The Picasso Thing

This week during a ceremony in Daley Plaza commemorating the golden anniversary of the work of art known to every Chicagoan simply as "The Picasso", Mayor Rahm Emanuel called its introduction to the city a "critical inflection point in Chicago's story."

Almost fifty years ago to the day, that point wasn't lost upon Mike Royko, who in his Chicago Daily News column published the day after the unveiling of the fifty foot sculpture by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, called the event, not without a trace of irony, the "cultural rebirth of the city." True to his curmudgeon spirit, Royko continued:

Out there in the neighborhoods and the suburbs, things probably seemed just the same. People worried about the old things·would they move in and would we move out? Or would we move in and would they move out? 

But downtown, the leaders of culture and influence were gathered for a historical event and it was reaching a climax with Mayor Daley standing there ready to pull a ribbon. 

Thousands waited in and around the Civic (now Richard J. Daley) Center plaza.

They had listened to the speeches about the Picasso thing. They had heard how it was going to change Chicago's image.

When Mayor Richard J. Daley struggled, then finally succeeded to free the artwork from its shroud, Royko wrote that the Picasso was greeted by a spattering of applause, followed by lots of silence.

Royko, like many Chicagoans at the time, wasn't particularly taken by the sculpture.

They had hoped, you see, that it would be what they had heard it would be. 

A woman, maybe. A beautiful soaring woman. That is what many art experts and enthusiasts had promised. They had said that we should wait that we should not believe what we saw in the pictures. 

If it was a woman, then art experts should put away their books and spend more time in girlie joints.

Mike Royko was no art critic. But he was one of the best observers and chroniclers of the life and times of this city that you will ever read. He was writing at a time when this city was bitterly divided over race, class and ethnic identity which he alluded to in the column. That would all come to a head the following year as the city burned during the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Royko pulled no punches when it came to describing his passionate distrust of Mayor Daley, the Chicago Democratic Political Machine, and the moneyed establishment, all of whom exerted their considerable influence upon the city and in doing so, among other less charitable things, made the Chicago Picasso possible. To him, the Picasso was nothing more than a bone the powers-that-be threw at the people of this city, a silver lining within a cloud of greed, corruption and arrogance that controlled Chicago. And Royko famously made a living out of pointing out, as Jerry Garcia once sang, that every silver lining has a touch of gray. On someone's comment that the Picasso captured the "spirit of Chicago", Royko picked up on that point and ran with it:

...from thousands of miles away, accidentally or on purpose, Picasso captured it. 

Up there in that ugly face is the spirit of Al Capone, the Summerdale scandal cops, the settlers who took the Indians but good. 

Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak. And of every building inspector who took a wad from a slum owner to make it all possible... 

It has the look of the big corporate executive who comes face to face with the reality of how much water pollution his company is responsible for and then thinks of the profit and loss and of his salary. 

It is all there in that Picasso thing the I Will spirit. The I will get you before you will get me spirit. 

Picasso has never been here, they say. You'd think he's been riding the L all his life.

I suppose few Chicagoans at the time read that deeply into the Picasso; they just shook their heads and failed to see what all the fuss was about. After all, to them it was just a big pile of rusty metal that didn't really look like much of anything recognizable.

Fifty years almost to the day after its unveiling, the rusty Cor-Ten steel of both the sculpture and the building it stands in front of, has developed as promised, a lovely rich, deep bronze patina, Today taken out of the context of the time, Royko's words and the feelings of the average Chicagoan sound philistine and sacrilege. The Picasso is every much as beloved, and part of Chicago's iconography as the lakefront, the Water Tower, the Chicago Theater marquee, the Wrigley Building, and the Marshall Field clocks.

Just as most locals never set foot inside the Art Institute, Symphony Center, or other institutions of so called "high culture", I dare say that Chicagoans deep down consider the Picasso if not beautiful, at least something to be immensely proud of. Just as those esteemed institutions, the Picasso has put this city on the map of respectability. After all, being regarded only as the city of  hog butchering, Al Capone rat-a-tat-tat, and corrupt politicians, gets a little old.

Young man "owning" the Picasso

If you don't obsess over the silly question of what it is supposed to represent, the Chicago Picasso is indeed, to my eyes anyway, a beautiful object in its own right. The form of its graceful, sensuous lines set against the ninety degree angles of the surrounding buildings creates a powerful study in contrast, especially when the light is just right. But that's only the half of it. The Chicago Picasso has done what none of the other great works of public art that were inspired by it have managed to do. It has become part of the urban fabric, and in doing so, has transcended its role as a work of art.

When you think of objects of art in a museum, chances are you take them dead seriously, your immediate reaction is to look and not touch. If that thought doesn't happen to occur to you, there are guards to remind you. Likewise, for a while, the Picasso was cordoned off with chains so you could not get too close, presumably to prevent the natural inclination of children sliding down its base. Removing those barriers played a big role in humanizing the work.

In his speech the other day, Mayor Emanuel said the Picasso belongs to all of us, and that is certainly true. Today without the chains, day and night you can see children and adults as well, using the sculpture as if it were an enormous playground apparatus. It's hard to imagine that Pablo Picasso, himself a child at heart, would have objected. Less exhilarating but equally poignant is the crevice underneath the base which serves at times as a shelter for homeless people.

Daley Plaza, Chicago's agora, is hands down the city's most democratic public gathering space. True to the democratic nature of the place, during his speech the other day at the foot of the Picasso, there were demonstrators shouting Mayor Emanuel down.

As Daley Plaza's centerpiece, the Picasso has borne witness to important moments in this city's history for the last half century. Joy, tragedy, exaltation, frustration, anxiety, hope, and every other imaginable emotion have all played out in front of the sculpture. The plaza is the site of political rallies, demonstrations, celebrations, memorial services, ethnic festivals, a wide range of musical and dance performances, farmers markets and the annual Kristkindlmarkt, the most authentic German Christmas market anywhere this side of the Maginot Line.

In 1983 I was in front of the Picasso at a pep rally for the Chicago White Sox who were about to enter the post-season for the first time in my memory. Four years later I was there when the official announcement was made that Mayor Harold Washington had just died. A few weeks later I was present in the plaza as Eugene Sawyer, a good man who was appointed mayor by the City Council in the most shameful of ways, lit the city's official Christmas tree. I saw Lech Wałęsa there in 1989, soon after he led Poland to a peaceful revolution from its Soviet subjugation. I was there in the late seventies when Iranian students demanded that the Shah be ousted from power. I attended many more events, both happy and sad, at the plaza, that have faded into the recesses of my memory, save for the presence of the great statue and its somewhat ironic role  (given its iconoclastic origin) as a stabilizing force mediating the array of events taking place around it.

Today as we read and hear stories of the anniversary, reporters are still eliciting opinions from passersby over what they think the Picasso represents. For all his shortcomings, miscues and malaprops, Richard Daley the Elder set everybody straight when he said, hitting the nail right on the head: "with modern art, you're just supposed to use your imagination."

At the unveiling fifty years ago this coming Tuesday, either Daley, or his speechwriter came up with another remarkably prescient line:

We dedicate this celebrated work this morning with the belief that what is strange to us today will be familiar tomorrow.

Powerful words spoken by a man not known for profound utterances, how can it be you may ask that Richard J. Daley of all people, son and lifelong resident of the once hardscrapple, provincial neighborhood of Bridgeport, was instrumental in bringing the Picasso to Chicago?        

Daley prided himself on being a builder and Chicago is filled for better or worse, with roads, bridges, buildings, projects, institutions and monuments that are the direct result of his power and influence over his twenty one year reign as mayor of Chicago. In that respect, he was no different from other big city mayors of the fifties, sixties and seventies. Speaking from experience having lived through the era, people back then had a profound faith in the new; in those days the word "modern" was an unequivocally positive term.  No matter how banal, uninspiring, or purely awful it may have been, anything modern was unfailingly preferable to anything old. That is precisely why there was so little objection to the wanton destruction of some of Chicago's greatest buildings during that era, virtually all of them replaced by vastly inferior modern buildings.

That the Picasso was strange or didn't conform to Daley's expectations of what art should be didn't matter in the least, the fact that it was important and new was all he cared about. When he became mayor in 1955, Richard J. Daley could very well have not known Pablo Picasso from a hole in the ground, but shortly after learning that Picasso was the most important Modern artist around, Daley became the artist's biggest Chicago benefactor. And Picasso returned the favor.

The story goes that the architect William Hartmann of the architectural firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill first approached Picasso in 1963 at his studio in Paris, Hartmann allegedly mentioned to Picasso that he was offering him a "site for the most important piece of sculpture in the United States." Never known for a small ego, those words were music to Picasso's ears. Back in Chicago, a man of no small ego himself, Daley was quite pleased, giddy in fact when Hartmann relayed the story that Picasso asked him if Mayor Daley was still in charge of Chicago. Despite the fact that they never met in person, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Hartmann reportedly offered the artist a check for a cool $100,000 for his efforts, which Picasso turned down. The sculpture would be Pablo Picasso's gift to the people of Chicago.

The work itself was the result of several years of sketches and three dimensional maquettes, some of which were displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1966. While the exhibition wasn't overwhelmingly attended, word got out that this would not be your grandfather's public monument. There was a bit of resistance to the construction of what for the time was a groundbreaking project. One alderman, a Republican of course, famously suggested that a statue of Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks be erected instead. There were also rumblings about Picasso's communist sympathies. But Mayor Daley put his foot down and insisted the project go forward, reportedly saying: "Leave the art to the artists, and the politics to the politicians."

Maquette and preliminary drawing of Chicago Picasso
that were exhibited at the Art Institute in 1966,
one year before the unveiling of the sculpture

In the end, it may seem impertinent to lump Chicago's Picasso with the expressways, universities, housing projects and all the other major public works projects built under Mayor Daley's watch, but there it is. Richard J. Daley forever changed the face of Chicago and not all of it for the good. Mike Royko was right about Daley about 95 percent of the time, but he fell a little short with the Picasso thing. It is a piece that defies categories. It can be whatever the viewer wants it to be. To Royko it may have been a metaphor for all that was evil and corrupt about the city. Conversely, it could be a beautiful object representing the more edifying aspects of the spirit of Chicago.  Or if you are so inclined, it could simply represent a woman, an Afghan Hound, a horse an insect, or most likely all the above. Like all good art, it makes you stop and ponder. You may not have the answer but sometimes all that's important are the questions.

Beyond its own merits, the Chicago Picasso opened the door, the flood gates actually, for public arts projects to flourish all across the city and the country. Ironically in this, the "year of public art", officially proclaimed by the current mayor in honor of the anniversary, we are learning of the possibility that some of the works of art mentioned by Rahm Emanuel in his speech in front of the Picasso, are themselves endangered, either by the elements, or by removal. It turns out that of all the works of public art in Chicago, only the Daley Center Picasso is protected by landmark status, ensuring that kids of all ages generations from now, will still be able to slide down its base, and that it will continue to stand watch over the ebbs and tides of the flowing river of Chicago history.

It didn't happen very often in this town, but in the case of the Chicago Picasso, Mayor Daley got the last laugh. This coming Tuesday morning, the fiftieth anniversary of the unveiling, I'll be looking toward the sky and tipping my hat to Hizzoner.

Ya done good with this one Mr. Mayor, real good.

Monumental Headaches

When I was in high school, I read Boss, Mike Royko's muckraking portrait of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. Despite being dismayed at the appalling abuse of power by Daley, who inherited the Cook County Democratic Organization from his predecessors and fine tuned it, well, like a machine, there was always something fascinating to me about the man who ran the city of Chicago from the fifties to the seventies. I regularly attended City Council meetings and sat transfixed, especially when the old man went into one of his famous rants. When Richard J. Daley died, late in 1976, I experienced a profound sense of loss, as I'm sure most lifelong Chicagoans did, who felt the same way about the only mayor many of them ever knew. Admiration for Daley was for me, a kind of guilty pleasure.

I had a similar feeling during my all too infrequent visits down south, upon visiting monuments to Confederate heroes that you find in virtually every city below the Mason Dixon Line. Being a Yankee through and through, I had contempt for the Rebels and especially for their cause. Yet I've always had a fascination with the Civil War and a hesitant admiration for the players on both sides of that tragic conflagration. It was indeed a guilty pleasure for me to see monuments that needless to say, would be quite out of place back home in the Land of Lincoln.

I remember Monument Avenue in Richmond, the most beautiful street in town, lined with grand old trees, post-bellum mansions and churches. Sprinkled in between are the eponymous monuments of famous sons of the South, most of whom came to prominence during the "War of Northern Aggression" as they still call it down there. For good measure, there's also a monument to tennis star, AIDS activist, Richmond native, and all around good guy, Arthur Ashe.

Looking down St. Charles Avenue toward the Robert E. Lee Monument
New Orleans, 1990

Then there was the memorial to Robert E. Lee which prominently stood at the point where St. Charles Avenue enters Downtown New Orleans. That statue was installed on top of a sixty foot column in 1884. General Lee stood at that location, looking north (toward his enemy), until last week. The Lee memorial would be the last of four Confederate monuments to be removed from the Crescent City this year.

It should come as a surprise to no one that the removal of these statues has been controversial. Borrowing a strategy out of the playbook of Richard J. Daley's son Ritchie, workers removed three of the four monuments in the dead of night, wearing masks no less so as not to reveal their identities. Small wonder, tensions ran incredibly high. The contractor originally hired to perform the work backed out after his Lamborghini sports car was torched, and a member of the Mississippi State Legislator, Karl Oliver, made the insightful statement that politicians who supported the removal of the monuments "should be lynched." Oliver  later retracted and apologized for the comment.

As someone who is particularly interested in historic preservation, it pains me to see the removal of landmarks that have been around for nearly a century and a half. On the other hand, I am not African American, someone for whom the men memorialized by those statues, represent the enslavement of my people. 

OK I understand there was more to the Civil War than slavery; we could carry on a conversation all night explaining the causes of the costliest war in our nation's history. But no matter how you slice it, it all comes down to slavery. The fact is, human misery, injustice and morality trump all other matters. Just as you can't have a meaningful conversation about the German government during World War II without bringing up the Final Solution and the Holocaust, you can't address the motivations of the Confederate States to secede from the United States without bringing up the issue of slavery. To some white southerners, the Confederate politicians and generals, and the events of the Civil War represent, honor, gallantry, and the hopes and dreams of a long lost and to them, better world. To black southerners, those men and events represent bigotry, oppression and slavery. So something's gotta give.

The justifications for saving the monuments center around avoiding the obfuscation of history and the slippery slope of removing landmarks some people find offensive. The tone of their discourse ranges from thoughtful and reasonable arguments, to incoherent diatribes about "whining offended liberal crybabies" that we have heard ad nauseam in our current political climate. In fact, opposition to the removal of the statues has become a cause celebre for the self-imposed haters of the left, in both the north and the south.  

Essentially, the defenders of keeping the monuments in place say that their removal represents the white-washing of history at the hands of people who are motivated by political correctness, rather than concern for culture, history and the truth. 

Not so said Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, who delivered last week a most eloquent argument in favor of the removal of the monuments from their current locations. 

In his brilliant, passionate and courageous address to his city, Landrieu claimed that the construction of the monuments in the 1880s was in itself, a whitewashing of history, a deliberate attempt by members of a group who labeled themselves as "the cult of the lost cause" to promote their own agenda regarding the ideals of antebellum culture.

Mayor Landrieu painted a far different picture of the men honored by those statues than the one promoted by their supporters:

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

From an article published in the Winter 1975 issue of Tennessee Historical Quarterly titled The Cult of the "Lost Cause" author John A. Simpson described the means by which members of this cult achieved their goals:

More than anything else, their strategy utilized a mystique of chivalric Southern soldiers and the noble Confederate leadership embodied in Jefferson Davis to achieve their ends. This aspect of Southern myth-making is vitally important to understanding Confederate vindication, for it fused basic truths with nostalgic emotions to revise the picture of Confederate history.

Mayor Landrieu sites theses myths, in refuting the vestiges of the cult of the lost cause as a re-writing of history, which to him negates any claim that removing those vestiges is tantamount to an obfuscation of history:

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

But Mayor Landrieu goes far beyond that:

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

To the mayor, the monuments are themselves direct links to the period of terror toward black people that existed in the South well into the 1960s and beyond.

The most powerful moment in that speech, to me anyway, was when the mayor asked the members of his audience to put themselves in the shoes of African American parents who must explain to their children why their community commemorates in places of honor, men who fought for the denial of their ancestors' basic rights as human beings. The mayor then pointed directly at a couple members of his audience and asked them bluntly, "could you do it, could you?"

Powerful as Mayor Landireu's sentiments are, this is by no means a slam dunk issue. There are hundreds of these monuments scattered throughout the South that inevitably every community will need to address at some point. At the same time, each community is different. Unlike the New Orleans monuments, Richmond's Monument Avenue is a focal point of that city, a national historic site, and one of that city's most important tourist attractions. Levar Stoney, the mayor of the capital city of Virginia, himself African American, made a campaign pledge not to remove the monuments, but to include other plaques and  monuments on the avenue to put the Civil War monuments "in their proper context." Mayor Stoney didn't elaborate on exactly what that meant, but rest assured, any attempt to remove the likenesses of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stewart and Robert E. Lee from their perches overlooking the City of Richmond, will be met by fierce opposition that will make the current battle in New Orleans look like the battle of the three little pigs.

Then there is the issue of precedent, Will the removal of the New Orleans monuments inspire as some believe, a movement to remove every monument that anyone finds offensive? We all know that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well other Founding Fathers of this country, owned slaves. Will people at some point demand that their likenesses be removed from places of honor? How about Christopher Columbus, whose "discovery of America" brought with it, death and destruction to the people who inhabited this land before the Europeans?  I'd be willing to bet that there is not a single monument in America to a person, place or thing, that does not offend someone. Can an argument then be made to eliminate all monuments from all public squares and parks around the country to avoid offending anyone?

I don't think so.

Public monuments serve as symbols of the values of the community in which they reside. As such, I truly believe there should be no broad national mandate over what kind of public memorials should and should not be built or maintained. Rather, that choice should be made at the local level as those are the people that have to live with the monuments and answer for them. That said, it is essential for any local government to reflect the will of the people by democratic means, just as they ideally decide all matters of local governance. The people of New Orleans decided, through their representative government, to remove their Confederate monuments, and the people of Richmond elected a man who pledged to do something quite different. Obviously, no matter what decision is ultimately made, not everyone will be happy.

But such is life. 

Who Owns the Universe?

The other rite of spring: earlier this month, Preservation Chicago released its annual list of the seven most endangered buildings in Chicago. According to Ward Miller, the executive director of the advocacy group, the list is released every year in early March, to coincide with the anniversary the founding of the city, which in Ward's words: "...is a significant time because these buildings tie to the city’s history."

One of the seven items on this year's list is not a building at all, but Chicago's 20th century public sculpture. All of it, with the exception of the iconic Picasso Sculpture in Daley Plaza, surprisingly is not protected by landmark status. I say surprisingly because one of the bullet points civic boosters (including Miller) like to use in defense of their argument that Chicago is a "world class city" is indeed this city's vast treasure trove of public sculpture.

As the entry on public sculpture on Preservation Chicago's list of threatened works points out, we have already lost a good number of significant works of public art including a Henry Moore sculpture that once stood in the lobby of Three First National Bank Plaza. That sculpture was sold at auction last year, presumably being removed forever from public view. Some notable works have been compromised such as the Harry Bertoia kinetic sculpture in AON Plaza, which was broken up and reassembled in greatly diminished form when the plaza was reconfigured in 1994. Other important works are in desperate shape, most notably Marc Chagall's mosaic sculpture, The Four Seasons, which has been severely damaged by the natural elements it represents.

Since the list was released, in barely the blink of an eye, one of the pieces mentioned, Universe, by Alexander Calder, which has stood in the lobby of the former Sears Tower for over forty years. began to be dismantled, and is now headed toward an unknown future.

Universe, by Alexander Calder, which at this writing,
is being removed from the lobby of Willis (formerly Sears) Tower.
This photograph was made in 2009, shortly after the name change of the building.

This whimsical mechanized mobile, consists of geometric shapes representing the sun, the moon and the stars, as well as organic elements from terra firma. Each piece is meant to be in constant motion with the elements moving independently, meaning that theoretically, the objects are never in exactly the same relationship to each other, just as the objects in the universe, (get it?). Unfortunately, quite often the motors used to animate the piece weren't turned on consistently so the entire point of the sculpture was lost on the tens of thousands of visitors who passed by it every day. 

The Calder sculpture was considered by many to be the one saving grace of the lobby of the behemoth building in the west Loop, which despite several attempts at re-design, remains desperately cold and uninspiring. The latest attempt to make Sears/Willis Tower meet the ground in a kinder, gentler manner, (as well as providing extra retail and other revenue-generating space), was announced to the public earlier this year. The design presented by the building's new owner, The Blackstone Group, an investment firm based in New York City, will feature an entirely separate structure that will wrap around the first four stories of the tower, doing away with the current wind-swept plaza whose level base gracelessly encounters the street grade as it rises to the level of the bridges crossing the Chicago River one block west. This is how the entrance to Sears Tower looks today:

The Wacker Drive entrance to Sears/Willis Tower as it looks today from Adams Street.
The barrier wall, part of the original 1974 design, the awkward barrel-vaulted entrance, stuck on in 1985,
and the globe which appeared in 2010, will soon be be counted, along with Alexander Calder's Universe,
among the artifacts of Lost Chicago.

A rendering of the new entrance can be found here in Blair Kamin's Chicago Tribune piece on the new structure.. Careful observers at the public announcement of the new design were quick to notice that nowhere in the new plan did there seem to be any provision for the Calder. Mayor Rahm Emanuel who attended the presentation, remained mum when asked about plans for the sculpture. Ironically, Emanuel proclaimed 2017, the "Year of Public Art" in Chicago.

At this point it may be useful to ask this question: what exactly is public art? Obvious examples are the aforementioned Daley Center Picasso, and Chicago's other Calder, The Flamingo, which not coincidentally was unveiled on the same day in 1974 as Universe.  Both The Flamingo and the Picasso are owned by the public, and they sit atop public space on public land.

Here are Preservation Chicago's recommendations for Chicago's public art:

Preservation Chicago believes that these works of art should be protected and always on public display. Additionally, these works of art are contextual and were designed to be viewed in situ, so to the extent possible, should remain in their original environment. The loss of any of these art pieces is tragic, and we suggest that these public and private works of art, with public access, and on open plazas and semi-public spaces, be considered for thematic Chicago Landmark Designation along with their plazas and open spaces, to guarantee that they will always be here for the public good. 

Fair enough. It gets tricky however when you deal with a privately owned work of art that sits on or inside private property, but is still accessible to the general public, which is the case with Calder's Universe. Should a work of art be like a building owned by a private entity, whose owners have the right (assuming landmark protections do not apply), to do whatever they please with it? 

The answer to that question is not as cut and dried as you might expect. Most folks I assume would believe that, as a matter of principle, the owner of a work of art has every right to display it or not. Heck, even the Art Institute took down the much beloved stained glass windows of Marc Chagall for a number of years (because the director at the time didn't like them), much to the consternation of many of the museum's patrons. When they finally returned on display, the windows ended up stuck in a remote corner of the museum rather their former place of prominence, thereby losing much of their context.

So what about a privately owned site-specific work of art such as Universe? Preservation Chicago argues about the importance of the context of specific works of art, but what happens to the art when the owner of a building decides to modify the space where the art resides? From the renderings of the new entrance to Sears/Willis Tower, it appears that the new space does not even provide the ample clearance necessary to display the piece let alone the original context for which the piece was intended.

Logic would seem to rule in favor of the owners who would face an unreasonable burden to insure that they would need to work around the requirements of existing works of art, whenever they perform what they deem to be necessary alterations to their buildings.

On the other hand, in the seventies and eighties, it was common practice for the city to offer zoning and tax breaks, as well as other perks to encourage developers to create open spaces populated with works of art. Given that, it would seem that the owners of these buildings would have some sort of obligation to the public to maintain those works of art.

Now suppose the original owners, the beneficiaries of those perks. are long gone. Are owners a few generations removed, obligated to maintain their art, and its context, into perpetuity?

Another case brought up by the Preservation Chicago piece is the Jean Dubuffet sculpture called "Monument with Standing Beast", outside of the James R, Thompson Center in the Loop. Like the Picasso and The Flamingo, the Dubuffet sculpture is publicly owned and sits on public land. Unfortunately the government is considering selling the building and the property upon which it stands. Would the new owners be obligated to preserve this piece in situ? Logic would tell us probably not. If the Thompson Center is demolished, (a distinct and unfortunate possibility), that sculpture would have lost its context anyway.

Even Calder's Flamingo is considered endangered, as the Federal Government who operates the plaza where the sculpture resides, is considering consolidating all of their operations into one of the three buildings on the site and selling off the plaza to private concerns. Arguably no piece of public art in Chicago is more tightly connected to its context than the bright red organic curves of that Calder work which perfectly compliments the rigid black and white geometry of the Mies van der Rohe Federal Center. Its loss would be a devastating blow to the city.

So where does that leave us?

Clearly there is a conflict between the "public good" and private property rights. Even our strapped-for-cash government seems to be unmoved by the question of public art. I'm sorry but I don't have a clear answer to this complicated matter.

Even if we wanted to, we probably can't pass a law to insure that all of our works of public art, whether they be publicly or privately owned, be maintained and preserved in the context in which they were intended.

Short of that, it would seem that the best solution is to provide every incentive to the owners of Chicago's tremendous collection of public art, including the government at all levels, to look at the big picture. If Chicago is to be a world class city (whatever that means), then it must lead the way culturally as well as economically.

It seems that when we led the nation in encouraging the creation of public art in our city forty years ago, we got it, but somewhere between then and now, we lost our way.

Star Wars Wars

Shame on me for having so long avoided the subject of the construction of the George Lucas vanity museum known officially as the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Frankly it's a subject that hasn't exactly piqued my interest. Unlike the Obama Library which I think would be a tremendous asset to the city and the people of Chicago, I'm lukewarm about the Lucas venture. And unlike the plan to build the presidential library in an existing historically significant park, a move I strongly oppose, plopping down the Lucas museum in the Soldier Field parking lot, or on the current site of the old McCormick Place building, doesn't irk me much at all.

Plop away I say.

The real problem as I see it, is that the controversy surrounding the construction of the museum has become yet another symbol of the dysfunction that has come to define the way this city has been run for the past several years.

In an article written in Friday's issue of Crain's Chicago Business, Greg Hinz asks the question: "Who gets the blame for the Lucas Museum fiasco?"

According to Hinz, just about everybody involved is to blame and for the record, I couldn't agree more.

Hinz's list begins with Mayor Rahm Emanuel for his failure to make a convincing case to build a privately owned venture on Chicago's most valuable public land. He also scores very low in Hinz's book either for not anticipating the inevitable dispute over that land, or his sheer arrogance in believing that by the power vested in him, he could just steam roll over a century's worth of opposition to building on the lakefront.

According to Hinz, Lucas and his wife, Chicago investment banker Mellody Hobson are to blame because they also failed to properly sell the museum to the public, acting as if their "philanthropy" alone were just cause to grant them their every wish, including the location and choice of the design of the building. That design, to my eyes resembles a headless Jabba the Hut, clad in gleaming white Storm Trooper garb. Oh I forgot, this is not supposed to be a Star Wars museum so any resemblance must be purely coincidental.

Rahm-bashers come next on the blame list; you know them as the folks who according to Hinz, believe that anything the mayor supports, "has to suck."

Last but far from least in Hinz's opinion is Juanita Irizarry, the director of Friends of the Parks, the organization who has filed a lawsuit against the city to stop construction of the museum on the grounds that it violates the public trust doctrine, which grants title to all land created out of formerly submerged portions of the lake. to the state whose responsibility is to preserve that land for public use. In this case, one would be hard pressed to view the proposed site, currently the parking lot between Soldier Field and McCormick Place, as public space. In addition to the building housing the museum, the new project would add public green space to the site where there currently is none.

According to Hinz, the intransigence of Irizarry and Friends of the Parks, whom he claims, bear the biggest responsibility for the impasse, is due to their arrogance and myopia. They are according to Hinz,  "so utterly stuck on their own view of the universe that they ignore any other reality or need." The Rev. Michael Pfleger goes even further. He claims they are racist.

Excuse me?

Pfleger might just be parroting the views of Ms.Hobson, who along with her husband, Lucas Skywalker, has given a substantial amount of support to Pfleger and his church over the years. Hobson claims that the real losers, if her museum is not built, will be the "young black and brown children of Chicago." On the Friends of the Parks' actions regarding the Lucas Museum, Pfleger, not known for subtlety, says:

...it is unacceptable that a group of un-elected, unaccountable elites have the temerity to stand up and say they speak on behalf of our city's "public trust." 

Let me be clear—the Friends of the Parks have proven that they are no friends of Chicago. They have shown that they speak not for my community, not for the people who are dying every day in our city's streets; rather, they speak for a small group of elites obsessed with preserving the past and imperiling our collective future.

Now I buy into the idea that building the museum will provide job opportunities, directly through the museum and indirectly through the added tourists who will come to the city to visit. It will no doubt engage in outreach programs for disadvantaged children, a handful of whom will be inspired by the experience to do great things with their lives, just as kids today who come to similar programs in all the other major institutions in the city. But I'm not clear how the museum would address the needs of the people who are dying every day in our city's streets. Perhaps the Lucas's hired gun Father Han Solo Pfleger believes potential victims will learn self-defense techniques from the museum's proposed Jedi in training program.

As for Princess Leia Hobson, if she were truly concerned about the "young black and brown children of Chicago", one would think it would be of little significance to her on which side of Lake Shore Drive her museum was built. I'm not suggesting as many have to build the museum in disadvantaged neighborhoods on the far south or west sides (as if that would ever happen), which would really have had an impact on the communities that Father Pfleger describes. Rather I believe a good compromise would be to build it just a few hundred yards to the south and west of the currently proposed site, say on the recently cleared site of the former Michael Reese Hospital, a patch of land ripe for development. There the Lucas Museum would be a tremendous anchor to a burgeoning new community. 

Some claim that since it's the Lucas's money, they should get to choose where their museum goes and what it should look like. Well perhaps, but then please don't call the "gift" of the museum an act of philanthropy, call it an act of self-aggrandizement. 

On the other hand, while deep down I respect the Friends of the Parks and their mission, I do believe that in this case, they are going overboard with their assertion that the museum violates the public trust doctrine in any practical way. Since 1960 with the construction of the original McCormick Place (an egregious violation of the public trust doctrine), the ten block stretch of lakefront between the Field Museum and the south point of McCormick Place has blocked the view of Lake Michigan if not access to it. There are many who believe this unfortunate situation can and should be rectified by the demolition of the underused second McCormick Place building, built after the first was destroyed by a massive fire in 1967. The problem with that plan is the cost of tearing down the enormous structure, which would be borne by the taxpayers, would run in the hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps more. That would be a bitter pill to swallow, especially during lean times for the city and state coffers. If the Friends of the Parks win their lawsuit and prevent the construction of the Lucas Museum, it's more than likely that the site in question will remain in all its lackluster glory, barely distinguishable from the desert planet of Tatooine, for the foreseeable future.

Personally I believe the Lucas Museum would be a welcome if not particularly essential addition to the cultural landscape of Chicago. Judging from its PR conduit, its slick website, the Lucas people are bending over backwards to distance the museum from the Star Wars franchise. No, it is to be a museum featuring the vast art holdings of the Lucases, displayed with the intent of using them within the context of telling stories. The web site is vague in explaining how they intend to pull it all off, the only clue is the catch phrase: "this is to be a 21st century museum designed to change the way we think about museums."

Whatever.

All this talk about the cultural value of the joint is sure to sway some of the "elite" folks  derided by Father Pfleger. However I'm not so sure keeping Star Wars at an arm's length is such a good idea. If stimulating job growth and opportunity in this city by drawing as many visitors as possible to the place is the city's main concern, perhaps a Star Wars theme park would do a better job than a museum of narrative history. After all, George Lucas's place in history is as the creator of one of the most successful entertainment empires of all time, not as a museum curator. I'm sure name recognition alone will draw people to the place at the outset, but once word gets out that once there you can't participate in a mock light saber battle, enter a sound booth where you can change your voice into Chewbacca's, or experience hyperdrive behind the wheel of a virtual Millennium Falcon, people might lose interest.

If that were the case, it wouldn't be the end of the world if the museum doesn't get built in Cbicago. But as always, nothing is ever so easy. The failure of Mayor Obi Wan Emmanuel and the city of Chicago to secure the development of what should have been a no-brainer of an asset that would benefit many and harm no one, would send out to the world the unequivocal message that this city is an impossible place to do business. 

If that happens, rest assured the Friends of the Parks will bear the blame and their chairman, the dark lord Darth Juanita, will be placed in the unenviable position of being known throughout town as the person who crushed the hopes and dreams of the "young black and brown children of Chicago." Furthermore, the entire conservation/preservation community of Chicago will be held guilty by association for being impractical, unyielding, and an unwelcome obstacle to this city's development and progress. Rest assured that whatever credibility there exists between most of the people of Chicago and these groups will be lost.

For the Friends of the Parks, this is a battle of principle. To them, every inch of the lakefront must forever remain inviolate, regardless of the current status of the area in question. If the Lucas museum is built as planned, nothing of value will be lost, no dangerous precedent will be set, and if anything, the lakefront would gain public green space. If Friends of the Parks succeed in preventing the construction of the museum, the open lakefront movement would gain little if anything, other than bragging rights. I have nothing against fighting battles purely out of principle, but there are times when those battles are simply not worth winning.

In a short while. a federal appeals court will decide whether or not to proceed with the Friends of the Parks lawsuit to halt construction of the Lucas Museum. For the sake of the entire conservation/preservation community of Chicago, all the landmark parks, buildings and institutions in desperate need of our help saving, and especially for the sake of Friends of the Parks, I hope they lose this battle.

Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years

My friend Rich Cahan has done it again.  Along with Michael Williams he just compiled and published the third of (what his wife hopes to be) a trilogy on the life and work of the Chicago photographer Richard Nickel. Cahan's first Nickel book, They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture, was a straight ahead biography which depicted his subject as a driven young man whose life's work began as a grad school project documenting the work of the architect Louis Sullivan. The project which Nickel made his own, to record and save everything he could of the architect's disappearing work, turned into an all consuming passion that ultimately cost him his life. In I972 Richard Nickel was crushed underneath the rubble of Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building while attempting to salvage artifacts of the building as it was being demolished.

The second book was called Richard Nickel's Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, a book that allowed Nickel's camera speak for him. Beyond proof sheets, Nickel didn't make many publication or exhibition prints of his own work, so the lion's share of images in this exquisitely printed book had not been seen outside of a small circle. The book, not limited to the work of Louis Sullivan, or architecture for that matter, could be considered the definitive work on Richard Nickel the photographer, as it is to the best of my knowledge the most comprehensive collection of his photographic work to be found.

Richard Nickel was the Charles Marville of Chicago. Marville if you recall was the photographer who was commissioned to document the city of Paris as it existed before and during its mid-nineteenth century destruction and re-construction under the hand of Baron Haussmann in the reign of Napoleon III . Here is a link to a site describing a major exhibition of Marville's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York.

Unlike Marville, Nickel's work documenting the destruction of his city was for the most part, self-commissioned. Richard Nickel's Chicago shows us the ways and means of a soon to be post-industrial city, rooftops with their smokestacks and water tanks, steel rails reflecting the sun, automobiles in motion, and the incessant building up and tearing down of a restless city.

Early on, Nickel photographed people. Many of his early pictures show the influence of his school, the Institute of Design, especially the work of Harry Callahan with whom Nickel studied. The very first picture in the book proper in the chapter titled, The Passing Scene, is a provocative image of a woman standing alone in front of the Tunnel of Love at Riverview amusement park. Her expression suggests concern or maybe disappointment. Perhaps she is waiting for a lover who has stood her up, or one that never existed at all. One can't help but think of this image as a metaphor for Richard Nickel and his first love, the City of Chicago. a love that was unrequited.

As Callahan taught Nickel how to construct a photograph, it would be his other major influence at the ID, Aaron Siskind, who would teach him how to tell a story. Siskind initiated the Sullivan project and the two worked closely on the project during Nickel's remaining time at the Institute and beyond.

Eventually Nickel became a one man band with the Sullivan project which remained incomplete at the time of his death. Were it not for the steadfast work of Nickel's close friend and accomplice in salvaging Sullivan's work, architect John Vinci, Nickel's project would have died along with him in the rubble of the Stock Exchange Building. Forty years after Nickel's death, Vinci managed to complete Nickel's project with the publication of the massive tome The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan.

Cajan's third Nickel book, Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years, What He Saw and What He Wrote, puts the photographer/preservationist's life, work and times into context. This time along with Nickel's photographs, his words speak for him. Nickel was a compulsive letter writer who kept carbon copies of all the letters he sent out as well as copies of letters he never sent. The current book reproduces in full color, selections of Nickel's letters to friends, collaborators, newspaper columnists, architects, landmarks commissioners, Mayor Richard J. Daley, the residents of buildings about to be demolished, and the owners of those buildings whose help he enlisted in gaining access before and during demolition, even though he openly opposed their intentions to destroy them. The book also reproduces Nickel's personal notes, sketches and detailed itineraries for photographic road trips in minute by minute detail.

Two of Nickel's struggles to save Chicago Landmarks are covered in great detail in the book, the Garrick Theater and the Stock Exchange Building, two of Louis Sullivan's greatest works.

Another great loss, and perhaps a bigger personal blow to Nickel was the demolition of Holibard and Roche's Republic Building on State at Adams. A self-portrait of Nickel on the roof of the Republic graces the cover of They All Fall Down. The new book includes two Nickel photographs of the Republic that I've never seen. The first is a stunning cityscape from about 30 stories up looking southeast. The stepped pyramid atop the Metropolitan Tower with its famous beehive beacon, dominates the picture. Grant Park and Lake Michigan can seen in the background. Virtually every building in the photograph still exists, save for the Republic Building, smack dab in the middle of the frame. The Republic stands out from its neighbors with its classic Chicago School facade, gleaming, (despite its grimy surface), in the hazy late afternoon light.

The other photograph, taken from the NW corner of State and Adams, shows the building toward the end of its demolition, with only the first two floors remaining. (the caption mistakenly identifies the picture taken at the start of the construction of the building that would replace it). Signs on the scaffolding proudly announce the coming of the new building, the Home Federal Savings Savings and Loan Building. Even the architects of the new building, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, shamelessly display their stylized logo, despite the fact that part of the ornament of the doomed building was still visible through the scaffolding. Talk about a lack of respect! In the photograph, passersby go about their business, causing me to wonder what must have been going through their minds as one of the best buildings to have ever graced this city turns to dust before their eyes, about to be replaced by a second rate building, despite the first class pedigree of its designers. My guess is that most of them, as was the popular opinion of the day, thought that new necessarily meant better.

Richard Nickel begged to differ. In one letter reprinted in Cahan's book addressed to a Chicago Daily News reporter he wrote:

I had a good look recently at that Home Federal S&L building which replaced the Republic several years ago. That looms in my mind now as one of the great tragedies... or rather as one of the most willful unnecessary destructive acts to Chicago School heritage. I'll  never forgive Hartmann (Bill Hartmann, then senior partner of Skidmore Owings and Merrill) and SOM for that. The Republic was a work of art, and the new building is nothing... maybe some tinsel!

Nickel wrote a much more scathing letter to the editor of a publication called The American City, responding to an article they wrote in praise of the Garrick Parking Garage which replaced the Garrick Theater, The article pointed out the design of an ornamental panel which consisted of 233 slabs of concrete that were cast from a molding of a detail from the Sullivan building, plus one of the original details, all stuck together. in a large mass. Nickel scoffed at the caption of a photograph of the garage that said: "Chicago's new Civic Center Parking Garage represents a growing awareness of Chicago's architectural heritage." In response Nickel wrote:

...what about the lines, "the building pays graceful tribute to the memory of "Louis Sullivan"? They wreck one of his masterpieces, and you conclude it is a tribute. How? Why? Would  you say that if someone wrecked St. Peter's Cathedral [sic] in Rome and erected a garage on the site,  using some statues and whatever, that that was a tribute to St. Peter???

Whoever wrote that article is soft in the head...

Nickel was one of the leading advocates for saving the Garrick Theater. It turns out that he was successful in convincing none other than Mayor Richard J. Daley that the building was worth saving. The city of Chicago filed an injunction in an attempt to halt the demolition of the Sullivan building, but were over-ruled by the courts.

Daley was not so moved to save the old Stock Exchange Building. In a letter to CBS News, praising their coverage of the fate of the building, Nickel wrote:

it doesn't surprise me at all that hizzoner Daley is the dumbhead who lacked the imagination to save this unquestionable work of art. ... 

The question now is, well, it obviously isn't even a question... why do we have a landmark commission (headed at the time by the aforementioned William Hartmann), which gets $100,000 a year (?) funding, and is getting nothing done, is working at odds with the City Council and the blankety-blank mayor?

Nickel goes on in the letter to lambaste the cultural elite of Chicago who turned a blind eye to the fate of the city's architecture, by failing to show up for demonstrations to save the building:

Where was the cultural leadership of Chicago?? The architects, the curators, the professors and historians, etc. So perhaps it boils down to our getting what we deserve... 

Cahan follows that letter with another, a bitter attack of the city fathers, perhaps written under the influence, a double scotch to be exact, to William Hartmann himself. What does the letter say? Well you'll just have to buy the book to find out.

What follows these two letters are a series of heartbreaking photographs of the construction of the scaffolding around the Old Stock Exchange Building, symbolizing the demise of both the building and the photographer. This time, passersby stop and look in dismay at the sight of impending doom for a marvelous building.

The book is a fascinating look into the psyche of Richard Nickel, into what drove him, and the conflicts he faced as the life's work of the artist he chose to devote a good portion of his life to, was crumbling all around him.

It's easy to imagine Nickel as a bitter, tragic figure, pursuing a quixotic mission, doomed to failure, much the way Cahan portrays him in his biography. But the correspondence in this book show another side to the man: funny, engaging, awkward and perhaps like any good artist, just a bit off.

One letter (presumably never sent), which Nickel put huge crosses through, is a comical, rambling, stream of consciousness rant to a potential collaborator, referencing everything from sailing, to the author's car troubles, to his frustration about the apparent sexual advances from a male art historian. As if it were necessary to point out which side of the fence he was on, Nickel writes: "I often do a lot of things I don't want to do just to accommodate people and then I get impossible and bitchy. And art history is so full of old ladies...and whilst I'm not married, that doesn't mean I like to travel with men, or associate with men much at all." then at the bottom of the typed page he writes out by hand: "I'm beginning to appreciate women more and more! Backlash?" There he closes the letter with "Regards, Dick", but he wasn't finished. On the flip side of the page he typed another half page explaining the tone of the letter by saying he was sitting listening to (the composer) Janacek while downing some Johnny Walker Black, a "real luxury." Once again he closes the letter, this time with "Drunken Dick."

Nickel did have one release valve and that was a sailboat which he kept moored in Burnham Harbor. He delighted in inviting friends to sail with him. One post card printed in the book was an invitation written to the daughter of the ID professor and photographer, Arthur Siegel. "Oh I love to have pretty girls aboard the boat..." he writes, "wear your bikini (or whatever the girls are not wearing nowadays)." At a recent lecture at the Art Institute promoting his book, Cahan flashed on the screen that postcard, not commenting on its content, when who should turn up but the recipient of that letter, Julie Siegel. Being perhaps the one person in the room who actually knew Nickel, she tried to assure the audience that while tragedy befell Richard Nickel, he was quite a lovely, engaging character, not at all the sullen, miserable wretch as he is often portrayed.

Having written three books on Richard Nickel, Richard Cahan must now be considered the world authority on the subject. His quest to document the man rates up there in tenacity with Nickel's pursuit of Louis Sullivan. Cahan said at his talk at the Art Institute that when you think about it, Richard Nickel was a failure in everything he did. He lived much of his life with his parents in Park Ridge, Illinois. He wasn't successful in preserving any of the Sullivan buildings he worked diligently to save. He never came close to finishing the Sullivan project. And he never finished the house he bought for himself in Bucktown.

This time I beg to differ. Cahan is certainly right in asserting that Nickel left this world with an unfinished legacy. But his work to save the most important Sullivan buildings did make a difference. The group that Nickel led, protesting the raising of the Garrick Theater in the early sixties was a ragtag bunch that managed to get the mayor's attention and his tacit support. By the time the Stock Exchange Building was about to turn to dust, there was a more significant presence of protesters opposed to the demolition. The ultimate loss of the building and the tragic death of Nickel inside it, galvanized the preservation movement in Chicago. It would be premature to say battle lost but war won, as the struggle to save Chicago's architectural heritage continues. Yet I'm convinced that Nickel both in life and in death was and is the driving force of the preservation movement in this town and for that we have much to be thankful, as well for the efforts of Messers Vinci and Cahan who have worked so diligently to care for and preserve the legacy and the work of Richard Nickel.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you.

The Last Ride at Riverview

Inspired by the impending demolition of the 54 year old Western Avenue Overpass which began this week, I took the kids for one last ride up the old roadway for a final chance at a view of the city that will be gone forever. If you recall from two posts ago, that roadway's purpose if you don't know its history, may seem perplexing. It was built to bypass the tremendously popular Chicago icon, Riverview Amusement Park. Perhaps when the overpass was built in 1961, Riverview and its million and a half yearly visitors seemed like a fixture that would be around forever. Alas, six years later after the 1967 season, Riverview closed for good. Long after the Shoot-the-Chutes, the Bobs, the Parachute ride and Aladdin's Castle were turned to scrap and dust, the roadway remained until nature ran its course, and a few years ago a decision had to be made, either rebuild the dilapidated, out-of-date structure, or simply remove and replace it with a conventional roadway. 

Many motorists no doubt would have preferred the former solution but such is life. Sorry to say it, but as of March 1, 2016, the last ride of Riverview is no more.

The Western Avenue overpass as it looked during its last weekend of operation.
Here you see local traffic on the right, while on the left,
some of the final motorists to ever use it "fly" over Belmont Avenue.

After Riverview closed, from a practical standpoint, for drivers on Western the overpass was a nice, but relatively insignificant bonus as it enabled them to avoid only one stoplight. From the street level as you can see, the overpass is something of an eyesore, and as far as I can tell, there was little opposition to its demolition.

The intersection of Belmont, Western and Clybourn.

Of course nothing is ever perfect, and the demise of the overpass will no doubt result in more backups at the five way intersection of Belmont, Western and Clybourn Avenues. That's not counting the horrific congestion its demolition and reconfiguration will cause. The whole project is not scheduled to be completed until September, 2017.

A symbol of the pre-eminence of the automobile in the early sixties, the overpass like the expressways of this city, was built without any consideration of its surroundings. It obscured the main entrance to Riverview on Western Avenue, visually cutting it off from the other side of the street. Visitors arriving on foot from the east had to walk under the overpass whose diminishing ceiling under the north ramp had to have been a nuisance, especially for tall people:

The main entrance to Riverview on Western Avenue before the overpass was built.
The presence of the "Green Hornet" streetcar dates this historic photo (photographer unknown)
 to sometime before 1958.
The structure of the Silver Flash roller coaster is in the background.

This was shot from roughly the same spot as the photograph above,
showing how the overpass would have obscured the view of the entrance from the street.

For an eight year old like me however, walking under the overpass was a prelude to the fun house with its rooms of distorted proportions. But for grownups on foot, the cramped, unwelcoming, somewhat threatening confines of the space underneath the overpass certainly had to diminish the experience of entering the park:

My daughter demonstrating the experience I had at her age while under the overpass, feeling very tall.

I also wanted to show my kids the site of one of the happiest places of my childhood. Unless you have a thing for irony, you'd be hard pressed to apply Riverview's old slogan. "Laugh your troubles away" to the site today. The closest thing that resembles lost Riverview is the huge police radio tower that was built on almost the exact site of the Pair-O-Chutes ride. With a bit of squinting and a whole lot of imagination, you can almost see the old contraption that thrilled and terrified Riverview patrons at the same time:

A rendering of the Pair-O-Chutes at night (artist unknown)
If you use your imagination and squint really hard,
you may be able to conjure up this; but open them...

...and this is what you see, the police tower which sits upon the site of Riverview's Parachute ride.

Of course the functions of the two structures couldn't be more different, and opening your eyes to the reality of the place is like waking from a fantastic dream and finding yourself back within the confines of your old, bleak, hum drum world. If you recall the story of my mother's two delinquent classmates who ditched class one day only to find themselves stuck on top of the parachute ride back in the forties, how appropriate, or ironic it should be that the ride would be replaced by the ultimate symbol of authority. Perhaps that tower should be named for the two boys. Perhaps it already is.

It only gets stranger. As if it were a twisted joke, the police headquarters/courthouse proper sits upon the site of Aladdin's Castle, Riverview's fun house. Your sense of fun would really be tested here, especially if you found yourself checked in as a guest of the police station's iron hotel.

I'm only speculating but I suppose that given Riverview's dubious reputation in its later years for being crime ridden, a lot of folks applauded the fact that the first thing to be built on the old site would be a police headquarters. It was the late sixties after all, a time when the tension between those who loved authority and the police, and those that hated them was even stronger than it is today. That a facility representing the state's authority would be built upon a site that once represented joy, freedom,  and a little bit of controlled mayhem, is very powerful symbol indeed.

As a token effort to pay lip service the old amusement park as well as add a touch of color and levity to an otherwise dour environment, artist Jerry Peart was commissioned in 1980 to create a sculpture, titled, appropriately enough, "Riverview", intended to evoke the feeling of the long lost park. Did he succeed? Well, you be the judge...

Before (photographer unknown)

After

It may be a pleasant work of art of sorts, but there's no question where I'd rather hang out.

For many years, the vast majority of the old site of Riverview was taken up by acre upon acre of concrete, which served as parking spaces for the staff and students of DeVry University. Most of the time the parking spots were empty, making the area great for student drivers, skateboarders and roller bladers but not much else. Recently a few other schools replaced much of the concrete and now there is a little campus of schools that is an improvement:

A new campus has brought some more life to the site.

I shot the photograph above while standing near the site of the famous Bobs roller coaster which would have been to my left, just out of the picture frame. Here you're looking north, in the direction of the Shoot-the-Chutes and the Tunnel of Love, a ride I didn't get the point of until about eight years after Riverview closed. By the time I understood, it was too late...

Riverview Tunnel of Love, 1943 (photographer unknown)

Fortunately there is a small section of the Riverview site that retains some of the atmosphere of the old park. It fronts the river and could legitimately be called Riverview Park, even though that's not really its name. It's called Richard Clark Park and comprises a sliver of the west end of the old Riverview site. Now that the overpass is no more, Clark Park contains the only relics from Riverview that you will find on the site. For starters, I'm told there are cottonwood trees that were around at the time of the amusement park. I spent a good time photographing them about fifteen years ago while working on a photographic project documenting the Chicago River. If you look hard enough, you'll also find some remnants such as footings from the old Shoot-the-Chutes ride:

The Shoot-the-Chutes, the first ride ever built at Riverview,
and the cable railway called the Sky-Ride, the last, (photographer unknown)

My son standing upon what remains of the Shoot-the-Chutes.

Clark Park has a lovely river walk that is perfect for a stroll day or night. Even better, some of the devil-may-care spirit has returned to Riverview in the form of a bike dirt jump and pump track. Without any bikes, my kids still had a blast running up and down this crude but effective obstacle course that takes advantage of some of the remnants and topography of the old picnic grounds that surrounded the Shoot-the-Chutes:

A little bit of the spirit of Riverview lives on...

This looks like fun. If I were about ten years younger I'd try it out myself.

The bike course pictured above, maintained by an independent group, Chicago Area Mountain Bikers, has brought back a little of the fun and mayhem to the north side of Chicago, something it sorely needs.

Last Saturday we went for a final ride on the Western Avenue Overpass, the last ride at Riverview. I asked my children, one on the passenger side, the other on the driver side, to document the ride. Strap yourself in folks for a hair-raising, spine tingling, ride. Hold on for dear life...

Photographs by Rose and Theo Iska

Ok so maybe it wasn't  the Silver Flash, the Comet the Jetstream, the Flying Cars, Hades, the Rotor, the Chute-the-Chutes or even the Wild Mouse. It certainly didn't have the cache of the Bobs, or the Pair-O-Chutes. More than likely, most of the people who used the overpass everyday didn't think much about or even notice it, or the great views of Chicago it provided.

Like the old amusement park it was built around, it had its dark side to go along with the thrills (yes I mean thrills). Eventually the realities of economics, safety and practicality deemed it had to go. So be it. We've been through this before and will again and again. The city, ever growing, ever changing, stops for nothing, least of all memories of a long gone, but very sweet past.

The overpass on its last day of service, February 29,2016.

Goodbye old friend.