Things change

Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design

Like a river, a great city is constantly flowing, changing its course at will, never standing still. When you live in a city, change becomes a routine part of life, a new business opens, another one closes, neighborhoods slowly crumble while others gradually revive. Sometimes, when an important building is threatened as is with the case of the former Prentice Hospital in Chicago, change becomes a hot button issue on both sides. But that's the exception not the rule, generally we accept change and move on; like our children, most changes take place right under our nose and we barely notice them.

Of course if you don't see a child every day, those changes become profound. It's our kids' grandparents custom to tell them how much they've grown since the last time they saw them, even if it was only a week ago.

A reminder of the now distant past in the Third Ward

We just took our annual birthday trip up to Milwaukee and overall I'd say the city looks like it's doing just fine. Admittedly, we tend to visit the same old haunts so I can't report on the city as a whole. "The "Historic Third Ward" just south of Downtown seems to be booming. Centered around MIAD (the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design), the old warehouse and manufacturing district is flush with art galleries, boutiques and upscale restaurants. The lack of available parking spaces attest to its success.

Here I'll give a shout out to my friends Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, collaborative artists who have a wonderful show of their new work, a project called Natural History, which is currently on view at the Portrait Society Gallery in the Third Ward.

Recent riverfront construction in the Third Ward

Downtown Milwaukee, the main drag anyway, Wisconsin Avenue, had its life sapped away with the construction of the Grand Avenue, an indoor shopping mall which was built back in the eighties. I haven't been inside that mall in probably twenty years so I can't comment on it, but the outside is as dead as ever. Which is a shame, the death of the once vibrant street life in the heart of town is an enduring testimony of the fallacy of building such places. We here in Chicago can thank our lucky stars that our lame attempt to build a downtown mall back in the day was easily reversible, and is now but a distant memory.

A couple of years ago I wrote a small post about Milwaukee and listed several of my favorite this and thats in the world found in that city. Sadly, one of them is gone. There was a little restaurant on the East Side, catty corner from the Oriental Theater called Palermo Villa. They served what I and my family considered to be the best pizza we'd ever had and was the traditional final stop on our visits up there. Our heart sank as we walked by the empty storefront last Saturday, it had been closed since July.

Another of my wife's longtime favorite restaurants, a little hole in the wall Middle Eastern place called Abu's was gone, as was another longtime haunt in the Third Ward.

On a brighter note, another of our favorite stops, Boswell Book Company on Downer Street (yes it's really called Downer Street but it doesn't live up to its name), is alive and well, testimony that the independent book store is not quite dead yet. As you may recall from this earlier post, the shop used to be part of a small chain of Milwaukee book shops that went out of business. This one was kept alive by former employees of the old Harry Schwartz chain and retains its depth of selection and charm.

Another business in Milwaukee that's bucking the trend of the national chains is Alterra Coffee. They now have several shops in Milwuakee, the most beautiful of which is in an abandoned water pumping station on the lake shore. In all honesty, this company in every way blows the competition out of the water; unlike most other cities, you are hard pressed to find a Starbucks or other big name coffee chain in Milwaukee, there's no point.

Simply put, Milwaukee in so many ways is unlike every other city. Could there be any better reason to love the place?

Meet me between Thomas and Vivekananda

Chicago may not be the most logical place in the world. For starters, the river flows backwards. Then we have two baseball teams in town; last season one of them battled another team for the worst record in the major leagues and you couldn't keep people away. The other team was involved in a legitimate pennant race and they had to lower ticket prices just to get warm bodies in the seats. Most important of all, even though we're a city with many great assets, we're known around the world for our gangsters and corrupt politicians.

One thing however that is completely logical about this city is its street numbering system. Based on the Cartesian grid, addresses are numbered according to points on the grid, meaning that if you were looking for an address, say 1200 North, you would know that what you're looking for is twelve blocks north of Madison Street, Chicago's north/south divide. If you know your east west coordinates, say 2400 West, you'd know that you were exactly twenty four blocks, or three miles west of State, the dividing line between east and west. Since the vast majority of Chicago streets run in the same direction as the grid, if you told a Chicagoan you were looking for something in the vicinity 1200 North and 2400 West, he or she most likely would know that your destination is somewhere around the intersection of Division Street and Western Avenue. It's even easier on the South Side where all the east/west streets have numbers for names, the numbers corresponding to the grid. 22nd Street for example, is twenty two blocks south of Madison. Even more logic: unlike other cities, a street at a particular coordinate on the grid will keep the same name even if it does not continue uninterrupted through the city. The residential streets way up north in my neighborhood of Rogers Park: Claremont, Oakley and Bell, the streets just east of Western Avenue, have counterparts with the same names all the way down in my cousin's neighborhood of Beverly, more than twenty miles to the south.

Simply put, if you can't find your way around Chicago, you probably couldn't find your way around anywhere.

Recently however, that logic has been put to the test with the introduction of honorary street names. All over town you can find street signs that were placed in honor of someone of distinction who either lived or worked in the area, or did something important in that place.  If you've been around town a bit, you learn to ignore the brown signs displaying the honorary names which are meaningless, navigationally speaking that is. Unfortunately, visitors see the brown signs which look like legitimate street signs, and mistakenly think they are the real names of the streets. Hence out of town visitors to the Art Institute mistakenly think the famous Chicago landmark is on Swami Vivekananda Way, rather than the actual street with the less resonant name, Michigan Avenue. To make matters more confusing, one block to the south, the Swami gives way to Theodore Thomas, a tribute to the first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

With the exception of the Loop, the majority of honorary street signs in Chicago pay tribute to people who are not well known. An example I'm intimately familiar with: Honore Street between Division and Thomas (the actual street name, not the one honoring the conductor) is named Rose Gabellini Street after a beloved teacher who taught for many years at the elementary school at that location.

This morning I decided to map my route through the Loop from the train station to work by means of the brown signs. I must admit I had to look up two of the names, (and learned a few things in the process), when I got home. My journey took me past (David) Ben-Gurion Way (honoring the first Prime Minister of Israel), Chicago Region for the Weitzman Institute of Science Way (here is a link to their web site), Eugene Heytow Way (honoring a local businessman and entrepreneur ), Newton Minow Way (honoring a former chairman of the FCC), Palmer House Hilton Way (in tribute to the landmark hotel), to the aforementioned Swami Vivekananda Way.

In 1893 the Hindu monk Vivekananda gave a famous address advocating religious tolerance to the Parliament of the World's Religions at their conference which took place during the World's Columbian Exposition, in the building that would become The Art Institute.

As you can imagine, to the initiated, the brown commemorative street signs provide a unique insight into this city's history.

To the uninitiated, the signs are more or less a nuisance.

I just discovered the history of dedicating sections of streets in Chicago to particular individuals; it came courtesy of the WBEZ Chicago History Today blog, written by John R. Schmidt.

It turns out that columnist Mike Royko proposed re-naming a small section of the street where the late author Nelson Algren lived. Much to Royko's surprise, Mayor Jane Byrne agreed and before too long, workmen were replacing signs that said "Evergreen Avenue" with signs that read "Algren Street." The neighbors, many of whom were Polish folks who didn't care much for Algren or his work,  (they felt he portrayed them in a bad light in his novels), vehemently objected to the change, citing issues ranging from safety to the expense of having to change official addresses. City Hall listened, the Algren signs came down and shortly thereafter the honorary street program began.

Today there are an estimated 1,000 honorary street signs in Chicago, elightening, confusing and irritating folks at the same time.

Ugly

What do Pyongyang and Chicago have in common?

Both cities have buildings that made HuffPost Travel's "Ugliest Buildings in the World" list. I'll give you a second to guess which Chicago building made the list. I knew the answer before the question, had it been the other way around, I would have guessed wrong.

The North Korean capital's entry in the list is the Ryugyong Hotel, a multi-pyramidal shaped hulk that has been under construction for the past twenty years. Having seen pictures of Pyonyang, I suppose any building there could have made this list, except the editors point out that being merely stultifying doesn't cut it, you have to work really hard at ugly to be included.

Anyway, if you guessed Helmut Jahn's Thompson Center as I probably would have, sorry. The building that put Chicago on the map of ugliness is Hammond, Beeby and Babka's Harold Washington Library.

Since I spend a good deal of time in that building, and remember when its construction in the early nineties was cause for great celebration given the fact that we hadn't had a main branch of the public library for well over a decade, I give it a pass.

Still I have to admit, the over the top eclectic pile in the South Loop is in my opinion a pretty ugly building. Here's the assessment from the article:

Neoclassical references collide with a glass-and-steel Mannerist roof; throw in some red brick, granite, and aluminum—and a bad sense of scale—and you’ve got way too much architecture class for one day.

In case you're interested, here's a link to the list, check it out if you dare.

By the way, if you think Bud Goldberg's old Prentice Hospital is ugly, take a look at the post and maybe you'll see the light.

Our president

Last night a Facebook friend posted the question: "What's the first election you can remember?" This guy is in his twenties as are most of his friends, and the typical response went all the way back to Bush/Clinton, 1992. I didn't respond to his query because given my age compared to the age of the responders, I might as well have said I can remember Abraham Lincoln's last election. In truth the first election I remember, though not in great detail, was the 1964 election between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. In other words, I've been around a long time and can remember a lot of presidential elections. Without a doubt, the one this year has been by far the most contentious election in my life.

When folks tell me that more hatred is directed toward Barack Obama than any other president, I try to downplay it, pointing to events such as the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton and the broad dislike, even hatred of George W. Bush from the Left. But Clinton and Bush earned most of the vitriol aimed in their direction all on their own. While some people find President Obama's politics, his methods, even his personality objectionable, I can't for the life of me figure out why he is hated so much by a such a large sector of society. At least I don't want to admit what I think might be the reason.

Walking past a public school on my way to work this morning, I passed several children who were having an animated conversation about last night's election. Clearly some of them had not stayed up past 10pm and were asking their friends: "Did Obama win Ohio?" Interest in such details of an election coming from kids who couldn't be more than ten or eleven was inspiring. I couldn't help being moved by the fact that those children were all African American. In fact during several encounters with black people today I noticed a definite sense of enthusiasm. The exuberance over the president's winning the State of Ohio and consequently the election was contagious. In the world in which I live, Barack Obama is very popular.

In other parts of the country, he obviously is not.

Clearly we live in a divided nation, and much of it has to do with race. It's a nasty issue that doesn't get  discussed much in polite society. A co-chair of the Romney campaign, former New Hampshire governor and Chief of Staff to the first President Bush, John Sununu touched on the subject briefly during a TV interview when he suggested that General Colin Powell's endorcement of Obama was racially motivated. He said: "I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him." In a more reasonable, non racially-charged society, that comment probably would have gone unnoticed. But it went viral here because between the lines, some people read Sununu as saying: "If it's OK for black people to support one of their own, why can't we white people do the same?"

After I encountered the enthusiastic kids this morning, the thought did cross my mind about how I'd feel if the tables were turned and I walked past a group of fist pumping, high fiving white folks, hollering and whooping it up because Mitt Romney won the election. I'd probably dismiss them as a bunch of yahoos.

In this year's presidential election, about 59 percent of the white vote went to Romney and the pundits are using that figure to comment how racially divided we are. But about 93 percent of the black vote went to Obama and there was hardly a peep. Is this a double standard?

In one word, no.

The ancestors of most African American people lived in this country long before the ancestors of most European Americans, including my own. Needless to say, most of them did not come here of their own free will. Black soldiers fought and died for this country in every war, often in disproportionate numbers. When they had the opportunity to, which was not until quite recently in some cases, African Americans could be counted on to consistently vote for white candidates. Black voters had been taken for granted for so long by white politicians that no one saw coming the tremendous ground swell of support for black candidates such as the late Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago. Still it is a mistake to assume that African American people always vote as one block for candidates of their own race. The last mayoral election in Chicago was decided by the black vote in favor of Rahm Emanuel, despite the fact that on the ballot there was an extremely well known black candidate.

The fact is, in the past four years, the Republican Party has bent over backwards to alienate black voters:

• The issue of requiring voter ids in some states harken back to the days of the poll tax where poor people, many of whom were black, were prohibited from voting simply because they could not afford to. The tremendous turnout in many of those states in this election where people stood for hours in line to cast a ballot, proved that people would not be denied the right to vote. 
• The new campaign laws which eliminated spending limits, made the office of president available to the highest bidder. Unfortunately for the Republicans, the Democrats and Obama outplayed them at their own game by raising more money, an obscene amount, than any campaign in history.
• While the office of president should command the highest respect, opponents of Barack Obama have gone to tremendous lengths to disrespect both the man and the office. Instead of doing their jobs and governing, some Republicans in Congress openly vowed at the outset of his presidency that their number one goal was to make Obama a one term president. From ridiculous demands of proof of citizenship, to a governor pointing her finger in his face, to a congressman calling him a liar during a speech, to the unbelievable intransigence in Congress over every bit of legislative minutiae, Republicans have shown over and over again that they will stop at nothing in order to gain control of the government. 

In short, every plausible reason for black folks (and folks of many other shades including white), to vote for Mitt Romney, was overshadowed by the enormous baggage of poor choices made by the candidate and his party. Instead of venting their anger at the results of this past election, Republicans need only look in the mirror.

It's not going to get any better for the GOP. This country is moving in a new direction demographically, and being the white people's party is simply not going to cut it anymore. As someone who has voted "Democrat" for most of his life, you might think I'd be thrilled at the prospect of the demise of the Republican Party. I'm not. As an American I believe deeply in the two party system, in a meaningful rational dialog, and being forced to make a choice between two credible candidates come election time.

In this election I didn't feel there was a choice. Four years ago I knew President Obama was in for a rough ride and given the state of the economy, I was skeptical about his prospects of being re-elected in 2012. Yet I believe he's done a reasonably good job in office, attempting at least to fulfill the campaign promises he made four years ago. My most profound experience of the effects of his presidency came this summer while driving up to Wisconsin with my family. As we passed the massive Chrysler plant in Belvedere, Illinois, I noticed the employee parking lot was filled with cars, far more of them than I had seen in years. As my wife pointed out, had it not been for this administration, that lot, and hundreds like it around the country today would be empty.

That said, we're still in deep financial trouble and I'm not entirely convinced that the policies of this administration will lead us out of the morass. I would have desperately liked to have been challenged by a candidate from the other side who presented a clear, consistent alternative vision for the future of this country. Unfortunately Governor Romney did not. His statements during the campaign were all over the place, made more out of convenience rather than conviction. The only conviction of the governor's I could detect, was his desire to be president. Perhaps the delicate balance of trying to please a very disparate constituency was too much for him, but in my opinion, the governor was simply not a credible candidate.

Obviously a lot of people disagree, most of them belonging to the same race and gender as me. Unemployment, the deficit, the debt, the bad economy and a plethora of other issues are all legitimate concerns and most of the people who voted for Governor Romney believed his ideas to address those issues were better than Obama's.

Some people however, I have no idea how many, don't feel that Barack Obama truly represents them and voted for Romney simply because of the color of his skin. I know this to be true because I personally know some of them. Unsavory as it may be, that is their right.

All I can say is this: I'm glad the election is over.

Deja vu all over again

It was interesting to see deposed alderman Burton Natarus testifying at the Landmarks Commission hearing that decided the fate of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital building. Natarus, the Yogi Berra of Chicago politicians, (which is really saying something given the quality of oratory in that esteemed group), said the following about the building:

This is not a good piece of architecture...We have a Yiddish word for what it is, farshimmelt.

I must admit not having known what farshimmelt means, but I do know that seldom does a person use a Yiddish word to describe something favorably. From the site Wordreference.com I found this:

This term is used to describe a confused state of mind, disorientation, or feeblemindedness.

Now that's one man's opinion and I have to respect it for what it's worth. Lot's of people think the building is shall I say, less than appealing, certainly not worthy of the fuss to save it, given that Northwestern Memorial Hospital plans to use the site for a facility that will not only produce medical research that will save countless lives but will also bring thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of revenue into our fair city. At least that's what they say.

An even more colorful term I've heard to describe the building is "butt ugly." Fair enough, everyone's entitled to his own opinion.

But I do have to disagree with all due respect of course, to the former alderman's assessment of old Prentice as "confused, disoriented, and feebleminded". The building in fact is everything BUT those things. It was one of the most sensible, well thought out buildings ever built in this city. Goldberg's "bed tower", the cluster of cylinders, containing hospital rooms. around a central core which contained the nurses' stations, was a brilliant, ground breaking design; the architect's sensibilities putting patient care at the forefront of his efforts gained him worldwide acclaim.

Uninformed as they were, Natarus's were probably the most honest words spewed during yesterday's meeting. The Commission went to great lengths to present Prentice as a building that met more than the minimum number of requirements necessary for landmark status. Their report waxed eloquently about the significance of Goldberg's building, presenting it favorably in the context of other major works of international architecture inluding Le Corusier's sublime Notre Dame du Haut, in Ronhamp, France, Frank Lloyd Wright's Gugenheim Museum and Eero Sarrinen's TWA Flight Center, both in New York City, among others. Then the commission voted to adopt

the Preliminary Summary and make a preliminary landmark recommendation concerning the Building in accordance with Sect. 2-120-630 of the Municipal Code.

The vote was unanimous, the Commission would recommend landmark status for the building. Fantastic. But wait, there's more:

The commission then presented a report from the Department of Housing and Economic Development for the City of Chicago which congratulated the Commission for its careful and professional work in recommending the landmark status but added: heck, the building is in the way of Northwestern's plans so it should go, landmark or not.

The Commission apparently was so moved by the report and no doubt by Mayor Emanuel's OpEd piece in the Tribune this week in favor of the demolition, that it voted 6 to 1 to rescind the recommendation they made just minutes earlier.

Heads in the room must have been spinning quicker than pardon the expression, lager turns to piss.

The Landmarks Committee in effect declared that the work they allegedly do for the city is irrelevant. What after all is the point of declaring a building a landmark, then refusing to protect it? Spineless is too kind a description of their actions yesterday. Unless of course this was all part of the plan, which turns out to be the case. In his blog Lee Bay posted the agenda one day before the meeting took place. The events of the following day followed the script line by line.

It turns out the fate of Prentice at the hands of the Landmarks Committee was a fait accompli, it had no chance. The meeting in the words of Christina Morris of the National Trust for Historical Preservation was a farce. Jonathan Fine, the executive director of Preservation Chicago said this:

We asked for a day in court, instead we got a show trial.

Much more distressing than the refusal to protect the Bertrand Goldberg building is the ease in which the commission gave in to the forces behind its destruction. What they're saying is that no matter how important a building may be, there can always be a legitimate cause that trumps protecting a building. In one fell swoop they did away with decades of hard work of preservationists and concerned citizens who feel that the city's architecture matters. It is a terrible precedent that may very well have dire consequences for every significant building in this city. Suppose Roosevelt University campaigns to demolish the Auditorium Building because it cannot effectively teach its students (tomorrow's leaders) in the "out of date" landmark? What if the forces driving the La Salle Street Financial District insist on their need to expand onto the site of the Rookery Building and propose to demolish it to build a state of the art "world class" trading center? What if somebody discovers oil underneath the Wrigley Building?

Those admittedly far fetched scenarios would potentially result in windfall profits for the city, but at what cost? Northwestern Memorial Hospital paints a very attractive picture of what they would do with the site in terms of benefits to the city. I have no quarrel with that. But I have a serious problem accepting their assertion that all their plans, the money made for the city, the jobs created and the lives saved would vanish if they don't get their way and turn old Prentice to dust. The truth is that patch of ground upon which Prentice stands represents a tiny fraction of the property owned by the hospital in their Streeterville campus, much of which is currently unoccupied. There are lots of very talented architects and designers in town who could create a solution that would satisfy everybody's needs, the hospital's and the preservationists' alike.

So why is the hospital so intransigent?  I don't have an answer but looking around at the brand spanking new hospital buildings on the campus all bearing the names of wealthy donors, I have a sneaking suspicion. I have a little experience with big institutions and know that people like to put their names on big spiffy and above all new projects. Turning old Prentice into an office or teaching facility would be very feasible, but not very sexy. Could the morass over old Prentice be really be about ego, power, money, control and prestige, rather than jobs and lives? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

The mayor in his Tribune OpEd piece acknowledged Bertrand Goldberg as an important architect whose buildings are worth preserving. Then he added that we have other Goldberg buildings in town so losing this one won't be so bad. As I pointed out last week, the exact thing could have been said about the Garrick and Old Stock Exchange Buildings, two Louis Sullivan masterpieces that were lost decades ago. It would be difficult to find any reasonable person in town today who would support the demolition of those buildings so long ago.

So in fifty years what will they be saying about us? My guess is they will say this:

"Didn't those people learn anything?"

Throw in a little pixie dust

One of my favorite movie lines of all time comes toward the end of the John Ford Western: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the story, as legend had it, the eponymous "man" of the film's title was the beloved Senator Ransom Stoddard (played by Jimmy Stewart). Years before he was challenged to a gun duel by the notorious outlaw and town menace Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). At the appointed hour, the vastly out-matched Stoddard fired his gun and the gunslinger Valance fell dead, much to Stoddard's surprise. As he and the audience would find out later, the real killer of Valance was Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who was hiding across the street in the dark. He shot Valance for the sake of the woman both he and Stoddard loved, but that's another story. Anyway, neither Doniphon nor Stoddard ever let on to anybody else about the true identity of Valance's killer. Stoddard went on to great success and got the girl, all based upon his being the "man who shot Liberty Valance." Doniphon, brokenhearted, slipped off into obscurity. Late in life the guilt-ridden Stoddard, in an interview with a newspaperman, fessed up to the true story.

At the end of the interview the newspaperman burned up his notes telling Stoddard:

This is the West sir, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Imagine a reporter today being spoon fed a scoop like that and letting it go up in smoke.

Despite the fact that nine out of ten Americans according to a 2011 Gallup poll, claim to believe in a God of whose existence they presumably have no rational proof, we seem to have an insatiable thirst for proof of everything else. No stone goes unturned to get the "real story", no matter how many people get hurt in the process. Hope, acceptance and faith (except apparently in God), seem to be rare commodities these days, at least in this country.

We live in a fabulous late twenties apartment building on the north side of Chicago. For the past two years our building has been one of the several hundred buildings featured in a wonderful event called "Open House Chicago", sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. It has been my privilege to have been one of the tour guides for the building. As you can imagine, a big old building like ours has lots of stories, many of them involving sprits of former residents haunting the building.

Now I can't say truthfully whether I believe in ghosts or not, all I'll say is I have no proof they do not exist. Besides, I like a good ghost story as much as the next guy. Our building's engineer told us the story of a teenager, Johnny Gidwitz (I'm making up the name), who many years ago drowned in our swimming pool after hitting his head on the ceiling while trying to show off on the diving board for his friends. According to our engineer, his spirit has been hanging around the pool area since. Again, I don't know as I've haven't seen hide nor hair of him.

Our neighbor, one of my fellow tour guides who herself has no time for such foolishness, told me that on one of her tours, while walking though the pool area one of her guests asked her completely out of the blue: "Are there any ghosts in this building?" "Why?" our neighbor asked. "Because I can sense one right now", said the woman.

I'm presuming it was Johnny Gidwitz but of course, I can't prove it.

The story gets more interesting. On my first tour this year, a gentleman told me he grew up in the neighborhood and one day back in the fifties, his sister and her friend snuck into the building and went for a dip in the pool. The two girls entered the shallow end and eventually worked their way into the deep end. Unfortunately neither girl could swim and both found themselves in a state of panic, struggling for their lives. All of a sudden the girls felt themselves being grabbed by the backs of their swimsuits,  pulled out of the water, and placed on the edge of the pool. Standing in front of them was an enormous man with a shaved head, dressed in a white tee shirt.  The man they said bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Clean. He asked if they were OK then calmly walked away. The girls ran home and told the girl's mother the story. She immediately went over to our building to thank the man who had just saved the girls' lives. She found several people from the building and asked them about the man who looked like Mr. Clean. To a person including the building's engineer at the time, no one had any clue who the man was, as no one fitting that very distinctive description either lived or worked in the building. To this day his identity remains a mystery.

From the gleam in the storyteller's eye I could tell where he was going: "So you think he was an angel?" I asked the man. He shrugged his shoulders and said sheepishly: "Well you never know."

That story was too good to pass up and I told it, along with the story of Johnny Gidwidtz to the rest of my tour groups that day. Perhaps because I didn't have just the right the gleam in my eye when I told the story, nobody bit as I did. "Hmmm... maybe he was an outside contractor or a guest" they'd say or, "maybe he was someone who snuck into the building himself."

Probably. Those are perfectly reasonable, plausible explanations.

But I think I'll just go with the legend.

Climbing off the fence

We've been through this before.

In 1960, protestors showed up at the the Garrick Theater in Chicago's Loop to challenge its imminent destruction. Although the building was granted landmark status, its owners felt the site could be put to more profitable use as a parking garage. So they applied for a demolition permit and after a court battle, got their way. In reality, few people cared about saving the great Louis Sullivan building that had seen better days and in the subsequent years, dozens of other important Chicago buildings were lost, with barely a peep from the general public. A few more protestors showed up in 1972 at the corner of LaSalle and Washington as the scaffolding marking its doom consumed the old Stock Exchange Building, another Sullivan gem, perhaps his finest. The relative few who expressed their concern and outrage over the destruction of our architectural heritage were voices crying out in a desert of indifference; the fact is, hardly anyone noticed those buildings back then, let alone cared about them. To the general public, they were just grimy old buildings that had outlived their usefulness.

Then something terrible happened during the destruction of the Stock Exchange Building. The de facto leader of the small band of brothers and sisters who fought for the buildings was killed as he was trying to salvage fragments from inside the old Sullivan building as it collapsed around him. His name was Richard Nickel, and his life's work was documenting the entire body of work of Louis Sullivan as it disappeared before his eyes.

In the end, Nickel's tragic death and the loss of the Garrick and Stock Exchange Buildings, galvanized Chicago's architectural preservation community. After the Stock Exchange Building came down, people in this city woke up and realized that architecture did in fact matter. Today, Chicagoans, the haughty and meek alike boast about their city's architecture and the city's official boosters use it as a selling point to lure potential residents and visitors.

Chicago is best known for its innovative commercial buildings from the turn of the last century whose form clearly expresses their structure, a style that slavishly adhered to Louis Sullivan's famous dictum: "form ever follows function." Much of "Modern" architecture in the fifties and sixties, especially the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his followers, can trace its roots back to the architects of "Chicago School." It would be heresy today to suggest knocking down any of these buildings.

But Chicago is an architecturally diverse city and unfortunately, the buildings that don't trace their roots back to Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Root, William Holabird and Martin Roche, are fair game.

The former Prentice Women's Hospital by Bertrand Goldberg,
awaiting its uncertain fate, October 20,  2012

One of this city's important architects who marched to the beat of his own drummer was Bertrand Goldberg whose work broke free of the constraints of the traditional Chicago style box. Goldberg's most famous works are the iconic corn cob towers of Marina City which typify his work, radiating around a central core, from the inside out rather than outside in. His egalitarian spirit let him to be a radical pioneer in the design of space, which in turn out of necessity led him to be an innovator in materials, predominantly reinforced concrete. His other residential works in Chicago run the gamut from the Astor Tower in the city's tony Gold Coast, to the Raymond Hilliard Homes on the near south side, Goldberg's attempt to humanize low income housing.

Goldberg, like his predecessors Frank Lloyd Wright and the French architect and planner Le Corbusier, was a utopian. He believed that architecture could be re-invented in order to change society for the betterment of people's lives. River City, built on the former approach to the long gone Grand Central railway station, was Goldberg's scaled down dream of building a city within a city, a mixed use complex of homes, shops, venues for entertainment and more.

Bud Goldberg applied his concepts of radial space in other areas, especially buildings devoted to health-care. Prentice Women's Hospital of 1975 was a ground breaking approach to hospital design. In the words of Michael Kimmelman, the architectural critic for the New York Times, Prentice:

...translated new ideas about hospital “villages” of care into unobstructed floors around a central nurses’ station.

The hand responsible for the design of Prentice is unmistakable; four cylindrical concrete towers containing the patients' rooms are bundled clover-like around a central core. The towers with their signature elliptical porthole windows, death defyingly cantilever over a more conventional steel and glass base which housed the hospital's other functions. It was a bold design for the era, stunningly different from anything else at the time, except other Goldberg buildings.

Northwestern University which owns Prentice, built a new women's hospital, closed the old one and plans to demolish it to make way for a research facility.

Again we're faced with the aspect of losing another architectural landmark, an important building that may have outlived its original intent, but could easily be adapted for any number of uses. Apparently however, not the use that Northwestern has in mind. The institution vehemently opposes any proposal to retrofit the thirty seven year old building to fit into their plans, including an 11th hour submission from the distinguished Chicago architect Jeanne Gang who, (at the suggestion of Michael Kimmelman) has proposed to build a tower above Goldberg's building.

Earlier in this space I stated the opinion that Prentice was no slam dunk for landmark status. But I have since come around to believe that the destruction of Prentice would be a tremendous loss, possibly rivaling that of the Garrick. Why the change of heart? Well I've listened to both sides of the argument and frankly, it's the "let's demolish Prentice" argument that has swayed me the most, negatively of course.

Ample land surrounding Prentice and its environs

Take the university hospital and their disingenuous campaign to convince the public that preservationists are hijacking the creation of thousands of new jobs, millions of dollars of revenue into the city and life saving treatments, all to save an old building. The truth is the hospital has no immediate plans to build the new facility; it wants to level the Goldberg building and leave the site empty until the time when and if ground is broken for the new building. In other words, Northwestern wants to replace a perfectly good building with a vacant lot. If you've visited the neighborhood in which old Prentice resides, you know that it is filled with many empty lots. I'd compare it to the East Berlin I visited just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the way, since there are all those empty lots in the the vicinity, most of which owned by Northwestern, why is it not possible to build their research facility somewhere else, directly across the street for example?

Even more compelling are the voices of people whom I know to be passionate about all things Chicago and its history, including its architecture. They are unmoved by the proposed demolition saying things such as: "We have other examples of Bertrand Goldberg architecture in town that are not in any danger of coming down." Or: "The building's only thirty odd years old, it hasn't been around long enough to have earned the distinction of being a landmark." Or this catch-all phrase: "We need to be more concerned about people than buildings."

I'll give you that Goldberg's Prentice is not an eminently lovable building; it's too old to be modern and too new to be charming. It hasn't aged all that well and it's been partially altered so the arches that lead dramatically up to its towers have been obscured by the extension of the glass and steel base.

It dawned on me this morning as I listened to more arguments in favor of demolishing Prentice, that those same arguments were leveled in favor of demolishing some of Chicago's greatest buildings forty and fifty years ago. The Garrick and Stock Exchange were not the only Sullivan buildings in town when they came down. They hadn't aged very well either, were disrespectfully altered, not maintained properly, and covered with a patina of grime. Mostly they seemed irrelevant, memories of a bygone era for which we had little use. Like Prentice today, there was a contingent of folks back then who thought the old Sullivan buildings were eyesores. The comment I heard this morning: "let's tear it down and put up something new" has a familiar ring to it. Yet many of the folks who don't care about the fate of Prentice would no doubt look upon the loss of those earlier buildings as nothing less than wanton destruction.

Despite years of neglect, old Prentice still has
 a dramatic presence in the Streeterville neighborhood

The handful of buildings that survived the dark era of wholesale destruction of our architectural legacy, have been lovingly restored and in some cases today are as beautiful as the day they were built, in some cases even more. It breaks my heart to think how much greater this city would be if some of the buildings we destroyed over the course of about fifteen years, had been allowed to stand, restored to their original splendor.

No I don't believe we should save everything. A city that does not build and grow, dies. Not all old buildings are great or even good for that matter; not everything deserves landmark status. Nor are all new buildings bad, (I'm old enough to still consider old Prentice a new building). In general, we have a bad taste in our mouths about the seventies, especially its architecture and design. Much of that derision is unfortunately deserved, virtually all of the great buildings lost during that time were replaced by unadulterated crap.

Prentice is an important perhaps even great building that was designed by an architect who cut through all that crap. Bertrand Goldberg was an innovator, an experimenter committed to the idea that through the practice of his art and craft, he could benefit humanity. Although many of his utopian ideas have long been discounted (as have Le Corbusier's and Wright's), we can't blame him for trying. Plus he built some pretty wonderful buildings to boot, and Prentice may very well be one of his best.

Let's keep it around until we can begin to appreciate it again, just as we appreciate Sullivan today in ways we could not comprehend fifty years ago.

Do I believe the philistines are knocking at the door? Hardly. Just the short sighted and the indifferent, a much more formidable adversary.