On the 100th anniversary of her birth. Marliyn, Forever

 

June 1st 2026, marks what would have been Marilyn Monroe's 100th birthday.  She's now been dead far longer than she was alive, yet her claim on our imagination endures, never grown old, frozen in time at 36. 

In 2011, J. Seward Johnson (1930-2020), set free to follow his artistic pursuits through his status as an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, created a 28-foot-high, 34,000 pound steel and aluminum sculpture, Forever, Marilyn, depicting her in the iconic pose from the film The Seven Year Itch, her skirt blown up around her from a gust emanating from a New York City subway grating (not included).  Originally situated as one of a series of supersized-installations by the sculptor on Chicago's Pioneer Court, it evoked both protest and delight.

The next year, it was moved to Palm Springs, California, part of a long odyssey that saw the film star's doppleganger travel to New Jersey, Australia, Connecticut, and, eventual dismantling and storage in a New Jersey warehouse.  In 2021, she was rescued to take up residence back in Palm Springs, and there she has stayed, the centerpiece of a Great Palm Springs Palm Event this past weekend shattering a previous Guiness world record for Marilyn impersonators with 1,037 participants. According to Christina House in the L.A. Times, a $75.00 registration fee got each attendee "a white dress, platinum blonde wig, cat-eye sunglasses, and a martin glass to complete with iconic look."

Photograph, Christina House, Los Angeles Times

For a brief number of days, well over a decade ago, she was ours, an erotic, earthy, super-human counterpoint to the hard, angular stone, steel, glass and terra cotta surfaces of the towers all around her.  Now, as with the enigma of Marilyn herself, she belongs to the ages, or least to Palm Springs. 

Marilyn's aura and image remains a potent symbol to appropriate, from trying to lease chronically empty space in the Equitable Building . . .

... to Andy Warhol, reproduced in a Jeff Zimmerman mural on the blank wall of the old Saks Fifth Avenue building on Michigan Avenue.

I haven't checked.  Does she still haunt the facade of Carnivale on Fulton?

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J. Seward Johnson sculptures ARE PEOPLE!!!! A Chicago Survey

 Over 15 years, the sculptor J. Seward Johnson created a large number of works for Chicago, mostly temporary installations, and largely situated in Pioneer Court, the large public space between the Gothic Tribune Tower to the north, the steel-and-glass Equitable Building to the West, the Chicago River to the south (and since 2019, the Apple Store), and Michigan Avenue and the Spanish-styled terra-cotta-clad Wrigley Building to the West.

2008, King Lear, Pioneer Court. (since 2009, at Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton New Jersey)

2008, God Bless America, Pioneer Court

Forever Marilyn, 2011, Pioneer Court

Caution, Man Contemplating Work, Roosevelt Collection 2012

Return Visit, 2016, Pioneer Court, here in time for Cubs World Series run

Allow Me, Four Seasons Hotel (Chicago does like to celebrate our winning teams)

Take Time Out Before Time Runs Out, Presidential Towers, 2017

Crack the Whip, Navy Pier, 1996

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The End of Saks

We like to surround ourselves with intimations of luxury.  Whether that fills you with anxiety or a sense of security is a matter of the moment and personal status.  But when it all goes away, when all you see is the skeleton beneath, what do you feel?

Saks Fifth Avenue, Chicago:
1929 at Michigan and Chestnut (left); 1935-1990, 669 North Michigan (right)
(images courtesy Nena's Notes)

Saks Fifth Avenue came to Chicago almost a century ago, in 1929.  It moved to what is now Niketown six years later, and, half a century on, to it's long-time, final home at 700 North Michigan.  It was anchor to a massive 1990 development, Chicago Place, a 42-story tower with 233 apartments above a 320,000 square-foot vertical shopping mall, to which Saks, with about a quarter of the space, was the department store anchor.  Emulating Marshall Fields, that still wasn't enough; their men's store was across the street.

Although there was still a lot of empty space at the time of opening, developers were optimistic of a quick fill-out, maybe even a Barney's to be added to the mix.  And while Chicago Place did fill out, it never met that initial promise, a third wheel to the majors Water Tower Place and 900 North Michigan just blocks up the street.  Like the joke of how you go bankrupt - slowly, and then all at once - Chicago Place went into painful decline.  The wonderful, upscale Bockwinkel's grocery in the basement folded early on, and more empty storefronts, dead behind the eyes, followed.  

[Read: Dead Mall Walking]

Then, in 2009, the mall was acquired for a bargain-basement $39,000,000, and the new owners pulled the plug for conversion into office space.  Saks, the anchor, was now sole survivor, having already pulled back the men's store into the mothership.

And there matters stood, as department stores fell out of fashion and bricks-and-mortar retail shriveled under the onslaught of Amazon and buying stuff on the internet. Water Tower Place shed anchors Macy's and Lord & Taylor, closed its food court, and now is about to shrink under a major rehab.  Somehow 900 North Michigan - and maybe the far newer Shops at North Bridge, anchored by Nordstrom's - seem to be doing fine.

Saks was not immune.  Owned by former Canadian department store powerhouse Hudson's Bay, in December of 2024 it spent $2.7 billion acquiring troubled luxury rival Neiman Marcus.  Little more than a year later, in January of this year, like two drowning swimmers dragging each other under the waves, the combined retailer filed for bankruptcy, announcing a wave of closings, including the Saks in Chicago Place, which happens to be right across the street from Chicago's Neiman Marcus which, for the moment, is last man standing.

Saks has only days to live, but it's already a corpse waiting to get itself buried.  The sparse selection of actual merchandise is overwhelmed by a closeout of art, furniture, fixtures and extension cords.  The medium of photography has allowed us to witness with dread the dance macabre of how even the greatest beauties wrinkle, age and die.  The current state of Saks infers something similar, although in reality it was always less a matchless beauty than a carefully appointed machine for selling expensive goods through the allure of luxury.  In department store years, Saks has had a long life, and now, in the final stretch, you can see how much it was held together at the end by botched surgeries and too much make-up.

"Going to the mall" used to be our solace, our safe place when the outside world turned anxious. Rem Koolhass famously wrote an entire spectacular, brilliant book about it, just before the phenomenon was about to begin its decline. In the present unstable moment, our psyches under constant assault from the capricious, destructive actions of madmen, we've strangely decided to continue weaning ourselves from the social consolation of shopping malls, our drug of choice, for the isolating, impersonal world of the on-line, the algorithms of AI feeding both our desires and their assuagement.   

For me, a simple lower-middle-class peasant, Saks Fifth Avenue was never my world, but walking this Die tote Stadt, stripped to its remnants like the twigs of Lavinia's hands, I feel both afraid and queasily at home.

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