Which side are you on?

I just filled out an online poll asking whether I support Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Having gone on the record before the current controversy up there, I've already expressed dismay about Walker and his handling of federal funds going toward the development of high speed rail. It should then come as no surprise that I do not support Gov. Walker.

The poll also asked if I supported labor unions, if I think they're too powerful, and if I thought that workers in the public sector should be paid the same as their private sector counterparts. Honestly I'm a little more on the fence with these issues. Yes I think that the right to bargain collectively is a good idea, although I don't have it where I work. Unions served a very important purpose back in the days of the robber barons, and quarter an hour wages for back breaking, life threatening work. We've come a long way since that time, we now have the five day work week, the minimum wage, the ability to get disability payments if we are injured at work, pensions for when we retire, laws that protect our health and our rights on the job and many other benefits that we working stiffs would not have were it not for the unions. I'll be the first to say that we all owe a tremendous debt to the men and women who fought and sometimes died for the right of workers to unite.

Indeed the unions did a good job for all of us, American workers for a time were higher paid and better taken care of then their counterparts anywhere in the world. Of course all good things must come to an end and American companies simply could not compete by paying the relatively high wages and benefits that the unions demanded. American companies were excoriated when they moved their plants overseas or across the border to Mexico where they could pay the same worker a fraction of what they had to pay an American worker.

There in a nutshell is the divide between the right and the left regarding business and labor. In short, does a company's responsibility lie with making a profit, or with taking care of its employees? I can't tell you how many Facebook links I've received to the labor song "Which Side are You On?", or the number of people who have changed their profile picture to the fist raised in solidarity with the public workers of Wisconsin. I also have a few FB friends who have expressed in less dramatic fashion, tacit support for the the governor.

The company in question up in Wisconsin is the government, and profit may not be the rallying cry for the right, but solvency is. Governor Walker claims that the state is well on its way toward bankruptcy and drastic measures must be taken to keep the state afloat. On the left, folks say that Wisconsin is not in the dire state that the governor claims. It is in fact in way better fiscal shape than Illinois for example. They say that the governor is using his ploy to break the unions to gain attention and support from right wing circles and his fat cat friends.

Personally I find the governor's grand standing to be deplorable. Clearly he is trying to make a name for himself. I think it would have been much more effective and responsible for him to go to the unions and negotiate with them first, asking for concessions wherever necessary. If they said no, then it would be perfectly reasonable for him to go to the public and say: "Look, these are tough economic times and we all must sacrifice. I've tried to negotiate with the unions in good faith but they are unwilling to budge."

Instead he tries to push through a law taking away the unions' right to bargain on anything except salary. Now this is a man who posed in a political ad wearing boxing gloves. Clearly he knew his actions would create the resentment, protests, and media circus that we've seen for the past two weeks. The name Scott Walker is now known throughout the world. Congratulations Guv, you got what you wanted.

On the other hand, I come from Chicago, perhaps the ultimate union town, a place known for excesses such as exhibitors at trade shows not being allowed to plug a cord into an electrical outlet without paying a union electrician fifty bucks for the privilege. I've witnessed first hand the devastating loss of industries and the livelihoods they provided because of the greed of both the companies AND the unions. I've seen the well paid union teachers at my son's school vote overwhelmingly against adding ten minutes to their five and three quarter hour work day so the kids could have one recess break. And two years after no pay raise for myself, each year the expenses go up in our building as we are forced by union rules to give our janitor, who is better paid than I am, who will not lift a finger to do anything that is not explicitly in his job description as well as several things that are, a significant raise.

Clearly we all must sacrifice to get through these tough times. Perhaps what's going on now in Wisconsin is just the tip of the iceberg, as these issues likely will be surfacing soon, at a state legislature near you.

Hopefully it will be handled elsewhere better than it is in Madison right now.

Here are two excellent articles that illustrate my conundrum, making good points for both sides, this one against the governor and this one, chastising the unions.

So which side am I on?

I think I'll just sit this one out.

Folks, it doesn't get any better than this

Here in Chicago, those of us who are sports fans are in the midst of a frenzy this week that we haven't seen since, well for me since the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup last year. For most however, that is to say those who don't give a hoot about hockey, the match-up between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers this coming Sunday in the NFC Championship Game, is indeed a once in a lifetime event. True the two football teams play each other twice every year, and in every game the tradition of the Bears/Packers rivalry is hyped ad nauseum during the incessant sports-babble that takes place before and after each professional football game. No matter how poorly one or both teams may be at any given time, there are always expectations usually fulfilled, that the game will be exceptionally emotional, intense and brutal, even by football standards.

Of course this game is different, it will determine which team will go to Super Bowl XLV, the Promised Land of professional football. As the Packers and the Bears are both charter members of the National Football League, this is by far the league's oldest continuous rivalry. To give an idea of the significance of these two teams to the NFL consider this, the winner of Sunday's game will be awarded the George Halas Trophy, named in honor of the founder, owner and long time head coach of the Bears. The winner of the Super Bowl in two weeks will be awarded the Vince Lombardi trophy, named in honor of the legendary coach of the Packers .

Despite all the hoopla, the Bears and Packers have hardly ever faced each other in a post-season game. The last time that happened was right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Bears won that one by the way, 33-14 at Wrigley Field and went on to beat the New York Giants the following week to win the NFL Championship Game. Of course hardly anyone cared as we had just entered World War II.

Much as we in the Midwest like to make of this rivalry, it did not make ESPN's list of the top ten great sports rivalries. There is indeed much to quibble about the list, not the least of which is the fact that it only includes sports played in North America.

The point has to be made however that in recent history the Bears and the Packers have rarely been good at the same time and have seldom played against each other in a game of real consequence for both teams. A notable exception was the year 1963, the last time the Bears won the NFL Championship before there was a Super Bowl. The Packers won the NFL Championship the two previous years but 1963 was the Bears' turn. They beat the Packers twice that year, in fact they were the ONLY team to beat them in 1963.

The big game that people watch mostly for the commercials, the one that is measured in Roman numerals was first played in 1967. Can you guess who won Super Bowls I and II? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the Bears.

Since then both teams have had their moments in the sun, including two Super Bowl victories between them, but they have not played against each other in a championship game.

That is until now.

As I see it, great sports rivalries are based on at least one of three criteria:

• one or both teams possess tremendous historical success,
• the teams are in the same division and continually battle for position in the standings, or
• the teams' fans would despise each other regardless of any team affiliation.

The Packers and the Bears rivalry is special in that all three criteria apply. It may be hard to imagine today but both teams were once powerhouses in the NFL. The Bears have a total of nine NFL championships, most of them coming in the 1930s and 40s. They are second only to the Packers who have twelve. The two teams are of course division rivals and as mentioned above play each other twice per season.

It's the third category that is the most salient, where a game becomes more than just a game, but a measure of national or civic pride. Imagine a cricket match between India and Pakistan. Or the rivalry between two great cities such as Madrid and Barcelona when their teams face each other on the soccer pitch. Or the 1969 world ice hockey championship when the Czechoslovak national team defeated the USSR just months after Russian tanks rolled into Prague crushing the original Velvet Revolution.

Some would say that at least north of the Illinois-Wisconsin border, the rivalry between the Bears and Packers is as intense as all three of the above put together. Just ask Bears players who tell stories of their team bus being pelted by rocks thrown by grandmothers sitting in lawn chairs along the highway leading to Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Or go up to the Brat Stop just north of the border off I-94 and see the enormous stuffed bear wearing a Chicago Bear jersey hung in effigy. True, our two states have never been officially at war, and neither has ever held dominion over the other. Yet there remains, especially with our neighbors in the great state to the north, a great deal of animosity towards those of us living south of the border. I can't honestly say the reverse is true but perhaps my father-in-law who insists on wearing his full Packer regalia whenever he visits us down here in Bear country would disagree.

Like any great passion, the love of one team and abject hatred of another is usually handed down from generation to generation. Not so with me. My parents both hated football and I spent a lot of time as a child in Milwaukee, so I didn't grow up to be a Packer hater.

No, my true hatred of the Packers officially began on November 23rd, 1986. It was the season after the Bears won Super Bowl XX and they were having another tremendous year. That day the Packers were playing the Bears at Soldier Field and Charles Martin a defensive tackle for the Packers was shown on TV, wearing a towel with two numbers on it, 9 and 34, the numbers of the Bears Jim McMahon and Walter Payton respectively. It was to be his hit list. Now the indestructible Payton was no match for any defensive player no matter how large, tackling him was usually more painful for the tackler than for the intended victim. McMahon was another story. In the second half, after McMahon threw an interception, Martin body slammed McMahon to the ground dislocating his shoulder and ending his season. The Packers argued that the play was justifiable as a quarterback after throwing an interception is considered fair game. The refs disagreed and kicked Martin out of the game and the league for his cheap shot, suspended him for two games. Despite their 14-2 record, the Bears without McMahon went on to lose to Washington in the first round of the playoffs, and to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, for me it was the beginning of a beautiful enmity.

Still I have to respect this Packer team which on paper at least is probably superior to this year's Bears. Fortunately as they say, that's why the game is played on the field and not on paper. The Bears and the Packers split their two games this year, the Bears won (or more accurately the Packers lost) the first game in Chicago and the Packers held on and won the hard fought last game of the regular season up in Green Bay.

For the fans of the two teams, this game is far more important than the Super Bowl which this year will seem rather anticlimactic. Of course there are those who couldn't care less, and question why any of this matters. They see sports, football especially as modern day tribal warfare, a barbaric ritual enabling fans, mostly men, to return to their caveman roots, to cheer on warriors doing their bidding on the field to beat the crap out of other warriors fighting for our rival tribes in neighboring towns or states.

Well they're probably right. There is certainly much to be said about the outright hostility and violence that fans sometimes exhibit toward one another. Fortunately, at least in this country, sports hooliganism is fairly uncommon and rivalries like the Packers/Bears are usually played out in good humor. On the positive side, a winning season brings a community together in ways that no other public event could. This week I've seen perfect strangers, people who otherwise would not give each another the time of day, strike up conversations with one another about the game. It is a cause to celebrate and goodness knows, those causes are few and far between these days.

I dare say that a Packers victory on Sunday would mean more up in Wisconsin than a Bears victory would down here. I'm reminded about a front page article in the local paper I read while visiting the in-laws in Wisconsin on the day the Packers were to play a big playoff game several years ago. It was a point-counter point article between two Roman Catholic priests who seriously debated whether or not God was a Packer fan.

How foolish. Everybody knows that God wears blue and orange every Sunday. This Sunday I'll be sitting in my man cave cheering on my team as they hopefully beat up on the invading tribe from the north.

Go Bears!


Post script:

The Packers alas beat the Bears who seemed to have forgotten to show up for the game in the first half. The second half was another story and after losing their starting quarterback Jay Cutler to injury, and their second stringer Todd Collins to incompetence, third stringer Caleb Hanie led the team on two spirited scoring drives while the defense ended up playing heroically stopping the much lauded Packer offense on a number of key drives, keeping the Bears in the game until the end. Final score: 21-14.

The Packers will play the Pittsburgh Steelers in Super Bowl LXV on February 6th in Dallas, to which I will add:

Go Steelers!

Post-post script:

Guess I was wrong. Congratulations, gulp, World Champion Packers.

American System-Built Homes

Back in Milwaukee on our annual family visit, we returned to the 2700 block of West Burnham Street just past beautiful Layton Boulevard to re-photograph the six American System-Built Homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Throughout his career, Wright was interested in building housing in his distinctive style that would be affordable for the rest of us, and these particular homes were early ventures into that territory.




In the second decade of the Twentieth Century, Wright entered into a working relationship with the developer Arthur L. Richards whose company would implement Wright's System-Built designs in developments all over the country. Re-usable plans, and materials which would be cut to size at the mill and then assembled on site, greatly cut the cost of building the homes. The six Burnham Street structures would serve as model homes for the project and they were built on what was at the time the edge of the city's south side in 1916. Four of them are duplexes of nearly identical design although the westernmost is the mirror image of the other three. The remaining two houses on the block are single family homes.


Unfortunately the United States entered World War I in 1917 and home construction all over the country was suspended. Meanwhile Wright had other commitments and his relationship with Richards soured. That leaves this wonderful, eccentric collection of homes on Burnham Street and a few other System-Built homes scattered throughout the Midwest including two on the far south side of Chicago, as the only extant examples of this ambitious project. The Wilbur Wynant house in Gary, Indiana, as previously mentioned in this space, was recently demolished after many years of neglect.


The six houses make up Milwuakee's Burnham Street Historic District, and they were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Wright in Milwaukee is a site that deals exclusively with the Burnham Street homes, including detailed history, as well as tour information.

The homes are well worth a visit off the beaten path.

High speed to nowhere?

The following is a comment and a response to that comment that I found following this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about the governors-elect of three states, including Wisconsin, promising to reject hundreds of millions of federal dollars earmarked for the creation of High Speed Rail systems in their states. Here is comment one:

Florida's governor seems opposed to HSR as well. He's talking about "privatizing" a rail system there. He may be on to something. Let's privatize roads! Let the markets decide, you know, that Ron Johnson "creative destruction" thing. Let's put rail up against roads in a competitive, free-market scrum and let capitalism decide who lives and dies. But it's got to be a fair fight -- with no socialist subsidies either way.

And the response:

I love it. Since we have had roads and cars shoved down our throat for so so so long it is easy to forget that oil companies make billions because they do not pay for the roads that people use. Car companies also do not pay for the roads. It appears that when you get the federal government to subsidize something it forces the population to use something they might not otherwise use because they are already paying for it. The goal of transportation is to foster economic growth and profit indirectly not directly. Roads do not turn a profit.

These two folks bring up a fact that is so often neglected in the debate over public subsidies for transportation. Namely that few of us ever factor in what it costs to build and maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to enable us to drive our cars. We do calculate the steep cost of owning a car, payments, gas and insurance, because that comes directly out of our pockets. Yet it would be impossible to use those cars without the roads, highways and bridges that are built and maintained by the government at the local, state and federal levels. In the winter they are plowed, in the summer the potholes are filled. Government provides police and safety workers that help prevent us from killing each other and when accidents do happen, someone comes along to take care of the victims and someone else comes along to clean up the mess, all on the government's payroll. And after the roads and bridges have served their useful purpose, the government steps in and re-builds them. We take our roads and highways so much for granted that it is inconceivable that one day they will not be there for us.

If roads were privatized as the first commenter suggested, and it were up to us to pay directly out of our pockets every time we used them, and I'm not referring to the token amount we pay on tolls, gas taxes and license fees, I mean really pay for them without any government subsidies, we would not be having this conversation about whether or not we should encourage the development of high speed rail. It would be a done deal.

Of course passenger rail service today is subsidized as well, but not nearly to the extent that driving is. The cost of a rail ticket is comparable to an airline ticket (whose industry also benefits from government subsidies). Since the current system of public transportation in this country, both long and short distance, is for the most part, expensive, slow, and woefully inadequate for serving most people's needs, the vast majority of Americans, myself included, feel compelled to own a car. The choice between traveling long distance by rail or by car is unfortunately a rather simple one.

Governors-elect Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Scott of Florida, all Republicans fulfilling campaign promises, have taken action to stop the creation of High Speed Rail systems in their states by announcing that they will reject federal money that has already been set aside for their states. The argument of the politicians is that the money should go into repairing highway infrastructure rather then into some government "boondoggle" to build a train that "no one will use." It fit right into their "let's cut spending and lower taxes" song and dance, music to the ears of the constituents who voted for them, most of whom are probably married to their cars and would never conceive of taking a train in the first place.

"Let's just privatize passenger rail" is the mantra of those against government subsidies for High Speed Rail, knowing full well that it will not succeed as passenger rail has never succeeded in making money. True there once were the glory days of passenger rail, back when railroads were thriving businesses and traveling by rail was still glamorous. But even then a railroad was lucky if it could turn a marginal profit off of passengers. It was always transporting freight that made the railroads their money, passenger service existed almost entirely for advertising and public relations. The Interstate System of highways built under the Eisenhower administration marked the beginning of end for most of the railroads, as the trucking industry took over much of the long distance freight business and the automobile began to reign supreme as the cross country transport of choice for most Americans.

As the two commenters above pointed out, roads do not turn a profit either. But roads and highways are seen in this country as a necessity while passenger rail is seen as a nice thing to have but something we can live without. This is not so in other parts of the world.

Americans have witnessed in the first decade of the 21st Century that driving and air travel both have their downsides. We saw what happened after the tragedy of September 11, 2001 with the complete shut down of air travel in the U.S. for several days, and the economic blows the airlines took in the subsequent years. And while we have for many decades been the beneficiaries of cheap gas, we all know that the oil market is capricious, and that the days of inexpensive fuel, both in terms of cost at the gas pump and cost to the environment, are numbered. Alternative transportation systems benefit all of us, now and in the future. Without them, one day we may wake up to find that the once most mobile of nations has become paralyzed. Not only will HSR benefit the economy, but it will also play a critical role in national security. I believe that not supporting it is both short-sighted and foolish.

The future governors rightly claim that HSR will cost the states money in operating costs, perhaps in the low tens of millions per year, certainly not chump change. On the flip side there is this: once they reject the HUNDREDS of millions of dollars of federal money, it will be gone from them forever along with opportunities for new support industries, jobs and tax revenue. The money will be freed up and made available to other states to further along their own development of HSR. States such as Illinois are chomping at the bit to get it and the opportunities that it will provide.

Governors-elect, Walker, Kasich and Scott however are sticking to their guns, hell bent it seems to leave their states behind in the dust.

Visiting Frank

One of the great joys of parenthood is following your children's passions and doing your best to encourage them. Architecture has been a keen interest of mine for many years, but I can't take credit for my son's latest passion, Frank Lloyd Wright. That came as a result of a field trip to the FLW Home and Studio in Oak Park at the end of last school year.

Since then he, his little sister and I have made a couple of pilgrimages to Oak Park which has the the world's greatest concentration of the architect's work, and also to the neighborhood of Hyde Park to see one of his most famous and beautiful homes, Robie House.

In that vein, our family decided to devote much of our summer vacation to Frank Lloyd Wright by visiting as many of his works as we could in his home state of Wisconsin.

Any FLW tour of Wisconsin has to revolve around a visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Spring Green. It was there, on property owned by his family, that the architect built his home, Taliesin, and his school of architecture, also referred to by that name, which continues on to this day.

In nearby Mount Horeb, my wife found a home designed by one of Wright's Taliesin apprentices, the guesthouse of which is available for lodging. Her touch of brilliance insured that we would not only visit Wright, but also have the first hand experience of living Wright.

This Prairie Style home was built in 1953 for the renowned chiropractor Dr. Clarance Gonstead. Its architect, Herb Fritz Jr. as both student and disciple of Wright, designed the house in what Wright described as "organic architecture," that is to say, built in harmony with nature. This house, like so many of its Prairie Style brethren, does not stand out from its surroundings, but rather blends in, its horizontal motifs echoing the contours of the flat prairie landscape.

Typical to the style is the fireplace which is the centerpiece of the home. As you can see from the picture, this is true even in the guesthouse of the Gaustead home. The hearth, the most important part of the home is where, according to Wright, the family should congregate. It is placed not along an outside wall where it would block the view to the outside, but rather in the center of the room. This is significant because there is a strong connection between the interior and exterior of the house. Wright and his followers took great pains to make this point clear in their treatment of the windows where exterior walls typically extend without a break into the interior. The intended effect is that there is not a clear distinction between inside and outside.

To visit the buildings of the Foundation at Taliesin you need to take a tour from a Foundation member. As we had young children along, the only tour available to us included only the school, not the house.

The house was the center of the most salacious and tragic episode in the architect's life. You can read about it here. Suffice it to say, this is no doubt the reason why children are not invited as discussion of the tragedy that took place inside the house in 1914 is inevitable.

The school, pictured here, evolved from a design which was originally built as the Hillside Home School, commissioned by Wright's aunts as a school for children. Both the house and the school continuously changed over the decades as Wright used them as laboratories where he would work out design concepts before committing them to actual commissions. As the school was intended to be a work in progress, little attempt was made to make the building permanent. Consequently the Foundation has its hands full preserving the building.

The drafting room is the most amazing space in the school. It has a large open space with natural light pouring in from the windows which provide a beautiful view out to the grounds of Taliesin. The students work under spectacular trusswork beams, their now anachronistic drafting tables serving as bases for their CAD enabled computers. T-squares and triangles, other ancient tools of the trade adorn the room, no doubt more as decoration for the benefit of the visitors than for the students who probably wouldn't know what to do with them.

Another great space is the theater where students as part of their curriculum are expected to put on performances. As is typical for Wright, this is an unconventional space with two tiers of seats meeting each other at an oblique angle. A beautiful pieced felt curtain, its design abstractly depicting Taliesin and its environs, was given to Wright by his students. Our guide pointed out that upon receiving the gift, Wright immediately found fault with it, insisting that the region depicting the sky was too prominent. His students dutifully dyed the fabric with coffee, thereby toning it down a few shades.

The deference to FLW given by the Foundation guides borders on the obsequious. My wife and I have taken this tour before as well as the tour of the school's winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and noticed that Wright has developed what could be described as a cult following. He is reverentially referred to as "Mr. Wright" and seldom is heard a discouraging word about him. This time however our guide let slip a few good ones, dealing mostly with the architect's gargantuan ego. "Mr. Wright..." our guide pointed out, "not only claimed to be the greatest architect who ever lived, but also the greatest architect who will ever live." She went on; "I guess we'll have to come back in 500 years to see if that's true."

One thing is certain, considerable work will have to go into them if any Frank Lloyd Wright building will be around in 500 years. It is said that FLW didn't believe that his buildings needed to survive him. The cost of maintenance alone on one of his homes is staggering. He was an innovative and radical architect who was not afraid to take chances, employing building materials and techniques that were often impractical and unwise.

Despite his countless clients, the person Wright seemed the most driven to please was himself. Anyone who stands taller then Wright's 5'6" stature, certainly understands this as it is not uncommon for ceiling clearances to be well under six feet. Here is a deliciously iconoclastic post about the architect from the 2 Blowhards blog.

Later in our trip we visited Wingspread just north of Racine. Built in 1938, the magnificent home of H.F. Johnson, president and C.E.O. of the Johnson Wax Company, was Wright's last home to be built in the Prairie Style. Outspread wings (giving the house its name), radiate from the central core of the home which consists of the family room, centered of course by an enormous fireplace. In fact there are no fewer than nine fireplaces in the home.

The room is lit from daylight filtering from hundreds of window panes in the ceiling. The centerpiece of the tour of Wingspread is a video featuring Sam Johnson, the son of H.F., who moved into the place during his early teens. Sam recounted a particularly amusing story of a dinner party in the house with several prominent guests. The sound of thunder began to rumble in the distance, and father and son Johnson looked at each other with trepidation as their worst fears were about to come true. The roof leaked, badly. As rain drops dripped on the elder Johnson's bald head, he told the maid to bring over the phone. In front of his guests he picked up the receiver and demanded the operator connect him with Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright in Scotsdale Arizona. Much to the amazement of the guests, Wright picked up the phone at the other end. Johnson in a stern voice said, "Frank, you've built me a beautiful home, my family and I are in love with it, but the roof leaks. I am at this very moment sitting at dinner with the governor, and several prominent members of our community, and rain is pouring in above my head." At this point there was dead silence in the room as every word of the response could be heard by all. Without missing a beat, Frank Lloyd Wright told Mr. Johnson: "Well why then don't you move your chair?"

Sam Johnson also recounted a story about a visit by Wright to Wingspread. This was after H.F's second wife, the one for whom he built the house, died suddenly. His third wife understandably was never in love with Wingspread. When she moved in she brought her furniture with her. Wright woke up early in the morning on the second day of his visit. He proceeded to move all of Mrs. Johnson's furniture out and brought up the original furniture he designed from the cellar. When Mrs. Johnson awoke, she was astonished to find FLW sitting in her re-furnished living room. Wright said to her: "now isn't this better?" Mrs. Johnson in no uncertain terms told Frank Lloyd Wright to leave her home immediately.

He never returned.

It was H.F. Johnson who commissioned Wright to build his company's famous headquarters in South Racine. Again, unconventional is the rule. Wright designed the administrative building to be another great open space with a roof comprised of glass (currently being replaced by acrylic) tubes, which bathe the working space with diffused natural light. The roof is held up by the building's most distinctive feature, its lily pad inspired columns. As photography was not allowed inside the building, here is a link to a photograph of the interior. You can see from the photograph that the Wright designed furnishings still are in use. The open workspace was a break with the traditional office design of the time and is a testament not only to Wright's design skills, but also to the innovative thinking of H.F. Johnson whose company continues to this day to set standards for corporate ethics and civic responsibility.

Unfortunately, another innovative design as well as the most prominent building on the Johnson Company campus, the Research Tower is no longer in use as its provision of only one stair well is no longer up to building code.

Wright was the paradigm of the idiosyncratic, difficult, creative spirit. He led his life as he alone saw fit, which resulted in scandal, forcing his departure from Oak Park. Oak Park has long since forgiven, they've in fact made a cottage industry out of him. But in his home state with the exception of the Wright sites, there seems to be little love lost for its native son. Indifference was mixed with tales of Wright's egotism and his misplaced sense of entitlement all during our vacation. Part of the trip included an unscheduled stop in Milwaukee to see one of the Wright homes featured in my son's book on Wright. Since we hadn't planned visiting the city, we didn't look up the address of that particular house. No problem we thought, we'd just head to our favorite bookstore and find a book on Milwaukee architecture. If that failed surely someone at the store would know where it was. Unfortunately we failed on both counts, no book, and most surprisingly to me, no knowledge of the house.

Undaunted we headed to the nearest branch of the Milwaukee Public Library where we found a very helpful librarian who was impressed with and eager to participate in our nine year old's quest. She found out all she could for us about Wright in Milwaukee. Not only did she locate the house we were looking for, but also a block consisting of Wright's American System Built Homes on the city's south side, as well as the flying saucer inspired Greek Orthodox Church in the suburbs that was to be the architect's last design. She even added a story of her own about a long deceased aunt from Spring Green who, like many of her neighbors, did not approve of Wright's penchant for being above the trivialities of everyday life such as paying his bills.

Our intended destination, the 1916 Frederick C. Bogk House turned out to be only a few blocks away. It was designed during the same period that FLW worked on the Imperial Hotel in Japan. In contrast to his Prairie Style homes, this one has an imposing presence on the street and, as its owner describes in this interesting article, is strongly influenced by Japanese and even Mayan design, a marked departure at the time for the architect.


The south side homes are closer to the Prairie Style Wright with their exaggerated, cantilevered eaves and strong geometric lines. These were built as affordable middle class homes, an early incarnation of his much later "Usonian" designs. As the self-appointed architect for the ages, Wright clearly had his sights on bigger and better things to do than simply build homes for the wealthy. He wanted his influence to spread across all society and was convinced, like so many architects of the 20th Century, that he had a better idea of how people should live. Unlike the Swiss architect Le Corbusier whose famous plans for the city of the future would have had people stacked on top of one in other in cities that would be made up of clusters of glorified housing projects, Wright's idea for the ideal city gave each family an acre of land to tend as they saw fit, as long as they did it Wright's way of course. In FLW's "Broadacre City" there would be no political administration. It would be (not surprisingly) the architects who planned and organized the way people lived. Wright saw the automobile as the great democratizing force and even looked forward to the day when private planes and helicopters would be as prevalent as cars.

As much as Le Corbusier's vision lives on in the long discounted notion of high density public housing, Wright's vision will forever be tied to suburban sprawl, another idea whose time has come and gone, or at the very least, has been discredited.

Today we are left with as this picture depicts, the irony of perhaps the quintessential expression of suburban life, aluminum siding, cladding a house by the greatest proponent of suburban life, Frank Lloyd Wright. It's kind of fun to think that this sublime indignity may have been in some way the third Mrs. Johnson's final revenge on the Master.

All that said, there is much to admire about Frank Lloyd Wright's work. He was a radical thinker, thoroughly original, an innovator whose ideas, far fetched as many of them were, prompted to us to re-think the way we live and how we relate to the world around us. Most important he crated a body of work that is unique and stunningly beautiful.

I think it is no accident that there is something immediately appealing to children about Wright's work. Sam Johnson lovingly described in the Wingspread video the joys of growing up in a house with a crow's nest from which he could command divisions of armies of friends attacking each other from the grounds of the estate divided by the wings of his fabulous house.

My son was completely swept away by the whimsical design of the children's room in the Home and Studio. He, as I was some forty years earlier, was struck by the design of a house, the likes of which neither of us had ever seen before. Clearly, someone was responsible for creating this wonderful space and, eureka, the idea of the architect suddenly became apparent. It is not surprising that when most Americans hear the word architect, the name they are most likely to conjure up is Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright was by all accounts a fantastic teacher who had a great fondness of children, if not particularly, adults. Blue Balliett in her novel The Wright Three, about the fictional near demise of Robie House (which takes on its creator's cantankerous personality), suggests that Wright was perhaps atoning for the sins of abandoning his six children in Oak Park.

In any case, my son is completely enthralled by the architect and his work, and through this interest has developed a new found appreciation of architecture. One can certainly do worse than teach a nine year old boy that there are worthwhile things in life besides baseball and football.

And for that, all I have to say is, thank you Mr. Wright.

FIB's

Here is part one of the report by Dan Egan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that deals with Chicago's reversal of the flow of the Chicago River, and its role in the possible introduction of an invasive species of fish, the Asian carp into the Great Lakes.

Chicago reversed the flow of the River over 100 years ago if you remember, to avoid dumping its sewage into Lake Michigan, the source of its drinking water. As horrible as the thought of dumping sewage anywhere is, one has to remember that, well as a guy who owned a porn shop explaining his place in society once said to me; "shit is shit, and it has to go somewhere."

So for 110 years the recipients of our effluence have been the communities along the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, and ultimately the beleaguered Gulf of Mexico itself. And how you may ask did these communities react to Chicago's action to send its crap their way? Well it's a great story, one that is recounted in the MJS article. Essentially the state of Missouri sought a Supreme Court injunction to stop the opening of the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. But before the court had a chance to review the case, in the middle of the night of January 17th, 1900, crews were dispatched from Chicago 30 miles downstream to open the canal, instantly making the matter a moot point. It's the Chicago way after all.

It is this same waterway that conservationists fear will be the conduit for a very unwelcome fish to enter Lake Michigan and ultimately the entire Great Lakes ecosystem. The Asian carp was originally introduced into the Mississippi River in the 1970s by catfish farmers to remove algae and particulate matter from their ponds. Periodic flooding made the ponds overflow thus introducing the fish into the Mississippi River. These fish are big, weighing up to 100 pounds, have a rapacious appetite, and are extremely prolific. If they manage to find a way into the Great Lakes, they most certainly will wreak havoc with the ecology of the world's largest supply of fresh water.

Clearly something has to be done and it is looking more and more like the answer is blocking off the Sanitary Canal from Lake Michigan. This would have a deleterious impact on the economy, directly effecting the shipping (predominantly barge) industry which relies on the waterway to move heavy materials from the lake to the river. Clearly the biggest impact however would be the fact that our waste will be released into Lake Michigan, once again, the source of our drinking water.

This scenario may not be as dire as it sounds. Sewage, which is already treated in Chicago before it's released into the water in a process briefly described here, would then be chemically disinfected to remove harmful bacteria that would otherwise contaminate the water supply. This disinfection process is done in virtually every major city in the country already except Chicago. The MJS article goes to great pains to excoriate the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the governmental body in charge of disposing of the area's waste, for resisting measures that have been standard procedure elsewhere in the country. In this article from the Chicago Tribune, the Reclamation District did its own study which found that chemically treating water not surprisingly has its own ecological drawbacks. To be fair it must be stated that most environmental groups claim that this study is mostly stonewalling on the part of the District.

The MJS article is misleading in implying that Chicago simply dumps its untreated waste directly into the waterways. It states that Chicago's canals contain "bacteria at levels that can be more than 1,000 times higher than what is discharged at Milwaukee's Jones Island sewage treatment plant." This may be true but what the article fails to point out is that Chicago's canals were built specifically for the purpose of transporting diluted, treated water while Milwaukee returns its treated water directly into Lake Michigan, the source of its drinking water. What Egan describes as Chicago's "crude sewer system", was actually, along with Brooklyn's, the first comprehensive combined sewer system constructed in the United States. Chicago's system in fact was an engineering marvel given the city's flat topography. In the 19th Century while Chicago was transporting its diluted sewage away from its water supply, Milwaukee was dumping raw sewage directly into Lake Michigan and to some extent, continues to do so today.

The tone of this one sided MJS article is clearly biased against Chicago, which is their prerogative. But the fact is that if Milwaukee and other cities had the opportunity and wherewithal to address their sanitation issues as Chicago did at the turn of the last century, they most certainly would have done exactly as we did. I find it just a little disingenuous that journalists and the public at large up in the great state of Wisconsin, given the less than stellar record of dealing with their own sewage, feel compelled to bash Chicago in what is turning out to be a supremely complicated problem. Perhaps a little case of the pot calling the kettle black no? But what do I know, I'm just another "fucking Illinois bastard".

Re-reverse the flow?

This interesting plan to help save Lake Michigan comes from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In Chicago we like to boast of our grand undertakings, and the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River was certainly the grandest of the grand. Unfortunately we tend to obfuscate the other side of the story. This is another side.

Almost as enlightening is the comments section where our neighbors to the north profess their never ending love and admiration for us.