Tonight: Mayor Richard M. Daley's Scorched Earth Obsession About to Obliterate Michael Reese?

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wants to destroy this:
and this:
and this:
and this:
We've written before about how the rich legacy of Bauhaus inspired architecture on the former Michael Reese Hospital campus is living on knife edge waiting to be sacrificed to the mayor's Olympic vision. Now it's crunch time.

How casually our mayor comes to the international Olympics table in the role as a destroyer of world culture. Let us count the desecrations:

1. A century of Chicago Jewish culture, as embodied in on of its most enduring and important institutions.
2. All manifestations of a critical decision point in Chicago history where, in the mid 20th Century, Michael Reese chose not to abandon the city, but commited itself to be a key mover in the plan to rescue a desperately troubled south side.
3. Some of the most beautiful landscapes in the city, from the hand of famed designer Hideo Sasaki.
4. Chicago's richest repository of Bauhaus-inspired architecture, a worthy mirror to the Mies van der Rohe designed IIT campus from the same era, in buildings bearing the unmistakable imprint of the involvement of Walter Gropius, one of the most important architects of the 20th century.

Destroy it all, our mayor decrees. Grind it into the dust and leave no trace behind.

And it gets worse.

The Gropius in Chicago Coalition has already reported that the commemorative plaques - to Gropius, to donors, to the spot where softball was invented at the old Calumet Club - have all disappeared. Now added to the pile is Pillar, a sculpture by renowned Chicago Afro-American sculptor Richard Hunt, which vanished between June 30th and July 3rd.

Far too heavy and large for amateurs to remove, the sculpture was surely uprooted from the fenced-in site by one of the various contractors. The GCC has been attempting for the last week to locate the sculpture, without luck. At the present time it is considered stolen, and joins several other irreplaceable historic artifacts in this pathetic category. On June 30th, a source at the hospital informed the GCC that demolition contractors had wanted to remove the important Richard Hunt sculpture so that it could be sold as scrap metal. If anyone has any knowledge of the sculpture’s whereabouts, please contact us immediately.

We are told we have no choice but to do this, to provide an athletes' village for the 2016 Olympics. This is, of course, a lie. The Michael Reese location is a very capacious 37-acre site. It would not be hard to strike a balance between preserving Chicago's rich history and supporting a better future.

But our Mayor is desperate. Cities all across America have no alternative but to keep coming up with innovative ways to survive in an often gravely uncertain economy, but at a July 8th press conference Mayor Richard M. Daley declared he has but one idea - the 2016 Olympics. "This is the only economic engine," said Daley, adding that he has "nothing else up my sleeve." There is no Plan B. Daley gives us but one choice for securing Chicago's economic future, a choice between stagnation and an Olympics that lasts all of several weeks during one summer seven years away. He's become like the drunk telling his family that their only salvation is, not in his sobering up and getting a grip, but in the lucky lottery ticket he's just purchased.

Specifically, he is desperate to find a developer willing to commit over $1 billion dollars to build the Olympic Village, and he apparently believes if he gives them a clean-as-a- whistle tabula rasa site they'll forget to ask themselves basic questions such as how they'll be able to unload up to 5,000 units after the village is converted to condo's when there were only about 4,400 sold throughout the entire downtown area in the peak year of 2005.

Yes, this is the Chicago of legend - tough as nails, cynically corrupt, where, for those with money and power, anything goes.

That is not my Chicago. It is not the Chicago of the millions of non-insiders who love this city and its history, and see its culture as something to be cherished, not pitched in the nearest dumpster.

Tonight, Tuesday, July 21st, 7:00 p.m., at Olivet Baptist Church, 31st and King Drive, the 4th ward's alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, will join officials from the city and Chicago 2016 in unveiling the grand plan for demolishing Michael Reese. The activists of the Gropius Chicago Coalition will be there, as well, "for a polite showing of support in favor of a more sensitive plan." You're invited, too. You get to declare which Chicago is your Chicago, and probably do it with a lot more grace and diplomacy than I've shown here.

Wow, if only the city always moved this fast - newsstand now in place

As can be seen in this photo provided courtesy Edward Lifson, the city, amazingly, has already put the replacement newsstand in place at Chicago and Michigan.

Yes, it's plug ugly - a heavy-lidded tool shed in Bob Stern black, and I wonder how badly this metal can heats up should Chicago ever gets to summer - and yes, as predicted, ads for the 2016 Olympics are plastered all over it, but it appears to be generously proportioned, with a fair amount of display windows. Here's hoping proprietor Anil Modi is back in business shortly, with minimal loss in income, and enjoys a long, prosperous future serving the appetites of we hopeless addicts of the printed page.

(Also check out Edward's blog for the first photo of fabric inching its way onto the aluminum frame of Zaha Hadid's Burnham Pavilion in Millennium Park.)

From the Chicago Architecture Blog, here's a great post with photo's showing the new(stand) being hoisted into place.

Get high at the Chicago Temple this Thursday- Sacred Spaces summer tours

Since we're a bit of a sluggard, we've already missed the chance to alert you to a tour of Chicago Sinai Congregation last Thursday, but the local branch of Sacred Space International is offering a total of 12 tours this summer of "a diversity of worship spaces throughout Downtown Chicago with architectural tour guides."

We don't have the full schedule, but this Thursday, July 23rd, will see the opportunity to tour what is claimed to be the tallest church in the world, the sky chapel 400 feet up in the Chicago Temple building by Holabird and Roche. Although the building itself dates back to 1921, the sky chapel was added in 1952 as a gift from the Walgreen family. The First United Methodist Church, whose main 1,200 seat sanctuary is on the first floor, has been at this location since 1838, and it's the last survivor of what was once Chicago's church row, where most of the the young city's most prominent houses of worship centered around Chicago's public square, on the block now occupied by the Daley Center. Chicago Temple's current sanctuary includes five stained glass windows designed by architect Dirk Lohan.

Next weeks tour will be of the Downtown Islamic Center, located in a five-story building where the ground floor appears to be the usual State Street retail building but "with one step inside, the DIC offers visitors a calm oasis away from the activity of the city. The founding of this center stemmed from the need for a place to observe Jummuah, traditional Islamic Friday prayer." Future tours, taking place through October 1st, will include such locales as the Midwest Buddhist Temple and Harry Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist.

Tours begin at 5:15 p.m.; $15.00 per person, $5.00 for members. Reserve by calling 312-580-1050 or via email.

Michael Reese Demolition Plans to be Unveiled Tuesday

We received word from Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition that this Tuesday evening, July 21st at 7:00, 4th ward Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, Chicago 2016, and the Chicago Department of Environment will unveil the plans for demolishing the historic Michael Reese campus and the Bauhaus inspired buildings designed in partnership with Walter Gropius, as well as the amazing beautiful Hideo Sasaki landscaping shown below.
It is not expected to be pretty, and the coalition is seeking to get as many sympathetic bodies in attendance as possible "for a polite showing of support in favor of a more sensitive plan. We will have some tee shirts for group identity, signs, etc."

I've written in detail about what's at stake here, and will be giving you an update Tuesday morning, but for now here's a heads up that the session is scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, July 21, at the Olivet Baptist Church at 31st and Martin Luther King Drive, itself an historic structure dating back to 1876. If you can, leave a couple bucks for the church's restoration fund, as well.

WTF? Overnight, local landmark newsstand disappears from face of the earth

So, I'm walking east on Chicago yesterday to pick up Crain's and the Sunday NYT (in a disconnect of how the digital world should work, you can't see them on-line until Sunday, but you can buy the paper versions Saturday afternoon) and suddenly, I'm struck dead as I'm confronted with this:
One of Chicago's last real newsstands, open 24 hours, that was there seemingly forever, suddenly vanishes into thin air, freshly poured sidewalks erasing any trace that it ever existed.

Crains's had already reported in 2007 how the decline in print media and aggressively priced subscription offers from publishers were squeezing single copy sales and newsstand operators' future. For the city, however, that death march wasn't moving fast enough.

It's another pound of flesh being extracted by JCDecaux S.A., the French firm with which the city signed a 2002, 20 year, $200 million deal for a monopoly on the city's bus shelters. As with the recent parking meter deal, the Daley administration continues to turn control of Chicago's streets over to private interests, and now we have things like a new Pritzker Park in the South Loop, where a huge area has been left unlandscaped to provide JCDecaux a place to put one of the food concessions promised them as part of the deal.

Crain's Ann Saphir reported on Friday that the destruction of the Chicago Michigan newsstand was still another manifestation of JCDecaux's control, as they will be constructing their own replacement beginning "at the end of the month."

And, of course, while the city makes sure Decaux is taken care of, the newsstand's proprietor, Anil Modi, who works long hours to keep his business going, gets screwed. He apparently gets to return, but no matter how long it takes to build Decaux's stand, he'll receive not a penny of compensation for all the lost income, no doubt part of the city's strategy to just make him go away.

Instead, according to CDOT spokesman, he'll get "better accommodations," a euphemism for the relentless Disneyfication of Chicago's streetscapes, where every bit of character needs to be rubbed out for the banal and generic. What I'm sure we'll soon see at Chicago and Michigan is one of JCDecaux's dark, thick-limbed Bob Stern specials, with the incredible mosaic display of magazine covers that Modi provided replaced by a small area to display his wares and really big areas for ads that line Decaux's pockets.

In Praise of Little (comparitively speaking) Plans: Burnham Bros. at DePaul

Sometimes the most enjoyable shows can be the ones at the periphery. Building the Business of Architecture: The Burnham Brothers and Chicago in the Golden Twenties, at the DePaul University Art Museum through September 16th is a small show but a good one. Although there some different pieces - handsome examples of terra cotta from Stuart Grannen of Architectural Architects and some drawings and photo's of the Carbide and Carbon Building (now the Hard Rock Hotel), probably the Burnham Brothers' most accomplished work, the exhibition focuses heavily on a single building,

The structure in question, the 23-story structure Engineering Building at 205 West Wacker, is one of those large - and largely anonymous - buildings that fade into the surrounding streetwall, in this case the one along the south side of the Chicago river. At the time of its completion in 1928, however, it was a prestige project, home to a large number of engineering firms, with the headquarters of the Western Society of Engineers taking up the 11th floor. The exhibition includes a large number of "heavily annotated" working drawings, and sharp, informative text from curator Paul Jaskot, professor of art history at DePaul, who calls the building's Wacker drive location "a fantastic site for exploring the intersection of urban planning, economic history and the importance of advertising to architects in the 1920s." The Burnham Brothers were Daniel Burnham's sons, Hubert and Daniel, Jr. Their firm was one of two eventually split from D.H. Burnham and Company, the other being Graham, Anderson, Probst & White.

Jaskot sees the Engineering Building's extensive use of terra cotta on the facades as an expression both of economy, lightness, and an era when Chicago was still constantly rebuilding. "By 1926, the average building in Chicago's Loop district had a predicted lifespan of only twenty-eight years, and therefore builders did not choose the most expensive, long-lasting materials, preferring those that could be acquired cheaply while also being aesthetically pleasing."
When I was a kid growing up, out with the family, we would find ourselves, when nature called, searching for what was called, seemingly interchangeably, a bathroom, washroom or restroom. One of the most interesting part of the Burnham Brothers show is to see how these terms actually evolved at a time when women were becoming major components of the workforce. On the plan for the Engineering Building's 13th floor, there's the usual "men's toilet." But there's not only a corresponding "women's toilet", but adjacent spaces labeled "wash rm", "women's rest rm" and still a third, with the name "quiet room." Hey, in a time when we tend to be crammed into stacked cubicles, isn't that something all of us - regardless of gender - could really use today? There were also separate cafeterias for men and women, and, a sign of the slow tread of progress, a segregated cafeteria for Afro-Americans in the basement.

I don't want to oversell Burnham Brothers - it's not a show that's going to knock your eyes out, but in a year where it tends to be all about making big plans, it's refreshing to see something both smart and human-scaled. The DePaul University Art Museum is at 2350 N. Kenmore, just a couple blocks from the Fullerton L stop. Hours are M-Th 11 to 5, Friday, 11-7, and Saturday and Sunday, 12-5.

on Saturday: how to make really big buildings out of concrete and break things for educational purposes

We've written before about the Museum of Science and Industry's Science Chicago program that, through partners as varied as UIC, the U of C, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and Facets Multimedia, has created a year long series of events to introduce young people to the joys of science.

We wanted to alert you to a great event this Saturday, July 18th, From Sidewalks to Skyscrapers: The Latest in Building Technology, which will feature a talk by a structural engineer to be named later from the Portland Cement Association who has worked on such signature reinforced concrete structures as the Burj Dubai and Chicago's Trump Tower and will cover the selection of structural materials and how not to have your really big building fall down in a hurricane or an earthquake. We're also promised live demo's including breaking concrete beams (cool!) and what should be a really interesting tour of the labs of CTL Group, which specializes in R&D and testing of construction materials, including the concrete used in the Burj Dubai.

It takes place this Saturday, July 18th, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., at 5400 Old Orchard Road in Skokie, and it's limited to - depending on which website you consult - 30 or 50 participants. $7.00, ages 12 and up. Register here. Information here.

Chicago Streetscene: 353 North Clark

Avian Bonus: Duck!

Now, duck again!

Streeterville's Parkview park continues to blossom

When the Trib's Blair Kamin wrote about the park at the ParkView Condominiums last October, he talked about it needing time to fill out. A summer later, and it's already on it's way.

The 1.75 acre private park, serving both the residents of the Solomon Cordwell Buenz designed condo tower and the public, is a hugely handsome addition to Streeterville. Designed by San Francisco's Hargreave Associates, it provides a variety of levels that mediate between the streets and the condo tower and a variety of conditions that combine to form a richness only rarely found in Chicago Park District design.

The center point could said to be a grove of pine trees that will keep the park green even in winter.
The project has come out pretty much as described on the website of the developer, MCL Companies, in 2006, combining canopy trees set to produce rich fall color, perennial flowers, decorative grasses and a fountain.
Across the street, the former North Pier, revitalized by MCL as the River East Art Center provides a warm, colorful backdrop.
The longer-term issue, of course, is how long the current quality of the park will be maintained by private interests and whether, should the need arise, the Chicago Park District will step up to the plate and secure the park for permanent public access or, as at the park next to the AMA building, the only green space in River North, they will simply look the other way as its destroyed. When you look at the how beautiful the ParkView Condominiums park is today, you can only hope that day of reckoning is a long way off.

Daniel Burnham/Jane Adams/St. Vincent DePaul Grudge Match, Archeworks Open House this week

Okay, so it's not actually tag-team wrestling, as entertaining as that might be, but what promises to be a fascinating panel discussion Daniel Burnham Meets Vincent De Paul and Jane Adams, which DePaul University is sponsoring at the Cliff Dwellers Wednesday evening, July 15th. It's one of two events we've added to the July calendar, the other of which is Archework's Summer Open House, beginning Thursday the 16th at 5:30, which will include a lecture by co-director Martin Felsen. There are more than a dozen great events - from Reinventing Public Investment to Benjamin Marshall: Architect and Bon Vivant, the Jewels in July fundraiser for Architreasures on Wednesday, and much more - this week. Check them all out here.

Felsen and Sarah Dunn are also scheduled to speak at WorldFuture 2009 Innovation and Creatvity in a Complex World, which runs July 17-19 at the Chicago Hilton and brings together deep thinking futurists from across America. A cautionary note about futurism can be found on the organization's home page, where they commemorate the passing of board member and former secretary of defense under JFK Robert S. McNamara, whose career was an object lesson in how the future has a bad habit of careening out of control in ways you never anticipated.

Also, a reminder that this is the last week for Prairie Avenue Bookshop's spectacular Summer Sale, which ends on the Saturday the 18th and offers savings that start at 20% off purchases of $10 to $49, and top out at a full 50% savings past the $100 mark. Not be left out, the shop at the Chicago Architecture Foundation is offering a 15% discount on all regularly priced merchandise through July 31st. And, as always, yummy and affordable ArchitectureChicago PLUS jams and jellies remain on sale in our lobby.

Chicago Streetscene: Constructed Sky

Chicago Streetscene: Voyagers

David Woodhouse wins Burnham Memorial Competition

David Woodhouse Architects has been announced as the winner of the Burnham Memorial Design Competition. More images here. Graphics of all 20 invited entrants and several unsolicited ones here.

Edward Lifson's wedding party, Piano included

As someone who carries their outcast status around with them like a carapace, who has never been married and is unlikely ever to be married, I hate weddings, but, as anyone who follows my blog will attest, I love wedding parties in public places. I get to be the flaneur at one of the key moments of other people's lives. I can leave when I get bored or roughed up. I love the costumes, the flowers, the interplay with architectural tableau's and interiors.

And so, apparently - and, I'm sure, with a much healthier attitude - does critic Edward Lifson, who has put an incredible series of photos up on his blog of a bride and groom at Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing at the Art Institute, at one point providing a compelling comparison between the rushing bride and Gerhard Richter's famous painting, Women Descending the Staircase, which is actually hanging on a wall only steps away from her.

To get the full effect of Lifson's great shots, make sure you click on each one to see them in higher res. To me, the most amazing of the lot is this one, taken in the wing's Pritzker Garden.
It's a painterly composition, the bride posed with her legs extended, bare feet curled, over the lap of a groom who's looking in the opposite direction, almost as if he were unaware (unable to handle?) her relaxed but assertively sensual presence, accented by the cast-off sandals criss-crossed atop each other on the ground to her left. The reflection of Ellsworth Kelly's sculpture White Curve hovers over their heads like a chuppah, and as you pull back, the supposed intimacy is shattered by the presence of two more figures, photographers pairing off with their subjects - male,male to the left, female, female to the right, capturing the ceremonial exhibitionism of the occasion. The male photographer is like the groom - close to the earth, head on; the female photographer on high, gazing down on the couple as if she were God checking out the progress of her creations.

Indeed, the groom seems so detached in most of these shots that you fear for the future of the relationship, until you get to another stunning shot set against a seemingly infinite white wall. Edward sees this as their purity reflected "by the pure white room." I see it as a cautionary tale of how Piano's overwhelming whiteness threatens to overpower everything it comes into contact with.

Again, you have to click on the photograph to view it at a resolution where you can actually see it. I've cropped a bit here for emphasis.
The backstory I see here is that the overwhelming nothingness all around them finally turns the two lovers back in to each other. It's them against the world. The groom is still standing there stiffly, arms folded, legs planted far apart as if he's expecting to be toppled at any moment, but he's smiling, completely softened by the way his bride leans in to him. The geometry is wondrous. The line of her chin extends to the sloping of his left shoulder; the line of the slant of the groom's head extends down the back of the bride's dress. The fullness of her dress provides the secure grounding that the spareness of the triangular perch of his pants legs does not. The richness of her bare arms, the gentle touch of her hand that seems to be going directly to his heart - you get the impression this marriage may turn out OK after all. See all the photo's in Edward's remarkable set here.

Chicago Streetscenes: The Bad and the Beautiful

It's the 6th of the month: Time for the July Calendar!

The pace may be slowing as people are remanded to the countryside for summer, but there are still over three dozen great events on the July calendar. Pecha Kucha goes out on the road for Volume 10, down to Doug Garafolo's Hyde Park Arts Center, where they promise to make use of those spectacular projection screens. (And because it's not at a bar, the event is both free and open to all ages.)

If you missed Dennis McClendon talking about the Plan of Chicago for Friends of Downtown on the 2nd, he'll tackle the subject again for APA Chicago on the 21st. Elsewhere, there's Rachel Crowl and Julie Fisher of fcStudio inc at a CAF lunchtime lecture on the 8th, where Steven Monz talks about Benjamin Marshall on the 15th, David Swan discusses the Fine Arts Building on the 22nd, and Mary Woolever takes on Edward Bennett on the 29th. Also at CAF, there's a big symposium, Reinventing Public Investment, on 14th, Architreasures has there Jewels in July 2009 benefit at Room and Board on 15th, and AIA/Chicago has events with Edward Torrez talking about Howard Van Doren Shaw's Marktown on the 8th, and Peter Janko on the restoration of the stunning Palmer House Grand Ballroom chandeliers on the 9th.

But wait - there's more! (Did I mention kickball) And, no, I'm not putting all the hyperlinks in this post. Check out all the great July events here.

The Last Great Oak Falls - a response from Andrew Patner

Chicago Sun-Times and WFMT critic and commentator Andrew Patner sent me a very thoughtful and thorough response to my post on the passing of Norm Pelligrini, which I want to post here, with his permission, in its entirety. Some of the more obvious mistakes it references have been corrected.

Andrew's comments are quite eloquent. I would make just a few responses (not numbered in the same order as his):
1. Although I can see that my sentence construction could be read in various ways, my reference to the station's full boil being brought down to room temperature was in no way a direct critique of Andrew's commentaries, which are in the great tradition of Claudia Cassidy and Herman Kogan, but to the overall direction of the station.
2. To me, 43, as 86% percent of the total, qualifies as "close to fifty" in a article that is not meant to be a legal brief.
3. I made no reference to Rita Jacob's complaints about the number of ads because I understood fully that they were legally mandated, today just as then. I referred, instead, to her complaints against what she stated was an over-reliance on syndicated programming.
4. Steve Robinson may, in fact, be WFMT's general manager, but that is not his official title, and it is the way the present titles reek of corporate bureaucracy that, to me, symbolizes, WFMT's current status.
5. To say that the cutting of Sunday newscasts had nothing to do with staffing or costs seems bizarre when the result was completely automated Sunday programming where live announcers were no longer anywhere in evidence.
6. I see little comparison between Rita Jacobs seeking contributions from listeners when the station had a basically non-existent budget and zero dollars in the till with an institution with millions in annual revenues and a surplus of upper level Vice Presidents, whom I seriously suspect all pull down very substantial salaries, doing the same. Ray Nordstrand was brilliant in leveraging current possibilities to create a self-supporting organization. In today's admittedly very different times, current management has not. Is it really impossible, or do we just not have the same level of thinking?
7. Two primary things we agree on: firstly, as I wrote in my original post, WFMT remains "a Chicago treasure"; and secondly, the magic - and innovation - created by the Jacobs, Nordstrand and Pelligrini were something that happens once in a lifetime, if that often. As Andrew himself writes, we shall not see its like - or their's - again.

Now, on to Andrew's response:

Dear Lynn,

I think you know of my admiration for you, your writing, your websites, and your tireless advocacy for the city's architectural and cultural legacies as one force or another takes a whack at them. And I absolutely share -- and have expressed at my own site and elsewhere -- the very same general sentiments as you have here about Norm's death and the history and continued importance of WFMT.

But I have to point out a few things in this post that are either incorrect or might benefit from some additional context:

1 -- Norm was program director of WFMT for 43 years, from 1953 to 1996.

2 -- Richard Dyer-Bennet is spelled thus, with one "t." The song of his that closed "The Midnight Special" for many years is "Lonesome Valley," which has no "lonesome river," although "Jordan River" is the subject of one verse.

3 -- I do not think that anyone could find any "unraveling" from the station's earliest days through the attacks some 33 years later by the CETA, now WWCI, board beginning in the mid-1980s and the sale of the magazine in 1986. The earlier sale of the station to WGN Continental Broadcasting in the late 1960s and the subsequent gift/transfer to CETA in 1970 resulted in no management or format changes. (Rita [Jacobs] Willens complains in Bob McClory's 1987 Chicago Reader article that you link to that there were to many "political ads" -- Bob should have pointed out that these were and are mandated by the FCC.) WFMT and WFMT, Inc., parent of the station and Chicago magazine then, functioned separately and without interference from CETA/WTTW. The bureaucrats took over in the mid-1980s, NOT in 1970 or at any earlier date. (My late father, Marshall Patner, worked with Len Despres on the WGN/TribCo purchase issue and I worked full-time at WFMT, Inc./Chicago magazine from 1981 to 1983 and observed the management of the station first-hand. I rejoined WFMT in 1998, at the invitation, as a matter of fact, of then WFMT chief Dan Schmidt, now the head of the whole WWCI/WTTW.)

4 -- Steve Robinson's title has changed several times since he joined the station in 2000, but he is in essence the station's General Manager, functions as such, and frequently refers to himself by that title.

5 -- The cut of Sunday newscasts was not a staff- or cost-cutting move. But I agree that it was and is not a good move either and I hope that the Sunday newscasts will be reinstated.

6 -- Is the current "state" of the station "compromised" or simply a reflection of the reality that if we refuse to take recorded commercials and jingles -- and we should refuse these absolutely, we present only announcer-read advertising copy -- and if we do not have the income that we once had from the magazine, then we have to come to the listeners for assistance, just as Rita Jacobs did in 1952. "Endless" pledge drives? We come to the listeners just three times a year and have eliminated evenings, nights, and Sundays from those three membership drives.

7 -- Thanks for the shout-out and link (which brings up my own initial tribute to Norm, with a great photo of Norm and Ray Nordstrand at the station in the early 1960s). If you found the commentary that you heard this afternoon on my "Critic's Choice" feature "veering towards the tepid" there's no one to blame but me. I was under some bad congestion and allergies on Tuesday when I tape it. No one dials my "creative boil" up or down but me. In fact, for the 11-and-a-half years that I have been doing these commentaries no one at the station has ever told me what I could or could not say or talk about or how I might talk about my topics. Nor has anyone ever heard, let alone edited, my commentaries before they are broadcast. The only change in the last few years perhaps did effect the level of "boil" for the better: Program Director Peter Whorf and Steve Robinson asked me to deliver these little talks without a script and ad lib as Peter and Steve thought that that would make them livelier and have more edge and that's how I do them now.

8 -- No, Steve is not Norm. And certainly I am not Studs Terkel or Claudia Cassidy or Harry Bouras. And no one is Jim Unrath. We won't see the likes of those folks again. But we are people who are trying to do our best and to live up to the history and principles of Norm Pellegrini. I hope that listeners such as you will continue to hold us to those standards and I hope that you might also recognize what we get right and when we do so.

Thanks!

Andrew Patner, Critic-at-Large, 98.7WFMT Radio and wfmt.com

viewfromhere.typepad.com

The Last Great Oak Falls - Norm Pellegrini is dead

I feared something was up when I started to see a number of hits to my website that came off of Google searches for Norm Pellegrini, and late last week, the fears were confirmed: Norman Pellegrini, program director for Chicago fine arts station WFMT for nearly fifty years, died on Thursday at the age of 79. For years, I would see him taking his lunch at, of all places, the food court atop Chicago Place. He was legendary for his outbursts of temper at FMT, but when I dedicated a contribution I made to a Lyric Operathon in his honor, I received not long thereafter a handwritten note from him thanking me.

He was the last survivor of a group of often contentious individuals, all now gone - Bernard and Rita Jacobs, Ray Nordstrand, Studs Terkel - who created one of the golden eras in Chicago's cultural history: a radio station that reinvented the very idea of classical music broadcasting into something that adhered both to the highest standards and most democratic impulses. No, I didn't go to college. I almost felt that I didn't have to. WFMT was my higher education, my introduction to the world of classical music and opera, Beethoven and Mahler and Verdi, and, through a special series, contemporary composers, as well. It's through FMT that I first encountered Job and Godot, and through Studs, people like journalist James Cameron and the voices of Hiroshima's survivors, through the Midnight Special, the great American musicals, Steve Goodman, and that the unearthly falsetto, as chill as death, of Richard Dyer-Bennet, taking us across that lonesome valley, a new baptism at the close of each week.

What went out over the air sounded seamless and perfect but, as chronicled by the Chicago Reader's Robert McClory all the way back in 1987, what went on beneath was apparently not entirely unlike Italy under the Borgias. Everyone had their own ideas of what made the station great and how to keep it that way. Rita Jacobs despised those taped transcript ions of performances of the Big Five orchestras and San Francisco Opera that I loved, that brought such soul-changing events as Tennstedt's first Beethoven with the Boston Symphony, and Giulini's Mahler 9th with the Philadelphia.

It all had started to unravel even before I became a listener. Ill health forced sale of the station, and a citizens group that included Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow, who I always remember poking fun at an FMT announcer's pronunciation of the word fondue in one his novels (Humboldt's Gift?), scuttled the station's purchase by WGN. Instead, the station was turned over to WTTW, where it's been in the hands of bureaucrats ever since. The management structure there, shared with WTTW, lists no fewer than eight Vice-Presidents - they threaten to eventually out-number the ranks of on-air talent. The titles, themselves, are masterpieces of obfuscation. Not one identifies anyone as general manager for either FMT or TTW. Steve Robinson, who used to have the title of WFMT General Manager, is now EVP for "Radio & Project Development". For TTW, there's a "SVP and Chief Television Content Officer." It's hard to imagine any place on such a roster for what was, for decades, Stud's official title: "Free Spirit."

The worst fear of the 1980's - that the station would be sold - has yet to come to pass, but many others have: - the sale of Chicago magazine without creating an endowment, a risible staff-cutting announcement of ending Sunday newscasts positioned as a gift of providing an untroubled Sabbath to listeners, followed by putting the day on autopilot, leading to one Sunday where an entire hour of programming was lost without anyone in management seeming to notice.

To be sure, even its compromised state, combining the worst of commercial radio (commercials) with that of public radio (endless pledge drives), WFMT remains a Chicago treasure - I've just heard Howard Shore's The Fly from the L.A. Opera, I'm listening to Andrew Patner as I write this - but brought down from a creative boil to room temperature, veering towards the tepid. There seems to be a lot more talking down, a lot more of the idea that everything has to explained to listeners.

Although I see him regularly at various events, I've never met Steve Robinson. He seems a very nice man, and I have no doubt he is very dedicated, but when I look into his eyes I don't see the fire I could see in Norm's even in a brief encounter at the food court when I told him how much I enjoyed still being able to hear his voice, that inimitable voice - warm, assured but approachable, inquisitive, and, always, almost breathless with enthusiasm - on the Lyric Opera broadcasts. Even now, it still hangs in the air. I strain my ears to catch every last trace. I don't want to let him go.

Last Two Days for great Edge of Intent - don't miss it.

In the time-honored Lynn Becker tradition of reminding you of something special just seconds before it's gone, one of best Burnham related events I've encountered is a superb exhibition at the Columbia College Museum of Contemporary Photography, Edge of Intent, which you have only two more days to see - today, Friday, the 3rd and Sunday the 5th (the Museum is closed on the 4th.)

On one level, the exhibition is completely tangential to the Burnham centennial celebration, with few overt references to the man and his celebrated 1909 plan, but at a deeper level, it's one of the most direct engagements, exploring the dynamics of urbanism in utopian/distopian viewpoints of often stunning visual power.
Andrew Harrison takes a roadmap of his native New Jersey and reconstitutes it within the contours of plans of perfect cities, from Burnham, to Atlantis, El Dorado, The Radiant City and the Plan for Brasilia, exploring the imposition of an abstracted, idealized order upon a terrain that has already been abstracted through mapping.
Simon Menner presents a series of high-res photographs depicting the homeless in very individual conditions from Mumbai to Paris to Chicago, where a shot of the homeless sleeping in a small park near where the Congress Expressway crosses the river appears almost cliche until you notice that they share the park with a family of nocturnal rabbits.
The photos of Tim Long begin almost like a travelogue on kayaking the Chicago river, but as it evolves you see you're on an eloquent journey, all the way to the Mississippi, that tracks the various landscapes of urbanism from the sleek towers of downtown, the raw industrial outskirts, the trashed outlying districts and the slow depacing as density dematerializes pre-despoiled landscape.
Perhaps the most cautionary and disturbing echo of the great expectations Burnham and his plan engendered can be found in a stunning series of photographs by Eric Smith of the abandoned Michigan Central Train Station, designed by the same architects - and the despairing doppelganger - of New York's Grand Central, a hallucinatory ruin of eviscerated grandeur and decimated ambition.

There's not a clunker in the bunch of the ten artists exhibiting - it's the best Burnham-related show I've seen so far. You can see descriptions of photo's of each artist's contribution here. The museum is free, and it's open today, Friday from 10 a.m., and 5 p.m, and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Conveniently located at 600 South Michigan and just on your way to Taste of Chicago and the fireworks. Try to carve out a half-hour or so of your holiday to check out this extraordinary show - you won't regret it.

Uncle Dan Wants YOU! A Burnham 4th - new edition of 1909 Plan, celebration at History Museum

July 4th, the day the Adams died (Jefferson, too), is not only the 233rd anniversary of our nation's birth, it's the day that Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett officially unveiled their 1909 Plan of Chicago. As part of an enormous range of events the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee has co-ordinated to celebrate and contemplate the plan, at 1:00 p.m., the Chicago History Museum will be including a "Daniel Burnham historical re-enactor", Living History Theatre’s R. J. Lindsey, presenting a slide show titled, inevitably, Daniel Burnham: Make no Little Plans, in the History Museum's Rubloff Auditorium. It's free, and part of the museum's 50th 4th celebration, which takes place from 10:00 a.m. to noon on Uihlein Plaza behind the museum at 1601 N. Clark. At 11:00, there will be a "keynote oration will feature members of the Burnham and Bennett families in honor of the 1909 Plan of Chicago." Muskets will be fired, declarations will be read, faces will be painted, and at 10:45 a.m. children's costume parade promises "the world’s tallest Uncle Sam".

The Museum's celebration will also mark the presentation of the Great Books Foundation just-issued new edition of the Plan, available in paperback for $39.95, with an introduction by Carl Smith, author of The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, and what is promised to be better quality illustrations than those found in the hardcover reprint of the Plan issued by Princeton Architectural Press, which has its own excellent introduction, by Burnham scholar Kristen Schaffer, and carries a list price of $85.00. A a paperback edition on Amazon is listed for $38.90 on up. Great Books is also publishing their version of the Plan in a "special hardcover collector's edition", complete with a hair from Burnham's moustache (or perhaps not) for $125.00. Both editions are available for purchase directly from the foundation, and at various venues, including the museum store, throughout Chicago.

Another new book is The Plan of Chicago @ 100, published by the Ely Chapter of Lamba Alpha International, made up of scholars and activists in the land economics field. You can see the list of topics and authors, which includes people such as Lawrence Okrent, Joseph P Schwietmann, and John Norquist, below. The book is also available at the Chicago History Museum, or directly from the publishers for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, here.

Chicago Streetscene: The Phantom of the Opera Tower

The 45-story Steuben Club Building, 188 West Randolph, 1929, Vitzhum & Burns, whose work also includes One North LaSalle, St. Peters on Madison, and Painters District Council 14 on Adams.