20 Feet High? How about 23 stories? The forgotten sign that Trumped Trump

Photograph: 1934, Gordon Coster, courtesy Calumet412

If the Donald Trump sign wasn't already nearing the endpoint of its 15 minutes of fame. my appearance on a Tuesday panel on WTTW's Chicago Tonight with Ward Miller and Peter Exley, hosted by Elizabeth Brackett, discussing the topic should finish it off for good.  And so, I thought it a good time to tell you about another, now-forgotten sign that makes Trump's look like chump change.

photograph courtesy The Chuckman Collection

In the 1930's,  a spectacular, 23-story-high sign hawking Chevrolet was erected near what was then the Illinois Central Railyards. on Randolph just east of Michigan.  It's largely forgotten today, but Chevrolet commissioned a promotional film, Behind the Bright Lights, a “Jim Handy picture” to document all the details behind the massive project.

The film tells how “sign monkeys” attended to the “millions of lights, and how the average bulb would have a life of 6 to 8 months. “Rarely a day passes within 30 to 40 having to be replaced.”  According to the film, an electrical engineer was always on site.  The lights were controlled by something called “a flasher”, whose 305 separate contacts made it “the largest one in the world.”

Another machine controlled the hands of the massive clock, “and it has kept the clock in perfect time for over a year without a slip.”  (See? Donald Trump didn't invent hyperbole.)

The promotional film goes into fascinating detail about how the whole thing works.  Actually, it's how all signs of this type - now largely only a memory - worked.  Chevrolet just did it on a completely larger scale.  The scrolling text was made possible by a moving “motograph.”

You want to know how it works?  Well, every light bulb connects by a wire to a small contact point or brush.  The tip of the brush presses against a copper plate, and the return wire carries electricity through the plate, brush and wire to light the lamp.  A strip of paper inserted between the copper plate and the brush stops the flow of electricity and the lights go out.  But where a hole in the paper lets the brush touch the copper plate, electricity flows through again and lights the bulb.  No matter how many light bulbs and crushes are connected, each of them operates the same.

If a strip of paper is passed between the copper plate and the brushes, the lights will all go out.  But wherever holes in the paper permit any brushes to touch the copper plate, the lights connected to these brushes will go on.  The message is punched in a role of heavy paper, light a player piano roll.  When the paper passes between the brushes and the copper plate,  different groups of lights on the sign panel flash on and off and when running, makes you think the lights are moving, when they're not. 

It apparently didn't take too many years for the sign to become more trouble and expense than it was worth, and by the 1940's it had been converted into a massive multichrome promotion for Pabst Blue Ribbon.

photograph Jack Delano, courtesy Library of Congress

And then the sign was torn down.  By 1952, the corner had been taken over by a rather inelegant construction promoting Coca-Cola and Four Roses Whiskey, the Skid Row staple.

photograph: Joe + Jeanette Archie via Flickr, Creative Commons license

And then that sign disappeared as well, and in its place rose a new construction, the audacious Prudential Building, the first new Chicago skyscraper since the Great Depression.  Beginning in the 1970's, the massive railyards atrophied and were covered over by the sleek towers of Illinois Center.  Across the street?  Millennium Park, this summer celebrating the 10th anniversary of its opening.  There's a sedate sign atop the Prudential, but today the most prominent branding is expressed not in text, but in the billowing sales of Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion.

OD'ed on Outrage: The Donald's Sign is Very Bad. The Circus of Distraction is Worse.

click images for larger view

Call it the Facebook syndrome.  The noxious flower, originally cultivated on television by Fox News, has exploded, through social media, into a blanketing culture of perpetual outrage.  No topic is too fallacious or inconsequential to inspire a tsunami of angry screeds - Obama's birth certificate, vocal fry in young women, lap dancing squirrels . . .

And what is Chicago really, really mad about right now?  A set of five 20-foot-high letters that Donald Trump is affixing to the riverward side of his elegant 1,170-foot-high telescoping tower, designed by Adrian Smith when he was at SOM.

 And it's true, the sign scars a handsome building.  You normally don't want to bring attention to the continuous strip of metal louvers of a service floor interrupting a sleek glass curtain wall facade but that's exactly what the 141-foot-strip of letters does, drawing your eye to a visual interruption that would otherwise be subsumed into the larger mass of the building.  We still have to see how the sign will be affected by the LED back-lighting that's part of the design.  It might soften the blow.  It might make it worse.

Update:  Get out your sunglasses.  I'm going for worse . . .

What's evident even now, however, is that the actual letters look astoundingly cheap, like those you'd find in a child's magnetic letter set, bleached of color.

Controversy over the sign has been building ever since it was announced this past February,  but once the actual letters appeared in a couple stacks on the lower level of the Trump Tower riverwalk early in May, the topic has built to a viral meme of increasingly hyperventilating outrage.  Everybody has to get their two cents in.   Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has taken on a Bob Green-like obsession with the topic, writing column after column and making himself the star in an epic battle with the irascible  developer, who has taken the bait by referring to Kamin as a third-rate architecture critic who he thought had been fired.   The Sun-Times's Neil Steinberg felt compelled to enter the fray with his own lengthy screed, calling the sign “noxious” and comparing Trump to Oxymandias.  You get the idea. 


Although it took several weeks after the sign going up for him to finally notice it, Chicago Mayor Emanuel has “smelled the meat a'cookin” and moved himself to the front of the anti-Trump line, pre-empting the battle into a “faceoff" between billionaire and scrappy mayor that has taken the media carnival national.   It's send-in-the-clowns time, with idiots of all stripe appropriating the Trump sign as a piece of evidence certifying whatever's their personal scandal-du-jour, with a special Looney Tunes award to right wing pundit Jeffrey Lord, who blithely proclaims “This is about zapping Donald Trump the Obama opponent who dares to intrude on the private political preserve that is the President’s hometown.  There’s nothing more to this little if telling episode than that. ”

Trump has responded in kind claiming what he's doing is no different than the beloved Hollywood sign, only better.  He compared his sign to the one on the old Chicago Sun-Times building, which Trump Tower replaced, referring it to ”the ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen”, echoing a tweet 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly issued to defend his own non-action on the sign . . .

They're both banking on everyone's lack of memory.  In fact, the Chicago Sun-Times sign was actually a not-inelegant relief from what was essentially a metal-faced services bunker at the top of a unfairly-maligned structure that was a showcase building of its day . . .

photo courtesy The Chuckman Collection

The unending commentary on Trump's sign has become like one of those amusement park attractions where you poke your head into a hole in a wooden flat imprinted with the images of various celebrities so you can have a picture taken of yourself inserted into the scene.  As important as they may be to those in the frame, there's only so many of those pictures you can see before wanting to shoot yourself.

And what does it all accomplish?  To send Donald Trump into a seventh heaven.  Once again he gets his inane observations and sour visage plastered across media stories throughout the world.  He's the
the idiot-King whose empire is kept flourishing by a capable staff who have mastered how to work around their boss and and extract the random good ideas from the daily mound of egomaniacal manure.

Trump is little different from the street performers you see on Michigan avenue, soliciting spare change from  passersby by dancing, pounding on plastic bucket drums, or painting themselves gray and posing as statues. He just does it on a far larger stage, a trash-talking, cuckoo's nest-crowned living billboard, running on hyperdrive 24/7,  a king-of-all-media busker trolling for attention.  Attacking Donald Trump is like whipping a masochist - the intended victim winds up enjoying it far more than you ever could.

While social media is an infinitely expandable resource, newspaper space and television time are not, and it is a sign of our bread-and-circuses time how so many outrages and problems of much greater import than Trump's stupid sign are thrust into invisibility by our self-gratifying orgy of disapproval.  If you ever wanted a demonstration of how the culture distraction works, this is it.

You want outrage?  Start with this, right beneath that sign.  When Trump Tower opened, it gave the city a superb new riverwalk, featured truly outstanding and unique landscaping by Hoerr Schaudt featuring plants native to our area.  Little more than a year later, Trump ripped it all out for a cheap generic replacement featured large swatches of rocks.

Want more?  Go down two levels and look at all the Trump Riverwalk's storefronts.  None of them have ever had a tenant, nor, does it appear, are they likely to anytime in the future.  In 2012, Trump told Alby Gallun of Crain's Chicago Business that he basically intended to keep everything empty until the kind of upscale retailers who could meet his rent fell into his lap. “I'm in no rush,” he proclaimed, and now, two years later, nothing has changed.  While the Wrigley Building plaza has undergone a stunning restoration that has made it a magnet for new retail, Trump's stores remain empty.  Trump seems willfully blind that his Riverwalk's primary users are not the Portofino crowd he imagines, but normal people like you and me boarding a water taxi or tour boat.  God forbid we have a place where we could sip a cappuccino on the terrace or get a (gasp!) ice cream.

Rahm and Forrest Claypool are pleased as punch that we're exhausting ourselves in a frenzy of disapproval over Trump's sign, so we won't notice how they're about to decimate the Lakeview neighborhood around the Belmont ‘L’ stop with a wide-swatch demolition of buildings for an ill-conceived roller-coast overpass.  Could we slice off just a bit of the Trump outrage for this?

This week's Chicago Reader has a great report by Maya Dukmasova on how the CHA is pushing redevelopment of the landmark-quality Lathrop Homes to push out the poor and make the area safe for affluent developers.  I wrote about it two years ago, and nothing has changed.  If not actual outage, could we at least peel off a modicum of interest amidst our all-consuming obsession with really big letters?

Then there's the way that Rahm, facing potentially bankrupting pension costs, is assiduously emptying out Chicago's TIF accounts for things like sports stadiums, city-owned hotels, and still another $60 million selective-enrollment high school to make sure not a penny is left to help us out on the city's financial crisis.   A little outrage might be in order here, but you can be sure Rahm is more than happy if we prefer, instead, to be watching him and the Donald slug it out.

Or how about the fact that Chicago is on the cusp of a new residential tower construction boom that's awash in architectural mediocrity, with not a single one of the buildings looking to add anything to Chicago's global reputation.  Couldn't we get mad about that?  Just a little?

I'd write more, but I have to stop to check out Facebook and Twitter for the latest on the Trump brouhaha.  I suppose I should be outraged, but mostly it just leaves me a little sad.