OWP/P Environmental Awareness lectures, CNU IL Conference, Pecha Kucha2 - additions to September calendar

Monday at noon Henry Henderson of the Natural Resources Council will be the leadoff lecturer for OWP/P's 6th Annual Environmental Awareness Week. Henderson will be followed on Tuesday by a presentation by Heifer International, John Andersen of the Nature Conservancy on Wednesday, a discussion on grasslands by the U of C's Justin Borevitz on Thursday, and concludes Friday with a panel discussion on the benefits of natural open land, including the Wetlands Initiative, Openlandss and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. All events are scheduled to run from noon to 1:30 P.M., and will take place at OWP/P's offices at 111 West Washington, conference room 22c. RSVP required.

Elsewhere, the Congress for New Urbanism, Illinois Chapter, will be holding its first annual statewide conference in Wheaton on Friday, September 28th, with Doug Farr and Susan Mudd discussing LEED for neighborhood development among the presentations.

And then there's Pecha Kucha2, at Martyr's on Lincoln Tuesday night, September 25th, the speed presentation event in which everyone gets slightly under 7 minutes to present 20 slides - for 20 seconds each - to cover whatever they want to talk about. Those scheduled this month include architects Deborah Kang and Anders Nereim.

This week also sees lectures by Carol Ross Barney and Gordon Gill, and the unveiling of Landmarks Illinois 2008 Watchlist. Check out the entire September calendar here.

Farnsworth Saved From Drowning - Documentary Debuts Tonight

By now you've probably read how Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece, the Farnsworth House, narrowly escaped major damage from Fox River flooding following the polite August monsoons that dumped over nine inches of rain in the Chicago area. Trib architecture critic Blair Kamin writes about it here.

Tonight, Thursday, September 13th, at 8:00, WTTW, Channel 11 will debut a new documentary, Saved from the Wrecking Ball: The Farnsworth House, that describes the building's previous major trauma, the battle to keep the house open to the public after long-time owner Sir Peter Palumbo put it to auction in 2003. Amidst fears it could be sold to a private buyer who might cut it up and cart it off for re-assembly far away from its spectacular Plano, Illinois site. Farnsworth was ultimately acquired for $7,500,000 by a group of preservationists that included The National Trust for Historic Preservation and what is now Landmarks Illinois. I wrote extensively about the battle here.

The new documentary is hosted by WTTW's omnipresent Geoffrey Baer, and is said to also tell the story of Mies's ultimately soured relationship with client - and rumored lover - Dr. Edith Farnsworth, which was also the subject of June Finfer's acclaimed play, The Glass House.

WTTW will show the documentary again on Sunday, September 16th at 2:30 a.m. (?!), and is finding its way onto the schedules of other public television stations across the country.

Read our version of the Farnsworth House story here.

Chicago Streetscene - Voyagers

Emerging Chicago Architecture on CAF October 6 tour

Chicago Architecture Foundation docent Nancy Cook and tour director reminds us that this year's Emerging Chicago Architecture tour is coming up on October 6th. It's a great opportunity to not only see some of Chicago's best new buildings, but also actually have the architects on hand to talk to you about them.

This year's event will begin at CAF, with a talk by Stanley Tigerman before setting forth for a tour of his new building for the Pacific Garden Mission, followed by stops at Rancho Verde/Christy Webber with architect Doug Farr, and a stop at the Center on Halsted with Gensler's Elva Rubio. A walkaround of Helmut Jahn's new SRO on Clybourn, sans architect, and projects by Miller/Hull and LCM Architects finish up the 4-hour event.

For a highly reasonable 45 bucks ($40.00 for CAF members) you can guaranteee yourself a spot on the bus. (Bring your own sack lunch, and purchase your reservation on-line at the CAF's website, via Ticketmaster, complete with that monopoly's accustomed unreasonable service charge, in this case $5.75.)

More information available on-line.

No Escape(s) for The Palmer House

Roving correspondant and habitual shutterbug, engineer Bob Johnson, gives us these shots of the continuing restoration of the facades of Holabird and Roche's 1925 Palmer House, in this case of the removal of the first of three massive fire escapes and screens, re-establishing the continuity of the facade's long row of tall window groupings. Here's hoping they also restore the original window frame design and pediment of the newly re-exposed center window sets, as well.

Last year, Preservation Chicago led a successful charge to block concessions made by a typically pliant Commission on Chicago Landmarks, during landmarking negotiations for the building, that would have allowed developer Thor Equities to destroy the original limestone facade on the first two stories and replace it with a decidedly non-contributing steel and glass "modernization." The Commission's lack of backbone still failed to protect the hotel's great block-long arcade, whose width is being decimated in an effort to increase ground floor space, an economically suspect strategy since most of it will be deep within the building's interior.

Marsha White joins Marshall Fields Protesters

Tigerman, Wimer, Kerwin and the 2016 Olympics - late additions to the September calendar

This Monday at 6 P.M., you can hear Stanley Tigerman, whose new building for the Pacific Garden Mission is set to debut next month, give a lecture at School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where at the same time two weeks later, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Ross Wimer will also lecture. And if you're lucky, you may still may be able to get a reservation for this Tuesday's dinner talk for the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois by SOM's Tom Kerwin, on the topic of planning for the proposed 2016 Chicago summer Olympics.

And don't forget that this coming Saturday, September 15th, you'll have a rare chance to tour Gordon Bunshaft's Building 42, Hostess House, at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, one of 25 finalists in the American Express Partners in Preservation competition, which pits landmarks against each other in quest of funding dollars.

These events are among nearly 40 individual items on the September calendar. Check them all out here.

Addio Luciano

When I think of Luciano Pavarotti, I often remember the commercial he made, pre-superstar phase, for American Express, part of its legendary "Do you know me?" campaign. "When I sing Tosca," the ebullient tenor says to the camera, "they shout, 'Bravo! Bravo', but when I check into a hotel, they say, "Who? Who?" If you didn't know him, you immediately wanted to. His warm, engaging personality - which, along with an outsize talent, would soon make him one the most famous people on the face of the earth - leapt off the small screen.

Especially in his later years, it was fun to make fun of Pavarotti, of his massive, demobilizing girth, his constant cancellations, and his barnstorming Three Tenors stadium tours. Now he's gone, and all that melts away. There's only his many great recordings, and the memories of that pure, flawless voice and his timeless artistry.

As might be expected, OperaChic offers up a wonderful, wide-ranging tribute, bringing together comments from his colleagues, her own cogent explanation of his fabled diction, and several videos. See, and - most importantly - hear it all here.

On another troubling note, the New York Times is reporting that the great conductor Claudio Abbado, battling undisclosed health problems, has cancelled all upcoming concerts in the near future, including a return to Carnegie Hall next month.

Once More into the Breach for Marshall Field's Protesters

Saturday, September 9th will mark the one year anniversary of the end of Chicago's legendary Marshall Field's department store and its rebranding as the local Macy's outlet. A group called Fields Fans Chicago will again be gathering, from 1 to 2:30 P.M., under the store's great clocks to protest the change. The group's has a great website that's definitely worth checking out.

The group claims to have distributed over 60,000 leaflets, 63,000 label buttons, and thousands of "Field's Is Chicago/Boycott Macy's" bumper stickers in support of its cause. It cites its continuing boycott of the store as contributing to a 77% drop in profits for the Macy's chain last quarter.

"As we continue our grassroots efforts to bring back Marshall Field's in all its glory," the group's announcement reads, "it is good to keep in mind that in corporate America, anything can happen. After seven years as part of Daimler, Chrysler is again an independent American auto company. 'AT&T' became 'Cingular' only to reverse course back to 'AT&T.' "

Unfortunately, these examples don't exactly present optimistic harbingers. Chrysler is a deeply-troubled company in a deeply-troubled industry, which Daimler was dropping like a hot potato before it could inflict even more damage on its parents finances, and the rebranding of Cingular as AT&T comes from the same kind of global consolidation that resulted in Macy's replacing the Fields name. The only valid example mentioned by the group, the triumph of Classic over New Coke, remains notorious because it represents an extremely rare exception to overall trends.

And that's the key issue. The former Marshall Field's biggest problem is not the name change - although that monumentally stupid move managed to wipe out a century of valuable brand equity overnight - but the fact that while, in in their heyday, the great department stores like Field's and Bullocks and Filenes were all about uniqueness, in today's supply chain economy, it's all about sameness and standardization. It's not about building a business, it's about wringing every last profit from being the last and biggest dinosaur in an industry that is struggling to justify its continued existence.

You only have to look at Macy's latest move to market itself through a series of celebrity endorsers that is said to include Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, and Jessica Simpson. What, exactly, do these people have in common other than being famous for being famous, and what, exactly do they have to do with building a department store brand? The answer, of course, is very little.

The resort to celebrity endorsers is most often a mark of desperation. A quick high, bereft of nutrition, followed by a long, painful withdrawal. In the rare cases where they're used well, with a logical and compelling relationship to the brand they're promoting, celebrity endorsers can be enormously effective. When merely slathered on like cheap perfume, however - as is the case with the Macy's campaign - they're simply marketing smack.

I am in total sympathy with the protesters and wish them only the best, but without a bold and radical rethinking of what a large city's flagship department store should be, and how what made it exciting and seductive can be translated effectively into the realities and possibilities of today's markets, reinstating the Marshall Fields name won't help much. The nightmare scenario is the recent closing of the century-old Carson Pirie Scott flagship, designed by Louis Sullivan. Corrosively unsentimental, Macy's could just decide that their massive State Street property is worth more as marketable real estate than as a department store, which would be a real, but completely plausible, tragedy.

September 17th deadline for shaking money out of the Graham - Why is their website so bad?

The Graham Foundation has sent out a reminder that September 17th is the deadline for individuals to submit an inquiry form for 2008 grant funding. This year, the Graham awarded seven grants to individuals and 13 to organizations (the inquiry deadline for organizations is February 28, 2008), totaling over $250,000. More information, including an on-line inquiry form, can be found on the Graham Foundation's website.

The foundation makes "project-based grants to individuals and organizations and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society." It makes its home in Schmidt and Garden's turn-of-the-century Madlener House.

With the 2006 appointment of new director Sarah Herda, the Graham appears to undergoing something of a retrenchment. Its last public lecture or exhibition was back in October of that year. The foundation's website has become spartan veering towards the inscrutable. The "programs" page has a single item, "H_edge - ARUP Advanced Geometry Unit/Cecil Balmond" for October, with no indication of whether it's an exhibition or lecture, or any further details.

It wasn't long ago that the Graham seemed to be getting the hang of the web, and was actually posting streaming videos of its lectures, making them more readily available to the public. On the evidence of its current web presence, however, it's backward march, full-force. The design is clumsy and unattractive, and the navigation is non-intuitive. (The home page is now the grants page.) Unless they're hidden in some secret nook, those videos seem to have entirely disappeared. One can understand if the Graham has decided to re-orient its priorities, but the current website is a misshapen embarrassment.

Carol Ross Barney, the two Gordon's - Gill and Bunshaft, Preservation Chicago's 07 Benefit at Opera Lofts, Landmarks Illinois Chicagoland Watch List

Ah, a perfect Labor Day weekend, cooking on the grill, tossing frisbees, relaxing hours lazily basking on the beach . . .

SNAP OUT OF IT!
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The Chicago architectural scene has sprung back into action big-time, with over three dozen events. You can tell things are heating up when Gordon Gill, Carol Ross Barney and Nathan Kipnis are all giving talks on the exact same evening at competing venues.

Preservation Chicago is holding its 2007 benefit at the Opera Lofts. There's an open house at Gorden Bunshanft's Hostess House at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and a rare opportunity to tour Eliel and Eero Saarinen's Crow Island School in Winnetka. Historian Bill Tyre talks on the history of Prairie Avenue, Charles Leeks discusses the Chicago Historic Greystones Initiative at APA. There's an update on progress at Adler & Sullivan's Pilgrim Baptist Church, and a book signing at CAF by Lisa D. Shrenk's for her new volume on building the Century of Progress Exhibition.

Landmarks Illinois unveils its 2008 most endangered Chicagoland Watch List. Mario Gooden and Charles Waldheim lecture at IIT. But wait - there's more! We're too lazy to put the links in this posting, but you can check out the entire September calendar for yourself here.

Chicago Streetscenes - Sunrise, and Lincoln Park Bouncer

Future City is nigh - volunteers and participants needed

Imagine a tropical paradise filled with fun and adventure. You’re climbing up the side of a waterfall with the mist spraying in your face. Now imagine a vast desert that seems to stretch as far as the eye can see. What if you could travel Earth in a day? Today, in the year 2537, Città Sotto Ghiaccio, located under the oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, provides its citizens a healthy lifestyle in a thriving economy.

No that's not the new series on the Sci-Fi Channel, but the program behind the entry that made the team from Hubble Middle School in Wheaton , pictured here, regional winners in the 2007 National Engineers Week Future City Competition, which asks 7th and 8th graders to design their visions of the city of the future, first on computer, then in a large three-dimensional model.

Last year, more than 30,000 students from 1,000 schools in 34 regions competed. This year, studies will begin in October, leading up to regional finals next January at UIC, where first place winner will get a trip to the national competition in Washington, D.C. help during National Engineers Week, February 17-23. Prizes for the final winning team include a trip to U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, which is only appropriate, since 1996 winner Anna Gunn-Golkin has gone on to a career as a launch systems engineer at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Currently, Chicago regional co-ordinator Don Wittmer is looking for local schools to participate and engineers willing to volunteer. He can be contacted at 312/930.9119 or via email. Registration deadline is October 15th. Additional information, including the Future City brochure, can be found at the competition's website.

Modern and Monument, sliding past each other on King Drive

Chicago's historic Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, as the former Grand Boulevard was renamed in 1980, is still dominated by elegant mansions in various historical styles built for the city's elite in the 1890's, when, in the words of Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade's Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis:

"One of the most colorful social rituals of the time was the Sunday promenade down Grand Boulevard in the summer, where thousands of expensive carriages majestically bore the wealthy to the race track south of Washington Park."

(Was Chicago's elite a cabal of godless heathen, the builders of the city spending the Lord's day in ostentatious parades and gambling on the ponies?)

Despite some rough times in decades past, most of the mansions and greystones of King Drive survive today, and gentrification is seeing more and more of the old grand dames restored for today's economic elite, with new construction, attempting to blend in with varying degrees of success, taking over many of the longstanding gaps of vacant lots. The "contemporary" concrete block and brick mansion to the left in this photo can be yours for 740K, while the thoroughly renovated Queen Anne original to the right, 4000 square feet, six bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths, can be yours for $699,900, which in downtown Chicago would be lucky to get you a cramped three bedroom in one of those new "luxury" condo towers where a fancy name seeks to mask a basic poverty of design.

Modernism isn't King Drive's thing, but there are scattered notable exceptions, such as 1953's Art Moderne South Park Baptist Church . . .

. . . and Morningstar Baptist Church
Pride of modernist place, however, has to go to the Illinois/Service Federal Savings headquarters, just north of 47th, home to one of the last black-owned financial institutions in Illinois.

It's a bright, high-contrast accordion of white concrete and dark triangular windows, bookended between tall, Prairie-style stone walls. Lee Bey calls it, "One of a few examples of Googie/populuxe/midcentury modernism on the city's South Side." Dating from 1962, it's a lovely counterpoint to all the heavy masonry that surrounds it.
Just across the street, you'll find the Mammoth Life and Accident Insurance Company, Jackson District, building standing alone in abandoned splendor, moated by surface parking and a vacant lot.

My bet it was originally a bank, probably failing in the Great Depression. Its compact, bulldog form is like a Temple of Dendur, gussied up in Corinthian attire. Today, small, thin reeds of broken neon hang from the letters of the large crimson sign, as the building sits silent as tomb, wondering whether what it's awaiting will turn out to be a prince or a bulldozer.

An Honest Critic's Credo - from a shocking source

Who would perpetrate such a thing? We unmask the mystery culprit - and reveal his picture - here.

Uptown Still A'Mouldering

A note from David Balaban alerted us to a couple of new videos on the Balaban & Katz Foundation website, dedicated to the legendary family company that dominated Chicago film exhibition in the era of the movie palace. The first contains excerpts from a documentary Balaban is making of interviews of family members remembering the four brothers who built the chain. He's also the author of the recent book, The Chicago Movie Palaces of Balaban and Katz, which is both a chronicle of Balaban's family, and a museum of factoids, stories and photos from the heyday of the ornate theaters, including a summary of receipts that shows that the flagship Chicago, alone, entertained an incredible 2,200,000 patrons over the just the first half of 1924, with an average weekly gross, adjusted to today's ticket prices, of nearly $750,000.

The second new item points to a YouTube video, The Uptown Today, edited by Balaban, which features a series of images by Loren Robare of the architectural details of 5,000 seat North side movie palace, closed since 1981. The theater continues to decay, with the auditorium in the video looking like the bleached bones of a lost castle sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

In May, Crain's Chicago Business reported that, after decades of attracting nothing but dust, two different suitors were fighting to acquire and restore the Uptown, but since then an ominous silence has again descended.

Earlier this month, another of Chicago's famed palaces was lost when the 2,000 seat, 1931 Nortown was demolished, after being closed since 1990. The beautiful shot you see here, for sale as a print for $800, is sampled from the web portfolio of the work of photographer Russell Phillips, a remarkable series of color shots of Chicago area movie palaces from the 1980's, many of which - the Nortown, the Esquire, the Parkway - are now gone. Even though the structures were already in deep decline and nearing their end, Phillips was able to capture their original astonishing beauty one last time. Check out this remarkable shot of the Moorish-styled ceiling of the United Artists, demolished in 1989 in exchange for what would remain a vacant lot for the next 15 years, until construction finally began on Block 37.

Psssst, hey - buddy! Wanna buy the Larkin Building?

You may have heard Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple referred to as a jewel box of a church, but now you actually have the opportunity to stash your own baubles there. Not in the real thing, of course, although I'm sure the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation will accept any spare gemstones you may care to donate.
No, I'm talking about a cherry and curly maple replica made by Jay Rogers, a Harvard music grad who abandoned teaching to "leave financial security behind and become a full time artisan and maker of boxes." The award-winning craftsman's work will be on display at this coming weekend's American Craft Exposition, taking place August 24th to 26th, in the Henry Crown Sports pavilion at Northwestern University in Evanston. (Friday 10-8, Saturday 10-6, and Sunday 11-5 - more information online or by calling 847/570.5096.)

In addition to the three compartment Unity Temple box, there's also a six compartment box replica of the demolished Larkin Bulding, until 1950 in Buffalo, New York, and now in Pommele Sapele, Lacewood, and Curly Maple. Open the box by lifting off the roof, and you can almost hear the soft click track of all the teensy-tiny clerks pecking away at their teensy-tinier typewriters.

Dudamel and Abbado, morning and sunset

Can Claudio Abbado really be 74? The fondly remembered former principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony paces himself carefully these days, six years after treatment for cancer ended with the removal of much of his stomach.

As noted in an excellent profile by the New York Times' Daniel J. Wakin, the boyish-looking conductor, now gray and frail, has turned away from the power centers of classical music - La Scala, the Vienna Statsoper and Berlin Philharmonic, which he led from 1989 to 2002 - to lead both the Mahler Youth Orchestra, and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which he founded in 2003, and which he will take to Carnegie Hall in October.

As anyone who's listened to his recent recordings can attest, he's reached the golden autumn of his career, when the respect and rapt attention of his players overcomes declining physical prowess. Every time he steps to the podium, he personifies the immensity of the human creative spirit, and its ultimate fragility. As Mark Twain once noted, it's the kind of thing that tends to concentrate the mind, and the result is often deeply profound performances whose power and emotion carries the best of what we are into the sinews of new generations.

Abbado's tribulations has left his ambition - and courage - undiminished. He's looking forward to conducting Fidelio for the first time next year (11 performances!), and his Carnegie Hall concerts will include not only a pair of Beethoven 9th's, but the Mahler Third, which he conducts at the London Proms tomorrow (Wednesday) night. (You can listen to the concert on-line off the BBC Proms website, both live - my calculation is 1:30 P.M. Chicago time - and as a rebroadcast, for one week only.) The New York Times story also includes links to several snippets of Abbado rehearsing the work.

Gustavo Dudamel is at the other end of the spectrum. The 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor, recently named music director designate of the L.A. Phil, is all cascading hair and explosive energy, leaving audiences limp with excitement as he makes his inaugural tour of the world's great orchestras (including the CSO last spring). Via the irresistibly entertaining - and informative - Opera Chic blog, we pass on Dave Paxton's charmingly purpled account of Dudamel's Proms concert this past Sunday:

Gustavo Dudamel (conducting without a score) violently contrasted the two [aspects of Shostakovich's Tenth], concentrating on hushed textures and interplay of lines in the former and ejaculating the brisker passages with horrifying, agitated urgency.

But you don't have to take Paxton's word for it. You can listen to the entire blazing performance on the Proms website - again for one week only. Would that the unions would allow such real-time broadcasts here. (A couple years ago, union restrictions resulted in the yanking of a broadcast of a Cleveland Orchestra Proms concert from the Proms website.)

Dudamel's Proms triumph was powered not by the members of a Berlin Phil, or VPO, but by his own Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, a 200 person ensemble drawn from Venuezuela's extraordinary El Sistema, a nationwide music program that includes a quarter million children. In capability and inclusiveness, nothing in American music education comes close.

The virtuosity of the young players in the Simon Bolivar was more than a match for that of the blue blooded orchestras with which they shared the Proms, pumping the excitement of critics and audiences alike. "The performance of the season . . . ," gushed The Independent.

" . . . a superstar conductor who on this showing could hardly be priced too high," The Independent wrote of Dudamel, "He is musical in every fibre of his body." Like the young Leonard Bernstein, who made his own incendiary entrance over half a century ago, Dudamel is flying very close to the sun. (Fittingly, Dudamel's Proms concert included an impassioned performance of the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.) Dudamel's giving off a brilliant light, and he will pay a price. Savor these all too infrequent moments of unalloyed joy.

A fiery young cub, a lion in winter. To everything there is a season.

A New Dana every Century

A rendering was released last week of still another new Chicago hotel, this one in River North at State and Erie. The dana hotel and spa (having committed $60 million to the project, Neighborhood Development Corporation and Gold Coast Hotels, Inc. apparently didn't have any money left over for capital letters in the name) is being constructed on the site of an another Hotel Dana - opened in 1891 as the Erie Hotel, which was demolished, despite the efforts of local preservationists, to make way for the new, much larger structure.

An extensive press release says the developers "initially considered the former Dana Hotel . . . as a historical renovation project, a specialty of Neighborhood Development Corporation," but - surprise, surprise - "Ultimately, it was deemed structurally and economically unfeasible for preservation." Emphasis on economics. Hotel Dana was five and a half stories. dana hotel will be 26 stories and have 216 rooms, "competitively priced" beginning at $350 a night, which probably would have bought an entire week or more lodgings at the old place.

The new dana is the work of the Chicago firm of Eckenhoff Saunders Architects, who are also architects of the new Southgate Market along the booming new Roosevelt Road retail strip, as well as the ill-fated Museum of Broadcast Communications, further down on State, which has remained unfinished for over a year after funding for the project ran out last spring.

Architect Walter Eckerhoff is quoted as calling the new dana "an exercise in simplicity." It's a simplicity in the Miesian carriage trade style, with an aluminum and glass facade, and a ground floor offering "an undulating timber wall" and "two-story fireplace." The design of the spa will include bamboo bricks and recycled glass terrazzo flooring. Guest rooms will match exposed concrete ceilings to walnut wood floors. Registration and lobby will be located on the second floor to allow , in the words of the press release, "the ground floor to give back to the neighborhood and serve a more public function." The sleek design looks to be a positive addition to River North, but currently it's probably most noted for the vast expanses of plywood being deployed in its construction.

The 1891 Dana, while not quite so posh, was pretty neat for its day. According to a first-rate history on the Preservation Chicago website, it was designed by Normand S. Patton and Reynolds Fisher, who also designed the original Armour Institute building on the IIT campus, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences, now converted to a park district admin building, at Clark and Armitage. Opened as the Erie Hotel, the Dana combined Queen Anne stylings with Romanesque details, with three projecting metal and decorative pressed brick bays centering the composition.

The press release announcing the new hotel tells us 'dana' means "the pleasure of giving" in Sanskrit, a factoid of which the architects of 1891's Hotel Erie, as well as the proprietors who renamed it the Dana, most probably went to their graves blissfully ignorant. Still, you'd likely be getting a lot of pleasure, too, if every room night booked got you $350.00 and up a pop.

Grant Park Advisory Reviews new DuSable Harbor Building Monday Night

The Grant Park Advisory Council will present plans for a new building for DuSable Harbor tonight, Monday, August 20th, beginning at 6:30 P.M. at the Daley Bicentennial Plaza at 337 East Randolph, just east of Columbus. The new structure will be built west of DuSable Harbor and north of Randolph, replacing an existing set of trailers. David Woodhouse Architects , designers of the award winning Beach House at Rainbow Park and Beach, and the Chicago Park District will present the plan. For additional information, call Bob O'Neill at 312/829.8015.