There goes the neighborhood: A few touches less of funk and grunge; another giant dollop of glitzy retail

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The three buildings from 10 East Walton on weren't any one's idea of great architecture, and they all had seen better days.  The one furthest to the east had bare backing brick at the top, its cornice long ago ripped off like a bad toupee, and the one in the middle, with the mail-order windows and faded red clapboard - well, the less said, the better.

Still, they were among the shrinking number of remnants from a time when the neighborhood wasn't flush with back-to-back highrises - all "luxury" of course - and when there was still room for such mundane functions as a nail salon, currency exchange,  shoe repair shop and, in the basement, the Underground Wonder Bar, where you could get a drink and listen to Lonie Walker and her Big Bad Ass Company Band until 4 a.m.

These kind of activities were clearly far too vulgar for the area's upscale pretensions, best on display in the phony-baloney French Empire carriage court of the Elysian, just across the street.  Just imagining the refined inhabitants of the Elsyian having to contemplate those decaying rockpiles and their riff-raff clientele, every time they entered or alighted from their limousines - well, the spine shudders.

As you can see, help is now on the way.  The three old wrecks are being wrecked, to make way for BHLDN, the second outlet of the Anthropologie chain's new bridal store concept, which will take up 6,000 square feet in a new building to be constructed on the site.  The Crain's Chicago Business story quotes Baum Realty Group's Janika Brenner as saying Anthropologie was attracted to the "limestone, old-world looking" design of the new building.  They apparently just have no interest for it in the original.  Although I haven't seen the design, the quality of the Anthropologie stores is often  a cut above the norm, so the new one on Walton could turn out to a handsome addition. It will just make for a more homogenized, less varied and interesting cityscape.

There's also a happy ending for pianist, singer/songwriter, arranger and bandleader Ms. Walker, who has found a new home for her Big Bad Ass in the green-stoned 1891 Raleigh Hotel at 650 North Dearborn, where you'll now find the Underground Wonder Bar just under entrance to the The Joynt, open for business until 2 a.m. nightly, 3 a.m, on Saturday's, with live music 7 days a week until 1:30 to 2:30 a.m.

So I guess the moral is that no matter how hard you try to squeeze the life out of a place, it'll just keep popping up somewhere else.

The Limp Building: Lucien in Dali-land or The Persistence of Mediocrity

One of these things is not quite like the other . . .

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can't quite put your finger on it ? . . .

Lucien Lagrange, the Chicago architect who recently announced his retirement, built a fabulously successful career out of creating high-rise buildings in a stripped-down classicism that allowed his patrons the fantasy of living as royalty in the French Second Empire.

His ideas tend to be most coherently expressed, and gracefully detailed, at the base of his buildings, and to begin to fly out the window as a tower rises and he has to fit in all those ugly balconies that buyers seem to require.  His latest achievement is the Elysian, a 60 story hotel/condo tower that terminates in a massive, clunky metallic crest that looks like the cap on a stick of lip balm.  It's  heavy, vaguely Germanic feel almost seems to suggest that Lagrange wasn't really raised in the South of France, but in Alsace.

At the bottom is the Second Empire calling card, with a four-story pavilion along State Street with a Mansard roof would look a lot more convincing if it were executed in traditional tar paper rather than ribbed metal that makes it look like a Quonset hut.  Adjacent  is a full-up "carriage court" where limo's and sports cars can make their entrance with a backup of appropriate Parisian splendor.

A few weeks ago, the previously completed Mansard roof was encased in scaffolding - apparently some touch-ups were required to the original construction.  Now, similar rehab work is going on in the carriage court, and that's the source of the photo's you see above.  The usual ugly open scaffolding just wouldn't do, so the building has created fabric replicas of the facades to place over the scaffolding.

It's one of the trippiest architectural visions you're likely to see.  In it's emulation of a dead style, Lagrange's designs are already a fake.  So now, with the fabric hangings, we have a fake of a fake.  (Is it too much to hope that the irony was intentional?)  The way the hangings droop and crinkle, it's like the courtyard facades are melting under the heat of their own strained artifice.  Christo couldn't have done it any better.

It's not to be missed. Stop by Walton just east of State, and make up your own backstory.