a strong role in creating the American Middle Class, the computer played an equally strong role in its downfall.

At this point, Steve Jobs advocates, at least those in the OWS movement, might want to get off the bus and leave their man as a mere bit player in the computer revolution, and give all the credit, or blame, to Bill Gates.

With all the revelations coming out about Jobs, it may not be far fetched to add another comparison, the fictional Charles Foster Kane.* True the two characters could not have been more different, Jobs' background was solidly middle class while Kane's family found itself literally on top of a gold mine. Kane's primary business interest, the Inquirer, was inherited while Jobs founded Apple Computer, along with his partner Steve Wozniak, in his parents' garage.

Yet there are parallels that are worth noting. Both men were separated from their birth parents. Neither earned a college degree. Jobs dropped out of a community college, and as for Kane; "Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Switzerland... he was thrown out of a lot of colleges. "

Kane and Jobs both owed their success to the inspiration of their adopted fathers, but in diametrically opposite ways. Steve Jobs credited his father for teaching him how things work. Jobs said of his adoptive father:

I was very lucky. My father, Paul, was a pretty remarkable man."

Paul Jobs, a machinist at as laser manufacturing company gave a piece of his workbench over to his young son. Again here are Steve Jobs words:

...he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me... teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together. He showed me the rudiments of electronics and I got very interested in that.

In a moment of self reflection late in life, here is Charlie Kane in a conversation with his long time associate Mr. Bernstein and his adopted father/guardian/caretaker, the Wall Street mogul Walter P. Thatcher:

Kane: You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.
Thatcher: Don't you think you are?
Kane: I think I did pretty well under the circumstances.
Thatcher: What would you like to have been?
Kane: Everything you hate.

Neither Kane nor Jobs were primarily driven by money.

Kane of course didn't need the money; here he is, again to Thatcher:

"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years."

Jobs was clearly driven to make his mark on the world by creating products of the highest standards of design as well as technology. That was certainly the key to his success, but his monetary compensation was chicken feed compared to that of other moguls in his industry. Of course you could feed a lot of chickens with his 8.3 billion net worth. Anyway, as CEO of Apple INC, Jobs received a salary of one dollar per year. Obviously in the end, he didn't need the money either.

I think it would be fair to say that Apple's success is largely a victory of style over substance. True, Apple products are well made, high quality items. Most of all, they look great, whether its an iMac sitting on your desk, the super sleek MacBook Air on your lap, or the iPhone pressed against your ear. What's more, they're fun to use. Small wonder that most Apple users are fiercely devoted to Apple products.

There are other products out there that do the same or even better job, usually for less money. PCs for example are more flexible than Macs. When you buy an Apple product, you buy into Steve Jobs, Apple and all that entails. You are forced to play by Apple's rules, their limited, dedicated software, the lack of backwards compatibility, and a whole range of limitations that most Apple diehards don't care about or simply overlook.

Charles Foster Kane when questioned by his first wife what "people will think..." about his incessant attacks on the President of the United States, barked back: "What I tell them to think."

Steve Jobs essentially had the same relationship with his customers, and they listened to him with relish.

Both Kane and Jobs enjoyed being in the spotlight. Jobs was almost as good as marketing himself as he was his company. His trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans created a look that fit in well with Apple's casual, hip, up to date image. The problem with being hip and up to date is that what's hip and up to date today is stale and out of date tomorrow. This is not only true about fashion, but also products. Look at this picture of Steve Jobs taken in the eighties with early models of the Mac. What at the time was a man and a product who were both at the cutting edge of technology, today looks like a forlorn piece of useless junk being sold by a (sharp dressed) Maxwell Street huckster. Since they are practically obsolete from the moment you take them out of the box, computers don't age well. Unlike automobiles, there is not much of a market for vintage computers, unless as a prop for a period piece movie or play. My vintage 2002 iMac G4, the one that that I'm typing on now, in its day blew people away with its sleek, elegant design, but today looks tired and dated in not an entirely charming way.

Steve Jobs must have thought long and hard about his own legacy, he hand picked the man who wrote his authorized biography, Walter Isaacson. Isaacson, who like Jobs has CEO credentials in his resume, had previously written three biographies, one on Benjamin Franklin, another on Albert Einstein, and still another on Henry Kissenger. Jobs clearly saw his place in history residing next to at least two of those subjects.

As for me, well I'm not so sure. We're currently in the midst of the computer revolution and can't possibly gain correct perspective on it. Things sort themselves out over time, in one hundred years, those few who might be interested the end of the 20th Century, might remember Steve Jobs' name in connection with Apple's development of the Graphic User Interface. But I think there's little doubt that Bill Gates will be forever known as the father of the personal computer revolution.

Probably the biggest difference between Steve Jobs and the fictional Charles Foster Kane is that Kane died long after his relevance to society did. At the time of his death, he was already a relic of the past. Steve Jobs left this world while still on top. He was so important to his company that on the day he announced he would be stepping down from his post at Apple a few months ago, stocks in the company tanked. With the vacuum he has left, it's difficult to say what direction the company will take in the future as far as product development goes. Apple products today are highly valued and serve as upscale status symbols. In their day, so were Packards and Studebakers. People however still drive Fords. Walt Disney's name is still on his studio as Edison's is in the industry he helped found. Edison, Ford, Disney, and more than likely Bill Gates, are names for the ages. Steve Jobs was very much a man of his own time. He shook up the industry and the world with his terrificly cool and innovative products. But products come and go and when all the iPhones and iPads and iWhatevers end up in the recycling bin, something even cooler will come along to take their place. Without Jobs, it's quite possible that they will come from somewhere other than Apple.

None of this is intended to in any way disparage Steve Jobs, his life or all he accomplished. His was a charmed, brilliant, and creative life, one that will be missed. The reaction following his death says more about us than it does about him.

Some people say that everybody thinks their own generation invented sex. In other words, we're so wrapped up in our own little worlds, we forget that the folks who came before us experienced much the same things we do, including radical changes in their own world. I don't know if historical amnesia is unique to our own time, but it sure is rampant. Our world is indeed changing before our eyes. Yet I look at my grandmother's life and realize that the changes that have taken place in my own lifetime pale next to hers.

My grandmother could remember a time when there was no electricity in her home. When she was a child, the streetcar was the primary means of transportation about town if you didn't want to walk, or if you weren't rich and could afford a horse and buggy. If you wanted to get someplace far away you would need to hop aboard a train powered by a steam locomotive. She lived through Prohibition and the Great Depression. She lived thorough two world wars and several other wars, including a cold one. She lived through the assassination of two presidents. My grandmother experienced a time when there was a distinct possibility that the world might come suddenly and violently to an end. My grandmother could remember a time before there was radio in the home, and the time when the airplane had yet to be invented. Yet approaching the twilight of her life she saw a man walk on the moon, live on TV.

Did Steve Jobs change the world? Of course he did, just as millions of people did before and millions will after him. I think it's fair to say that he had a little bit of Edison in him, some Ford, Disney, Ben Franklin, with maybe even a little Einstein thrown in. I'd add a little Charlie Kane and a whole lot of P.T. Barnum to boot.

In the end he was the guy who made people fall in love with computers, including me. No small accomplishment. In my book I'd say that, all by itself, is pretty cool.

RIP.

*The character of Charles Foster Kane in Orson Wells' Citizen Kane was based loosely on the life of the famed newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Even though the film took pains to differentiate the two as Hearst's name appears more than once in the movie, the similarities were not lost on WRH, who unlike Kane, was very much alive throughout 1940. Hearst did everything in his power to prevent the movie from being released, unsuccessfully of course.

Chicago on film

2011-10-31T13:00:00.006-05:00

Here's a link to Lee Bay's WBEZ website which features two amazing films of Chicago of the past. The first is a newsreel of the city from the mid-thirties, during or just after the Century of Progress Exhibition. It's amazing how recognizable the city is after 75 years.

The second is from a home movie shot in 1955, with folks showing off some serious wheels and duds.

Check it out.

A theater lives in Detroit

2011-10-28T23:47:00.004-05:00

Here's a link to an inspiring story about how a group of people in Detroit became involved in the preservation, and hopefully the revival of a theater in their neighborhood. They're taking their neighborhood back, one building at a time, and in a small way, making a real difference in the life of a great city.

Slow down, Big Brother is watching

2011-10-27T23:38:00.003-05:00

Automated cameras for years have been installed at selected traffic intersections in Chicago to catch drivers going through red lights. Mayor Emanuel has announced that he would like to see the use of these traffic control devices extended, especially in the vicinity of schools and parks to catch speeders. His stated reason is to protect the children of our city from reckless drivers. Well, who's not in favor of that? Of course if you believe that's the real reason behind the cameras, then I'd like to personally welcome you back from your forty year visit to Never Never Land.

Everyone else knows that at one hundred bucks a pop, catching misbehaving drivers red handed is a cash cow for the city. According to this article in the Chicago Tribune, in 2009, the red light cameras netted 59 million dollars for the city. The city certainly needs the money. As someone who has two school age children and who commutes to work primarily by bicycle, I should be cheering the mayor's new initiative. If only I had a dime for every time I was cut off on the road by a speeding driver and thought: "Where's a police officer when you need one?"

Yet I'm skeptical. As far as I know, studies on the effectiveness of Chicago's red light cameras have been inconclusive. As a driver for well over thirty years, I know that safe driving doesn't depend on slavishly adhering to the rules of the road, but on carefully observing and accessing traffic conditions, and driving accordingly. A safe driver could be completely aware of his surroundings, but be breaking the law if by going with the flow of traffic he is exceeding the speed limit. Another driver could be completely distracted by a conversation, drinking coffee and switching the dial of his radio, all at the same time. If that driver is traveling at the speed limit however, he is not breaking the law. Under the mayor's proposed new use of the cameras, the first driver would get the ticket.

A flesh and blood police officer can make appropriate judgments about safe driving, a camera and a computer cannot. It's just a cold and calculated machine that works 24/7, night and day, rain or shine, without lunch, overtime or a doughnut break, and won't let the driver off with a warning. There is no question of guilt or innocence, no mitigating circumstances, no conceivable justification for one's actions, just a photograph with the conclusive evidence, your car is in the middle of the intersection and the light is red, one hundred dollars please. You have a week to contest but what's the point? If you wait longer than a week, you owe another hundred dollars.

Small wonder the city loves them.

There's no doubt that there will be much opposition to Mayor Emanuel's plan, but I have little doubt that he will get his way. Let's hope that this technology will work to our benefit and will result in fewer accidents. Not that it matters but if they actually do the job they're supposed to do, I would support the speed cameras whole-heartedly.

Until I get a ticket.

Real Ale

2011-10-27T20:42:00.005-05:00

My friend, the author and architectural historian Francis Morrone made note of my admitted short shrift of craft brewing in my last post about beer. In the following, he fills in a crucial precedent for the great beer revolution in the United States:

I think a crucial link you left out is that the U.S. microbrew and craft-brew revolution followed on Britain's Campaign for Real Ale, which began in the 1960s (though not made a formal consumer advocacy organization until the early '70s) when a number of Englishmen, most of them young, began to sound the alarm about declining British beer and the decline of the traditional pub. I am sure that when you were over there you noticed that many pubs announce themselves as "real ale pubs." That shows that they pass muster with CAMRA, which is today the U.K.'s single biggest consumer advocacy group. This is important to me both because I think there never would have been a similar movement in the U.S. but for the movement in the U.K., and also because one of the people who most influenced the real ale movement was my idol among architecture writers, Ian Nairn (who, alas, died from cirrhosis of the liver).

Reinheitsgebot

2011-10-25T00:32:00.006-05:00

That word and everything it entails meant that at one time, all was well in the world, at least in Germany. It was the law stipulating that in order to produce something and call it beer, (yes I'm writing about beer again, just a warning), you could only use four ingredients, water, barley, hops and yeast. The law was repealed in the 1990s when Germany became part of the E.U. and the laws of all the member nations were consolidated. German beers sold domestically continue to adhere to the law. But it is now possible for German brewers to export something they call beer that is something well, just a little less than beer.

What's the world coming to?

A wise man once said:
As goes beer, so goes the world.

I don't remember who said it, maybe it was Abraham Lincoln. Anyway, in this topsy turvy economy with our manic-depressive stock market and the country on the verge of class warfare, the world of beer in many ways parallels the bigger picture. After all, if you can't trust beer from a place that takes beer as seriously as Germany, what can you trust?

Yes friends, I'm saying that beer is a metaphor for life.

OK for those few of you who have continued reading after that last line, I offer my thanks for sticking with me.

The beer world is essentially divided in two camps, the macros and the micros. The macro breweries, Big Beer, represent the one percent of the population who control most of the wealth. As such they represent all that is evil with corporations, greed, capitalism, you name it. Their product is a watered down version of real beer, filled with adjunct ingredients like corn and rice that dilute the product, designed to increase the profit margin for the sole purposes of making the rich CEOs of the multi-national corporations who control them, even richer. Why do people drink their ghastly swill? Because the multi-nationals have brainwashed the unsuspecting public through their marketing campaigns, into believing that using their product will make them hipper, sexier, manlier, more attractive, more honest, and less pretentious than drinking the beer of the smaller, less visible, independent companies, the micro breweries who represent the other 99 percent, aka, the rest of us.

Instead of occupying Wall Street and Chicago, maybe today's protesters of corporate greed gone amok should be at the doorsteps of Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis and Miller in Milwaukee, both subsidiaries of the evil global corporations based in South Africa, or Europe or God only knows where. After all, Big Beer in all its incarnations, controls about 95 percent of the beer market in America, and one of its products, an appalling concoction known as "Bud Lite" has a 28 percent market share all to itself. The insatiable appetite of Big Beer will not rest until its opposition is thoroughly crushed, mangled, and wiped off the face of the map, or short of that, absorbed into Big Beer.

It's not like the old days when the hard working immigrant brewers who brought their recipes from the old country and founded thousands of small breweries in this country, all made wonderful beers and happily co-existed with each other in blissful utopia when the world was less cruel.

Well that's the story as told by the most strident beeristas, the real story isn't quite as salacious. It is true that brewing in America resembles the overall economy in its complexities, and its inscrutable system of hierarchies, ownerships and distribution. But the history of beer making in this country is also a fascinating tale of struggle, innovation, survival, and ultimately for the lucky ones, tremendous success and fortune.

Beer was brewed in the New World before the arrival of the Mayflower. But if you consider beer a genuine part of American culture, as anyone who watches TV commercials during sporting events does, the real dawn of the brewing industry in America came during the great influx of German immigration in the nineteenth century. The thirst of all those new arrivals needed to be quenched and one of the most valued professions among their ranks was that of brewer. Hundreds of breweries were founded in the cities with large Teutonic settlements such as New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and of course, Milwaukee.

In America, the brewers did the best they could to replicate the beer they made back home, but found that the barley available to them on this side of the ocean resulted in a cloudy brew. They discovered that the addition of corn or rice (ingredients that would have been prohibited in Germany), provided the clarity their customers demanded. The beer those customers wanted was a type of beer known as lager, which was the prevalent, but certainly not the only style of beer found in Central Europe at the time. The descendants of those German brewers would create an entirely new style of beer known as American Pale Lager, which would become virtually the only style this country would produce for a very long time.

The names of a handful of those immigrant brewers are immortalized to this day on the bottles and cans of the products that represent the companies they founded. The names include Frederick Miller, Adolph Coor, Captain Fred Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and Adolphus Busch. The fact that we still know those names and not the others, testifies to the fact that these men, all of whom came from humble backgrounds, were businessmen first, and brewers second. In each case, they bought their way into existing breweries, and ended up with success far beyond their wildest dreams.

Joseph Schlitz's brilliant marketing skills were helped along by tragedy, the Great Chicago Fire. Five local breweries were destroyed in the fire and almost as serious, the city's water system was contaminated. Relief came from Milwaukee in the form of hundreds of barrels of beer, courtesy of Herr Schlitz. That bit of altruism not only solidified the company's reputation around the country but also that of its hometown. In fact the slogan: "The beer that made Milwaukee famous" was inspired by Schlitz's act of generosity back in 1871. For his part, Schlitz gained a foothold in the lucrative Chicago market which enabled him to open up several saloons serving of course, exclusively Schlitz beer. You can see evidence of this today as the familiar logo of the Schlitz company, (the earth wrapped by a banner displaying the name of company), still graces the facades of many surviving buildings that once housed Schlitz owned saloons.

Beer plays an important part in Chicago's history. Back in 1855, the city fathers enacted a law banning the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Since it was the tradition of Germans to congregate in beer gardens on their one day of rest, the law was seen as an affront to that community. This resulted in the Lager Beer Riot on April 21st of that year. The ban was soon lifted. The labor movement that rocked the city in the 1870s and 80s was made up mostly of Germans and Bohemains, and the resentment towrd those folks and their drink of choice, fueled the fire of the temperance movement, as did the intense anti-German sentiment during WWI.

Well into the twentieth century, most beer was sold in saloons. If you wanted to enjoy your beer at home, you'd have to go to the local watering hole and fill up a vessel of one kind or other to bring home. Part of my family's lore is the story of how my great-grandfather Robert Houlihan became a teetotaler. One Sunday morning, Robert had a taste for a beer and asked his wife Margaret to head out to the tavern to fetch him some. Margaret wasn't in the mood for a Sunday morning jaunt to the neighborhood tap so she did what any sensible parent would do, she sent her child. Apparently, Robert's reaction to the sight of his favorite daughter Marie, my grandmother, returning from the saloon struggling to carry home a bucket of beer, sent him into a tizzy. Such was the disgust from the sight that from that day forward my great grandfather vowed, not to fetch the beer himself, but to give up drink. He would become an ardent and vocal supporter of temperance and Prohibition. Fortunately his beliefs did not rub off on most of his progeny.

The "noble experiment" of Prohibition sent a tidal wave of change throughout the land, little of it having to do with the expressed purpose of eliminating the evils of drink.

A good number of breweries had the wherewithal to survive the thirteen years of Prohibition, mostly by selling legal near beer, malt extract or yeast products. What the consumers did with those products was apparently their own business, so long as they didn't make beer, wink wink.

One unintended consequence was that Prohibition created a whole new market for beer. Old time saloons were primarily the domain of men, whereas the illegal speakeasies of Prohibition were filled with men, women and even children. When the repeal of the 18th amendment came in 1933, the breweries, anxious to recoup their losses, were eager to expand their market well beyond the traditional Central European, male core. The heavily malted, intensely hopped beverage that Bohemians and Germans preferred, was shall we say an acquired taste, not necessarily popular among this new group. So the brewers adapted their recipes to create a beer that was less intense, easier to drink, and had a greatly reduced mouth feel and aftertaste. They did this by adding more corn or rice, depending on the location of the brewery. This was the beginning of the aforementioned American Pale Lager, which became so dominant in the American market.

Many in the beer world call American Pale Lager an inferior product, but that's is not really true. The lack of taste and distinction (at least compared to other styles), is certainly the chief characteristic of APL, but that's exactly the point. While making a boatload of money is certainly their goal as with any business, big brewers do not skimp on effort or the quality of their materials. In fact, the opposite is true for the most part. The breweries spend a great deal of money to procure ingredients of the highest quality and to maintain the highest standards of quality control in their facilities. A brewmaster's most important job at a commercial brewery, especially a big one, is not creativity or experimentation, but quality control, making sure his beer tastes exactly the same, one insipid sip after another. That's not an easy job in the notoriously fickle art of brewing.

When a brand of beer becomes inconsistent, trouble follows, as the makers of Schiltz found out not too long ago. Schlitz was the leading brewer in America for most of the twentieth century. In the 1970s, the company seeking to improve its profit margin, tried to cut corners by experimenting with new techniques that would shorten the aging process and enable them to use a higher percentage of corn, which is cheaper than barley. The change of recipe changed the product, and resulted in a beer than was inconsistent from batch to batch, causing loyal drinkers to switch brands in droves. In about ten years, the great Downtown Milwaukee brewery closed for good, and Schlitz was absorbed into the Pabst company. The Schlitz label exists today, still owned by the Pabst Company, and contract brewed by Miller, as a boutique brand, brewed using the old recipe. Better yes, but don't expect it to taste like Pilsner Urquell.

If innovation, creativity and experimentation are not a part of the brewmaster's job description, that is certainly not the case for the marketers of beer. Early beer ads testify to the beer companies' desire to convince non beer drinkers to drink beer. They typically describe the healthful attributes of beer as well as other benefits. The following is the copy of an ad from around 1900: *

There is no beverage more healthful than the right kind of beer. Barley malt and hops - a food and a tonic. Only 3 1/2 percent of alcohol - just right for digestion.

Rhine wine is 12 percent alcohol; champagne, 20 percent; whiskey, 40 percent.

There are no germs in pure beer, while the sweet drinks you give you children are full of them.

Pure beer is a tonic which all physicians favor. They prescribe it to the weak, the run-down, the convalescent. And they recommend it to well people who want to keep well.

Of course you have to drink the right beer:

But get the right beer, for some beer is not healthful. Schlitz is the pure beer, the clean beer, the filtered and sterilized beer. No bacilli in it - nothing but health.

And now for the coup de gras:

And Schlitz is the aged beer that never causes biliousness.

Of course not.

As the advertising world became more sophisticated, a product's image became the selling point for everything from soup to nuts. Beer was certainly no exception. For more or less the first two thirds of the twentieth century, beer ads typically made an effort to present the image of their product and its users as urbane and sophisticated, in marked contrast to the public image that beer was the drink of working class men. The Miller Company for example, famously advertised its signature product, Miller High Life as the "Champagne of Beers"

Here is a TV spot featuring the suave and debonair Ray Milland in character as private detective Roy Markham from around 1960. Note the non-discreet product placement during the closing credits of the program:

A few things happened to beer advertising in the sixties. TV commercials became more epic and cinematic. Gone were the days of on screen talent simply explaining the merits of a product as they did on radio. Imported beer started making real inroads in the American market and the bland, less expensive, American beers could no longer with a straight face claim to be more sophisticated than a beer from say Holland or Germany. So American beer companies reacted by turning to their old reliable consumers as you can see in this ad from 1971:

This commercial was made in the era when the slogans; "Miller Time" and "For all you do, this Bud's for you" were introduced. Their message was; after a hard day at work, sit back, relax, and pour yourself a cold one, you deserve it. The aggressive, over-the-top manly, men doing über-manly things campaign of Schlitz didn't go over as well as its creators had hoped, maybe because viewers found it hard to relate to say, tuna fishermen. But it was part of the trend that continues to this day to market American beer primarily to the working man.

In the seventies and the eighties, the marketers and brewmasters got together to create an entirely new style of brew, light beer. Influenced by the diet soft drink, light beer was probably intended to be marketed toward beer drinking women who wanted to watch their waste lines. The Chicago brand Meister Braü was the first to market the stuff but went nowhere with it. The Meister Braü label was purchased by Miller, who was at the time owned by cigarette giant Phillip Morris Company. "Meister Braü Lite" became "Lite Beer from Miller", and the target audience was changed to thirsty men. The new angle was that you could drink a whole lot of this stuff and get drunk (ok not in so many words), but not get bloated. They also claimed it tasted good which I guess is a matter of opinion. Miller produced several commercials showing some of the manliest of men, mostly sports stars who wouldn't be caught dead drinking diet beer, but were happy to drink two cans of beer that had the same effect of one normal beer. It was brilliant. Not only did the beer companies have a successful new product on their hands, but they could sell twice as much of it. Every major brand jumped on the light beer bandwagon and today about 45 percent of all the malt beverages sold in the U.S. is "Lite" beer of one brand or another.

At the same time, another revolution was taking place in the beer world. No one agrees exactly how or where it all began, but the micro/craft brewing movement brought a whole new world of beer to this country. The author and renowned beer authority Michael Jackson, categorized beers from around the world and identified dozens of different styles in his groundbreaking book; The World Guide to Beer, first published in 1977. Another author, Fred Eckhardt, elaborated on the various styles is his book; The Essentials of Beer Style. Small, independent breweries and brew pubs began creating brews in every conceivable style. In the meantime, home brewing became legal for the first time in the United States since Prohibition, and all over the country people read Charlie Papazian's book, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and learned how to make their own Oatmeal Stout, English Bitters, Belgian Ales, India Pale Ales, German Kölsches, Weißbiers and Bocks, barley wines, heck even American lagers if they chose to do so. The end result was that in America, people who never knew they liked beer because all they ever drank was the tasteless product of Big Beer, became connoisseurs. It was a great awakening. New breweries sprung up all over the States after a steady decline for decades. Today there are almost 1,800 breweries in this country, and all but about 100 of them are either micro-breweries or brewpubs.

Big Beer of course is taking notice, not that craft breweries are really a threat to them. Boston Brewing Company, the largest craft brewery in the United States, shipped 2,259,000 barrels of beer in 2010 and ranked as the eighth top brewing company in the country according to Newsweek Magazine. That's a lot of beer. But its market share is 1.1% compared to 47.9% for Anheuser-Busch InBev, and 28.9% for MillerCoors. Boston's market share is even less than one half that of Pabst Company which doesn't even brew its own beer. Still those numbers would put the Boston Brewing Company in the ranks of Big Beer, even though there is world of difference between its flagship product, Sam Adams Boston Lager, and your standard American Lager from those other companies.

This year it was announced that Chicago's own Goose Island Brewery was to become part of the Anheuser-Busch InBev portfolio. In other words (to mix a couple metaphors), they went over to the Dark Side by selling out to the Evil Empire. Of course no one has a clue how this will all play out over the next several years, but it's unlikely that the giant multi-national corporation is interested in the brewery simply to destroy it. Here is some evidence to that effect. I seriously doubt if Goose Island will be cranking out Bud and Bud Lite anytime soon.

The craft beer movement has separated beer drinkers into people who either drink beer because of the taste, or because of the label. Big Beer is still the big player in the industry and far more people drink their product than any other beer. I'll admit that there are lots of folks out there who drink American Pale Lager simply because they like the taste of it better than anything else. But I'm willing to bet that far more people drink Big Beer more because of the label.

Again, there's that ever fascinating subject, marketing, and its ability to elevate one product over another even though there is absolutely no difference between the two. Take Pabst Blue Ribbon, an old time brew that was once best known as the beer preferred by red necks. PBR has recently gained a new life as the hip beer of the indie rock set. How that happened was a combination of dumb luck and shear brilliance. In the mid-eighties, Pabst was a near moribund company whose future was in the hands of a hostile takeover. The new owner concentrated on selling all the real estate holdings of the company and all but eliminating the advertising budget. The label became essentially invisible for a decade, until young, anti-establishment types, "re-discovered" it as a cheaper alternative to the familiar, more "commercial" brands like Miller and Bud that their fathers were drinking. Without any effort at all from the company, Pabst became big again, and while keeping away from main stream advertising, the new owners, the Metropoulos family have nudged the brand along by sponsoring alternative events such as concerts at indie rock venues, bike messenger contests and artists who work on Pabst related projects.

In the meantime, the good folks at Miller, in a sense bucking the trend themselves, began to emphasize their "macro-beer" image, featuring the High Life brand that we hadn't heard from for a while, though it never went away. A recent ad campaign has featured a likable Miller High Life deliveryman who actually takes his beer away from people whom he deems pretentious and therefore unworthy of "living the high life." This is a message obviously directed at the "everyman" but in a way has made MHL hipper than hip as a counter-counter culture product. In other words, drinkers of MHL reject the faux coolness of PBR and view its drinkers as poseurs. They drink what is in their opinion, a more honest, therefore hipper product.

The irony of all this is that Pabst Blue Ribbon is contract brewed by Miller. While the two are brewed using slightly different recipes, they are both made in the same brewery and are essentially the same beer. I'm guessing that if the workers at the Miller bottling plant accidentally switched the labels on a batch of PBR and a batch of MHL, nobody would notice.

These are pretty good times for beer lovers in America. For those of us who love beer for the taste, never before has there been more selection of styles of beer available to drink fresh, at a local brewpub, or to pick up at a retail establishment, even the local supermarket. For those drawn to the label, many of the old, forgotten brands will be coming back as a sort of niche for drinkers interested in nostalgia. Of course they'll all be brewed up at Miller's, but what's the difference, label lovers only care about the label after all.

For those folks who feel bilious about big business, there are still independent brewers out there without any corporate affiliation, you're job is to find them.

And if the idea of anyone at all profiting off of the making of beer sends you into a tizzy, you can always brew your own.

It is after all a free country. Let's drink to that, while we still can.

* reprinted from an advertisement for Schlitz Beer, c. 1900 as found in:
Breweries of Wisconsin, Jerry Apps, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

Restoring a piece of Chicago's past, one block at a time

2011-10-24T16:57:00.002-05:00

Chicago's last surviving wood block alley has been restored. Here is an article by Lynn Becker that makes a very good point about the economy of long range planning.

Well done I must say.

From the morning commute...

2011-10-20T21:26:00.004-05:00

Reality struck this week as the pleasant early fall weather gave way to a torrent of cold, wind and rain, in other words, normal weather for late October in Chicago. As I get older, I find myself a little more practical about my bike rides to work. By Tuesday with the weather reports looking particularly bad for the next two days, I had already made up my mind to shelve the bike. Any sense of denial about the weather to come was put to rest by a 30mph noreaster which made Tuesday's ride home a challenge.

Anyway, the ride to work yesterday was uneventful, the gentle rumble of the wheels along the L tracks, the muffled conversation of a few passengers, some soft music leaking through headphones, and the sound of the rain falling on the roof, were almost as comforting on a cold, rainy day as the heat coming through the vents. Even though the car was filled to the gills with riders, the car was remarkably still, until the monologue. The voice of a woman pierced the treasured silence as she enumerated her complaints to her colleague who apparently was not living up to his/her end of the bargain. "I'm just worried about you guys coming through for me" she said in a tone of voice loud enough for every single person on the car to hear. What should have been none of our business became everybody's business. It was as if the eighty or so other people in the car simply did not exist. That one way conversation kept up for about four stops until she got off the train without braking stride in her conversation, as far as I know, she could still be talking. After she left, peace and quiet took her place.

Today, similar circumstances. As it was hard to read standing up, I took an informal survey of my fellow passengers. In my immediate vicinity, two of them were reading the RedEye, one was engaged in a sudoku puzzle, another a crossword. One woman was reading an interior design magazine and two people were involved in a conversation. On the seat I was standing over, a man was reading his Kindle and a woman was surfing the web on her Android tablet. I counted at least eight people who were connected to a variety of mobile devices with headphones, some of them just listening, others listening and surfing or e-mailing. Then there were at least six more who were either e-mailing or surfing on their mobile devices sans headphones. One man read a book. Five people were lost in their thoughts and one, yours truly, was just taking it all in.

Not a soul was talking on a cellphone.

Open House Chicago

2011-10-14T22:21:00.004-05:00

This weekend, October 15 and 16, the Chicago Architecture Foundation is sponsoring a magnificent event called Open House Chicago. Well over 100 sites around town that are normally not publicly accessible, will be open to the public.

Here is their website.

One certainly not to miss building in the Loop is the former Chicago Auto Club Building, an Art Deco masterpiece by Holabird and Root that has been empty for a number of years. It is one of the most elegantly proportioned buildings in Chicago. It is scheduled to become a hotel in the near future, hopefully.

What's really great about this event is that it includes parts of the city that are off the beaten path, neighborhoods such as Garfield Park/North Lawndale, Little Village, Bronzeville/Hyde Park, and Rogers Park/West Ridge. Shuttles will operate in the neighborhoods making frequent stops between the individual sites. The website allows you to create your own personal itinerary.

If you do happen to be up in Rogers Park this weekend, do check out our building, Casa Bonita on Ridge Avenue, a magnificent late twenties Spanish Renaissance Revival apartment building, which is one of the sites.

Stop by and say hello. If you're lucky, you might even get a tour from my ten year old son.

More beer!

2011-10-13T22:46:00.004-05:00

Some stats on beer from Newsweek magazine combined with some scintillating commentary:

The most beer is consumed yearly per capita in which state?
New Hampshire - I would not have guessed that.

How about the least?
Utah - Not much of a surprise there. However New York State is number three, least that is.

Of the top ten beer companies in the U.S., I've only heard of five. On the other hand, the top two companies combined enjoy more than a 75% market share in the U.S., and I've definitely heard of those. One's based in St. Louis, the other in Milwaukee, but neither are owned by American companies anymore.

You need to enter your age in order to access the web sites of some of the beer companies. Is it illegal for anyone under 21 to read about beer? I wonder if anyone lies.

Pabst, a brand that almost disappeared not too long ago and is a company almost continuously in transition, is number 5 with a 2.7 market share in the U.S.

Montana proportionately employs more brewers than any other state, 3.2 per 100,000. However less than 1,000,000 people live in Montana which means about 30 people work as brewers in Montana.

Beer was virtually tied with milk as the third most popular beverage in the United States in 2010 with a per capita yearly consumption of 20.7 gallons. Soft drinks come in at a staggering 44.7 gallons and bottled water at 28.3 gallons. Americans drank 18.5 gallons of coffee per person in 2010, 2.3 gallons of wine (a little surprising) and 1.5 gallons of the hard stuff. Despite the high number for soft drinks, we drank 16% less of it than we did ten years ago.

In terms of beer consumption around the world, the United States comes in at number 15, between Slovakia and Denmark. Now get this, of the top beer drinking countries of the world, the Czech Republic is number one and Ireland number two. So how could I not love beer? It's my heritage. Extending this, Germany is number four right behind Austria. My wife is mostly German, meaning my children have even more beer running through their veins.

Nazdravy, Sláinte and Prost to all.

Getting thirsty

2011-10-13T20:03:00.003-05:00

All the talk of Prohibition has gotten me thinking about one of my favorite topics, beer. The world's greatest beverage and I go way back, you could say it flows along with my Czech and Irish blood. What's more, my surrogate grandfather was a German, and he enjoyed his bier at least as much as my father enjoyed his pivo. For many childhood years I spent my summer vacations up in Milwaukee with my grandparents, and with each trip inevitably came a brewery tour. One year it would be Schlitz, another Pabst, still another, Miller. These were not just factory tours, the breweries themselves were magnificent works of industrial architecture that played an extremely vital role in the history of Milwaukee. The companies. very conscious of public relations, put a great deal of effort into those tours which of course would end with a sampling of the product.

Since I was underage, the highlight of the tours for me was the brewhouse where gigantic copper kettles would boil thousands of gallons of wort, the sweet liquid that is derived from the malted barley which is the basic ingredient of beer. It is here where the hops are added, at the beginning to stabilize the brew, then at the end to contribute to the flavor and aroma of the beer.

The Pabst brewhouse was the most beautiful of the three, a nineteen century structure lined with steel, cooper and ceramic. Ceramic tiles also lined the magnificent kettles which resided in a room that featured a wonderful stained glass window featuring, what else, the history of beer.

But to me the most wonderful part of a brewhouse, was the smell of the boiling wort mixed with the spicy, herbal smell of hops. Folks either love or hate the smell of brewing beer but to me it brings back a particularly happy time of my life, and I love it.

I fell in love with the process of brewing beer, long before I learned to love drinking beer. The latter corrected itself soon enough, it was in Milwaukee in fact where I enjoyed my first legal beer as the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18 back in those days. It took me much longer to brew my own, it was during a brief period of bachelorhood in my mid-thirties when I finally had the time and inclination to pursue a life-long interest. As is usually the case with me, I plunged into my new hobby head first and for a few years, it was my main passion. Everyone who knew me back then knew not to bring up the subject of beer because it would begin a monologue which would last, well let's just say, longer than necessary.

Anyway, the bachelorhood and the brewing lasted concurrently for about five years. While I don't miss the bachelorhood part one bit, there are a few parts of brewing besides of course, the steady supply of beer, that I miss. Most home brewers brew with malt extract, a powder made from malted barley which you boil in water, add hops, then yeast after the mixture cools down. You could say it's a little like making instant beer.

That wasn't enough for me, no sir. I started with grain just like the real brewers, malted barley, ground it by hand, then mashed it by mixing it with water and cooking it at a very precise temperature. This is the process that extracts the good stuff from the malt into the water, and also chemically converts the starches from the grain into sugar, most of which will later be converted into alcohol. There is a fine line between success and failure in the mashing process, and it more than doubles the amount of time, but to me it was the essence of brewing my own beer, very much akin to processing my own film.

That was grunt work to be sure, the real fun came after the wort cooled down, and the yeast was added to the five gallon glass container that would be the home for the brew for the next few weeks or more. Usually, fermentation would begin the next morning, if not, anxious hours would be spent waiting to see if I would end up with real beer, or near beer. Fortunately for me, fermentation always took place. It was a joyful moment to discover that the hours of careful preparation and work were not for naught, when the brew would come alive as the yeast did its magic, feeding off the sugars I created in the mash, creating the byproduct of alcohol. Different batches fermented differently, but there was always a bubbling cauldron of activity as the yeast gleefully fed and fruitfully multiplied as it did its magic. Eventually most of the sugars would be converted, the yeast would go dormant, and it would be time for what now could be rightfully called beer, to age. Usually two or three weeks were enough, then it was time for bottling. That was the least fun part of the process. The bottles would have to be disinfected with bleach, then boiled, as were the caps. Each bottle was filled individually and capped. That process alone took at least four hours. Then came the anxious wait as the still active yeast in the beer would continue to do its work in the air tight environment with some freshly added wort to produce carbon dioxide, the all important carbonation.

After a few impatient days, the beer was ready to drink. How was it? Well some of it was pretty good if I do say so myself, although quite honestly not as good as the best commercial beers I've had. All of the batches were drinkable, better than many commercial beers, although to paraphrase a famous backhanded compliment, some may have had a taste that only a brewer could love.

But the satisfaction of brewing my own from scratch made even the lesser of my brews well worth the effort.

Eventually however the time and effort became too much, I just couldn't bring myself to bottle what could very well have been my best batch of beer, a Belgian ale. I sadly dumped all five gallons of the brew that had gone bad from sitting around too long, down the sink, and knew it was the end of my days as a brewer.

I became a father not long after that and even imagining going back to brewing now is something I can't even comprehend.

But it was fun while it lasted.

Now you know, don't get me started talking about beer!

There ought to be a law

2011-10-12T07:09:00.004-05:00

The man who bears a strong resemblance to a familiar Latin American dictator, emerges from the Presidential Palace in the fictional country of San Marcos to address his people:

"I am your new president." he says to an ecstatic crowd.

"From this day forward, the national language of San Marcos, will be Swedish."

"You will change your underwear once every hour, and you will wear your underwear on the outside, so we can check."

"All children in San Marcos under the age of 16, as of today will be 16."

I first saw Woody Allen's movie Bananas, not long after it was made forty years ago. That scene which still makes me chuckle after all these years, silly as it is, is useful in examining the nature of laws and how they are implemented.

I've been thinking about that subject since last week after watching the PBS documentary, Prohibition. I may not be the biggest Ken Burns fan, but I will say that he does a good job telling the story and presenting both sides. Viewers come away from the program understanding that although Prohibition in the United States was an unmitigated disaster, a total flop in terms of accomplishing its goals, there was a certain logic in the movement to ban booze. Its advocates, rather than being strictly religious zealots, actually came from diverse elements of society, and most of them had very good intentions. Prohibition in fact was seen as a progressive movement in many circles. Needless to say, alcohol when abused, causes tremendous suffering and hardship, not just to the abusers, but to those around them, as well as innocent bystanders. To solve the problem the theory went, why not make a law to get rid of the stuff altogether.

As everyone knows, banning alcohol did not end up solving the problem of alcohol abuse. While the total number of people who drank was slightly reduced during Prohibition, those who continued to imbibe, and there were a lot of them, drank more. The supply of alcohol may have been reduced, but the demand skyrocketed. As always, there were people who were more than happy to meet the demand, and they made a fortune selling illegal hootch. Organized crime flourished. Everything was turned upside down, industrious, honest people became criminals, and criminals became legitimate. Since a good portion of the country thought Prohibition was a joke, including most of the police, the law was unenforceable. Cynicism and disregard for law and law enforcement ruled the day, a situation that one could argue, exists to this day.

Arbitrary, frivolous laws like the proclamations of the fictional dictator of San Marcos, ill conceived, unenforceable laws, laws that that take away liberties that people once enjoyed, and laws that enforce one brand of morality over others, are counterproductive at best. Prohibition was all of that.

For much of the country, the era of Prohibition was a decade long drunken binge. It took the Great Depression, the repeal of the 18th Amendment, and ironically the restrictions that went along with legal booze, to sober the county up.

So have we learned anything from Prohibition? Well, people still flock to politicians who are more than willing to write laws that effect the behavior of other people. This "better life through legislation" mentality is not the domain of any one political ideology. Everyone likes freedom of speech, especially when it applies to themselves, but many wouldn't mind laws prohibiting certain speech of people with different opinions. So called "Pro Lifers" favor banning abortions but few seem prepared or interested to address the issue of how to enforce such a ban. Many folks support frivolous amendments to the constitution such as one defining marriage as a union specifically between a man and a woman, and an amendment that would ban flag burning.

And so it goes, it seems we just can't get enough of the idea that if we don't like something, make a law to get rid of it, and it will go away.

It just so happens that last week, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance that in a very small way, illustrates this point. On the surface, it seemed like a good idea, create a law that would forbid talking or texting on a cellphone while riding a bicycle. Quite honestly, I'm perplexed by people who use cellphones while riding their bikes. I think to myself: "if that conversation is so important, can't they just stop riding for a minute?"

I was prepared to accept this new law until I heard its sponsor, alderman Margaret Laurino speak about it on the radio. The interviewer asked what inspired her to come up with the law. She said that one of her constituents brought it to her attention and then she noticed some cyclists texting while riding. That's it, no studies, no data, not even rumors suggesting that texting and biking contributes to accidents, just an alderman's hunch that's it's not a good idea, simple common sense she said.

Well OK I can live with that, safety's important and it's hard to argue that using a cellphone while riding a bike is not the safest thing to do. On the other hand, there are more dangerous things that cyclists do all the time such as listening to music through headphones. I've been involved in several incidents and one accident involving people wearing headphones who turned into me because they couldn't hear me coming from behind. The alderman said she hoped bikers would hear her message on the redio while they were riding, presumably through their headphones. Could she possibly be that clueless?

Then she added that since it's illegal to text while driving, she wanted to "level the playing field" between drivers and bicyclists. I never realized the playing field was stacked so highly in favor of bikes, frankly I thought it was the other way around.

Where do I begin with that one? First of all, stand next to a city street on a normal day and count how many cars pass by before you see a single bicycle. I'd say that a very conservative estimate in Chicago would be ten cars to one bike on a good day to ride a bike. On a less than perfect day, the ratio of drivers to cyclists would be far higher. An average car weighs 2,000 pounds. A bike, including its rider might weigh around 200 lbs. An average automobile engine is rated between 100 and 150 horsepower, while an elite cyclist can generate about 1/4 horsepower, but only for a short amount of time. Speed limits on streets where you are likely to find bicycles range between 25 and 35 mph. Drivers routinely drive faster than the speed limit while most cyclists struggle to reach half that. Of course cars are capable of speeds well in excess of 100 mph.

If leveling the playing field were really an issue, it stands to reason that motorists would be the ones asked to sacrifice, not bicyclists. There is absolutely no comparison between the numbers, the space they take up, the speed, weight and the power of automobiles compared to bicycles. That's not to mention the relative safety afforded to the passengers in a car versus a completely vulnerable cyclist.

I've said it before in this space and I'll say it again, it's ridiculous to assume that cyclists should assume the same responsibility on our streets that motorists do. Cars and their drivers are responsible for wreaking far more havoc than bicyclists. Our lawmakers need to do better than perpetuate this "level the playing field" nonsense.

Alderman Laurino, the daughter of the old Machine alderman Anthony Laurino, clearly doesn't have a clue about traffic safety, at least as it relates to bicycles. Her new law will probably not cause any harm, but I doubt that it will be taken seriously, let alone save lives. Do we seriously want our over-extended police to be on the lookout for the dreaded bicycle texter? Motorists continue to talk and text on cell phones while driving even though it's illegal in Chicago, and it's hard to imagine that cyclists, (I'm guessing this new law is directed primarily at renegade bike messengers), will be any different.

This issue is certainly not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I haven't heard any opposition to it nor do I expect to see a phalanx of cyclists riding to the Daley Center, holding hands singing, or more appropriately texting "We Shall Not be Moved." But the law is unnecessary, unenforceable and arbitrary. There are many other dangerous things we could do on our bikes that are perfectly legal. How about a law banning juggling while riding a bike?

One of Ken Burns' trademarks is his use of the "talking head", the authority who appears on camera to help move the story along. Of all the talking heads in each documentary, there's usually one who I call the go to guy, the most colorful character, the expert of experts who comes up with the most memorable lines and often has the last word in each episode. Civil War historian Shelby Foote served that purpose as did baseball great Buck O'Neil in previous Burns' productions. In Prohibition the capo di tutti capi was New York journalist Pete Hamill. In his closing words of the film, Hamill spoke of the futility of laws that take things away from people. He said: "I haven't had a drink in thirty years and don't care if I have another one for as long as I live. But if the government were to tell me tomorrow: 'you can't have a drink', I'd head straight to the bar and order up a big martini."

That pretty much sums up my feeling about this new law. The thought never occurred to me to text while riding a bike, until now. That all has changed. In fact at this minute, as I write this post on my smart phone, I'm riding my bike down Michigan Avenue, with Pete Seeger blasting on my iPod.

So arrest me.

Some sources on the Great Fire

2011-10-08T00:40:00.005-05:00

Late one night, when we were all in bed,
Mrs. O'Leary lit a lantern in the shed.
Her cow kicked it over,
Then winked her eye and said,
"There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!"

Today is the 140th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. I wrote a post about the event a couple of months ago which you can find here.

Here's a partial bibliography:

History of Chicago, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time by Alfred Theodore Andreas, 1886, in three volumes is as comprehensive a history of the city as you are likely to find, pre-1886 of course.
The Great Chicago Fire, by Robert Cromie, McGraw Hill, 1958, is a compelling narrative of the eponymous cataclysm.
Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, 1973, by Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, University of Chicago Press, is the classic illustrated compendium of Chicago history that includes important pre and post fire panoramas taken from the Court House.
Lost Chicago, by David Lowe, Houghton, Mifflin, 1975, is an elegy for a bygone city.
The Great Chicago Fire, by David Lowe, Dover Publications, 1979, edited by the author of Lost Chicago, is a collection of first hand accounts of the event.
Smoldering City, Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874, by Karen Sawislak, University of Chicago Press, 1995, is a thorough examination and critique of the recovery from the fire and the re-building of Chicago.

And here are three excellent web sites about the Great Fire:

Chicagology is an independent web site dealing with many aspects on the city with an especially useful section devoted to the Great Fire. Its image Gallery contains an indispensable collection of photographs and engravings of pre-fire buildings.
The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory web site, the work of the Chicago History Museum, is the most comprehensive site devoted to the fire.
The PBS series The American Experience, devoted an episode to the Chicago Fire. Here is the accompanying site which features a chronology of the event.

Other than a good reading list, what would be the best way to commemorate the event? Well for my part, I'd like to remember an Englishman, one A.H. Burgess, who was so moved by the tragedy of the Great Fire that he proposed a donation not of money, or food, or supplies, but of books.

Said Mr. Burgess:

“I propose that England should present a Free Library to Chicago, to remain there as a mark of sympathy now, and a keepsake and a token of true brotherly kindness forever…”

The 8,000 plus books that made their way across the waters would become the foundation of the Chicago Public Library which was founded as a result of the donation in 1872, the year after the Fire.

One hundred forty years later the kindness of you and your great country has not been forgotten. Thank you Mr. Burgess, wherever you are.

While computers get smarter...

2011-09-30T21:44:00.009-05:00

Once I got on I-94 in Detroit I didn't need to keep the GPS on, but since it was going to be a long drive home and it was getting late, I thought I'd keep Marianne, my name for the machine, around just to keep me company. After nearly flawless directions, (the only mix-up was when Marianne mistakenly recalculated after a 15 foot detour in Gary), I got to the major east-west street closest to our home in Chicago when Marianne told me to turn right on "TAU-hee" Avenue. I immediately corrected her (OK I was getting a little punchy after a long drive on top of a full day's work): "It's 'TOO-ee' Avenue you dumb machine!" I said.

I returned the car the next day and took my son along so he could see my cool rented car and meet Marianne. "Listen to this," I said to him as we approached Touhy Avenue. "Turn right on 'TOO-ee' Avenue" said the machine. I said to my boy: "wow this really is a smart machine after all, she must have listened to me!"

Marianne was my first experience using a GPS, which is short for a global positioning system, a machine that is able to pinpoint your exact location then determine the best route to your destination. It's a marvelous bit of technology but I've always felt confident enough in my own navigational skills that I've never been tempted to get one. Once I was picked up at the Phoenix airport by a friend of my parents who insisted on using her GPS, even though I knew exactly how get to where we were going. She insisted on listening to the machine instead, which led us on a wild goose chase and got us hopelessly lost. But that was ten years ago and the machines are much better now. When presented with the GPS option as I rented the car a couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd give it a whirl, besides the company would be paying for it. Like any relationship there were some bumpy moments mostly due to my own inexperience. But pretty soon we were in the groove so to speak and as they say, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

In the Detroit area, my work was about 15 minutes from the motel and Marianne got me between the two via a dependable, if somewhat convoluted route as I would later discover. But after making the same trip three days in a row, I still depended on Marianne getting me there, I never committed the route to memory. What's more, I never got to know the territory I was covering. "Did you see such and such?" I was asked by a colleague who had been there before. I hadn't because, as far as I was concerned, following Marianne's directions to my destination was my only mission. Had I used a road map, I would have had to figure out the route myself, which as I have learned from experience, would have imprinted itself on my brain much quicker than simply following Marianne's directions. Plus a map would have shown me other features of the neighborhood I was driving through, places my curiosity would have taken me.

Which got me thinking about what we lose when we let our machines do the thinking for us. To put it more bluntly, as computers get smarter, are we getting dumber? Some might argue that computers are now employed to do many of our routine mental chores, freeing up our brains to think about more important things like our fantasy football roster. Others would argue that the very process of figuring out simple things like how to get where we are going, go a long way toward keeping our brain synapses active, healthy, and alive.

Let me say at this point that I love computers. To me they are amazing creations of the human spirit, limited only by the creativity and intelligence of the people who control them. I have done some programming of my own as a hobby, and have come to greatly respect the work of software designers. I thoroughly understand their drive to make computers perform tasks that people only a generation ago could not have dreamed. The holy grail of software design is to create intelligent computers, that is machines that can learn, correct themselves, and create and teach other computers, in short, computers that can do essentially what we do, only better. No one quite agrees whether we're there yet, computers can do truly remarkable things, but they don't do them the same way humans do and because of that, can't be truly called intelligent.

Take the computer that beat World Chess Champion Gary Kasporov. There have been chess playing computers for a long time but until fairly recently, none of them have been able to beat the best human players. It's not really intelligence that computers use to play chess, it's shear processing muscle. In chess a good player must look ahead several moves on both sides of the board to determine a successful strategy. The better the player, the farther ahead one can look. But even with the limited number of pieces on a chessboard, there are millions of permutations of moves, far more than even a grand master can possibly see. That's not a problem for a computer, even the old beat up one one I'm typing on now can perform about a billion calculations per second, give or take a few hundred million. A computer can take those possible moves, play them all out to their completion, and determine which will yield the best results, in far less time than it took me to type all that. Still it took a massively powerful computer to beat Kasparov, one that was was devoted entirely to the game of chess. In other words, you or I could have beaten it in a game of tic tac toe.

For his part, Kasparov was a bit of a spoiled sport when he lost to Big Blue the IBM computer in 1997. He claimed that it cheated and demanded a rematch, which never happened. To me that seems a little like a world class runner being disappointed at being beaten in a race by Michael Schumacher driving his Formula One race car.

Given that, one would think it would be child's play for a software engineer to design a program to play the game of Jeopardy. Not so. Jeopardy is not merely a game of retrieving information, which computers can do in their sleep. It's a game about human language, which computers are terrible at. Again it was the scientists at IBM who took on the challenge to build a computer to take on the greatest of the Jeopardy champions. Their challenge was to create a machine that could understand the clues which often contain slang words, cheeky puns and double entendre . Some Jeopardy clues are painfully easy for a computer. Take this one:

"He was the pope in 1324."

I googled exactly that and Google's first response was Pope John XXII, AKA Jacques Duèse. Pretty damn good.

Here's another clue, one that actually appeared on the show:

"The original head shrinker, he fled to London in 1938 following the Nazi annexation of Austria."

Try googling that and you'll get everything from Rudolph Hess to the Dalai Lama, but not the right answer. For a human player, that's not a terribly difficult clue. "Head shrinker" could either be a person who makes shrunken heads, or a slang term for a psychologist. We quickly dispose of the former since A) not too many makers of shrunken heads are household names likely to be answers on Jeopardy and B) in the clue we have 1938, and Austria, neither a time nor place known for shrunken head makers. So by process of elimination, this term must refer to a psychologist, and if that is correct, an obvious shot in the dark would be Sigmund Freud, which would be the correct answer. The other words in the clue merely confirm the solution. Rather than using this simple string of human logic, a computer analyzes each word in the clue and ranks them in order of importance. Judging from the Google results to my query, I'd say the program deemed Nazi to be the most significant word followed by Austria, then London. The results Google gave me contained all three words, but nothing having to do with a head shrinker, although some results included the word head and others the word shrinker. It's the subtleties and nuances of language that computers can't deal with very well. That is until the IBM guys got to work on the project. After another single use monster computer, a few years of work by some of their most brilliant minds, and tens of millions spent on the project, the folks at IBM did indeed build a computer that beat the best human Jeopardy players.

Now you may be wondering why all the effort to build a machine that can win a TV quiz show. Well its the same reason we learn subjects at school that seem at first to be pointless, like algebra. It's all about learning how to solve problems. While to this day I still can't factor a quadratic equation to save my life, much of what I learned in high school algebra has stayed with me and at least abstractly I use it as a basis for solving daily problems. Solving the Jeopardy problem gave programmers a clear insight on how to create software that comes close to dealing with the complexities of human language, that will help them build systems with far reaching applications. Some of these future applications no doubt will benefit us greatly. Of course as is the case with all great innovations, some applications will cause us harm. In the end, computers are simply tools. As a tool, a hammer can be used to build a house, it can also used to bash someone over the head. It's the same with computers, it's up to us to know how to use them wisely.

There is an ongoing debate in education circles on the use of computers in the classroom. Movements are afoot to provide money to underprivileged schools for the purchase of computers. This is seen as progressive, after all computers, the theory goes, are such an important part of society that in order to make it, let alone prosper, an individual needs to be computer savvy. If learning computer skills is to be part of the curriculum, something has to be sacrificed, as there are limited hours in a school day, especially here in Chicago. In the case of my son's school, as always, art, music, and the rest of humanities, which so many seem to think are the most dispensable, are the first to go. The old fashioned skill of penmanship seems to be a thing of the past, I guess what's the point of handwriting if you can type on your laptop? Arithmetic and spelling are still taught but one can only wonder for how much longer, after all we have calculators and spell check to do that stuff for us. The saddest of all to me, is that libraries are being turned into media centers and what was once space for books, is now space for computers. We removed our son from his first school because the room that was once a library became a broom closet. A seventh grade class project shown at an open house that publicly bragged that all the research was done on Wikipedia sealed the deal.

But like it or not, computers are here to stay. I believe there is a place for them in our children's schools but I don't think they should take the place of books or other traditional subjects that are also necessary elements of life. I just challenged my son to look up the state motto of Hawaii, in Hawaiian (please don't ask me why). He came up with the answer on the computer in less than a minute. That's great. But we need to find more challenging tasks for our children, tasks that teach the elements of problem solving. If computers are going to be an integral part of the curriculum, I would suggest including basic computer programming for children, that is, start with a blank screen, teach the kids a simple computer language, one perhaps designed for such a purpose, and let the kids have a go at creating simple programs, then see what happens. They will fail as everybody does at first. But gradually they'll learn to understand what makes a computer tick, and learn a very valuable lesson in logic and problem solving by being forced to communicate with a device that "thinks" much differently than they do. Most importantly, they will learn that a computer, a tool they have known all their lives, is not simply a magic box where you type in a question, and it delivers an answer.

Any innovation's greatness is measured in terms of how much it benefits vs. how much it hinders society. The automobile gave people at all ends of the economic spectrum unimaginable independence. On the flip side driving has become the primary means of transportation for most of us at the expense of walking and other healthy activities. We are consequently told that we need to exercise so many hours per week to make up the difference. By letting them do the thinking and not challenging us, computers and software, especially dependable ones that are completely intuitive and user friendly I'm afraid are doing the same thing to our minds that automobiles did for our bodies.

Computers may or not be intelligent, but the people who design them certainly are. Maybe we can tap into those minds if just a little to learn how to keep our own minds active and healthy,

And whatever we do, please let's not throw away those road maps.

Just an idea. But what do I know? Thanks to the computer, I just write a blog and as everyone knows, any idiot be a blogger.

The Motor City

2011-09-28T23:08:00.004-05:00

The best commercial that aired during the last Super Bowl was a Chrysler ad that featured the city of Detroit. Detroit of course is the quintessential rust belt city, the epitome of the run down, crime ridden, great city of a bygone era whose best days are behind it. The commercial makes no bones about that, at the outset it describes the city as a town that's "been to hell and back". Why then would we want to buy anything that comes out of this place? Well "it's the hottest fires that make the hardest steel" as we are told by the voiceover with an attitude. The soundtrack and cameo appearance by Detroiter, Eminem, give the spot an edge that is entirely appropriate.

The tag line coming from the rapper, his only line: "This is the Motor City, and this is what we do" sends a chill down my spine. And the slogan invented for the campaign: "Imported from Detroit", lends a memorable, if quirky bit of irony.

It's a brilliant spot:

You may have noticed that the makers of the commercial chose to show you more of Detroit than the car they're trying to sell. That may speak volumes about the state of the U.S. auto industry, to which the fate of Detroit is intrinsically tied, but that's a story for another day.

It can't be good when you Google your city only to find that half of the images on display are of urban decay. See for yourself. Detroit's hardships have been so well documented that there is a cottage industry in exploiting the ruins of what was until not too long ago the fifth largest city in the United States. And what magnificent ruins they are.

The statistics are grim, here are just a handful plucked randomly off the internet. Some of them may even be true:

Detroit's boom in the first half of the twentieth century was nothing short of meteoric. In 1900, the city's population was 285,704. By 1920, the population was pushing one million, and in 1950, over 1.8 million called Detroit home. Detroit's fall was almost as meteoric as its boom, in 1980, the city's population was 1,595,138. From the 2010 census thirty years later, it was cut in less than half to 713,777. Civic leaders who were surprised and appalled at that low number, complained that the census takers failed to count the folks who would one day return from prison.
From the 2000 Census, 21.7% of families in Detroit lived below the poverty line.
50% of Detroiters are functionally illiterate.
The unsolved murder rate in Detroit is approximately 70%.
Depending on how you define unemployment, between 25 and 50% of Detroiters are unemployed.
Approximately 30% of the land area of Detroit is vacant, so much so that there is a movement to remove much of the existing infrastructure and return the vacant land to nature.

and on and on.

So why is Detroit in such bad shape? The easy answer is that the city is essentially a one company town. As long as the auto industry prospered, so did Detroit. But the downward population shift in Motown began in the fifties, long before the crash of the U.S. auto industry. In that sense, Detroit is no different from other cities in the United States.

In her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote that a large part of what makes a vital urban community is a vibrant street life. Cities with people out and about contribute to a healthy social structure. She sited several criteria that contribute to an active street life and used Detroit at least three times as an example of what not to do:

Lack of diversity. By diversity, Jacobs refers not only to population but diversity in how a neighborhood functions. She believed for example, that successful urban communities do not segregate commercial and residential functions. Easy access to shops and services ensures a constant flow of people within the neighborhood. A mix of people with different types of jobs and schedules, means that there are folks out on the streets at all times of the day. Detroit's neighborhoods have been historically segregated in both regards.
Lack of density. Contrary to common wisdom of the time, Jacobs believed that urban crime is not born out of overcrowding. She points out that some of the most successful neighborhoods in the country are the most densely populated. Crime thrives on desolation, empty streets and sidewalks are far more dangerous than crowded ones. Area wise, the city of Detroit is sprawling, as much of its housing has traditionally been devoted to the single family home. From this map you can see that you could fit Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston within Detroit's city limits and still have room to spare.
Building a city around the automobile. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the Motor City should be this way. Jacobs does not blame the automobile itself for urban decline, but the theories of urban planning that insist that the city become the servant to the automobile and not the other way around.

Put them all together and you get what Jane Jacobs called "the great blight of dullness", cities lacking cohesive communities that encourage people to stick around. It's the same story in big cities all over the United States, only more so in Detroit.

Or so they say. In my life I've barely scratched the surface of Detroit, merely passing through it on trips to Canada. That is until last week when my job brought me to the Motor City for a few days.

Unfortunately, my experience exploring the city on this visit was limited by time constraints and a bad cold. I did manage to briefly get into Detroit from the suburb of Dearborn where I was working. One evening after work I headed straight in the direction of the Renaissance Center, the 1970s skyscraper which is visible from all over town.

I have to admit that I had low expectations of Detroit, having been swayed by the impression described in the Chrysler ad as: "the one you’ve been reading in the papers, the one being written by folks who have never even been here."

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that there was indeed life and beauty in downtown Detroit.

For starters, Detroit has several fine skyscrapers built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a collection which is rivaled only by New York and Chicago. Notable examples, the Dime Building by Daniel Burnham, the Fisher Building by Albert Kahn, and the Guardian Building by Wirt C. Rowland to name a few, grace the skyline with a mixture of Romanesque, neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance and Art Deco styles. There are also newer buildings of note: One Woodward Avenue by Minoru Yamasaki, the aforementioned Renaissance Center by John Portman, and John Burgee and Phillip Johnson's One Detroit Center are three distinctive landmarks of the Detroit skyline.

Life has been brought back to Downtown Detroit, (not that it ever really left), by a number of development projects mixing the old with the new. Perhaps the most famous rehabilitation project was the restoration of the magnificent Fox Theater.

Across the street from the Fox is the new home of the Detroit Tigers, Comerica Park, perhaps one of the very best of the new ballparks built for major league baseball. Beyond that is the new home of the National Football League Detroit Lions, Ford Field. I haven't read any reviews of that stadium but it appears far superior to the joint it replaced, the Silverdome in suburban Pontiac. Both teams were out of town during my visit but I can imagine the bars and restaurants in the area are hopping on game days.

On the edge of Downtown, the neighborhood of Greektown was indeed hopping, a commercial area that doesn't close up after 6 PM, as so much of Detroit seems to do these days. The other institutions that don't roll up the sidewalks after dark are the three casinos that call Downtown Detroit home. Parking lot attendants were out and about hawking spaces in their lots, just as they do outside sports venues on game days.

There were a few important attractions that I didn't get to visit this time, but will definitely make plans to see in the future. Eastern Market, is the largest public market of its kind in the United States, Belle Isle, the island park which features work of the architects Frederick Law Olmsted, Cass Gilbert and Detroit's own Albert Kahn, and Midtown which is home to Wayne State University and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Here is an article about the magnificent set of fresco paintings devoted to the workers of Detroit by Diego Rivera that graces the DIA.

After a brief tour of downtown and a pleasant dinner, I got into the car and headed back to my suburban motel. I entered the motel's address in my rent-a-car's GPS which dutifully led me to the walled expressway which would prevent me from seeing the devastation outside of Downtown that I've read so much about, save for one building.

The Michigan Central Depot, about a mile outside of Downtown, was a rail terminal built in grand Beaux Arts style that opened in 1913. It still stands majestically, though now even driving by at 70 mph, one can't miss the fact that you can see right through it as all its windows are gone. Here is a loving tribute to the building.

The Michigan Central Depot's days were numbered because it was built for a mode of transportation that would be supplanted by Detroit's chief export. Not only that, it was built in an inconvenient location outside of Downtown, along street car lines that themselves were put out of business by the gas powered bus, also manufactured in Detroit. But today it still stands, nearly twenty five years after being abandoned, waiting for somebody, anybody, to bring it back to life. Standing there, magnificent in its decrepitude, the old train station in many ways is a metaphor for its city.

It is impossible to downplay the role, for better and for worse, of the automobile in our society. I dare say that the automobile has changed the way we live more than any other invention perhaps since the printing press. The industrial revolution that Ransom E. Olds, Henry Ford and others started in Detroit is largely responsible for creating the middle class as we know it in this country. It was one of the first times in history where factory workers would build something that they actually could afford to buy. The automobile brought a kind of freedom, previously enjoyed by only the upper strata of society, to just about everybody.

On the flip side, it's easy to blame the automobile for all the woes that befell most older American cities, but let the truth be known that the real culprits are the social planners in the first half of the last century who believed they had a better idea of how to build a city. Whatever flavor the city of the future would take, be it the horizontal Garden City, or the vertical Radiant City, the role of the personal transportation device would be front and center.

We can thank the failed utopian notions of these planners for our suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, the decline of public transportation, for pollution and scores of other causes of the erosion of our great cities.

My superficial visit to Detroit did dispel many of the assumptions I had about the city. It's definitely a place I'd like to get to know better as Detroit remains an enigma to me. I was drawn to it in a way that I could not have imagined. I longed to turn back the clock to the Belle Époch, back to when the city was called the "Paris of the Midwest." Detroit is the oldest city in the United States outside of the eastern seaboard and had a magnificent history long before it became the Motor City.

As the Motor City, Detroit became one of our great cities, a powerful symbol of American ingenuity and resourcefulness. More recently of course it has become a much different symbol.

Beaten down as it is, it's not going away. It's not likely it will regain its power as an industrial giant, that simply has become out of the grasp of any city in the United States. But somehow it will revive, people will come back to the Motor City to live and to work, perhaps drawn by the impossibly low cost of buying a house, perhaps for the chance of starting something entirely new.

And when that happens, I'll be here to cheer it on, as every American should.

By the way, here is some tentatively good news about Detroit.

Detroit is a place where people make stuff, whether it be cars or music, or whatever. It was fitting that the last song I heard on the radio on the way home before leaving Detroit air space was this Motown classic by the Temptations:

And oh yes, after only driving Japanese cars for a very long time, the car that brought me to the Motor City and back was a Chevy Malibu, conceived and built (in part) in Detroit.

You know what? It was a damn good car.

News...

2011-09-27T19:18:00.004-05:00

Some promising, a fundraiser for the Uptown Chamber of Commerce which hopes with the mayor's support, to restore the old Uptown Theater. With the heartbreaking closing of Borders in the old Goldblatt's building, this would be a very welcome jolt to that wonderful neighborhood.

You can read about it here.

Page two... The Wrigley Building has been sold to a consortium which includes the internet giant Groupon. All indicators point to the new owners' intent to preserve Chicago's most iconic building (in my opinion) which surprisingly is not a landmark. And, they seem not intent in changing the name which in this day and age is something indeed.

Blair Kamin writes about it here.

Peace

2011-09-11T07:18:00.001-05:00

Ten years ago

2011-09-08T13:42:00.014-05:00

Between now and this Sunday we will be deluged by accounts of people telling us where they were on the morning of the terrorist attacks on the United States. That is entirely as it should be. December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001, are three days that changed America forever. They are days whose events are etched into the minds of all Americans who were alive at the time and old enough to understand them. As someone who has an almost pathological memory of my whereabouts during momentous news events, I can remember almost every detail of September 11, 2001. And since my story is virtually identical to the story of every other American not in the direct line of fire that day, it is perfectly irrelevant.

I will however share for a moment my memories of the day exactly one year later, September 11, 2002. I was in Los Angeles working at one of the city's major art museums. In LA like everywhere else in the country, full scale public events were planned to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11. Having been involved in the art world for a very long time, I've become accustomed to the political leanings of the vast majority of people in that world which as you can imagine are shall we say, to the left of center. My own politics are not entirely out of sync with theirs, just perhaps slightly more nuanced, I do try to listen to all sides and when necessary, break from the party line on occasion. For example, unlike many of the people I come in contact with on a daily basis, I don't have an overwhelming distrust of our country and its institutions. Not that I'm a jingoistic, flag waiving, my country right or wrong type of individual, but I do love my country despite its shortcomings.

Having said that, I was still unprepared for the conversation that took place during lunch with some of my colleagues from that LA institution, the gist of which was: "so what's with all this fuss about 9/11?" Frankly it was the first time I heard anyone address 9/11 without the gravitas it deserves, out of a deep respect for the victims and their families. Not these folks. "People die all the time...", someone said, "why should we place so much energy on this one event?" Another added: "...besides Americans are hated all over the world and we probably had it coming anyway."

Of course there is some truth to those words. No, we don't go out of our way to remember the victims of on the anniversary every single tragedy, and yes, our government's occasional forays both before and since 9/11 have created great resentment toward our country around the world. Like it or not, some folks do indeed hate us.

Still I find it amazing that there are people in this world whose hearts are so hardened by living in their own smug little cocoon of cynicism, that they cannot break free, not even for the most gut-wrenching experience they or any of us will likely ever experience, even if it was only from a distance.

I was reminded of those remarks the other day after hearing a snide remark about our museum's exhibiting some pictures of the World Trade Center (taken in happier times), in honor of the tenth anniversary of that terrible day. Granted, I haven't heard those sentiments expressed very often in the past ten years. Most folks I know who may at times feel a bit overwhelmed by all the attention to the event, out of respect for the dead, keep those opinions to themselves.

There will certainly be lots of coverage of 9/11 this Sunday, and I'll probably miss most of it.

This Sunday, the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I plan to go to church and pray for the victims of 9/11 and for the loved ones they left behind. I'll especially remember the first responders who without any regard to their own safety, went into those buildings to do their job, saving the lives of others. I'll think of all those folks who went to Washington, DC and New York, also at great personal risk and without compensation to themselves, to help out in any way they could. Of course I will also remember our servicemen and women who put their lives on the line every day in the service of our country. And however futile this may sound to some of you, I will be praying for peace in the world.

This Sunday by happenstance will be an unusually busy day for us. We are going to two first birthday celebrations AND the baptism of a new born. Most importantly, I will be spending the day with my family. I can't think of a more fitting way to spend September 11, 2011.

After all, life goes on.

Post Script...

My day went mostly as planned. Either by pure coincidence or by divine providence, the gospel reading for Sunday, September 11, 2011 was the parable of the unforgiving servant who after having his own enormous debt forgiven out of compassion by his master, refused to forgive a trivial debt owed to him by another servant. An amazingly apt and challenging lesson for us about forgiveness, on the anniversary of one of the most painful days in our history.

I did manage to catch most of the coverage of the memorials in New York, Washington and Shanksville, and a part of the film shot by the two French film maker brothers who were in the process of shooting a documentary on a firehouse in Lower Manhattan when the attacks on the World Trade Center took place. Never during the day yesterday were my thoughts far from the events of ten years ago, but the most compelling moment was during the recessional hymn in church when we sang America the Beautiful. I completely lost it during the fourth verse:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!

Labor Day

2011-09-04T22:01:00.011-05:00

Holidays have lost much of their meaning for us, they're usually just a welcome break from our everyday routine. The bookends of summer, Memorial Day and Labor Day are perhaps the most removed from what they commemorate, so much so that it's not uncommon for people to confuse the two. Memorial Day to most Americans honors something, most folks remember tacitly at least, the soldiers who died for this country. On the other hand, I suspect that the majority of Americans haven't a clue that Labor Day is more than just the last day that we refrain from labor after summer vacation.

As the day to commemorate the contributions of the workingman and woman in the United States, Labor Day came into being in the 1880s, during the period of the most turbulent battles for the rights of workers in this country. Chicago was a major battleground at the time, and one event that took place here was so compelling, that countries all over the world, except this one, celebrate their own Labor Days around that particular event to protest injustice and to honor the men who gave their lives one fateful day in 1887 to the struggle for justice for all workers.

That event was the Haymarket affair. In a nutshell, on May 4th, 1886, a rally was held at Haymarket Square, to support the workers who were striking at the McCormick Reaper Plant on the South Side. The organizers unequivocally emphasized the need for a peaceful rally to prevent the violence that took place the day before at the plant. The rally went on peacefully for a few hours until the police decided it was time to break it up. As they began to move into the assembled crowd, someone from the alley to the left of the speaker's stand threw a bomb in the direction of the police. One officer was immediately killed and mayhem ensued. Police fired into the crowd, some of whom may have returned fire. In the end, eight officers were killed as were an undisclosed number of civilians.

A public outcry went out that someone must pay for the deaths of the policemen, and the organizers of the rally were rounded up. Even though few if any were present at the time of the riot and the identity of the bomb thrower was never discovered, eight of the organizers, Albert Parsons, Louis Lingg, Albert Spies, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, and Oscar Neebe were convicted of conspiracy. For their parts, Neebe got fifteen years, and the rest were sentenced to death. Fielden and Schwab's sentences were later commuted to life in prison. Louis Lingg cheated the hangman on the eve of his execution by biting down on an explosive capsule. Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fischer went to the gallows on November 11, 1887.

Shortly before his death Spies said:

"The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

His prophetic words would become his and the rest of the Haymarket martyrs' epitaph. Their grave is marked with a tremendous allegorical statue by Albert Weinert based on the French anthem the Marseillaise, which was sung by Spies, Parsons, Engel and Fischer on their way to the gallows. A female figure represents Justice. In one hand she places a laurel wreath upon the head of a fallen worker, while in the other hand she prepares to draw a sword.

The Haymarket Martyrs' Monument, at the Forest Home Cemetery in the suburb of Forest Park, while being under the radar of most Chicagoans, is a pilgrimage site to anyone interested in issues involving labor and workers' rights.

Needless to say, labor issues are making headlines as we speak. Whatever side you may take, even if you're smack dab in the middle like me, if you earn a living through a paycheck, you owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to these men and the countless others who gave so much so that we all could have a better life.

Happy Labor Day.

Another church, another story

2011-08-30T15:05:00.020-05:00

It's not uncommon for churches to front on parks, the open space gives plenty of room to take in the architecture of what is often the most imposing building in the neighborhood. Congregations obviously like to build their houses of worship on these prominent spots, and from a planning standpoint, parkside churches give their neighborhood a focus and a sense of stability. It's Chicago's version of a town square.

Ever since I made this picture at the southern tip of the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side in 1995, I've thought of this as one of the loveliest spots in Chicago. It is the view of beautiful Sherman Park, terminating with the twin towers of Henry Schlack's St. John of God Church.

Sherman Park is one of the city's finest parks. The grand church formed a memorable ensemble with the architectural features of the park, the splendid fieldhouse, barely visible to the left in the photo, the pergola connecting the fieldhouse and swimming pool, and the four bridges that span the lagoon. The park is the work of the Olmsted Brothers, sons of the great Frederick Law Olmsted. Sherman Park and the neighborhood in which it resides have gone through some rough times, but as is the case with many of Chicago's parks, much love and care has gone into it in recent years. Today it retains much of its original glory, admittedly with some rough spots here and there.

I'm sad to say however that St. John of God Church is slowly disappearing.

The view in the photograph above is gone forever.

This is how the church looked last month. In this case there is a silver lining of sorts. The exterior of St. John of God is being dismantled stone by stone, and being carted up to a town by the name of Old Mill Creek, Illinois, just south of the Wisconsin border. There it will be re-assembled and become St. Raphael the Archangel Roman Catholic Church. The interior of the new church will be made up of much of what remains of another shuttered Chicago church, St. Peter Canisius in the Austin neighborhood on the west side. In addition, the new church will get the organ that was removed from Medina Temple when it was turned into a department store. The reaction over the dismantlement of St. John of God has been mixed in the preservation community. One comment from an anonymous source went like this:

"The churches that are closed and the most endangered are those in the poorest city neighborhoods. Do we now remove these buildings from the area and original context, rather than keep them there and find a way to reuse them as assets to the community?"

And what a context it was. The church was built several years after the park, and it was clearly designed with the park in mind. Its departure leaves a void in the park landscape that will likely never be filled.

If you may recall, I've written in this space before about another church fronting a park that was closed in the early nineties. St. Boniface Church in Eckhart Park, was also designed by Henry Schlacks. Like St. John of God, St. Boniface has been vacant for twenty years. Unlike SJG, there was interest from the outside in purchasing that shuttered church and re-developing it into another use. It appears at this writing that St. Boniface will be saved in tact and turned into a facility for the housing of senior citizens. Unfortunately there was no such interest in keeping St. John of God in the community.

Moving the church is by no means the perfect solution. A dwindling congregation could no longer support the church. It would have been ideal if another congregation could have moved into SJG as was the case with Little Flower Parish, also on the South Side. Unfortunately, like the Eckhart Park neighborhood, Back of the Yards is saturated with beautiful old churches, both Catholic and Orthodox, many of whom have already been purchased by other congregations. Reusing the church in some other function, like the solution found at St. Boniface, would have at least kept the building in the neighborhood along with its distinctive profile.

Not apparent in the photograph at the top of this post, is the fact that St. John of God was already closed at the time the picture was taken. While still beautiful from within the park, from directly across the street you could see that the windows that were not boarded up were broken, and pigeons were roosting inside of them. Despite its magnificent silhouette, the shuttered church only emphasized the neighborhood's decrepitude. I have not heard of any neighborhood objections to the re-location of St. John of God. An abandoned building with no hope of revival sucks the life out of a neighborhood, and at some point you have to defer to the neighbors who have to live next to it.

Still, these pictures break my heart.

Think of all the the baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals that took place within that church, all the hope and prayer through the good times and bad, all the memories that lie inside those crumbling walls. But this final picture testifies that as the workers carefully pile up the bricks in stacks for shipment, out of old life comes new life, which is really what faith is all about.

Or to put it into a strictly secular context, moving St. John of God to the suburbs is better than the whole building ending up in a landfill.

Something out of nothing

2011-08-28T08:28:00.007-05:00

The saga of St. Boniface in the neighborhood of Eckhart Park on the near northwest side of Chicago continues. I have been a little out of the loop with this building and was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I learned from the posted signs shown here in the picture, that the property has been sold and the church building will remain, to be re-developed into senior housing. Here is an article from the Sun Times from way back in December of last year.

St. Boniface has stood empty since 1990 when the Archdiocese of Chicago closed it and several other struggling parishes within its domain. Many church buildings have since been sold to other denominations and continue to serve as places of worship. Some have been torn down. One church, St. John of God in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, has been dismantled and will be reconstructed in another location in the suburbs. Others like St. Boniface have remained empty, awaiting definitive decisions on their fate. The old church has fallen to the ravages of the elements without the benefit of maintenance and despite its being architecturally significant, has come very close to a date with the wrecker's ball because of its dangerous state of repair.

Sadly I have to admit that I all but wrote off the beautiful church a couple of years ago .

Last October the church and property were sold to a developer who agreed to save at least part of St. Boniface. The original plan was to gut the interior of the church, what's left of it that is, and demolish most of the exterior walls, but leave the distinctive towers and front elevation intact. A new building would then be woven in between the towers and facade. Studies however showed that the partial exterior demolition would not be structurally feasible, and a new plan keeps the church intact and constructing an entirely new building on the adjacent lot to the east, once the site of the parish school, which is even better news from the preservation angle. You can read out it here.

This was all made possible through a complicated land swap deal that involved the city, the Archdiocese of Chicago and private interests. If it all comes to pass, and hopefully it will, this will be a major victory for the Coalition to Save St. Boniface, the members of the Eckhart Park community, and Preservation Chicago, among others, who worked tirelessly to save the building against tremendous odds. They deserve to be commended.

It would be nice of course if the building had remained in its original capacity as a functioning church. St. Boniface, the work of the Archdiocese's preeminent architect, Henry Schlacks, was a jewel both inside and out. But the neighborhood despite being populated by many Catholics as I wrote before, is saturated with Catholic churches, and simply could not support this one.

The lovely structure of St. Boniface has been a landmark in the community for over a century, bordering the neighborhood's eponymous park, with its own distinguished pedigree. Eckhart Park, a small community park at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Noble Street, is the work of the great landscape architect Jens Jensen. The Prairie Style fieldhouse, one of the best in the city, and a natatorium were designed by W.C. Zimmerman. All three have seen better days and hopefully the proposed saving of the church will inspire a new day for the park and the field house as well.

The church building if all goes well, will become not only a monument to the people who struggled to build it, but also to those who saved it.

Some good news indeed.

His unfulfilled legacy

2011-08-26T21:19:00.019-05:00

On the day the Martin Luther King National Memorial opened to the public, an unprecedented earthquake shook Washington D.C. If that were not enough, as we speak, Hurricane Irene is descending upon the East Coast, postponing the monument's official unveiling indefinitely. It seems the struggles that Martin Luther King endured during his short life have not eluded him in death.

Like the man it commemorates, the memorial has its detractors. The biggest gripe seems to be the choice of artist to conceive and realize the monument. Finding an explanation for why an American wasn't chosen to portray a great American hero isn't so difficult. The fact is, unless they specialize in kitsch, American artists don't do monumental very well anymore. We can make monumental pieces about trivial subjects, or understated works centered on larger than life themes. We're terrific with irony, but we haven't a clue these days on how to make a serious, monumental piece about a genuine hero. Perhaps it's simply because we don't believe in ourselves anymore.

When you need a monument to a larger than life figure, where better to go than China? Enter Lei Yixin, who cut his teeth creating massive likenesses of Mao Zedong in stone. To Lei's credit, with the exception of its impressive size, this memorial is no Chairman Martin. Lei's Dr. King stands defiant, yet contemplative, not as a demigod, but as a man who appears to have the weight of the world, or at least his people, upon his shoulders. I haven't seen it in person but from photographs the new monument seems to get the idea of the man and appears to be a powerful tribute.

Still it is not without bitter irony that the man who devoted his life to justice and economic equality for African American people, should have his memorial outsourced to China.

Regardless, the new monument brings Dr. King back into the public imagination where he belongs.

National tragedies normally have a way of bringing the public together. Not so with Martin Luther King's assassination, which ripped this country apart limb from limb. I don't think it is unreasonable to say that when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, with him all hope of racial harmony and equality in this country, at least during my lifetime, was lost.

As I became re-acquainted last week with the "I Have a Dream" speech, one line particularly spoke out to me. Dr. King said early in the speech:

"One hundred years later...", (after the Emancipation Proclamation), "...the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."

Perhaps for the first time in my life I put myself in the shoes of the people in the African American community who rioted in cities all over the country after King's murder. No longer do I feel that the violence, regrettable as it was, was not justified. With the image of people exiled in their own land in mind, I could understand why folks threw up their hands believing that this country had nothing left to offer. Martin Luther King preached non-violence in order to bring about justice for his people, and where did it get him? Dr. King did nothing more than confirm the rights guaranteed in our constitution. The only difference was he added the "for all" part that American children recite in school every day, preceded by the words liberty and justice. For that he went to jail in Birmingham. For that bricks were thrown at him in Chicago. For that he was killed in Memphis.

As a result, instead of an outpouring of love and sympathy, hearts were hardened all over America after April 4th, 1968.

On that terrible evening and in the days to follow, fires fueled by suffering, frustration, desperation and rage lit up the nighttime skies in cities all over America. Perhaps the more militant leaders of the black community were right, if there was ever going to be justice in this country, Dr. King's pacifist tactics would not work. All hope that the struggle for freedom and justice could be fought without violence, was over. The new leaders of the movement would no longer feel compelled to work with or appease white people. Why bother? Who could blame them?

For their part, white folks were scared. They saw the violence of those nights as the signal to leave town. Cities were hemorrhaging white people for years but this was the final straw. The whites who respected and heeded Dr. King's message while he was alive, and there were more of them that you'd imagine, would follow the lead of those that didn't, off to the suburbs and beyond.

The racial divide that Dr. King tried to close, was blown wide open, and has remained that way ever since.

But the greatest tragedy of Dr. King's death in my opinion, was the loss of hope and faith, the loss of the Dream.

It's our faith that teaches us to treat others as we would be treated. Hope for the future makes children understand that in order to make something of themselves they have to respect education and stay in school. Dr. King's Dream encouraged us to accept the fact that in order to build a better tomorrow, we need to sacrifice today.

Martin Luther King's death, the other assassinations of the era, the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the current economic morass, have worn us down in ways we can't even comprehend. One thing is certain, they have filled us with doubt about ourselves and our institutions and have turned us into cynics.

Oscar Wilde told us that "a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Since dreams, hope and faith are not commodities we can put a price tag on, they have little value for us in today's society. That is, until they're gone.

I alluded above to the notion that we don't believe much in ourselves anymore. In fact, many of our brothers and sisters unfortunately believe in nothing at all. The recent riots in England clearly illustrate this, young kids not much older than my ten year old son, in the streets, breaking windows, setting fires and looting, for no apparent reason other than boredom. This doesn't portend well for our future.

If anything good comes of the Martin Luther King Memorial maybe it will be this, perhaps the attention it will receive will spread this message around the world:

Don't be afraid to dream.

Gone...

2011-08-26T20:55:00.004-05:00

I was walking on State Street yesterday when I noticed that the wonderful art-moderne storefront of Baker's shoe store on State Street is gone.

Strangely enough, the wonky clapboard facade of the Beef and Brandy restaurant next door lives at least for another day.

Wyatt Earp would be pleased.

The Monumental City

2011-08-19T21:38:00.027-05:00

It should surprise no one that Washington DC is a city filled to the brim with monuments. Any government city is bound to contain reflections of its nation's past and Washington is certainly no exception, it is the repository of our nation's collective consciousness.

Washington is a remarkable place to visit, especially for anyone wishing to know what the United States is all about. Every child in this country I believe should visit the city at some point during his or her school career.

There are the great attractions to be sure, the White House, the Capitol, and Supreme Court Buildings, The National Archives, one of the best collections of museums in the world, the zoo, the arboretum, etc. But the real draw for me, like Berlin, is the emotional impact of history being spilled out from every nook and cranny of an incredible city.

Monuments come in all shapes and sizes, but essentially they either commemorate their subjects from a great distance of time and space, or they play an integral role in whatever story they have to tell. As our nation's capital for the past 211 years, Washington DC has its share of stories to tell.

To me the most compelling story to be found there is its role during the time of the greatest anguish in this country's history, the Civil War.

By 1790 there were already disputes between the North and the South, both wanted to claim the nation's capital for their own. New Yorker Alexander Hamilton and Virginian Thomas Jefferson, bitter political rivals, came to a compromise, over dinner nonetheless. The federal government would take on the Revolutionary War debts of the northern states in exchange for moving the capital south, to somewhere along the banks of the Potomac. George Washington chose the site for his namesake city, a piece of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers between the already developed towns of Georgetown, Maryland and Alexandria, Virginia.

After the South seceded from the Union in 1861, Washington found itself in hostile territory. The Confederate Army never made it to the Union capital proper, but they came mighty close, so close in fact that some Civil War battlefields are today only a short Metro ride from Downtown Washington. The Commonwealth of Virginia, (whose capital city Richmond was also the capital of the Confederacy), is an easy walk across the river.

Arlington Memorial Bridge, the work of the firm McKim Mead and White, opened in 1932. It connects Washington DC to its Northern Virginia suburbs and is crossed by tens of thousands of commuters every day. One can only guess how many of them are aware of the significance of that bridge, a great symbol of healing. It connects the North and the South and two icons of each, the Lincoln Memorial, and Arlington House, once the home of Robert E. Lee. His home and property were confiscated by the Union Army and turned into a military burial ground in 1864 just to spite the great Confederate general. Today, Arlington National Cemetery is hallowed ground, our nation's most important monument to the men and women who gave their lives in the service their country, some 300,000 of them lie within its confines.

One looking for a living monument to the Civil War needn't go further than the U.S. Capitol Building. Here is a photograph of it during the first inauguration of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. In addition to its duties as the home of two of the three branches of government at the time, the Capitol was pressed into service as a military hospital during the war. Washington was a much sought after prize for the Confederates and the defense of it was of the utmost importance to the Union. All construction was halted on the Capitol Building with the exception of the work on the dome, whose completion was seen by President Lincoln as a symbol of hope for the people of Washington, despite its tragic situation. The dome was completed when the Statue of Freedom was hoisted into place, crowning the dome on December 2, 1863.

Ironically, many of those who built the Capitol Building, including one of the chief artisans of the Statue of Freedom, were slaves. Phillip Reid presided over the final stages of the casting of the 20 foot high statue. He did not become a free man until November of 1864, when the State of Maryland in which he resided approved their new constitution which abolished slavery. (As a border state that sided with the Union, Maryland was not subject to the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation which only applied to the Confederate States.)

With the dome complete and the war nearing its end, on March 4, 1865, President Lincoln delivered perhaps his greatest speech, his Second Inaugural Address, from the Capitol steps. One month later, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. In six weeks the president would be dead, shot about a mile away at Ford's Theater. His body lay in state in the Rotunda under the great dome until it was carried down those same steps to begin its long journey home to Illinois.

Three miles away, at the other end of the National Mall, stands the most recognizable and poignant memorial to the Civil War, and so much more.

So ingrained in our national consciousness, it's easy to forget that the Lincoln Memorial wasn't built until 1922, generations after the death of the 16th president. That would place Henry Bacon's temple to Abraham Lincoln within the realm of monuments well removed in time from their subjects. Yet the Lincoln Memorial has been at the center of so many important public events in our nation's history that it has taken on a life of its own as a significant historical site in its own right, and along with the stretch of the National Mall in front of it, the country's most profound monument to freedom.

In the year 1939, and in the most pig-headed fashion, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the renowned American contralto Marion Anderson, because of her race, to perform in recital in their Constitution Hall. As a response, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt (who resigned from the DAR in protest), a concert was arranged for Easter Sunday of that year in a much larger venue, the National Mall. The steps of the Lincoln Memorial would serve as the stage with the magnificent Daniel Chester French likeness of the president as the backdrop. “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free" were the words of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes when he introduced Miss Anderson.

In 1963, an even greater event was held on exactly the same spot:

A plaque commemorating one of the greatest speeches of American history can be found on the top step of the Memorial.

As I write this, in a little over one week, a new monument will be unveiled in Washington. The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial promises to be a massive, jaw dropping commemoration of this great American leader, placed not very far from the Lincoln Memorial. Here is the official web site which includes a virtual tour. Quite something isn't it?

Perhaps it's because I can actually remember Dr. King that I simply can't imagine a more spine tingling experience than standing in his footsteps on the stairs in front of Abraham Lincoln and gazing out at that great expanse as he did nearly fifty years ago. Without that personal connection, I suppose that future generations who only know him as a distant historical figure will have a closer connection to the new memorial.

The King Memorial is only the latest in what has been a building boom for monuments in Washington in recent years. Of the soon to be ten National Memorials in the District of Columbia, half of them, including the King Monument, were built since 1982. This current trend began with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

After the deplorable reaction from their countrymen to servicemen and women upon their return home from the unpopular Vietnam War, a memorial was proposed to honor them on the National Mall, steps away from the Lincoln Memorial. A competition was held to select the design of the monument.

Maya Lin was then an undergraduate student of architecture at Yale who entered a class assignment, (which incidentally earned her a B), into the competition and gained instant notoriety when she was selected the winner. Her design was conceptual and minimal, two highly reflective polished black stone walls bearing the inscribed names of 58,175 American dead. The slabs were dug into the earth, as if a giant wound. Her creation which became known simply as The Wall, was a departure from the heroic designs of Washington's existing assortment of monuments. This was to be a statement about war, not merely a monument to those who participated.

There was immediate criticism of the design, much of it bombast from politicians who objected to the unconventional nature of proposed monument. In the midst of the feeding frenzy, there were some valid concerns. Some veterans felt that the monument only paid tribute to the dead, not to those who returned. Others objected to the fact that an American flag was not a part of the design. The debate about whether or not to build The Wall dragged on for several months.

In the end, Lin's design was built with minor concessions. The third place winner in the competition, an established Washington area sculptor by the name of Frederick Hart, was commissioned to create a representational sculpture to be added to the Memorial. His piece added faces to the overwhelming sea of names. Titled, The Three Soldiers, Hart's work was created with Lin's creation in mind, the soldiers gaze in the direction of the Wall, perhaps looking for their own names on the monument. Hart took great pains to place his statue at a respectful distance from Lin's work, in no way does it detract from the the Wall.

Still, Lin objected and displayed no small amount of arrogance when she refused to attend the dedication of Hart's work, apparently forgetting that the memorial was meant to be a monument to the veterans and not to her.

Despite the objections, Lin's work proved to be an unqualified success and has gained iconic stature. As was the case with the Lincoln Memorial, the monument was revered not simply for its design, but for the way that visitors have interacted with it. From the start, friends, relatives and comrades of the dead sought out the names and left mementos in honor of their loved ones. I've seen everything from a pack of cigarettes to a purple heart medal left at the base of the Wall. At the end of every day, park rangers collect the items and deposit them in the National Park Service Museum and Resource Center. The daily maintenance ritual also includes cleaning the polished surface of the monument as the hand prints of visitors reaching up to touch the names of the soldiers, poignantly mark their grief and devotion.

A third sculpture has since been added to the ensemble honoring women, specifically the nurses who served in Vietnam. Regardless, it is the Wall that everybody associates with the Memorial, The Three Soliders and The Women's Memorial sculptures, despite their relative merits, are merely bit players.

For better or worse, the Wall has become the standard by which monuments are judged, and it inspired a title wave of plans for the creation of new memorials on the National Mall.

The Korean War Veterans Memorial opened in 1995 and in many ways mirrors the Vietnam Memorial just across the Reflecting Pool to the north. It too contains a reflective wall. Instead of names, this wall contains images of the faces of people who participated in the war, sandblasted into the surface. The Pool of Remembrance at the center of the monument, is a somber black reflecting pool lined with granite blocks inscribed with statistics; the number of American and United Nations forces dead (54,246, and 628,833 respectively), captured (7,140 and 92,970) and missing in action (8,177 and 470,267). The dominant feature of this monument, scattered on evergreen shrubs between the wall and a walkway are 19 larger than life sculptures representing a squadron of troops on patrol.

Perhaps because of the lack of personal connection given by names on the wall, or possibly because the event it commemorates is farther removed from us in time, the Korean War memorial doesn't evoke the same kind of emotional response as its neighbor to the north, But it is a reflective and quite beautiful tribute to those who served in what has become a truly forgotten war.

Were it not for the creation of these two stirring war memorials, it's unlikely that anyone would have come up with the idea of a World War II monument for the National Mall. After all, the veterans of that war were never treated with open hostility, nor have they and the epic struggle in which they participated, ever been forgotten. Besides, a heroic and supremely iconic memorial already exists right across the river in Arlington. OK so technically it's a monument dedicated to the Marine Corps, but the event depicted in the sculpture, taken from an image by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, is so emblematic of World War II, that hardly a soul looking at the Iwo Jima Memorial would not immediately associate it with the veterans of that war, regardless of their branch of service.

The seeds of the National World War II Memorial were sewn not long after the dedication of the Korean War Memorial. The sentiment was essentially this: "the Korea and Vietnam vets got their monuments, why don't the WWII vets have theirs?" It was a no-brainer to go ahead with a project that would seem to be something no one could possibly quarrel with. Being Washington however, nothing is simple and there were detractors. The biggest complaint was the choice of location on the axis of the National Mall, right in the shadow of the Washington Monument. By contrast, the two previous war memorials were placed discreetly to the sides of the Mall and are not visible until you are right on top of them. The placement of anything on the site proposed for the WWII monument would obscure the previously unobstructed view between the Washington and Lincoln Monuments and the reflecting pool (at this writing currently being rebuilt), that spans almost that entire distance. That view was an integral part of the March on Washington and Dr. King's speech in 1963. Since then, the western section of the Mall has become sacrosanct to the members of the Civil Rights movement and anyone who values freedom of speech and the right to dissent. Any construction altering that space would be seen as a desecration.

Since the supporters of the monument were steadfast in their selection of that specific prominent site despite the objections, as a result they ended up with a monument that was destined to be constrained by severe design limitations. The monument that we now have has been well received by veterans and their families, much less so from critics. A visitor at the dedication responding to the critics of the monument made an astute comment, he said: "As long as it's a memorial, it could be a hole in the ground with a plaque on it and it wouldn't matter, it's in the heart."

With that I agree.

That after all is exactly what the Vietnam Wall is, but before it was built it was excoriated by veterans groups who said its lack of monumentality showed them disrespect. It's unlikely that the even more conservative WWII vets would have accepted an unobtrusive plaque in a hole in the ground to commemorate their war.

What they got was much worse. What they got was a compromise, a design that was hampered because of its site by so many restrictions that it has been rendered insignificant. The choice of architectural style is a throwback to a time when in Washington if you were going to build anything, you could use any style you liked as long as it was neo-Classical. Contextualism there is so rampant that two of my favorite buildings in town, the Richardsonian-Romanesque Old Post Office building and the neo-Renaissance Pension Fund Building (now the home of the National Building Museum), were threatened many times with demolition simply because they didn't fit in. Fortunately the community lightened up and those two buildings are now landmarks. That's not to say that neo-Classicism ever went away or that it is bad thing in itself. Think of the Lincoln Memorial. But the WWII Memorial is a monument to our role in the the greatest tragedy the world has ever known, and in the end it was designed to merely "fit in" so as to please as many and offend as few people as possible, which is political correctness at its worst.

The veterans of World War II deserved better. Six years after the Memorial opened, on any given day you may see a few of them at the monument, reliving memories of the past. Or you may see a handful of folks, reading the inscriptions on the walls from the familiar quotes of politicians of the day, or even fewer gazing at the small relief sculptures that depict in a nutshell, the war from an American perspective. You might even find one or two paying homage to the dead by the bronze stars, each one representing 100 lives lost.

What you're more likely to see are bus loads of school kids on field trips disembarking at yet another stop on their tour of the capital, to find a wading pool that you can't wade in, and tempting ramps that you can't skateboard down. You wouldn't know you couldn't do any of this were it not for the signs posted everywhere telling you not to. There are lots of good vantages to have your picture taken however, and any time day of night you'll see folks standing by the pool, primping and posing for their souvenir picture, taken against either the Washington Monument to the east or the Lincoln Monument to the west.

Granted, the task of designing a memorial to commemorate an event as enormous and heartbreaking as World War II, of creating something that all who were personally involved in the event as well as everyone else would approve, and building it in the middle of an already emotionally charged national treasure, had to be, well pardon the pun, monumental.

The way I see it, a successful monument needs to be a few things. It needs to be a place for contemplation, it needs to revere its subject and respect its visitors. There should be at least a modicum of beauty to the place. And while I certainly don't expect a memorial to be first and foremost an educational experience, I do believe that it should at the very least, inspire.

The World War II Memorial fails on all counts in my opinion. The design is stiff and passionless, it misses the point in so many ways. The monument is divided state by state, yet WWII probably brought the nation together more than any other. There is no invitation to connect with it, you can look at a distance, but you mustn't touch. Worst of all, it only pays lip service to those who lost their lives, the 100 dead per star system is more like a demographic map than a tribute. The monument was not built for the ages, its purpose seems to be that it exists, nothing else. It's almost as if a bureaucrat said to the vets: "Well you wanted a memorial, now here it is."

We recently lost the last American veteran of World War I and it won't be very long before all those who participated in World War II will be gone. All who will be left will be those kids who couldn't wade in the fountain or skateboard down those ramps. That is what they will remember of World War II.

In his actions and speeches, Martin Luther King did nothing but confirm the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the rights guaranteed by our constitution, those that we Americans claim to espouse. The March on Washington which featured his unforgettable speech forever marked the National Mall as the place where Americans go to openly speak their mind, whether it conforms to government policy or not, without fear of official retribution. As such that place embodies the core values of what this nation supposedly holds dearest, liberty and justice for all. For that reason alone all Americans whatever their political bent should view that particular patch of ground as our nation's most profound monument to freedom and democracy.

Which brings to mind an almost sacrilegious question: "Would it be better to have no memorial at all than one that is ill conceived and poorly designed?"

It may come as a surprise that there is no National Memorial in Washington, DC to the deadliest war in American history, the Civil War. Yet as we've seen, all of Washington and its environs is a monument to that war.

Perhaps the question was best answered by the columnist George Will several years ago. In essence he said in defense of NOT building the WWII memorial, that all Americans should go to Washington, DC, look around at the National Mall and all the other symbols of our democracy, then remember that none of it would be there today without the unselfish acts and sacrifice of the veterans of World War II.

Memorial or not, that is their real monument.

Our nation's Capitol

2011-08-11T21:39:00.015-05:00

Jefferson Smith arrived in Washington D.C. to be met at Union Station by an entourage of handlers dispatched by his mentor, Senator Joseph Paine. Immediately drawn to the dome of the U.S. Capitol Building a few blocks beyond the front door of the great railway station, Mr. Smith ditched his attendants and hopped aboard a tour bus to explore the sights of the Federal City.

This is a scene early on in Frank Capra's classic 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Mr. Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a young, idealistic scout leader who is chosen for his naiveté (and presumed willingness to follow orders), to replace a recently deceased senator by the corrupt governor of his un-named state.

In the scene that follows, Mr. Smith visits the icons of our democracy, the Declaration of Independence, the Jefferson Monument, the Capitol Building, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Washington Monument. The soon to be Senator Smith is swept away with patriotic fervor and raw emotion as are we, (at least those of us above the Mason Dixon Line), when the scene culminates with a visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Being a Capra movie, not a stop goes un-pulled in extracting every bit of emotional energy from us as Mr. Smith gazes upon the Daniel Chester French likeness of our fallen president. Not a dry eye in the house when he looks to his right to read the words; "with malice toward none and charity toward all" from the Second Inaugural Address, then to his left as a boy with the help of his immigrant grandfather reads from the Gettysburg Address, inscribed on the walls of the monument. As if that were not enough, cut in between are shots of an elderly African American gentleman who removes his hat as he enters the building and reverently directs his focus upon the massive sculpture.

This montage is contrasted by subsequent scenes involving the cynicism that Mr. Smith encounters from the press, his colleagues in the Senate, and his secretary played by the great Jean Arthur.

All that merely sets the table for what's to come, the classic Capra struggle between the ordinary man and all that is wrong with America, personified by "The Man." In this case, the man is a media magnate by the name of Jim Taylor who has Governor Hubert "Happy" Hopper and the more dignified Senator Paine, played by Claude Rains, wrapped around his little finger. The two elected officials are merely pawns to do Taylor's evil bidding.

By the third reel, Jeff Smith gets wise to the depth of the conspiracy around him and with a little help from a few loyal scouts and the vice president, he commandeers the Senate by means of a filibuster and defeats the evildoers.

Hokey as it may seem today, the film was quite subversive in its time. It is a stern indictment, not of the ideals of American government in the least, but in the people who implement them.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The message of the film, if not its improbable ending, is just as relevant today as it was 72 years ago.

I bring this up because I just returned from Washington, D.C., my second trip in a year. Now I'm just as cynical as the next guy when it comes to politics and politicians. I've been to Washington more times than I can count, yet like Jeff Smith, the great dome and many of the other symbols of our nation in that town still move me beyond words.

The U.S. Capitol Building, the house of the people, not the president, would become the most important building in the United States. Pierre L'Enfant, the man who laid out the original plan for the city of Washington understood this and chose the most significant spot in the region, an area known as Jenkins Heights, for the future Capitol Building. That spot would form the geographic center of L'Enfant's city and the Capitol Building would be visible from all over the city and beyond, as it still is today.

The dome, the building's second, was begun in the 1850s and completed during the Civil War as a symbol of the continuity of the Union during the time of its greatest tragedy. As such, more than one hundred fifty years later, that dome continues to be a symbol of our country and our government (both the good and the bad) all over the world. Small wonder it was one of the prime targets of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. As abominable as the loss of life at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were, the symbolic loss of the Capitol Building to this country would have been unimaginable. The attacks of that dreadful day almost ten years ago did take their toll on the building. Before that day the Capitol Building was accessible to the public, anyone could just walk in through the front door. Today you have to enter through the subterranean bunker of the Visitor Center a block away and be led around in a tour group. The Capitol is now a little less of the house of the people.

By all matters of judgment, the dome of our Capitol Building, the work of Thomas U. Walter, the Capitol's fifth architect, is a spectacular piece of architecture, it ranks along with those of the Pantheon and St. Peter's in Rome, the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, the Duomo in Florence, and St. Paul's Cathedral in London as one of the great domes of the world. The interior of the dome forming the great rotunda, is of equal or even greater merit. As architecture does matter, it would be interesting to imagine what symbolic power the Capitol Building would have if it still looked as it did in say, 1846. As stately as the original Charles Bulfinch dome was, I'd say it is very unlikely that it would have the same sway over us .

Now imagine if it looked like this, the notorious Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest.

There may be better, more beautiful government buildings in the world, but I can't think of another that has the power to sum up its nation and its ideals as our Capitol Building, I dare say, great as they are, not even the Houses of Parliament in London.

My own Mr. Smith experience was made complete on this past trip as my expressions of admiration for the building were met with cynicism by my Washington colleagues who saw the Capitol, just a stone's throw away, as the symbol of our recalcitrant Congress and their pathetic attempts to deal with the latest budget crisis.

Undaunted by the slings and arrows of their outrageous (but not unwarranted) cynicism, I trudged ahead with my own personal pilgrimage which I follow every time I visit Washington.

More on that later...

The Great Fire

2011-08-06T07:31:00.013-05:00

Back in the days before stringent fire codes and modern fire fighting technology, catastrophic urban fires were not uncommon. That's perhaps how Mark Twain in his 1883 memoir, Life on the Mississippi, could get away with this flip remark, commenting on the quality of the architecture of New Orleans:

New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago.

I've been doing some research at work on a multiple frame photographic panorama (not pictured here) made shortly after the Great Chicago Fire, perhaps made by one of the most important nineteenth century American photographers, George Barnard. It's difficult to find any "good luck" in the devastation pictured in any image made shortly after the fire. The hard facts are these: 300 people died in the Great Fire that began on the evening of October 8, 1871, 100,000 were left homeless, and roughly four square miles, including the entire central business district were leveled in the conflagration.

Chicago had been a city for 34 years at the time of the fire. In that time, it had grown from a settlement of 4,000 mostly rough hewn scraggly settlers, to a metropolis of 300,000, the most important city in the Midwest. The canal that joined the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River System at the Chicago River, and the railways that connected the city first with the East Coast, then the West Coast, meant that all roads led to, and through Chicago. Industries followed, along with the people to work in them. It was a boomtown the likes of which had never been seen before, or possibly since.

Out of necessity, Chicago was constructed hastily. The balloon frame was invented here, a method of framing a house using readily available wood for the beams and joists that would form the structure. Then more wood was slapped on top of the frame to form the skin. It was quick and cheap, you could build a house in a few days, entire neighborhoods sprung up in weeks providing much needed shelter for the new arrivals who flooded into the city.

Even the more substantial "fireproof" buildings downtown, the ones with the magnificent stone facades, still had plenty of wood in them. The industries that provided the inflammable materials that went into those buildings, lumber mills, paint factories, turpentine factories, lined the river. Add to that all the other industries that used wood and other inflammable materials to manufacture their products, as well as one of their chief by-products, sawdust.

Back then heating fuel, wood again, was stored in the home. Many folks kept livestock in barns behind their homes to supplement their incomes, the most famous of which of course would be the one belonging to the O'Leary family of DeKoven Street. Those of greater means had horses at their disposal. All those animals required feed and bedding stored in the barns and stables which were themselves made of wood and highly inflammable.

Oh did I mention that Chicago's sidewalks, and the streets that were actually paved at the time, were also made of wood?

Topping it all off was a summer of record drought. Barely one inch of rain fell between July and October. In early October, the western half of the United States was in the midst of an enormous cyclonic storm capable of producing winds of up to 80mph.

Chicago the great tinderbox, and the rest of the Midwest in the fall of 1871, was a disaster waiting to happen.

On Saturday October 7th, a massive fire broke out on the city's West Side. It would be the worst fire in the city's history, a distinction that would last exactly one day. The city's over-worked, under-manned fire department was able to bring that fire under control, but not before it consumed four square blocks, and left the firefighters exhausted.

The evening of following day, the fire that was to claim more lives than any other in United States history took place.

It happened in a town and the surrounding forests in northeast Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The Peshtigo Fire claimed between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. It consumed an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. That same day, Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, all sizable Michigan towns, also burned.

And of course, so did Chicago.

In all the details about Chicago Fire, certainly the least significant was how it started. Given the circumstances, a great fire was practically inevitable. Yet at the time, the media was obsessed with finding a scapegoat, or in this case a scapecow. That the fire started in or very near the barn behind Patrick and Catherine O'Leary's home in the near west side is indisputable. The story of the cow kicking over a kerosene lantern carelessly placed in the way by its owner, the lady of the house, unlikely as it turned out to be, became a legend, fueled largely by the anti-Irish sentiments of the time. Mrs. O'Leary would unfortunately become the symbol of the lazy, drunken, good-for-nothing immigrant portrayed by the media and the native born public. She would not live it down for the rest of her life.

However it started, the fire spread quickly, feeding on all that dried out wood, straw and sawdust of the barns, shanties and businesses of the west side. A series of tragic mishaps involving mis-communication, led to wrong directions being sent to the first responding firemen, wasting critical moments early in the blaze. Soon the fire easily leaped over the river which itself burned due to all the grease and garbage in it. The gale force winds, greatly exacerbated by terrific winds produced by the firestorm, blew toward the northeast, sending burning embers in that direction high into the night time sky, depositing them on the wooden roofs of the fancy downtown buildings, marking their doom.

One of the most enduring images of the fire is that of the great bell atop of the courthouse. It rang continuously warning Chicago of the fire, until the tower containing it succumbed to the flames, sending the bell crashing to the basement that only moments before, housed the city's prisoners.

That evil wind became even crueler as it fanned the blaze in a straight line right toward the Waterworks at Chicago Avenue and Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue). Like most of the buildings downtown, the pumping station, the walls of which still stand today, was attacked from above by flaming embers carried by the wind, landing on their wooden roofs. It was the first building in the area to go. With it, all hope of controlling the fire was lost as it was the only pumping station in town. When it went, the fate of the entire north section of the city, as well as downtown was sealed.

Given free reign, the fire would indiscriminately take the homes of the rich and poor alike, turning working stiffs as well industrial titans like Cyrus McCormick into refugees. The fire did not destroy all of downtown at once. Employees at the Tribune on Madison and Dearborn worked feverishly to get out an edition of the paper, in the end unsuccessfully, while the flames were consuming buildings only a block away.

Guests at the Palmer House on State Street breakfasted at the luxury hotel on Monday morning before being forced to evacuate shortly thereafter. Hours later, all that was left of downtown were a scant few surviving buildings, and some very impressive ruins. By Tuesday there was little left to burn and a welcome rain finally put an end to what was left of the fire.

But the rumors of Chicago's demise, this time to paraphrase Samuel Clemmons, were greatly exaggerated. The fire it turned out, was merely a temporary setback. Resolve and energy soon replaced grief and despair. Before the dying embers cooled down, plans for the "second city" (the origin of Chicago's famous moniker) began. The panorama photograph I've been studying was made perhaps one month after the fire. In it you can see that makeshift businesses and shelters have already appeared along with telegraph poles and streetcar tracks. Perhaps most indicative of the life goes on spirit, a beer hall is seen in the foreground of the picture.

Within three years, the city was virtually rebuilt. That's not to say all was right. The temporary equanimity that came out of the common plight of the homeless quickly eroded. The haves, with their wealth of resources, recovered quickly while those of lesser means struggled for years, if ever, to return to normal. Fearing that chaos among the have-nots would break out after the fire, Mayor Roswell Mason with the support of the leaders of the business community, called for marshal law in the streets. General Phillip Sheridan was happy to oblige. Those measures were strongly opposed by Illinois Governor John M. Palmer who saw the act as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution. The governor's protests turned prophetic when a volunteer sentry in Sheridan's militia ironically shot a member of the establishment, one Colonel Grosvenor, the public prosecutor. He was questioned by the sentry who tried to stop him late one night as he was walking home from a party. Having had possibly one too many, the prosecutor gave the sentry some lip and kept walking. For that brief indiscretion, Grosvenor paid with his life. In the end it turned out that most of the mayhem that occurred in the city according to an official report, was "committed by soldiers of General Sheridan's command."

The class struggle that inspired martial law and the vitriol leveled against foreign born Chicagoans escalated after the Fire and would have world wide consequences in the subsequent decade. The right for workers to organize that we take for granted today was born during those heady days at the plants of McCormick, and George Pullman, in Haymarket Square and on the gallows of the basement of the new courthouse built on the north side of the river.

Through the struggle, Chicago continued to grow in prominence. With its selection to host the World's Fair of 1892 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, (later pushed back to 1893), Chicago announced to the world that it had finally arrived. The sky was the limit, between the Fire and the end of the nineteenth century, its population would increase tenfold. Only New York City stood in the way of Chicago's claiming the title of pre-eminent city of the United States.

It's difficult to say what would be different had there been no fire. Despite a depression starting in 1873, the boom that occurred after the fire equaled or eclipsed the original boom. Certainly the opportunities to rebuild Chicago attracted even more people to the city, including the architect Louis Sullivan. But it would be a mistake to assume that the great architecture that this city is known for would not have been possible were it not for the fire. With the exception of Sullivan, most of the architects who would create the movement known as the "Chicago School" were already in town at the time of the fire. Besides, the city was pretty much rebuilt in the old style by 1874, several years before Burnham and Root built the Montauk Block, considered the first Chicago School building.

One significant change in the landscape was the new zoning law that prevented frame construction in the commercial district. Gone would be the homes and churches that once were sprinkled through that part of town. Downtown Chicago would remain exclusively commercial until very recently when commercial buildings were converted to residential use.

While the Chicago Fire ranks as the fifth worst disaster (in terms of loss of life) in Chicago, it is the defining moment in this city's history. Our Great Fire wasn't even the worst tragedy on the day it occurred. The Peshtigo Fire claimed at the very least five times the number of people. Yet the Peshitgo Fire and the other Chicago disasters are merely footnotes in history while volumes continue to be written on Great Chicago Fire. It can't simply be the tragedy that captures our imagination.

No, it was the total devastation of a great city, then the recovery and rebuilding, the phoenix rising from the ashes, that symbol of indefatigable human spirit that turns destruction and misery into hope, opportunity, and progress that so indelibly attracts us to the story. After some tragedies, we pick up the pieces, mourn our dead, then move on. Other tragedies are transcendent.

Fire survivor and real-estate man William Kerfoot put it all into perspective better than most. Shortly after the fire he put up a temporary office in the midst of the rubble of the South Side. A sign in front of his new place of business simply read:

All gone but wife, children and energy.

Inspiring words indeed that we should take to heart in our own troubling times.

Post script:

Here is a list of some of the sources for this post.

Building green

2011-07-17T06:39:00.012-05:00

Chicago is still known as the "hog butcher of the world", at least to people above a certain age. The Union Stock Yards were one of the engines that drove this city's economy for over a century. They disappeared back in the 1970s, but there are still vestiges of them in the neighborhood, in a handful of small meatpacking companies that still operate, along with their smell.

While driving past the site of the old stockyards the other day, I came across this unusual sight for the middle of the city:

The wind turbine is part of the new home of Testa Produce INC, a fruit and vegetable distributor that has been around for almost a century. The facility just opened this year although the turbine has not yet been put to use. It will be interesting to see how much noise the thing generates when its blades start to spin, I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of them in the near future.

It may seem a little ironic that a fruit and vegetable company would locate in the heart of what used to be the carnivore capital of the world. Not to mention building a Green plant in the heart of an industry known for its brutal working conditions and horrific environmental record. They used to say that the stockyards were so efficient, they used every part of the animal "except the squeal." That was not true as the effluent runoff from the plants into the South Branch of the Chicago River known not so affectionately as Bubbly Creek, testified.

But there it is, a windmill serving as a beacon proudly advertising the company, and its commitment to building an environmentally friendly facility. The soon to be electric generating wind turbine is just the beginning. Here from the company website is a list of the green features of their building.

There are some who would view this effort with cynicism. They see the Green Movement as nothing more than a bunch of tree huggers standing in the way of development and progress. Global warming caused by human beings emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere they say, is merely a theory, nobody knows for sure what the true cause is for this very real dilemma . That may be true. On the other hand, nobody knew for sure there was a direct link between cigarette smoking and cancer until fairly recently either, but people with any shred of common sense have always known that sucking smoke into your lungs certainly can't be good for you.

In the same way, we don't need scientific proof to understand that polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the ground in which we grow our food, can't be a good thing either, and we need to take steps to protect our environment, pure and simple.

The way I see it, efforts like Testa's, for whatever their actual motives, symbolize something that is extremely positive, that is to say that a profit generating business is willing to take the effort and spend the extra money (even if they do get a tax write-off) to build something that recognizes that our planet is the one and only home we have, and we need to take care of it. Hopefully their message will spread.

Those on the other side should see this positively as well, here is proof positive that there is money to be made in Green Technology.

Everybody wins.

Urban renewal

2011-07-14T14:39:00.014-05:00

I'm old enough to remember the 1960s, back when we let our cities run down to the point where to some anyway, it seemed better to knock everything down and start from scratch. Back then, "urban renewal" was universally regarded with glowing tems as a positive force for the future. Well, almost universal. Jane Jacobs in her monumental book; The Death and Life of Great American Cities published in 1961, sharply criticized the slash and burn planning strategies of the 1950s and 60s. She believed that people knew what was best for themselves, at least better than the eggheads from the universities or the mucketymucks downtown. She even successfully took on the mucks who wanted to bulldoze her own Greenwich Village neighborhood to build an expressway through it.

By and large however, Jacobs' was like a voice crying out of the desert. Fifty years later, her words sound prophetic. I didn't catch the name of the commentator on the radio the other day, only his critique of Jacobs' work and how the city that she championed is fine enough, but today it's unaffordable for the average person. Well that's not Jacobs' fault. Ever since WWII, we did everything we could to obliterate the American city as it existed up until that point. It just so happens that today we're tired of all the crap we built since then; buildings with no soul, superhighways that divided neighborhoods, segregated public high rise housing, strip malls, windswept public plazas, suburban sprawl, and all the rest of the things that Jane Jacobs lobbied against.

It's a matter of supply and demand pure and simple. What escaped the wrecker's ball in the second half of the Twentieth Century is now scarce and in demand. Gentrification was not Jane Jacobs' doing. She advocated diverse and economically integrated urban neighborhoods long ago, at a time when people who could afford to were leaving the city as fast as their feet could carry them. When those folks and their descendants later "re-discovered" the city, Jacobs was approaching the twilight of her life. In all that time, she never left the city.

The sociologists, planners and urbanologists told us in the fifties and sixties that cities were too dense, that the chaos that resulted from overcrowding bred all sorts social ills, filth, crime, disease, degenerate behavior and more. What we needed to do was lower the density, and open up space in our cities. One solution was to build vertically. Tall buildings with elevators and air conditioning would mean less density at the ground level. The buildings would be connected to each other not by streets but by parks. Streets that carried vehicular traffic would be set far off, inaccessible to the pedestrian, segregated and hidden either in the form of elevated roadways or underground. No longer would there be mixed use areas, housing would be set apart from commerce, government would have its own contained area, as would cultural facilities, and so forth. Everything would be planned sensibly and rationally. "A place for everything and everything in its place" could have been the motto for architects and planners such as LeCorbusier, whose utopian vision of the Radiant City served as a model for the gigantic urban renewal projects that took place in the mid 20th Century.

LeCorbusier's vision becoming reality in Boston between the 1950s and the 1970, is documented by before and after photographs in this article: Medieval Boston, (you'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the article). Three massive urban renewal projects are highlighted by the piece:

The West End of Boston was once a vibrant working class neighborhood of long standing that was deemed a slum by the city government. The neighborhood was wiped out in its entirety, replaced by uninspired blocks of flats.
At one time there was natural flow in Boston between the West End, the North End, the Waterfront, and Downtown Boston. The elevated highway known as the Central Artery would put an end to that by cutting off the communities from one another.
Scollay Square was a lively (and in its last days tawdry) entertainment center, which was transformed into the massive, universally disliked Government Center.

The before pictures in Medieval Boston evoke a sense of Dickensian London with gaslight lamps, cobblestone alleys, and ghostlike images of people, seen through a smoky haze. Admittedly they're not the kind of images one would see in a tourist brochure of a city. One could argue that the bulldozing of large swaths of Boston, and many other cities at the time including Chicago, provided much needed amenities such as highways, civic institutions, and open space as well as rid the city of blight and decay. The cost was the loss of neighborhoods that were deemed expendable by the powers that be, who fell captive to the then persuasive ideas of the utopian city of the future.

I first visited Boston, in the early 80s. I fell in love, as I'm sure many people did with its history, it's narrow, crooked streets leading every which way, the preponderance of buildings that reflected the styles of their eras, going back all the way back to the 17th Century, streetcars, graveyards that accompanied just about every church, the swan boats, Fenway Park, Union Oyster House, the great H.H.Richardson architecture, the North End, in short, everything that had been around long before I was born. It was the stuff that made Boston, Boston.

The newer stuff all left me cold, back then, as it does now. I'm not alone. The Big Dig project, one of the most expensive public works projects in history, put much of the expressways built back in the fifties, underground and out of sight. Plans have been discussed about dispersing the hideous Government Center, tearing down the Brutalist City Hall, and re-developing the area on a more traditional, human scale. The high rises in the West End however will more than likely remain. They were built to be segregated upper-middle class housing, (unlike LeCorbusier's model where the high rises were intended to be mixed income, with the wealthier tenants closer to the ground). The West End high rises displaced the thousands of West Enders who lived in the neighborhood before it was destroyed, and they remain fairly successful in attracting well to do Bostonians.

There was perhaps no image that came closer to LeCorbusier's vision than the view along the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago between 35th and 55th streets. There you had Radiant City incarnate, housing towers set apart by parks where the residents could indulge in outdoor leisure activities without having to encounter the traffic and other hardships of the streets. For their part, the streets were expressways where motorists could travel to their destination at high speeds, unhindered by cross traffic or pedestrian crosswalks. This utopian Radiant City was better known as Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes. The last of the buildings that made up these notorious housing projects was demolished four years ago.

Just as the case with the failed experiment of high rise public housing, we have been coming to terms with the effects of high-minded, well intentioned, but tragically flawed systems of urban planning and design of the mid-Twentieth Century, by reversing them as much as we can. It turns out that cities as they have existed for millennia, aren't so bad after all.

No, Jane Jacobs wasn't wrong, she was very much right, everybody else was wrong.

Dis for dat...

2011-07-14T06:19:00.003-05:00

...it's the Chicago way. The sorry saga our state and our former governor prompted me to write that in politics, rarely is something given without something else given in return. Our new mayor could not have illustrated my point more clearly than with his questionable new appointments to Chicago's Landmarks Commission, as illustrated in this article by Blair Kamin.