The Phantom Tower

Here's a good Chicago trivia question for you.
It's a picture clue:

In this view looking up Michigan Avenue from Monroe Street, three of the buildings pictured were at the time of their construction, the tallest building in Chicago. Name them.

I bet you can't. Well at least I couldn't name all three a week ago, as at least one of my picks would have been wrong. That in itself might be a clue, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Years ago, the syndicated columnist Sydney J. Harris used to have a regular feature called "Things I Learned on my Way to Looking up Other Things." That was back in the day before the internet when you'd look through a general interest reference book, perhaps an encyclopedia, and come across information that might catch your eye that had absolutely nothing to do with what you were looking for. Internet searches are more focused, so if the web is your primary source of information, you're less likely to be looking up say, gestation periods of mice, and find yourself engrossed in an article about the Gettysburg Address.

But I digress. As I was looking up information for an earlier post on the Sears/Willis Tower on the Emporis website, I came across a link that listed the chronology of the tallest buildings in Chicago, beginning in 1854.

It turns out the same list can be found on Wikipedia, which is what I copied here:

Building	Dates as tallest building in Chicago	ft (m)	Stories
First Holy Name Cathedral	1854–1869	245 (75)	1
Saint Michael's Church	1869–1885	290 (88)	1
Chicago Board of Trade Building	1885–1895	322 (98)	10
Masonic Temple Building	1895–1899	302 (92)	21
Montgomery Ward Building	1899–1922	394 (120)	22
Wrigley Building	1922–1924	438 (134)	30
Chicago Temple Building	1924–1930	568 (173)	23
Chicago Board of Trade Building	1930–1965	605 (184)	44
Richard J. Daley Center	1965–1969	648 (198)	32
John Hancock Center	1969–1973	1,127 (344)	100
Aon Center	1973–1974	1,136 (346)	83
Willis Tower	1974–present	1,451 (442)	108

Now if you know your Chicago buildings, you'll realize that the three buildings in my picture on the list of one time tallest buildings in the city are the Aon Center, (formerly the Standard Oil Building, the tower on the extreme right), the Wrigley Building, (the bright white building which you can see off in the distance in the lower left quadrant of the picture), and the Montgomery Ward Building, (also known as the Tower Building, the third building from the left).

The list contains a few surprises in its omissions. If you're an old time Chicagoan like me, you might be surprised that the Prudential Building, (or One Prudential Plaza as it's now called, the Mid-century Modern building with the huge antenna), is not on the list.  Between the time it was built, 1955, until the construction of the John Hancock Building on North Michigan Avenue in 1969, most people in town assumed the Prudential was the tallest building in the city because it featured an observation deck, and pretty much billed itself as such. Mea culpa, I declared it as Chicago's one time tallest in my appreciation of the building in this blog post. There I called it "the tallest building in the city and the most prominent building in the skyline." Well at least the second part was true. The first part was partially true, as the Prudential did once have the tallest roof and highest occupied floor in the city. But if you count the statue of the goddess Ceres atop the Chicago Board of Trade Building on La Salle Street, as the folks who compile building height stats do, that 1930 building is taller, by all of four feet! It became a moot point when the Richard J. Daley Civic Center was built in 1965, a full 47 feet taller than the Prudential. Still the top of that building is devoted to mechanical equipment so the Prudential still could claim the highest occupied floor in Chicago until 1969.

These may seem trivial distinctions until you consider the brouhaha over One World Trade Center in New York City, which was completed in 2014. The roof of that building is 1,368 feet above the ground. The roof of Sears/Willis Tower in Chicago is 1,450 ft. The difference is that One World Trade has a decorative mast on top of the building, which looks very much like an antenna, bringing the total package from ground to pinnacle, to 1,776 feet, an easy number to remember (no coincidence there). There was a huge debate at the time between backers of the two cities over which town's building was taller. The official arbiter of such things, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, determined that the thing on top of the New York building was indeed an architectural element, as opposed to a an antenna, which meant it counted toward the building's official height, making it by decree, taller than the Chicago building. Here, on their site you can read about their criteria, which is in agreement with the Chicago list which takes into account architectural elements like church spires and statues atop buildings, but not antennas and other purely functional elements.

Another surprising omission from the list is William LeBaron Jenny's Home Insurance Building. Topping off at 138 feet, the ten, later twelve story 1884 building was dwarfed by the 290 foot steeple of St. Michael's Church. Yet the significance of Jenny's building is far greater than the church steeple as it was the first tall building to have been supported both inside and out, by an interior fireproof metal frame. Ask any dyed-in-the-wool Chicagoan and he or she will proudly tell you that Jenny's building was the "world's first skyscraper." Given the term, one would assume that distinction alone would make it, upon its construction, the city's if not the world's tallest building. It wasn't even close. However "skyscraper" is not a technical term describing a particular construction technique, but a relative term that describes any tall building in relation to its surroundings. In Chicago, a city with today, perhaps 100 buildings with more than 50 stories, no one would call a new ten story building a skyscraper, regardless of how it is constructed.

Beyond their usefulness for providing esoteric facts and trivia game answers, if you actually put some thought into them, lists like these can be useful tools in the study of the history of a city. One might reasonably assume for example, that the tallest building in a city at a given time is an indication of the relative importance of the institution that built it. For example, if you look at the list of the chronology of the tallest buildings in Chicago, you'll notice that in the early years, the tallest buildings were churches. You might conclude that Chicagoans at the time were more concerned about building temples to God than to Mammon. This in fact is an interesting topic which has no simple answer, it is the jumping off point for such disparate topics as19th Century religion and building technology.

There is a practical reason why commercial buildings were not as tall as church steeples in the mid-nineteenth century; the first passenger elevator wouldn't appear in Chicago until the mid 1860s. Before that, it was simply unfeasible to build "walkup" buildings above a certain height as no tenant would rent a space where they'd have to climb more than six or seven flights of stairs to get to their office or home. Church steeples on the other hand, could be built at the discretion of their congregations, to great heights, some of them exceeding the height of a present day twenty story building. The taller the steeple, the greater the prestige of the congregation, and also the neighborhood in which it stood. While religion certainly wasn't the centerpiece of early Chicagoans ' lives, the presence of churches in a community gave at least the appearance of cultivation, that contrasted with the get-rich-quick, no-holds-barred, boom town mentality of Chicago, the necessary yin to the young city's yang, so to speak. In the 1860s, the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted cynically wrote in his journal:

A church steeple will be built higher than it otherwise would be because the neighboring lot holders regard it as an advertisement of their property. There is nothing done in Chicago that is not regarded as an advertisement of Chicago.

Spire of St. Michael's, Old Town
The tallest of tis kind in Chicago

 With the introduction of the elevator and William LeBaron Jenny's technical innovations, multi-story buildings could now be as tall as the economic conditions of the time permitted. As commercial buildings grew taller, church steeples did not. With the exception of the 1924 Chicago Temple Building which features a church steeple placed atop an office building, (a unique temple to both God and Mammon), the tallest stand-alone church steeple in Chicago is still St. Michael's in Old Town (not to be confused with St. Michael the Archangel Church, another landmark church with an enormous steeple that defines its community, South Chicago). After the destruction of the Church of the Holy Name in the Great Fire, the steeple of its successor, Holy Name Cathedral, would be several feet shorter than it predecessor's. Rather than compete for height with the new skyscrapers, church congregations in Chicago found new ways to distinguish their houses of worship, such as placing them adjacent to parks and other open spaces.

When I first conceived this post, my idea was to simply print the Emporis/Wikipedia chronology list
accompanied by some comments and contemporary photographs of the nine extant buildings, and historical photographs of the three that have been lost. In doing a little background research, I opened up my copy of the Encyclopedia of Chicago, to their entry on skyscrapers. That article included the book's own chronological list of the city's tallest buildings. To my surprise, their list doesn't quite match the Emporis/Wikipedia List. Here is the Encyclopedia of Chicago list, as borrowed from their web site:

Building	Date	ft	Stories	Address
First Holy Name Cathedral	1854	254	1	733 N. State Street
Water Tower	1869	154	1	800 N. Michigan Avenue
Holy Family Church	1874	266	1	1080 W. Roosevelt Road
Masonic Temple	1892	302	21	State and Randolph, NE corner
The Tower Building	1899	394	19	6 N. Michigan Avenue
Wrigley Building	1922	398	29	400 N. Michigan Avenue
Chicago Temple	1923	568	21	77 W. Washington Street
Chicago Board of Trade	1930	605	44	141 W. Jackson Boulevard
Richard J. Daley Center	1965	648	31	50 W. Washington Street
John Hancock Tower	1969	1,127	100	875 N. Michigan Avenue
Aon Center	1973	1,136	83	200 E. Randolph Street
Sears Tower	1974	1,450	110	233 S. Wacker Drive

Two buildings on the Encyclopedia of Chicago's list are not on the Emporis list, the Water Tower, in place of St. Michael's Church, and Holy Family Church, rather than the old Board of Trade. Now if you look closely at this second list, there is something curious about the inclusion of the Water Tower. Built in 1869, the Water Tower's height of 154 feet is exactly 100 feet shorter than the building it succeeds, the old Church of the Holy Name. That church was destroyed in the Great Fire while the Water Tower stands to this day, so it makes sense that as the tallest building left standing intact, the Water Tower would have succeeded the church as the tallest building in the devastated city. But the fire took place in 1871, so I can only conclude that the 1869 date is a mistake.

Holy Family Church
Prevailing SW winds on the night of
October 8, 1871 prevented this
great west side church from being
consumed by the Great Fire which
started only one half mile away.

Holy Family Church, built in 1860, also survived the Fire, apparently in answer to Father Arnold Damen's prayers that the church he built to serve Chicago's burgeoning immigrant Irish population of Chicago's west side, be spared. Whether it was divine providence or merely the strong southwesterly winds that steered the flames away from his church, less than a half mile from the source of the fire, to this day lights are lit at the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help inside the sanctuary of Holy Family in eternal gratitude that the church was saved. The reason why the the Encyclopedia of Chicago's date for Holy Family succeeding the Water Tower is 1874, rather than its construction date, was answered for me by Father George Lane and his seminal book on the subject, Chicago Churches and Synagogues: An Architectural Pilgrimage, which points out that the spire of Holy Family wasn't completed until 1874.

But what about the spire of St. Michael's, which is 24 feet higher than Holy Family's? Unlike Holy Family, St. Michael's was directly in the path of the fire. As this stereo-photograph of the devastation of St. Mike's shows, had there been a 290 foot tower at the time of the fire, it did not survive.

Confirming what's visible in the stereograph, in his book, Father Lane notes in his book that the fire, "... gutted St. Michael's leaving only the walls and part of the tower standing." According to Lane, the great spire and landmark of the near north side of the city wasn't completed until 1888. I haven't been able to ascertain whether the pre-fire tower was the same height as the one we see today, but it simply cannot be true that the church could claim title of city's tallest structure between October, 1871 and 1885 as the Emporis list claims.

I have no answer at the moment why the Encyclopedia of Chicago omits the old Board of Trade Building from its list. Here is a photograph of it standing on the same site as its Art Deco successor, where LaSalle Street meets Jackson, with the estimable Rookery Building visible on the left. Again it is the tower which puts this building over the top. The old Board of Trade lost its distinction as tallest building in the city in 1895 when its (in my opinion) inelegant clock tower was removed. The opulent building designed by W.W. Boyington, the architect of the Water Tower and many other mid-nineteenth century Chicago buildings, was demolished in 1929 to make way for its successor.

The real mystery surfaced when I began to assemble historic photographs of the buildings on these lists. Although its great size encouraged the Archdiocese of Chicago to use it for official diocesan ceremonies, the Church of the Holy Name, built in 1854, was, contrary to what it is called on both lists, never Chicago's official Roman Catholic cathedral. That distinction went to St. Mary's Cathedral in the Central Business District, what today we call the Loop. Holy Name was built in conjunction with the original St. Mary of the Lake University, Chicago's first university. Continually plagued with debt, both the university and the church struggled to keep afloat, and the university closed its doors in 1866. (The university re-opened in 1926 as St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in the Chicago suburb of Mundelein, IL). The photographs I found of old Holy Name Church were few and far between, but I was unable to find a single photograph with a tower anywhere close to the advertised 240 feet. I don't have the dates on these first two pictures but based upon what I learned, more on that later, I'd say the first photograph was made around 1862, give or take a couple of years.

You can clearly see the base for what would be the tower, hadn't yet reached much beyond the roof line of the church. The next picture shows the second stage of construction of the tower complete. I'm guessing it had to have been made not more than a couple years after the first, judging by the height of the tree on the right:

The date of the next picture is certain, the fall of 1871, shortly after most of the church was destroyed by the Chicago Fire. In this picture you can see the third stage in the development of the tower, and two beams protruding from the top, suggesting that there was indeed some kind of structure above:

Granted it's true that the documentation of the buildings of pre-fire Chicago is inconsistent, but the idea that I couldn't find one photograph of the completed spire perplexed me, especially if it was indeed the tallest structure in Chicago at the time. Unfortunately Father Lane in this case was no help. In his entry on the current cathedral which replaced old Holy Name, he only devotes one sentence to the lost church.

Another book I had on my shelves, Constructing Chicago, by Daniel Bluestone, devotes an entire detailed chapter to the construction of pre-fire churches in Chicago, but was also of no help regarding the specifics of the tower at old Holy Name.  

I also managed to find an old souvenir book on my shelves, published in 1949 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Holy Name parish. I got the book at the cathedral at the re-opening ceremony after the church was closed because of damage due to a fire in its roof, I think they were giving copies of the book away just to clean house. Anyway, that book contains a very detailed history of the city of Chicago, told of course from a very Catholic point of view. Turns out the very first cathedral of Chicago was actually the magnificent Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in Baltimore, designed by Benjamin Latrobe in 1821. Back in frontier days when Chicago was just a backwater settlement, the territory covered by the archdiocese of Baltimore extended all the way to the Mississippi River. The Chicago diocese was founded in 1843. This book didn't go into great detail about the church building either, but it did give a detailed account of the parishioners who donated the money to build it and how much they gave. It also provided an eye-witness account of its destruction which describes the steeple catching fire, then collapsing onto the roof of the church, setting it on fire. That account was my first evidence that the spire actually existed.

Then I remembered a photographic panorama of Chicago made from the tower of the old Court House Building in the center of town. The panorama was published in the book Chicago, Growth of a Metropolis by Harold B, Mayer and Richard C. Wade. In the section of the panorama pointing northeast, three towers are clearly visible. One is the Water Tower, which had yet to receive its distinctive cupola, the tower of St. James Episcopal Cathedral, which also survived the fire and the subsequent 146 years, and low and behold, the base of the tower of Holy Name Church, looking very much like it did in the second photograph, with no spire. Although the photo does not show the towers clearly as they are at least one mile from the camera, it does appear there is work taking place, probably the construction of the third stage of the tower. As the Water Tower was built in 1869, the date of this photograph has to be between 1869 and 1871. Since the city at the time was filled with many 200 ft spires, the assertion that Holy Name was the tallest building in Chicago since 1854, has to be incorrect.

I asked myself, was there ever a tower? True, there was the account of the burning tower crashing onto the roof of the doomed church, but that was a scene repeated over and over again during those dreadful two days of the fire. It occurred to me that perhaps the eye-witness, in all the stress of a huge city burning before his eyes, could have mistakenly been recounting the story of the destruction of another church.

I was prepared to leave the question open until I decided to trudge through the tedious prose of the souvenir book. Reading through the histories of a succession of Chicago bishops with delicate constitutions who met their maker many years before their time, I discovered that in 1863, under the episcopate of one of those unfortunate men, Bishop James Duggan, the pastor of Holy Name, Father Joseph P. Roles:

...undertook with the permission of Bishop Duggan to add to the interior decorations which others had left incomplete. He installed the main altar and two side chapels with their screens, the altar railing and the pulpit, all in hand carved walnut. He also started to build the steeple which was originally planned. This was still in progress when the Church of the Holy Name was burned to the ground in 1871.

So there you have it. My guess is that the process of adding segments to the tower began in 1863 and continued, probably sporadically since those were war years, at least through 1869 or 1870, when work on the steeple above its supporting tower began. The first photograph was probably made just before 1863 and the second, sometime not long after 1865. From the information I have, at the time of the fire, the steeple may or may not have reached its planned 240 foot height, but the account of the destruction of the church mentioned above is most likely true.

Given all that, the Church of the Holy Name could not have been the tallest building in Chicago before 1869, and given that the steeple was not completed at the time of its destruction, its status as tallest building in Chicago at any time is doubtful.

Coming across that information the other day was a little bit of a letdown, I had anticipated doing some more legwork tracking down the story of the phantom tower of the Church of the Holy Name, and learning more about the history of the city along the way. As with many research projects, the journey is more satisfying than the destination. There's no real joy in debunking the notion that the Church of the Holy Name once had the distinction of being the tallest building in Chicago. Had it not been for the Great Fire, it very well may have been, for a little while anyway.

I don't know why but trivial as it may be, knowing that fact makes me a little sad.

The good news is if the spirit moves me, I can now embark on a project to discover the actual tallest buildings in Chicago before the Great Fire.


If I ever get the time.

White Elephant

The great pop idol David Bowie died this week and social media has been abuzz with tributes, memories and laudatory comments about him. That is except for one friend who posted on her Facebook page that she never liked the dead rocker or his music.

I felt a little like her a couple months ago when it was announced that Illinois governor Bruce Rauner was planning to sell the James R. Thompson Center. a move some believe signals doom for Helmut Jahn's bombastic government building , for thirty years the tangible symbol of the State of Illinois in the center of its largest and most important city.

The news caused a tremendous uproar among the city's preservation community who see the Thompson Center as an important architectural landmark in the city.

Swimming upstream against the current, like my friend the David Bowie detractor, I had to admit that from day one, I never much liked the building. It's not that I objected it appearing to have been dropped into the cityscape from outer space, sticking out like a sore thumb in Chicago's Loop which was and still is dominated by architectural boxes. I wasn't too upset that the State of Illinois Building as it was known when it was built, took the place of the old Sherman House Hotel where I spent many happy times with my grandparents at what I once considered the classiest restaurant in the world, The Well of the Sea. And it didn't really bother me that the building's design with its enormous open atrium and bird cage elevators, trumpeted as being unique and original, actually parroted the work of John Portman, the famous neo-futuristic designer of hotels in the decade before the Thompson Center was built. Well all those things did cross my mind but...

One of the several thousand handrail joints
 in the James R. Thompson Center.
Today the edges and corners of the metal rails
are rounded off, sparing the hands of the
tens of thousands of people who use them
every day.

What really bothered me was the complete lack of attention to detail in a building that was first and foremost a grandiose statement on the part of its architect and the governor of Illinois who commissioned it, for whom it is currently named. Much has been written about the building's notorious heating, ventilation and air conditioning problems which resulted in a complete overhaul of the HVAC system shortly after it was built. But the detail that pissed me off above all was the design and execution of the sheet metal hand rails that line the terraced balconies and stairways. At each joint, instead of the pieces coming together smoothly, there was a gap of about one half an inch, leaving exposed metal edges. When the building was new, it never occurred to Jahn or the staff working under him to sand down those edges. Consequently, anyone who held onto the rails as they used the stairs or walked along the balconies, cut their hands bloody (as I did), on the sharp exposed corners and edges of the sheet metal.

I suppose the very real blood letting of visitors gave a new meaning to the term "brutalist architecture". Another brutal aspect of the building to my eyes anyway was its color theme which juxtaposed two starkly contrasting colors, blue and red. As the eye focuses slightly different on each color, the effect of the two colors side by side meant the eyes were continually adjusting to each color, producing a dizzying effect which only accentuated the enormous atrium, the death defying heights as viewed from the terraced balconies of the higher floors, and the kaleidoscopic design of the terrazzo floor below. Thirty years earlier, Alfred Hitchcock may have pre-visualized the building when he made his great film Vertigo.

This was of course no accident, I believe that Jahn intended the building to be the architectural equivalent of an amusement park ride, terrifying and wonderful at the same time.

Looking up into the cavernous atrium of the Thompson Center,
a view a friend once compared to the view from inside
a salt shaker.

Did I say wonderful? Well yes, the building was not without its merits. First and foremost, it was not boring, there was nothing anywhere quite like it. For all its flaws, the Thompson Center was always a featured highlight on my tours of the Loop. It was impossible to be indifferent about the TC, you either loved it or hated it.

These days, even though I find myself inside the building quite often, I hadn't given it much thought until the governor made his announcement. Truth is, after all these years, it has settled on me. Like the old afghan on your couch, I came to appreciate it for its comfort and familiarity despite the ugliness, which was exacerbated by neglect over the years. Time had worn off its edges; the garish colors of the walls faded and even the sharp edges of the hand rails had long ago been sanded down. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the building developed something it never had before, charm. Dare I say, in its decrepitude, the Thompson Center became cozy, which is probably why Helmut Jahn hasn't been very outspoken in defense of saving his building.

A couple months ago I had lunch with a friend at the Thompson Center food court on the lower level, perhaps at the exact site where the Well of the Sea once stood. In the central area of the ground floor, a political rally was going on emceed by Jesse White, the Illinois Secretary of State. As my friend and I were about to dine on our Panda Express Mandarin orange chicken and Szechuan beef, a color guard entered the space followed by a girl belting out the Star Spangled Banner. Feeling uncomfortable chowing down on Chinese fast food during the strains of our national anthem, we grudgingly stood up as did most of the diners around us. As the girl finished singing, we sat back down and settled into a rather serious conversation, trying best as we could to ignore the goings on around us. It was impossible. At the height of our seriousness, in walked a twelve piece Mariachi band, belting out an old Jalisco standard as loud as they could. We felt like we were in an episode of Seinfeld.

Neither of us could be upset however, in short, this brief Dada moment personified the very essence of the urban experience.

The best part of the Thompson Center is all the open space devoted to the public; like it or not, pure and simple, this is our building. Walk in during the week and there is always some kind of exhibit set up on the main floor attracting scores of people representing the diversity of the city of Chicago. It could be an exhibition touting a new book on a local subject, a benefit for some noble cause, or a flea market. These exhibits seldom are professionally constructed, often they're hastily put together, resembling an elementary school book fair. What the exhibits lack in style and grace, they more than make up in the human touch. The Thompson Center is perhaps to Chicago what the agora was to the ancient Athenians, the great public gathering space in the heart of the city. One can almost imagine two citizens of Athens, Plato and Aristotle perhaps, being interrupted mid-conversation in the agora by a 400 BC Greek version of a Mariachi band.

The Thompson Center is no longer as public as it was intended. You could once take an elevator to the top of the building as my ex-wife and I did the day it opened. From there if you chose, you could make your way down through the building one floor at a time either by escalator or by the stairs with those dreaded hand rails. The terraced balconies serve as hallways, connecting the government offices which have no walls sealing them off from the balconies and the atrium. Every noise coming from the public space below reverberates through the building and into the offices. Another friend who worked in the building for a time had his work interrupted twice by the crash of a person falling to his or her death after jumping off one of those balconies.

From what I understand, most of the employees in those offices understandably hate the distractions and lack of privacy, but the design is very symbolic of the idea of the openness of government, a concept that was perhaps unique to the moment in time that the Thompson Center was built.

Sadly, today, unless you have the proper credentials, you can no longer roam through the entire building, thanks to Mr. bin Laden and his suicidal charges. But what the September 11 terrorists couldn't take away was the feeling of openness in this particular building. Restrictions notwithstanding, the Thompson Center remains the most publicly open interior space in Chicago, with its millions of cubic feet devoted to the atrium, which through the ample use of glass in the exterior walls, provides a stunning view of the city outside.

If Governor Rauner gets his way, all that space which now belongs to us, will be gone. The sad thing is that Chicago's Loop is losing its public space at an alarming rate. Around the time of the announcement that the TC might be sold, the company that owns for former Marshall Field State Street store two blocks away, announced that it plans to rethink the current Macys, and most likely will drastically reduce the public area of what in my opinion is one of Chicago's greatest public spaces, second only perhaps to the Cultural Center. What once was a neighborhood of infinite interest to the general public, the Loop is fast becoming a neighborhood of walls and closed doors, sealing off private offices and residences.

The Thompson Center was considered the first twenty first century building in Chicago. Now that it actually is the twenty first century, we don't build over the top buildings like it anymore. Given the desperate financial state of the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois, Governor Rauner's plan to sell the TC may well be fiscally prudent, but not without a price.

The speculation is that what made the Thompson Center such a remarkable public space, most likely will lead to its downfall. If the building is sold to a private concern, most likely all that open space will be deemed very expensive wasted space. By itself the building would probably be considered a white elephant to any private developer as realistic adaptive reuse of such a structure would be quite formidable. On the other hand, demolition would be relatively inexpensive as most of the cubic feet comprising the building consists of glass and air. Unfortunately the writing is on the wall for the Thompson Center and at the moment it doesn't look very good.

Despite its flaws, the loss of the Thompson Center would be nothing less than a crushing blow to the very meaning of the Loop as the vital heart of this city. It's possible loss, combined with the other losses we've experienced bring us closer to the day when the Loop will be virtually indistinguishable from the downtowns of almost any other big American city.

Perhaps we don't care. 

And if that's the case, perhaps we'll get what we deserve.

The Radiant City is Alive and Well

Not so long ago we decided there was something terribly wrong with the way we built our cities. They were overcrowded, had too much traffic congestion, too much noise, and this was contributing to crime, disease and a host of other social problems. Planners and architects set out to change all that, conceiving what they imagined to be the city of the future.

In that vein, two of the most famous architects of the last century took divergent paths to create their own concepts of that city of the future. Although neither vision was fully implemented, the impact of the vision of these two architects, combined with the explosion of technological development in the last one hundred years plus, drastically altered our cities and the way we live.

Frank Lloyd Wright hated cities. He called his idea for the utopian city of the future Broadacre City, not a city as we know it at all, but a strictly planned community where every family is alloted exactly on acre to call its own. The personal transportation device, automobiles at first, then ideally personal aircraft in the future, would be the primary means of transportation. If this sounds familiar (except the part about the personal aircraft), well it has all the trappings of suburbia as we know it today. Frank Lloyd Wright did not invent the concept of suburbs; he saw the movement away from big cities as inevitable as in fact much of it was going on during his life. Where his plan and reality diverge is in the design and administration of these communities. He distrusted big money and politicians, instead, his communities would be administered by designers and architects. Not surprisingly, in the real world the moneyed interests and the politicians won out, and it's unlikely that Mr. Wright would approve of the lifeless, ugly, banal version of his dream, known today simply as suburban sprawl.

Some of Wright's inspiration came directly as a reaction against ideas for the city of the future that came out of Europe, specifically from Swiss born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the architect famously known as Le Corbusier. Le Courbusier was deeply troubled by the living conditions of the big city poor. His solution simplistically put, was to knock down much of old city housing and replace it with soaring mixed-income, multi-unit apartment buildings. These buildings would be separated by green, open space where everyone, poor and rich alike would have access. All vehicular traffic would be segregated into either above or below ground highways. He would label his utopia, Radiant City. As with Wright, some of what Le Corbusier envisioned became reality. Large sections of cities were cleared to make way for these massive buildings including the entire neighborhood of the West End of Boston which I wrote about in an earlier post. There, a thriving historic working class neighborhood was deemed slum land by the city. It was leveled, and replaced by Corbusian housing, and there it stands today, a successful if rather uninspired, upper middle class housing project.

The fate of the Boston West End project is vastly different from that of very similar housing projects in cities all across the United States, intended to house not urban professionals, but the urban poor. When the big housing projects were first built in the fifties and sixties, they were seen as a welcome relief to the old tenement slum buildings they replaced. They had strict standards for admission and waiting lines to get in. Soon enough however, the rules and regulations became lax and many of the buildings were taken over by gangs of thugs who terrorized the residents who felt imprisoned in their own homes. The projects were so vast and dangerous that even police and other emergency personnel were hesitant to enter them. In much of America, the dream of a Radiant City had become a nightmare.

The first Radiant City to go was Pruitt-Igoe, a vast project built in the mid-fifties in the north end of St. Louis. It was blown up in the early seventies having been around less than twenty years. It took a couple more decades here in Chicago, but eventually all of the major Corbusian housing projects for the poor: the Robert Taylor Homes, and Stateway Gardens on the south side, the Horner Homes, and an agglomeration of projects known collectively as ABLA on the west side, and most famously, the Cabrini Green Homes on the near north side, have been relegated to quote a former president, to "the dustbin of history."

Just as it is unfair to blame Frank Lloyd Wright for suburban sprawl, it is unfair to blame Le Corbusier directly for the failure of large public housing projects. Unlike his vision to create mixed income housing, the American version of public housing was intended, not with entirely good intentions, to exclusively house the poor. By doing this, their ultimate effect was to segregate the poor, cutting people off from the rest of the city and society, and perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

There are in fact, mixed and upper income projects in Chicago that have proven successful including Prairie Shores on the near south side, and Sandburg Village on the near north.

Successful or not, building massive blocks of flats in row upon row of identical buildings in the style of Le Corbusier has been stigmatized and is no longer in fashion, in this country anyway.

But the Radiant City is alive and well in China where new cities have sprung up in some of the strangest, most inhospitable of places, built in a style very reminiscent of the plans of the late Swiss architect. The cities are purely speculative, built with the hope that one day they will be filled with citizens in a booming economy. The fact that these sites sit mostly empty as ghost cities is a fascinating story in its own right and has been dealt with in many places. Just google "Chinese ghost cities" to see what I mean. The bottom line it appears is that the endeavor is either a boondoggle for wealthy Chinese businessmen and corrupt government officials to build a place to hide their money, or a very shrewd, far sighted plan by the Chinese government to prepare itself for the staggering population shift from rural-agrarian to urban that will likely take place imminently in that enormous country. We'll surely find the answer to that question in the near future but today these "cities" sit virtually empty on sites where no one in their wildest dreams would have built a city in the past.

Which is par for the course with most cities built from scratch. Washington D.C. was built on the flood plain of the Potomac River between the already settled cities of Georgetown, MD  and Alexandria, VA. The reasons for building there were political rather than practical, as anyone who has been to our nation's capital in the summer can attest. An even more extreme example is St. Petersburg, the scratch built one time capital city of Russia, built to satisfy Peter the Great's desire to build a great navy for his enormous but for all intents and purposes land-locked country. St. Petersburg was so remote and desperately cold that the hardships suffered by the builders of that great city prepared them and their ancestors for the brutal hardships they would endure during the subsequent three centuries.

Most cities don't begin on the drawing board, they evolve over time, starting out as small settlements, then growing as the local economy will allow. Sensible people don't settle in places with harsh economic and natural climates, it takes a government to make such big and outrageous plans. Enter China, still a totalitarian government with apparently most of the money in the world. Without having to worry about market forces (yet) or the fickle nature of public opinion, the commissars in charge have free reign to build whatever they want, wherever, and in whichever style they want.

It's interesting to see what style of architecture the Chinese officials have chosen to fill their cities. Why is the building style rejected by most of the Western World appealing to the powers that be in China? Maybe it's because multiple high rise units are the most practical means to house the largest number of people. Maybe it is the easiest way to control masses of people, remember that Paris during the 19th Century was reworked first and foremost to eliminate the hiding places of insurrectionists. Or maybe it's because this style of architecture with columns of identical buildings standing like soldiers at attention, evokes grandeur and power, at least in architectural renderings or in photographs of the buildings without people present, which these days are not hard to come by.

Could it be possible that the Radiant City is ideally suited to totalitarianism?

In any case, these real life Sim-Cities beg the question, who on earth would want to move into a ready made city with absolutely no history?

In two words: not me.