Can't get too worked up about this...

Blair Kamin recently wrote this article about Alderman Brendan Reilly's proposal of an ordinance that would allow the construction of flashing billboards on Michigan Avenue, north of the river. The argument against the proposal is that the introduction of the signs would erode the elegance of the street which continues to be known as "The Magnificent Mile", turning Chicago's premier shopping venue into another Times Square. In the comments section, readers expressed fears that the light emanating from the signs would do everything from cause cancer, to prevent us from seeing the stars in the heart of the city.

Now I haven't read articles in medical journals about the cause/effect relationship between artificial lights and cancer, but it does seem that long term exposure to anything causes cancer, so I wouldn't lose too much sleep about that. As an avid star gazer however, I can definitively say that Michigan Avenue even without the proposed signs, is one of the worst places on earth to view the Big Dipper, let alone the Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy. Let's face it, you simply don't go to the heart of a big city to look at stars.

So how would the signs effect the atmosphere of North Michigan Avenue? Well in my humble opinion, not much. The platitudes describing Michigan Avenue: civilized, elegant, and beautiful, once applied to the street both inside and out, but have not for at least forty years. Michigan Avenue did not experience the wanton destruction of great masterpieces of architecture as did State Street. The transformation of the Mag Mile which began arguably with the construction of the John Hancock Building in 1969, brought with it financial success, but came at the price of losing its soul. The physical attribute that once defined Michigan Avenue was its scale which in comparison to its cousin the Loop to the south, was quite modest. The underlying current was that despite being a high rent district, the owners of the properties along Boul Mich did not need to build tall to maximize their profits, they were content to keep the street low key and yes to some extent, elite.

That's not to say there were no tall buildings on the Mag Mile. In order to enter from the south you had to pass as you still do, between the gateway of two of Chicago's premier skyscrapers, the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. Once there, the landscape was punctuated by modestly tall skyscrapers mixed with two and three story buildings. The view to the north terminated at the Water Tower and the Art Deco masterpiece Palmolive Building with its distinctive searchlight, "The Lindy Beacon." The view south was equally stunning as the aforementioned Trib and Wrigley Buildings were the prominent features of the skyline, before they were overshadowed by taller, less significant buildings.

The interiors of bygone Michigan Avenue were more impressive than the exteriors. The greatest of these was Diana Court, the centerpiece of the Michigan Square Building designed by Holabird and Root, the firm who also built the Palmolive Building. David Lowe who wrote the seminal book about lost Chicago titled appropriately enough: Lost Chicago, compared the experience of Diana Court to the great Art Deco ocean liners of the 20s and 30s, specifically the SS Normandie and the SS Ile de France. Diana Court was lost along with the building that housed it to make way for the hideous Marriott Hotel, a building so awful, it was denounced even by its architect, Harry Weese.

Michigan Avenue was always a shopping street but it was once so much more. There were crosscurrents of life that went on there, a mix between the dignified and the bohemian; fancy stores with New York pedigrees like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller coexisted with art studios and galleries whose clientele were not necessarily tourists, nor members of the Fortune 500.

Another word that could have been applied to Michigan Avenue BJH (before John Hancock) is charm.

900 North Michigan Avenue is the name and address of the soaring Kohn Pedersen Fox building that now houses the Four Seasons Hotel, luxury apartments and a shopping mall anchored by Bloomingdale's. The building it replaced, also known by that address, was a twenties era apartment building which epitomized the elegance and charm that once was North Michigan Avenue. That building featured a restaurant that opened in the 1930s with the highly original name of Jacques French Restaurant. While it may not have been particularly authentic, or even (to some tastes anyway) very good, Jacques was one of the lovliest settings for an eatery in Chicago or perhaps anyplace else. Here is a link to a site with postcards featuring the joint. As you can see, there were several rooms at Jacques, including the outdoor courtyard garden which eventually was glassed off and open year round. I remember going there for lunch with my mom and my artist uncle who had just immigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a child, dining in the suave, sophisticated, continental restaurant in the courtyard of that beautiful building with undoubtably the coolest person I had ever met up to that point, was an experience I'll never forget. The building is long gone but apparently Jacques remains at 900 Michigan, undoubtably a shadow of its former self, with the exception of the mediocre food of course.

Nowhere was Michigan Avenue's BJH charm more evident than in a little passageway at Michigan and Ontario Street known as The Italian Court. Described by David Lowe as a "civilized little enclave", The Italian Court was carved out of existing "undistinguished" buildings in the early twenties to create a space for small shops and artist studios. It was the location of the restaurant Le Petit Gourmet, a local institution which was famous for its regularly scheduled poetry readings. The care free atmosphere of the Italian Court resembled Paris's Left Bank and could have easily been used as the setting of the second act of the opera La Boheme. This little bit of civilization was replaced by a truly undistinguished office building in 1969, wiping away any last vestiges of la vie boheme in that part of the city.

North Michigan Avenue was a once respite from the hustle and bustle of the Loop. It's openness connected it spiritually if not physically to Lake Michigan which one could actually taste and smell from the street, if the wind was blowing the right direction.

Today with its own hustle and bustle of continuous pedestrian and vehicular traffic, over sized buildings, and over priced shops, Michigan Avenue is all business. It is one of Chicago's premier tourist destinations, and as such, one of the major cogs in this city's economic engine. It is what State Street used to be, unfortunately without any of the quirkiness of that once great street. It could be argued that without the transformation of Michigan Avenue over the past forty odd years, Chicago today might very well suffer many of the doldrums that affect our sister cities in the Midwest. So it's foolish in a way to lament the changes that beset Boul Mich. How can one argue with success after all?

But we shouldn't fool ourselves; the attributes we'd like to apply to Michigan Avenue north of the Wrigley Building disappeared long ago along with the Italian Court, Diana Court and the old 900 Michigan Avenue Building. What we're left with is something that is not very special at all. It's Chicago's version of the Champs Élysées (without the Arc de Triomphe), Fifth Avenue (without Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building or St. Pat's Cathedral), the Kurfürstendamm (without the hookers), and Regent Street (without the beauty).

In the end, for me it hardly matters if they throw up a few bright signs on the old boulevard. Today the street is all about the money, and they may as well make as much of it as they can.

Chicago, c. 1980

You know you're getting old when thirty years doesn't seem like such a long time anymore. Two things last week reminded me of Chicago in the late 70s and early 80s. Cleaning my desk at work, I came across a set of slides that I shot in the Loop while I was still in school, around 1978. Then the other day we watched at my son's request, the movie The Blues Brothers which was shot in Chicago and its environs in 1979.

 State Street in 1978 looking not entirely different than it does today as opposed to...

...this view two blocks to the north. None of it survives, least of all the red AMC Gremlin

It's funny how you can look at pictures of the place you live from many years ago and be surprised at how much is still around, then look at other pictures from not so long ago, and be amazed at how much has changed. You're surprised at the things that have changed right under your nose while at the same time you're amazed that the world you inhabit isn't significantly different from the world that existed before you.

That said, a lot has indeed changed in the last thirty years.

When the movie The Blues Brothers was released in June of 1980:

• The Cold War was very much alive and Apartheid was still the law of the land in South Africa.
• The words Chernobyl and AIDS meant nothing to most of the world. 
• Jimmy Carter was the President of the United States and American hostages were being held at the American Embassy in Tehran.

And in Chicago:

• Jane Byrne was mayor. 
• Long time Chicago institutions that were still around included Stop & Shop, the Berghoff, Maxwell Street, the original Bozo, and Marshall Fields.
• Chicago would not have a main branch of its public library for another ten years. 
• Icons that had not yet made their way to Chicago included The State of Illinois Building (aka the Thompson Center), Oprah Winfrey, The Smurfit/Stone Building and Michael Jordan.
• Chicago was still the second most populous city in the United States.

Publicity still for the film The Blues Brothers (photographer unknown) 

By most accounts, Chicago, despite the current economic downturn, is in better shape today than it was thirty years ago. Like most comparable cities across the country, it experienced a decrease in population between the 1950s and the 1990s. In 1980 many Chicago neighborhoods were in decline while few were on the upswing. During the decade of the 1980s, Chicago would lose tens of thousands of jobs, mostly related to the steel and automobile industries. It was just a bad time for American cities, and probably the nadir for this one.

Things got so bad in the Loop that they decided to rip apart the thoroughfare that was once the heart of the city, and turn it into a gulp, mall. "It seemed like a good idea at the time..." was the mantra among people who attended the ground breaking ceremony which marked the demise of the State Street Mall in 1996.

As bad as things were in 1980, there were still vestiges of the old city that would soon vanish forever.

Times Square in miniature, Randolph Street c. 1977  

There's a shot in the Blues Brothers that follows the title characters as they drive west on Randolph Street. You see what was once the most vibrant street in Chicago, lit up like a little Times Square. There's the old Trailways Bus terminal with its enormous neon and incandescent sign (I wonder what ever happened to it), next door to Davidson's Bakery, a place we often frequented after our visits to Fields across the street. Then there's the old Walgreens that was replaced by, you guessed it, a new Walgreens. On the other side of State Street was a building covered with neon including the unforgettable Magikist (Kiss of Beauty) signs, miniature versions of the ones that graced the expressways until about 20 years ago. Also visible was a scrolling message sign that once displayed news headlines. Beyond that was the great theater district, the Oriental, the United Artists, the Woods, and the Bismark, along with a variety of restaurants, shops and night clubs, and the Greyhound Bus Station to boot, all lit up for one of the last times, if only for the cameras.

I saw The Blues Brothers back when it was first released. My most distinct memories are the amazing performances from musical legends, all but one of them gone: Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Pinetop Perkins, Big Walter Horton, and John Lee Hooker, as well as many great session musicians, including the recently departed bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn. Dunn has one of the most memorable lines in the very quotable movie:

We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.

With the exception of Chaka Kahn who has a cameo appearance as a member of the choir in "Reverend" James Brown's church, few of the musicians in the movie have close ties to Chicago. It hardly matters, those musical bits alone are worth the price of admission. The rest of the movie is an endless string of slapstick;  car chases, a nun armed with a yardstick, and several scenes where a character played by Carrie Fisher tries unsuccessfully to destroy the title characters in comic book fashion by progressively more drastic means that would make Wile E. Coyote proud.

When I saw the film for the first time I was also impressed to see a feature movie shot in Chicago. During the reign of Mayor Richard J. Daley who died in 1976, very few studio movies were shot here as supposedly the mayor was afraid Hollywood would portray his city negatively. That all changed under the Byrne administration which promoted film making in the city with a vengeance. Dan Aykroyd who wrote the screenplay (along with the director John Landis), and who played Elwood Blues, stated many years later that the movie was made to be a tribute to Chicago. It certainly was. Perhaps no major studio movie before or since has shown more of this city, from its rough and tumble rust belt industrial landscape, to its tony suburbs, and everything in between. The only thing missing are the familiar shots of the Michigan Avenue skyline. There is no question that the City of Chicago is one of the stars of the film.

Washington Station  of the State Street Subway showing old signage and retired 6000 series cars

Looking at The Blues Brothers today is like looking into a time machine. In addition to the shot of an unrecognizable Randolph Street, there are also shots under the L on Van Buren Street where Elwood Blues lived in a tiny room in a flop house, that is before it was blown up by Carrie Fisher. Elwood's room was on the same level as the L tracks, and the old 6000 series CTA cars rumbled by one after the other, a few feet from the window, as Elwood's brother "Joliet" Jake, played by John Belushi, tried to get some sleep. "How often does that train go by?" Jake asks. "So often that you won't even notice it."

The Dill Pickle on Van Buren before it was blown up by
 Carrie Fisher, then removed forever to make way for a small park
across from the Harold Washington Library

The storefronts on the street included a real diner called the Dill Pickle Pub (also blown up in the movie), several colorful, if less than "respectable" bars, a pawnshop that I believe was invented for the movie, and what was once the best hardware store in the city, Stebbins, which was across the street and not visible in the film. All that is gone now, replaced by respectability in the form of bland contemporary office buildings, a small park, and the Harold Washington Public Library. But back in 1980, Van Buren Street looked much the same as it had for decades, that is to say, right out of a Berenice Abbot photograph of New York in the thirties. Today, most of that character is lost.

At no single point in Chicago's history has the essence and character of the city been lost more than during the wholesale destruction of Maxwell Street on the near south side. One of Chicago's most storied neighborhoods, Maxwell Street was the historical port of entry for many groups of immigrants, most notably Jews from Eastern Europe in the early 20th Century and later, African Americans from the Mississippi Delta. The open air market that developed throughout the area was a fixture of the city until the late nineties when the entire district was taken over by the University of Illinois at Chicago, who after many years of trying, completely leveled the place, save for a few distinctive facades of commercial buildings on Halsted Street.

Street preacher, Maxwell Street, 1993

Here's a short piece I wrote about Maxwell Street several years ago, and here is a link to a site with photographs I made in 1993, not very long before it would all be gone. As you can see, there's nothing in the piece or the photographs that's at all sentimental about the place. It was not pretty, comfortable, or nice; it could be brutal at times, especially on days other than Sunday when the market was open. You wouldn't want to bring a girl there on your first date. Nor would you want to bring your mother, at least not my mother.

Yet it was an integral part of the fabric of the city, and even though a sanitized version of the market still exists just a few blocks to the east, Chicago lost a part of its soul when UIC took over the old neighborhood. John Landis captured part of that spirit in The Blues Brothers in the scene where Blues giants John Lee Hooker, Big Walter Horton and Pinetop Perkins perform Hooker's "Boom Boom" on the street in front of the real Nate's Deli, which in the movie is a joint called simply "Soul Food Diner", and owned by the character played by Aretha Franklin. Of all the scenes in this fantasy movie, this one was the most true to life.

There are of course many recognizable landmarks in the movie that still exist such as the Chicago Skyway and  moveable bridges over the Calumet River on the far southeast side of the city in the neighborhood of Eastside, (visible in the publicity photo above), the South Shore Country Club in the community of the same name, and the former Shoenhofen Brewery in Pilsen by Richard E. Schmidt,  Chicago's most beautiful industrial building. It's to the film makers' credit that they chose to use these often overlooked buildings and structures.

During the climatic car chase at the end of the movie, you get to see much of the skyline and the Loop. It's striking if you know the city today, how many familiar buildings are missing as they hadn't yet been built. Still new buildings in 1980, the Sears Tower, the AON (Standard Oil Building as it was known then), the First National (now Chase) Bank Building and the John Hancock Building stand out as lone giants among buildings less than half their height.

As Jake and Elwood approach their ultimate destination, the County Building, they drive through Daley Plaza right in front of the Picasso. That view is exactly the same as it was thirty years ago. But directly across Dearborn Street to the east, stood an entire square block of buildings (known as Block 37), that was foolishly destroyed in the late eighties to make way for a project that never developed. Two remarkable buildings were lost in that act of vandalism, the 17 story Unity Building built in 1892, and one of the handful of extant buildings in the Loop built just after the Chicago Fire, the McCarthy Block. There were many other notable buildings on that block including an early Louis Sullivan work, The Springer Building, the United Artists and Roosevelt Theaters, and 16 W. Washington, the skyscraper whose ground floor and basement were the home of the above mentioned epicurean delight, Stop & Shop.

The late, great Stop & Shop

Block 37 would stand empty, a vacant lot in the middle of the heart of the city for more than ten years. It didn't go completely unused as in the summertime it was the site of children's arts camps and in the winter, an ice skating rink. Embarrassing to the city as the vacant lot was, the building that ultimately replaced it, a mixed use piece of insignificant junk, is much worse. Here in a nutshell is a timeline of the infamous Block 37 boondoggle, which you will soon find out if you read the link, continues to play out to this day.

Some of the long lost ambience of Block 37. Notice the shopping bag the woman is carrying.
Long time Chicagoans will recognize it as coming from the chain of supermarkets, Hillman's,
which had a store a few feet away, in the basement next door to Stop & Shop.

Barely visible in the movie, just to the north of the County Building, stood the last home of the famous Sherman House Hotel. The hotel, one of Chicago's premier hotels for 100 years, closed its doors for good in the seventies but the building stood vacant until 1983 when it was leveled to make way for the State of Illinois office building, now known as The James R. Thompson Center.

As I mentioned above, much of the Chicago that I knew as a boy was still around in 1980, but it would not be for long. Thinking back to my life back then as a new adult with the whole world opening up before me, sometimes it seems like just yesterday.

The pictures prove otherwise.


CODA

Seeing The Blues Brothers for the first time in over thirty years, I figured out what bugged me the most about the film in the first place. Being a stickler for continuity, something that always annoyed me about films made in places I knew was when locations didn't make sense, for instance when a character walks down a particular street, turns a corner, and is in a completely different part of town. Today older and wiser, as well as having since made films and videos on a very small scale, I understand the logic behind such trickery.

One of the establishments lost when Van Buren Street went  respectable.

The Blues Brothers is filled with continuity issues which I now find to be amusing rather than annoying. In some cases the film makers seem to have exploited rather than disguised them. There are way too many worth pointing out, but the real doosey happens during that final car chase. After Jake and Elwood successfully evade what seems to be the entire Illinois State Police and Chicago Police Department put together, they are pursued by a small group of Nazis driving a red Ford Pinto and a station wagon. The chase takes them through the streets of the West Loop and onto the expressway, which is entirely plausible. But there's something strange about the expressway, it doesn't look familiar. It took me a few seconds to figure it out thirty years ago, but seeing the highway directional sign that said "Chicago" gave away without a doubt that they weren't in Chicago anymore. No, the boys didn't turn onto Chicago's famous Spaghetti Bowl interchange as you'd expect, but were for a brief time on the equally convoluted highway interchange just outside of Downtown Milwaukee! I understand why they used that particular stretch of road, there was construction going on up there at the time, featuring a ramp that abruptly ended into thin air. Given the nature of the chase scenes in the film, I'm sure this was too good to be true for the film makers who utilized it by having the Bluesmobile screeching to a halt just in the nick of time before going over the edge. The Nazis, unfortunately for them, were not so lucky and went over the edge.

The film makers could have easily gotten the shot without revealing its location. But they didn't. Clear as day in the background is Milwaukee's tallest building, the First Wisconsin Center (now the U.S. Bank Center).

Pre-mall State Street with the famous Magikist Lips sign
and the State Lake Theater in the background.

Now they could have just been sloppy, figuring no one would notice, or they could have simply not cared. My guess is they did it for comedic effect or as an inside joke. The next shot shows the Pinto in free fall, back in Chicago with the Hancock Building in the background. The car is at least 500 feet in the air, while the expressway ramp they flew off of couldn't have been more than 20 feet off the ground. The car lands cartoon style in the middle of a street creating a gaping hole, can't tell you exactly where but to me it looks more like Milwaukee than Chicago. More than likely however it was shot at the studio in Hollywood.

Oh, one last thing if you see the movie The Blues Brothers. Jake and Elwood's mentor Curtis, played by the great Cab Calloway, is forced to delay the crowd before their big performance, while the boys have to sneak into the theater, evading cops, and the rest of the folks who are after them. He asks the Blues Brothers Band if they know (what else?) Minnie the Moocher. As they break into the opening notes of the song, Cab is magically transformed from his black suit, fedora, and sun glasses, into his trademark white tie and white tails, while the band and the stage are likewise transformed into something that would fit right in with the Cotton Club c.1930. Check out the faces of the band as they back up the Hi-di-ho man. You can tell they are not acting, they're having the time of their lives.

Good times.

A tough ticket

The conversation this morning went something like this:

Mother: You'll never guess where I'm going Monday morning.

Son: You're right.

Mother: Although you probably won't approve.

Son: Try me.

Mother: C'mon guess.

Son: Ok, The Ice Follies.

Mother: No seriously...

Son: I give up.

Mother: I'm going to a taping of the Oprah show!

Son: I'm truly happy for you.

Mother: Well I couldn't pass up an opportunity like that.

Son: Certainly not.

Mother: I bet even you'd go.

Son changes subject.

My mother got a ticket to what is no doubt the toughest ticket in town from her niece who could have given it to any number of her countless friends. So it was quite flattering that my mom was chosen.

Like it or not, Oprah is as big a Chicago icon as they get, she's as big as the Sears Tower. Some (not me) might say with an ego just as big. In some circles around the country she has replaced Al Capone as our most famous citizen. If you want to get a ticket to her show you have to mail in a request and wait years before it arrives in the mail.

The other way to get in, well in true Chicago fashion, you have to know somebody.

There is only one person I can think of whose status in this town came anywhere close to Oprah's, and his show was just as tough a ticket. He and his show is familiar to anyone who grew up in Chicago during the sixties and seventies.

He name was Bozo the Clown.

Icon, con you?

With the selling of the naming rights to Sears Tower last week, there has been lots of talk recently about Chicago icons.

While I've blathered on and on about how undeserving I think Sears Tower is to be considered Chicago's premier icon, I've been considering what would be truly Chicago's most treasured icon.

So I went to where any inquiring mind would go to answer such a question.

I Googled "Chicago icon."

My answer was a little unexpected.

The number one item on Google's list linked to the site of a guy who seems to post images of graphic designs (not his own) that he likes. This page had images of the Chicago skyline, the kind of images you'd find on souvenirs that you would buy at Walgreen's.

Since I'm looking to refine my list to individual icons, I didn't count that one.

The number two icon item on Google's list was much more useful. It linked to a Flicker page with a photograph of "Chicago Icon" Ronnie Woo Woo, the guy who dresses up in a Cubs uniform and yells "Cubs Woo! Cubs Woo!"

Number three was a Chicago tourist site that I didn't get, or count.

Number four was Richard J. Daley, who could argue with that?

Number five, Sears/Willis Tower, of course it's been in the news a lot lately as has number eight, Holy Name Cathedral.

So without any further ado here is the list (after editing out entries that featured lists of icons) of the top ten Chicago icons according to Google for 5:00PM Friday, March 20, 2009:

1. Ronnie Woo Woo
   
2. Richard J. Daley
   
3. Sears/Willis Tower
   
4. The John Hancock Building
   
5. Studs Terkel
   
6. Holy Name Cathedral
   
7. The Wrigley Company
   
8. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable
   
9. Trump Tower, that should rub a few people the wrong way!
   
10. Chicken George, a fixture on Maxwell Street
    

Pretty good list. I'd place Ronnie Woo Woo above Sears Tower too.

City of Big Distinctions

Years ago I wrote this piece about how we Chicagoans love to boast about our firsts, our biggest, tallest and greatests in the world.

It's all coming to the surface again with the renaming of Sears Tower to Willis Tower. Frankly I'm a little surprised since buildings get renamed all the time without much notice. I didn't hear a peep when the Standard Oil Building became the Amoco and later the AON Building.

Or when the Associates Center (aka the Diamond Building at Michigan and Randolph) became the Stone Container Building and later the Smurfit-Stone Building.

SMURFIT???

As Cary Grant said to his mother while in a drunken stupor in Hitchcock's masterpiece "North by Northwest", "no mother I didn't believe it either!"

But this Sears Tower name change seems to have really rubbed people the wrong way. Maybe it's because of all the recent changes that have de-Chicagoized some of our most cherished institutions.

Marshall Field's becoming Macy's is the prime example. The Field name of course has been synonymous with Chicago for well over 100 years just as the Macy's name has been with New York. Having a New York institution replace a Chicago institution was more than most Chicagoans could stand, despite the fact that both stores for years had been owned by companies outside of their respective home towns.

The Sears name also has also been synonymous with Chicago ever since Richard Sears moved his one man jewelry business here from Minneapolis in 1887. The rest of course is history, the company quickly became one of the giant mail order retailers in the country to have been based in Chicago. At one time all across America the arrival of the Sears catalog was anticipated with as much gusto as birthdays and Christmas.

But much has changed over the years, the mail order business all but disappeared and while Sears department stores have stuck around, they are certainly not a fixture in American life as they once were. The company left Sears Tower for its new digs in suburban Hoffman Eastates in 1992 leaving only the name.

The building was built in 1973 to be the the tallest building in the world. It kept that distinction until 1998. But sheer height alone does not make a building good and no one has ever accused Sears Tower as being particularly interesting, let alone beautiful.

Given its size it is a rather unremarkable building without style or grace, plunked down on a sizable block site in the west Loop. It doesn't have a graceful profile like the great art deco towers, doesn't have a facade that plays gracefully with light as the AON Building, and it doesn't strike an audacious pose like it's SOM cousin, the John Hancock Building.

Its most objectionable feature in my opinion is the way it meets the street. There is no attempt to unify the monster building with its surroundings. The design of the entrance was so unsuccessful that it was reworked several times. Barriers had to be installed about 10 feet into the ledges on the base because pedestrians not paying attention could find themselves perilously high above the ground as the ledges that start even with the sidewalk on the Wacker Drive side end up about 20 feet above the ground at Franklin Street where the street grade (but not the ledge) has descended from the river.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Sears Tower's icon status in Chicago is based solely on the fact that it was once the world's tallest building. Now that the distinction has been lost, as far as I'm concerned they can call it whatever they like. There are hundreds, no thousands of better buildings in the city.

If you do need to cling to some kind of height distinction though, rest easy for as far as I know, Sears/Willis Tower still has the highest bathrooms in the world.

But here's something that should cause real concern about another Chicago institution. I just learned today that in some Chicago parks, 16 inch softball is is being gradually replaced by 12 inch with gloves.

This is truly disconcerting news.

Willis Tower

Somehow I just can't get worked up about the name change. In case you missed it, Sears Tower is getting its name changed to Willis Tower, after the British Insurance company that has bought the building.

It was the tallest building in the world for many years and for that reason alone has been a Chicago icon since it was built in 1973.

Personally I've always considered it to be a very unimpressive building, vastly inferior to its fellow members in the Chicago 1000 ft. plus club, the John Hancock and the AON (formerly the Amoco, and before that Standard Oil) Buildings, and now the new Trump Tower.

My guess is that people around here will keep on calling it the Sears Tower anyway.

No big deal.