Teddy Cruz lectures November 1, Grant Park South Wall tonight, Rolf Achilles on Chicago-Budapest Connection October 18

Remarkable Guatemalan-born architect Teddy Cruz will be in Chicago on November 1 to deliver the The American Planning Association and the National Building Museum's 2oo7 L'Enfant Lecture, From the Global Border to the Border Neighborhood, at 7:00 P.M. at Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center. Here's what I wrote about Cruz's compelling work, at the end of an article on a Field Museum exhibition on pre-fab housing. Here's the official event description:

As the world becomes more interconnected, it is critical for professionals in the built environment to think beyond borders and geographic lines. Inspired by his San Diego office that sits near the busiest border crossing the world, architect and urban theorist Teddy Cruz attempts to integrate two cultures geographically close yet culturally distant from one another. Cruz will discuss his firm's work in creating affordable housing, community centers, and developments on both sides of the border.

The lecture will be $10.00 for members of either of the two sponsoring organizations; $15.00 for the general public. Register on-line (deadline October 23rd). More information on the event here. More information on Teddy Cruz here.

also . . .
Two Late Listings to October Calendar

Tonight, October 4th. Completing Grant Park's South Wall and its Frame
This Grant Park Advisory Council session will feature The Central Station Development team presenting two new high-rises to be built along Roosevelt Road. 6:00 P.M., Roosevelt University, Congress Lounge, 430 South Michigan Avenue, 2nd Floor

Thursday, October 18th, Art Nouveau: The Chicago-Budapest Connection
Art historian Rolf Achilles will be delivering this month's Landmarks Illinois Preservation Snapshots lecture at the Claudia Cassidy Theatre of the Chicago Cultural Center at 12:15 P.M., offering a "visual exploration of the influences of Chicago and Louis Sullivan on form and function in Budapest, circa 1910."

Influential critic Herbert Muschamp dies at 59

Word came today that former New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp has died, from lung cancer, at age 59. He was a master at vibrant, incisive, and sometimes gloriously over-the-top prose that placed the beating heart of contemporary architecture within the broader streams of contemporary culture. Even if I didn't always agree with his conclusions, I loved his passion. I'll never forget how several years ago, out of the blue, this obscure, fledgling writer received an e-mail from him with kind and encouraging words about my work. Read the New York Times obituary here, and, via Archinect and the Gawker, the text of an internal memo marking his passing here.

Where Am 1? x5 - The Answers Revealed

Places your bets. Answers tomorrow.

A: Garfield Park fieldhouse


B: Midwest Athletic Club, 3800 W. Madison


C: Chicago Cultural Center cornice


D: Morgan Street Public Storage


E: Bankers Building, entrance, South Clark Street at Adams

A Forest Departs - Tree by Tree

At a deconstructing park, Big John scoops 'em up and sends them on their way. See the photo-essay and read all about it here.

Lagrange, Rubio, Tsien, Zago, Kipnis, Celebrating George Danforth, TIF's, Olympics,Remnants of the "L" - over 50 events on October Calendar

If you're bored this month, you've got a real problem. There are over 50 events on the October Architectural calendar.

Lucien Lagrange and Thomas Phifer at CAF, Elva Rubio at Archeworks, Billie Tsien at IIT, where there's also a panel remembering the great George Danforth. There's Andrew Zago and Jeffry Kipnis at UIC, the 3rd ward's Pat Dowell discussing the alderman's role in city planning for Women in Planning and Development, Designing an Olympic Bid at Chicago Women in Architecture, two major benefits/award programs - for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and AIA Chicago's Designight.

Mary Pattillo discussing her new book Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, at CAF, where later in the day there's a panel on China and the Crisis Infrastructure. Engineers discuss the CTA superstation at SEAOI's monthly dinner meeting. Sadhu Johnston, John Ronan, Sarah Dunn and Helen Kessler at Chicago Humanities Festival events. Rachel Weber discusses TIF's at APA Chicago. DeStefano+Parters Scott Sarver and Avi Lothan discussing current work for Friends of Downtown at the Cultural Center. Graham Garfield on lost remnants of the historic Chicago "L". Plus a full roster of programs at the Chicago Center of Green Technology.

And, as they say, much, much more. Check it all out and start placing reminders in your calendar here.

Chicago Streetscene - Hanson Lives!

Being woefully ignorant about pop culture, when I hear the name Hanson, I remember a band of three teen brothers that became a phenomenon upon bursting onto the rock scene in 1997 and imagine that, their 15 minutes of fame presumably expended, they've long since disappeared into a Bonaduce-in-the-making obscurity.

The adoring masses of teen girls descending on Marina City's House of Blues today proclaimed otherwise.

Even as the brothers wrestle with the issues of geriatrics as they begin the steep descent into their mid-to-late twenties, they have apparently captured an entirely new generation of female followers, a thousand of so of whom followed the Hansons on a one-mile walk through River North, both touting their latest album, The Walk and, according to a Pollstar article to "help raise awareness of poverty and AIDS in Africa."

"The trio has partnered with TOMS Shoes with the goal of delivering 50,000 pairs of shoes to needy children in Africa. For every pair of shoes purchased at each stop on Hanson's tour, TOMS will donate an equal pair.

"We want to inspire others to look for simple, tangible and fun ways to make a difference," Taylor Hanson said. "It is easy to be halted by the great hurdles of poverty and AIDS, but making an impact can begin as simply as giving someone a pair of shoes or buying a song."

Yeah, that kind of celebrity do-gooding, combined with album promotion, leaves the Hansons easy fodder for jokes, but cut them some slack. On a beautiful fall day, with teens, just at the point of getting a handle on what life might be, marching with their idols in solidarity of fan worship and social awareness, that's not a bad trade-off.

Chicago's Children Museum "fundamentally misconceived" - Blair Kamin

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin this morning condemns the proposed move of the Chicago Children's Museum to Grant Park, and provides an cogent analysis of what makes it so bad.

Apparently, there's still another revision which, according to Kamin, reduces the size of the skylights to a maximum height of 16 feet, and in process slashes the amount of natural light coming in to the museum but a third. In contrast to the current museum, which offers generous views of the park outside Navy Pier, the new museum is devolving into what is being called the "cave" compromise, essentially an underground bunker, in an increasingly desperate attempt to circumvent the A. Montgomery Ward court decisions that protect Grant Park. If Kamin's article is any indication, the museum continues to withhold all renderings of the project except wide-angle drawings that minimize its impact and conceal the real experience of the structure as placed into the park.

Like almost all other observers (Mary Mitchell excepted), Kamin has come to realize that this battle is not about "the children." It's about power politics.

" . . . it becomes apparent," Kamin writes, "that the chosen site will benefit neither Grant Park nor the children who are the museum's reason for being."

"The lakefront and the children deserve better than a political compromise that is principally designed not to produce inspiring architecture, but to let the powerful mayor save face." Read it all here.

Clean Shaven Palmer House Debuts

Our roving correspondent and photographer, engineer Bob Johnson, gives us these new photos of Holabird and Roche's 1925 Palmer House, now completely debearded of the trio of external fire escapes and grills that have subdivided the State Street facade for decades. What's remarkable about the change is how strongly it re-establishes the grand horizontal sweep of the building's five story-base, reestablishing a much more lucid and elegant visual foundation for the three tall red-brick wings that rise about it.

A Landmark Event - Art Institute of Chicago Puts Marion Mahony Griffin's Magic of America on-line

Nearing the end of her long life, living in a house at 1946 West Estes in Chicago, Marion Mahony (1871-1961) finished her magnum opus The Magic of America as a loving tribute to the life and work of her late husband, architect Walter Burley Griffin. What emerges from its pages, however, is nothing less than a vivid portrait of an era, spread across two continents, America and Australia, a highly personal account of the birth both of modern American architecture and urban planning, and - by reflection and inference as much as directly - of Mahony Griffin herself, one of the most remarkable and enigmatic figures in American architecture.

Read all about it - and see the pictures - here.

Engineers on Block 37; the Credit Crisis and Commercial Real Estate

Since we never seem to get around to doing the next month's calender of architectural events until about 11:00 P.M. the previous night, we thought we'd pass along an early warning on two events early in October:

Engineers Discuss Block 37: The October dinner meeting of the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois will feature a presentation by Thorton Tomasetti, structural engineer of record for the project, including the deep basement excavation that will ultimately let the CTA's blue and red line trains cross tracks underground. The event will be held next Tuesday, October 12th, at the Cliff Dwellers, cash bar at 5:15 P.M., dinner at 6, program at 7:00, $45.00 for members, $55.00 for non-members. Make reservations by today, September 27th, by calling Donna Childs at 312/649.4600 x200. More info here.

The Credit Crisis: How Turmoil in the Debt Markets is Affecting Commercial Real Estate - thats the cheery topic for a Thursday, October 4th breakfast seminar sponsored by the Urban Land Institute Chicago. Speakers include Mark Bratt, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley; David Maki, Director, Head of North American Capital Markets, RREEF; and Casey R. Wold, Senior Managing Director, Tishman Speyer. Keith Largay, Director, Debt & Equity Finance, Cushman & Wakefield moderates. $40.00 for ULI members, $50.00 for non-members, $10.00 for students, including continental breakfast, which begins, along with registration at 7:45 A.M., with the program at 8:15, at the Mid-Day Club in Chase Tower. More info and registration on-line, where the registration deadline is 10/2, 10/1 via other means.

Calatrava's Chicago Spire Seeks Persons of Interest

Look, but you can't buy - at least not yet, but you can see the ad on a finer bus shelter near you. Santiago Calatrava's design for the Chicago Spire continues to evolve. Read all about it and see the pictures here.


Plus - a bonus pop quiz. What do Marina City and the Chicago Spire have in common? (Hint: think giant phallus hats) The answer revealed here.

Really bad photos of the renderings the Chicago Children's Museum doesn't want you to see.

At a September 10th meeting at Daley Bicentennial Plaza, Chicago Children's Museum architect Mark Sexton presented a full set of renderings of Krueck and Sexton's proposed design for a new 100,000-square-foot museum in Grant Park. Unfortunately, as part of its slippery and cynically deceptive media campaign, CCM has withheld all renderings from the media except extremely wide-angled views that deliberately de-emphasize the building's impact on the park.

Krueck and Sexton Architects also does not include the renderings on their web site, but they have signed on to Mayor Richard M. Daley's "all opponents to the museum are racists"campaign by posting links to four articles regurgitating Daley's spurious, gutter-politics rants. The links include news reports from the Trib and Sun-Times on those very calculated mayoral tantrums, but, of course, no links to those same papers' strong condemnation of the mayor's tactics and fervent opposition to the museum's move to Grant Park.

These two admittedly pathetic photos are the best I could get from my vantage point in an outside hallway which I shared with local residents who had been banished from their own community meeting when it was hijacked by CCM supporters. They more accurately depict how a human being - as opposed to a high-flying bird or low-flying airplane - would actually experience the park with the CCM's building inserted into it.

The first rendering is of the large central courtyard; the second of the soaring, stalagmite-like skylights required to bring light into the museum's subterranean halls. Note how those skylights, up to 51 feet in height, rise many times higher and overwhelm the human figures inserted into the rendering. Even with all their oblique bluriness, the photos of these renderings demonstrate that, contrary to the claims of the museum, the structure would create a fatally intrusive presence in the park. If the museum doesn't agree, they should release ALL the renderings, which I will be glad to post on my web site. Let the public decide.

A Portrait of Mayor Daley's "Nowhere"

Here's a photo of "Nowhere":


That's what Mayor Richard M. Daley derisively calls Grant Park at Daley Bicentennial Plaza, at the east end of the Frank Gehry designed BP Bridge, in still another ploy in his increasingly desperate campaign to muscle a 100,000-square-foot building for the Chicago Children's Museum into that same park. See a photo-essay on the park Daley seeks to destroy here.

Chicago Architecture Club Fall Kickoff, Alfred Caldwell's Crown Hall Landscaping added to this week's calendar

Two late additions to this week's calendar of architectural events:

Chicago Architecture Club: 2007/8 Season "Architectural (Pro) activism"

On Wednesday, the 26th the CAC will hold its first event of the season. CAC is (slightly) reconfiguring the structure of the club, "reestablishing a more club-like club" and will share plans for the new year with members. The evening will begin with a new members Q & A, and then go on to event pitches, with 15 presenters competing for 5 events, concluding with comments and voting. 6:30 P.M. at I-space, 230 West Superior, Second floor. More info here.

Revisiting Caldwell

Also on Wednesday, at Crown Hall at IIT, Architect Sarah Dunn (principal, UrbanLab) and landscape architect Chandra Goldsmith Gray (Mies Society board member and IIT faculty member) and will lead Mies Society members in a tour of their recently executed landscape plan for S. R. Crown Hall. The evening will include a 7 p.m. reception and screening of the film Passionate Nature: Chicago Parks of Alfred Caldwell. Free for Mies Society members, with a $10.00 suggested donation for guests. Reservations required. More info here

And a reminder:

Preservation Chicago 2007 Benefit at Opera Lofts, the former studio and storage warehouse for Chicago's Lyric Opera, Friday, September 28th, from 6:30 to 9:30 P.M. Tickets $50.00 in advance (through 5 P.M., September 25th), $65.00 at the door, with the proceeds going to support Chicago's premiere grass-roots architectural preservation organization. Information, and on-line purchase of tickets here.

From Luciano - to Fabio?

With the passing of Luciano Pavarotti, Opera Chic considers the supposed current dearth of true Italian tenors, and places a bet on "Fabio Armiliato, heir to the greatest lineage of Italian opera tenors." Via YouTube, here's a clip of Nessun Dorma, so you can form your own opinion.

And speaking of something very different that packs an emotional wallop, here's another YouTube clip of 80 year old Giacomo Lauri Volpi taking on the same aria.


But wait, here's a 1933 clip of Lauri Volpi singing an aria from Les Huguenots. Oh, and here's Natalia Dessay singing Glitter and Gay, and here's, no, no, I must stop, I must stop - YouTube is the crack cocaine for music buffs.

The World Class Chicago's Children's Museum: We're Number 31!

Among the frenzied charges of child-hating and racism that Richard M. Daley and supporters of the Chicago Children's Museum have been hurling in a desperate attempt to discredit opponents of the museum's campaign to move to Grant Park, the mayor and Bob (if-we-don't-give-Grant-Park-to-the-CCM-it will-be-the-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it) O'Neill have gotten a free pass as they repeatedly extol the virtues of the "world-class institution" they seek to insert into Daley Bicentennial Plaza.

It seems we may have been more than a little gullible in accepting the museum's claim at face value. A post to my blog from yellow dog democrat directed me to an article in Friday's Chicago Sun-Times in which writer Delia O'Hara deconstructs the CCM's inflated sense of self-importance as

"some cultural temple our city's children must experience to claim a complete childhood."

"It isn't."

"The Chicago area has three major children's museums. The DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville and the Kohl Children's Museum in Glenview leave the Chicago museum in the dust."

O'Hara notes that the CCM has higher admission fees than either of those institutions, but "books one unimaginative commercial traveling exhibit after another, often with licensed characters children are expected to recognize from television."

O'Hara concludes that as "9 percent of Chicago's land is held in parks, less than half that in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco or Boston," it isn't a bunkered, parkland-grabbing CCM that children need. "They need safe, well-maintained, accessible spaces for play they direct themselves. These spaces don't have to be Disneyland. A nice park will do. Let's make a commitment now not to give away any more parkland." Read the full article here.

And if that isn't enough of a blow to CCM's pretensions, another voice is saying the real world-class children's museum in Illinois isn't in the Chicago area at all, but in Rockford.

The child-haters at Parents Magazine rank the CCM in 31st place in a list of America's top 50 children's museums, miles behind the Discovery Center in Rockford, which comes in 5th, the Exploration Station, Bourbonnais, at 15th, and the Children's Museum of Illinois in Decatur, at 23. Indianapolis's Children's Museum tops the list. Read the full Parents Magazine story here.

The Indianapolis museum, the largest in the survey, has 365,000 square feet of exhibits. The proposed CCM building will have 100,000. Which raises still another troubling question: how long will it before the aggressively expansionist CCM returns to the well, with demands to gobble up more and more parkland as it continues to grow?

Gigi Pritzker crawls into Richard M. Daley's gutter

The Pritzker family has been the bedrock of Chicago philanthropy. To mention just two of their countless contributions, they established the Pritzker Prize, which has become architecture's Nobel, honoring one great artist each year. If if weren't for Cindy Pritzker, Millennium Park would be the amiable mediocrity Mayor Richard M. Daley was willing to settle for. Instead, by recruiting Frank Gehry to design the spectacular Pritzker Pavilion bandshell, Pritzker set the park on the path to becoming a world-class sensation.

The Pritzkers are used to being the good guys. They're also accustomed to getting whatever they want. We are now seeing what happens when they don't. Chicago Children's Museum Board President Gigi Pritzker has signed on to the ugly, race-baiting campaign, engineered by Mayor Daley (is that Frank Kruesi in the shadows?) to demonize opponents of the museum's move to Grant Park. The Sun-Times headline says it all: Board chief: Museum opposition is racial.

"The thing that's sad," she told the Sun-Times, "is the loudest voices - it doesn't mean the whole community - seem to have the component to them." The tears that Pritzker is shedding are, of course, crocodile tears. Race-baiting is what the museum, whose campaign was falling flat when confined to the actual merits of its proposal, now sees as its ticket to victory.

And the Sun-Times is only too happy to help. How ironic that it's the Chicago Tribune, the voice of reaction, that's fighting for Grant Park's survival, while the scrappier Sun-Times, which just recently declared independence from the dark legacy of Conrad Black and a return to its original progressive roots, has not only been completely silent on Mayor Richard M. Daley's gutter-politic rants, but has been channeling the most sensational charges, without question or analysis, straight to its front page as a ploy for goosing flagging circulation. (The Sun-Times' own readers, however, aren't buying it. A poll of over 3,000 of them had 74% taking the opinion that opposition to the museum was not a racial issue.)

[POSTSCRIPT: on Friday, September 21st, the Sun-Times finally came out swinging, first with a strongly reasoned editorial opposing the museum, and contributions from Mark Brown, Neil Steinberg, Delia O'Hara and Mark Konkol that pretty much demolish every vicious charge and and specious claim put forth by the mayor and the museum. More on this later]

On a Thursday appearance on WTTW's Chicago Tonight, host Phil Ponce pressed Gigi Pritzker to substantiate her claims of the museums opponents' racism.

What did she have? The same useful dolt that St. Sabina's Father Matthew Pfleger has been trotting out repeatedly to support his own claims of racism. Oh, and she pointed to the very vocal anger of museum opponents at a September 10th meeting at Daley Bicentennial Fieldhouse.

Remember? That's the one where the museum hijacked a community meeting called by 42nd ward Alderman Brendan Reilly, cutting in line to fill up the auditorium and forcing the invited neighborhood residents into side hallways where they couldn't see or or be seen in the proceedings. And yes, they allowed themselves to get a bit rowdy at first, before quieting down as they strained to hear the speakers, with periodic bursts of spirited, mostly good-natured heckling.

So, stack the hall, throw neighborhood residents out of their own meeting - Pritzker has no problem with that. But when they don't take it laying down, raise your nose high in the air, point your finger, and declaim, "Shame, shame." It's the classic gutter politics maneuver - you get to maul, but your opponents must react as pacifists.

Here's something that is sad, perhaps even tragic: a great Chicago family that has become so obsessed with winning that its willing to trash a deep reservoir of good will, earned over decades, for a specious campaign cynically conceived to inflame racial tensions as a tactic to divert attention from discussion of the real issue: a private institution seeking to replace open, free public space with 100,000 square feet of new construction with an $8.00 admission charge.

Memo to Gigi Pritzker: if you really, as you keep saying, want to refocus the debate over the museum to the real issues and not make it all about race, stop talking nonstop about race.

Grace, Found in a Peat Bog, Turns her Back on Dirty Sexy Money

Last month, in Heritage Green Park, at Adams and Des Plaines just east of Old St. Pat's Church, there was a dedication of a new sculpture, Grainne, presented to Chicago by its sister city of Galway, Ireland. Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley joined with his Galway counterpart, Tom Costello, for the August 21st ceremony.

Irish sculptor Maurice Harron won a competition to create Grainne ("grace" in Gaelic), who symbolizes, in the words of the city's press release, "the traditional Gaelic society before it dramatically changed in the 1600’s and is inspired by an archeological finding of a young girl preserved in a peat bog. Pre-historic European sculptures of women were depicted with the left hand raised while those of men used the right hand, thought to be a gesture of blessing. The base of the sculpture is derived from the famous Turoe Stone, a Celtic pagan monument from County Galway, dating from the time of Christ. "

Heritage Green, reclaimed from a surface parking lot, was envisioned by the 2003 Chicago Central Area Plan as a major park for the new West Side, with tall trees and crisscrossed walkways.
Currently, it's a simple sea of grass, a welcome emerald patch of respite amidst the overbuilt high-rise bog rising all around it. Grainne currently stands in the shadow of a huge elevated billboard advertising a news ABC series celebrating "the absurdly wealthy and powerful." Clearly, she's found the right place to shed her grace.

Postscript: And speaking of peat bogs, the National Geographic has this article, with a number of photos, on the work of Robert Clark in photographing the eerily preserved 2,000-year-old bodies (Mel Brooks not among them) found in European peat bogs. See it here.

Why is the Chicago Children's Museum Withholding Renderings of its New Building?

On WTTW tonight, there was another discussion on the proposed move of CCM to Grant Park, and once again the only visuals were bird's eye aerial views or wide-angle sections. Yet at the community meeting on Monday, September 10th, architect Mark Sexton included in his presentation a number of closer-in views of the large central courtyard and soaring skylights.

None of these renderings were made available to the Chicago Reader for my article published last week. None of them have appeared in the major Chicago dailies. It's just the same wide-angle drawings, recycled again and again.

What are you hiding, Mr. Law? Are you refusing to release these renderings because you know they will undercut your arguments on the minimal impact of the building on the park? Are you afraid they might turn opinion against you?

Stop hiding your building, Mr. Law. Release ALL the renderings that were displayed in Mark Sexton's presentation. Let the public decide.

Daley the Demagogue

From Merriam-Webster - Demagogue: a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.

In his Tuesday rants against 42nd alderman Brendan Reilly's opposition to the Chicago Children's Museum building a 100,000-square-foot facility in Grant Park, Mayor Richard M. Daley raged at Reilly's characterization of Grant Park as "not a kid's park." It became almost a mantra, "Not a kid's park?, "Not a kid's park?!" he repeated, again and again, incredulous anger rising each time.

Except, as Greg Hinz reports in Crain's Chicago Business, "The mayor’s press secretary, Jacquelyn Heard, conceded afterward that the latter remark may have been based on bad information."

In other words, it's a lie. A lie that the mayor just goes on repeating, because he thinks it has legs. Just like the lie about all the opponents to the museum having racist motives. He knows it's a lie, but it doesn't matter. It's always worked in the past.

Stop hiding behind generalities, Mr. Mayor. Exactly who are you calling a racist? Name names. Do you think I'm a racist? Blair Kamin? The Chicago Tribune's editorial board? Is New Eastside Association of Neighbors' Richard F. Ward a racist, Mr. Mayor? Name names and let the public decide whether they agree with your characterizations.

And now, the Mayor calls on all the leaders of Chicago - businessmen, community leaders, the ministers - to rise up with him in revolt against Brendan Reilly's war against children and minorities. The unstated, underlying message in Daley's bullying is clear: get behind me on this, or suffer the consequences.

As quoted in the Sun-Times, the Mayor now talks about the battle over the museum as if were a civic Armageddon . . . "a fight for the future of this city . . . If you lose this one, you lose the strength of our city . . " How poor and weak a thing is this Chicago that Daley has given us, that a single mayoral defeat can send it collapsing into an impotent gelatinous goo.

FUD - Mayor Richard M. Daley is a master.

Let's be clear. This is not about "the children." It is not a fight for racial justice. It's about raw political power, and the Mayor's insatiable hunger to maintain a monopoly of it within the city he governs. To Greg Hinz, a sharp observer who knows city politics inside and out, the real issue behind Daley's blustering smokescreen is no mystery "At stake is Mr. Daley’s ability to steamroll any local opposition to venues for the proposed 2016 Olympics."

Postscript: The Sun-Time's Fran Spielman, with Greg Hinz among the city's most indispensable journalists, has a compelling story indicating that Mayor's plan to override Reilly's aldermanic prerogative in vetoing the museum could run into stiff resistance in the City Council. Aldermen as diverse as the 50th ward's Bernie Stone, the 2nd's newly elected Bob Fioretti, and even the 21'st Howard Brookins, who saw his own aldermanic prerogative overridden when he pushed for a Wal-Mart in his ward three ago, expressed grave reservations about upending a tradition that has been a major source of their effectiveness. Savvy politicians all, they realize it would set a precedent that would open the door to the Mayor usurping and eroding the powers aldermen depend on in running their wards.