Don’t tread on my gas stove!

     Will the Russians nuke us? Or high-tension power lines fry our brains? Could we be poisoned by the water? By fluoride, or lead? Are we being gulled by subliminal advertising? Blinded by sitting too close to color television? Or by computer screens? Cooked by microwave ovens? Will cellphones give us brain cancer? Are we being crushed by overpopulation — too many kids. No, bankrupted by aging demographics — not enough kids. A new ice age, no, global warming. Africanized killer bees, on the move north. Would the airbag in my Honda slit my carotid artery instead of saving me? Will AI — Artificial Intelligence — start churning out content in one corner of the internet while consuming it in another, shutting humans out of the loop entirely and somehow destroying the world?
     Honestly, by the time gas stoves were raised as a peril, I’d had a lifetime of ooo-scary threats that proved illusionary, an endless car alarm blare of empty warnings, so many that I’ve become immune. News of any danger without the immediacy of “you’re bleeding” is safely ignored.
     Seriously. Last summer, a colleague phoned to say his Chicago cop friend was concerned about people on Twitter threatening to kill me. I chewed on this a moment, then replied, “Are they on their way here, now, to get me?” They weren’t. So I went back to gardening.
     So naturally, the alarm about gas stoves left me unmoved. This week, when the state of New York banned gas stoves in new construction, I didn’t feel either the planet nor Empire State children are being saved. I grew up with an electric stove, burning myself more than once on coils that were off but still raise-a-blister hot. Supposedly the new electric stoves are better, but gas stoves are what pros cook on — you’d no sooner go into the kitchen in a fine restaurant and find an electric stove than you’d expect to see them emptying cans of Progresso into a big pot for the soup d’jour.

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Flashback 2010: Overshadowed by his skyscrapers

Willis Tower (Photo by: Mike Innocenzi, aka @pantagapher. Used with permission)

     Here's a koan for you:

     Q: How can a man be busy writing, yet have nothing written?

     A: When he's busy writing something else, and has nothing for his daily blog.

     That's okay. Because I noticed that Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the topping off of the Sears, of late Willis, Tower. That sent me wandering back, looking at my various takes on what for years was the world's tallest building. I like the one below, because it's a relic from slough after the 2008 recession, when half-built buildings dotted downtown and it seemed that the city had gone to hell. A reminder, as we struggle through our current civic woes: we've been through this before. Notice my use of "Trumpish" as a pejorative in 2010 — ahead of the curve.

     Shouldn't architects be better known, considering what they do? I'm not talking about Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sure, they're famous and probably always will be.
     I'm talking about subsequent architects. When Bruce Graham died last week, and I read in his obituary that he had designed both the Willis (nee Sears) Tower AND the John Hancock Center, my first thought — and perhaps yours, too — was: "Never heard of the guy."
     Of course, 1973 — when the Willis Tower opened — was a long time ago, and the Hancock was completed even earlier, when I was in third grade. Graham could have been borne in triumph down State Street on a sedan chair over scatterings of rose petals and given the key to the city.
     But I doubt it.
     How is it that any promising Cubs rookie receives more enduring fame than someone who created not one, but two, Chicago landmarks? We have a better chance of being aware of a French artist like Jean Dubuffet, because of his god-awful Snoopy-in-a-blender sculpture jammed into the too-small plaza of the Thompson Center, than we are of the guy who designed the center itself, Helmut Jahn (of course, that might be a favor to him, depending on your opinion of the Thompson Center — post-modern masterpiece or horrific white elephant, take your pick).
     Perhaps the obscurity of architects is their own fault — they're always winging off to Bahrain to design something new. Were I Bruce Graham, I'd have spent at least one day a year hanging around on the sidewalk in front of the Sears Tower with a big "Ask Me About My Building" button, cadging conversations with passersby. But I am not an architect.

    Work in progress

     

     Spring peeked over the fence Thursday afternoon, and I celebrated by walking a cigar along Wacker Drive, admiring the Chicago River.
     At Clark, I paused to study the stalled construction across the street. "Waterview Tower — A 90-story elite residence," the battered signboard proclaimed.
     "No," I corrected, "Waterview Tower — a 26-story unsightly concrete shell."
     It isn't nice to smirk at somebody else's financial ruin — this forlorn, decaying edifice blew through someone's millions.
     The truth is, we're all cooking in the same pot. But they put it up, and now we have to watch it crumble. And there's something about that sign that invites contempt, something about its exultant, Trumpish phrases of enticement — "World-class lifestyle." What was that exactly? Gold-plated faucets?
     Bristles of rusty rebar poke up where construction left off, like shoots from a dying plant. I crossed the street and gazed through the fence. An overturned safety barrel. A port-o-john. "No HIRING ON JOB SITE" read a blue sign. No kidding; no hiring anywhere. Construction on Waterview stopped almost two years ago, and nobody expects it to start up again.
     We're not used to this. If you go to a Third World country, residents start building structures as soon as they scrape together a truckload of cinder blocks, halt while they earn capital for another truckload, then continue. The streets are dotted with buildings in every stage of completion, many going straight from new construction to abandoned ruin without ever being a finished building.
     Something for us to look forward to.
     The Waterview condos are advertised as ranging from "$562,000 to $2,316,000." You have to marvel at the specificity of that second sum -- not $2 million, not $2.3 million, but $2,316,000. That's so exact, as if it represented actual worth, the result of complex calculations. When it was just a guess, and a wrong one. The people doing this kind of thing — those who plunged the world into its current financial crisis — loved to pretend they knew precisely what they were doing. But they didn't.
     I was at the corner of Franklin and Lake when I noticed a man — 60ish, holding a scrap of paper and looking puzzled. I sensed that if I looked him in the eye, he would ask directions. I did, and he did.
     "Where is Wacker Drive?" he asked.
     Savoring the moment, I slowly raised both arms, straight out and perpendicular to each other, the right pointing north up Franklin Street, the left pointing west down Lake.
     "It's right there," I said, and let him gaze at me in bewilderment for a moment before explaining
     "Wacker Drive curves," I said. "There's a North, South, East and West Wacker. Where on Wacker are you looking for?"
     "Three Three Three West Wacker," he said. "A green, granite building."
     Now, it was my turn to be bewildered — 333 W. Wacker was directly in front of us. We were practically standing on its steps.
     "It's right there," I said, pointing to the number of the door. To my surprise, he argued.
     "No," he said. "That's 633 W. Wacker." Sure enough, there was some kind of scuffed area by that first "3" which, from where we were standing, made it look like a "6." We went closer and peered at the numerals while I pointed out that it was really a "3." He thanked me and went into the building.
     I walked away thinking, "Just goes to show the importance of details." Here you have one of the most attractive, beloved iconic, buildings in the city -- designed by Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, by the way — and one little flaw, some corrosion around a numeral, is enough to render the building practically invisible to someone standing in front of it. Architects matter, but so do maintenance men, and one of them needs to get out there with a rag and some solvent.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 14, 2010

Editor's note: In 2011, the owners conducted a study of the shell of Waterview Tower, at 111 W. Wacker, and decided it was salvageable. The project was scaled back from 92 to 59 stories, and completed in 2016. It's now dubbed OneEleven.

Sorry, Charlie! Kings aren’t Chicago’s thing

King Charles III

     In 2009, I had to go to London to give a speech, and wondered what else I should do while in town. Tea with the Queen of England sounded fun. So I phoned her press office at Buckingham Palace — nothing ventured, nothing gained! Not that I really expected to sit down with her, serf à la reine, and sip Earl Grey, I explained, in my brazen American way. But maybe she’d be cutting a ribbon somewhere and I could join the crowd.
     “The queen,” the press person explained, “will be at her castle in Balmoral.”
     Just as well....
     However, the press person continued, seizing the opportunity to bring up Prince Charles. He had a project. Something about architecture. I don’t think she wanted me to go over rolls of drawings with him. But he had some royal initiative she dangled before me. No matter, because at the mention of “Charles” my cognitive functions shut off. Sorry, Charlie.
     Charles never counted. Maybe it was the ears. Remarking upon people’s physical attributes has gone out of style, and I would apologize, but I am not expressing my own bias, but merely reporting the world’s. There is something squinty and inbred about the man — his parents were third cousins, remember.
     Charles was awkward and unpleasant, even before he cuckolded the world’s favorite princess and sent her hurtling toward her rendezvous with death on a Paris street (actually, “cuckold” applies only to men; a woman whose husband betrays her is a “ cuckquean” which is not a word even I would spring on you, unexplained, except to observe it was the only kind of queen Diana got the chance to be).

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'Stand up to bullies'

John Hewko, left, CEO of Rotary International, Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Steve Edwards, right.

     The first 89 minutes of the dialogue Monday night about the situation in Ukraine was compelling. Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, who has just returned from that war-torn country, talking for an hour and a half with John Hewko, CEO of Rotary International, at Rotary's headquarters in Evanston, moderated by former WBEZ host, Steve Edwards.

      The general tone was optimistic, despite 432 days having passed since Russia invaded Ukraine, with no end in sight.

      "Vladimir Putin has already lost the war," Daalder said. "He never had a chance because the Ukrainian people never gave him a chance."

     With a big assist from the United States, both in intelligence and some $40 billion in weaponry. Sometimes we get things right.

      Interesting, but not something I'd rush to share here. Then, with a minute left, Hewko — who I wrote about a year ago — asked the key question. Americans often tune this sort of thing out, particularly as it drags. We get bored. So, he wondered, what's the "elevator pitch" — the brief argument for why we're persisting, why we're continuing to invest our time and money and reputation in this war. Why we need to stick with this.

     Daalder's response is worth sharing:

     "We have a tendency in the United States to listen to the loudest voices, who usually are wrong," he began."But in this case the majority of Americans are right. Why do they believe that? The argument is twofold: one, it's a principle. Understanding that if you start to live in a world in which bullies can get away with bullying, in this case using military force to change borders, and to say 'What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.' We understand that's not a good world for us to live in. 

     "And then secondly when people decide to stand up to bullies, we should be with those people. People understand that at a very core level. That when missiles are raining down and destroying apartment buildings, that cities are being bombed, that 13 million people out of 40 million are on the move because of a war, we should be with them. We can do that in little ways, by financial support, by providing other humanitarian ways, and Rotary is based on the concept that a lot of little things come out to a very big thing. Or make sure your representative votes the right way in Congress on these issues. At its core, you don't want to live in a world in which  the bullies get their way. You don't want to live in a world where guy just because he has the capacity decides to take what's not his want to live in a world where people stand up against that. You can talk about larger issues, security of Ukraine, security of Europe, but at its core, it's about how we should behave in the world."

    That makes a lot of sense to me. And to most Americans. Something we should be proud of, in an era when Americans could use something to feel good about. We've done the right thing, so far. Now all we have to do is keep on doing it.

Books that pop out at you

     We didn’t have kids, yet. So with plenty of time to burn, my wife and I sat on the sofa and worked through Nick Bantock’s “Griffin & Sabine,” the 1991 illustrated novel whose love story unfolds, quite literally, in a series of postcards and letters.
     I admit that “Griffin & Sabine” has not come to mind much in the third of a century since. Not until recently, when I found myself strolling with the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry Library, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, through the exhibit she created, “Pop-Up Books through the Ages.”
     With the exception of freakish epistolary adult best-sellers — “Griffin & Sabine” and its sequels sold millions of copies — pop-up books today are considered primarily a niche entertainment for children, where colorful three-dimensional contrivances rear out of pages as they’re opened.
     But the Newberry’s books, some nearly a millennium old — the oldest dates to 1121 — have dials and flaps showing calendars and cosmos, anatomical studies, and a town before and after a landslide. (Though several reveal a discreetly hidden naked lady).
     “The interactiveness of it makes the show fun,” Karr Schmidt said.
     I was surprised, looking at these amazing volumes, how often the technological wonder in my back pocket came to mind. We often sneer at our phones, for good reason. But when you see the lengths scholars and clerics went to in the past, trying to visualize information, it makes you appreciate what we have. We’re living their unattainable dream.
     “A lot of these books do many of the things that a screen does now,” Karr Schmidt said.
     “Pop-Up Books through the Ages” is particularly kid-friendly, with large pages of cut out dolls and offers a souvenir pop-up Newberry Library, created for the exhibit by Chicago illustrator Hannah Batsel and paper engineer Shawn Sheehy.

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Flashback 1988: "Loop's Ranch music bar seeking new homestead"

    Twitter gets a lot of criticism, and rightly so. But one well-placed tweet can send you tumbling back in time. Like this, from my fellow University of Chicago Press author Mark Guarino.

     Suddenly it was the late 1980s and I was on the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. night shift again. One benefit of working midnights is you'd actually see the paper you wrote. Turn in a story at 8 p.m., and by 1 a.m. the stacks of tomorrow's newspapers containing it appear.

    For this story, if I recall properly, I started the evening at the country and western bar in the heart of the Loop, returned to the paper to write the article. Then, after I got off work, say 2 a.m., Tim Gerber and I cheekily went back to the Bar RR Ranch with a pile of the latest edition, featuring a story about the place. We were well-received.

     Things get hazy from there, because of the press of years, and, ah, other factors. I do remember singing "Tequila Sunrise" on stage. And I seem to recall Tim later climbing halfway up the Dubuffet sculpture before the police arrived and suggested he not do that, though I suppose that could have been a different night. There were also pancakes at the Golden Nugget at dawn, maybe. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading Mark's book.

     What good is progress if it means a person can't find live country music in the heart of the Loop at 3 a.m., or settle down across from the Daley Center to enjoy a steaming "chili mac tamale ham and cheese bowl"?

Not the Sundowners

     That was the question raised by several hundred people who gathered at the R. R. Ranch, 56 W. Randolph, to soak up ambience and beer at the Loop fixture.
     The Ranch, which originally opened in 1948 on Clark Street, faces eviction from its latest home at the doomed Woods Theater Building sometime this winter.
     "This is fun, this is old-time country," said patron Joel Montgomery, of Chicago. "It's too bad they've got to close."
     "Just what we need, another office building," his friend, Julie Hodson, of Chicago, said about the 40-story structure planned for the site.
     Emotions flowed with the beer Thursday night, which was billed as the "Last Roundup at the Ranch," though the basement bar is expected to be open through the end of January.
     "We love this bar! This is our favorite bar!" said Catherine Champion, of Chicago, who was out with co-workers from Crate & Barrel.
     "It's so much fun, and we love the Sundowners," she said, referring to the rustic trio the Ranch has featured for the last 30 years. "They play whatever we ask them, and we get everybody to dance."
     Barbara Scheid, a co-owner, reminisced about the many famous people who stumbled into the bar.
     "Robert Duvall was here, singing like a crazy person," said Scheid, who also remembered the rock star Sting showing up one night. 

Also not the Sundowners

    

     Scott and Gail Robson of Chicago, who got engaged at the Ranch to the romantic strains of a Patsy Cline song, returned to sit one more time at the heavily graffitied tables and soak up the boisterous atmosphere.
     Chris Harmon, of the Friends of Downtown, circulated petitions asking the owners of the Woods Building to allow the Ranch to stay as long as possible.
     "We're trying to generate public support to keep the bar open while they search for a new location," she said. "The Ranch is a dynamic, different part of downtown life, and we don't want to lose it."
     The Ranch's owners said they are trying to find a new spot for the bar, which was first located on Clark Street north of Madison, then moved to 56 W. Madison and finally to its present location in 1977.
     "We've got a couple of things going, but we haven't been able to finalize them," said Art Brown, another co-owner. "We'd like to stay in the downtown area. The big core of our business is downtown."
     Brown said that despite problems with finding a suitably large location and the skyrocketing rents that have forced many colorful small businesses out of the Loop, the Ranch management was optimistic it would find a new Loop location.
     "We're always one step ahead of the wrecking ball," he said. "In our hearts, we're very confident."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 30, 1988

Works in progress: Gene Weingarten

     Gene Weingarten is a humorist at heart, and as such is profoundly in touch with the inherent tragedy of life.  As a longtime columnist at the Washington Post, he won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for "The Fiddler in the Subway," where he put world class violinist Joshua Bell into the Washington Metro with his case open for change. What would have been a stunt in the hands of a lesser writer, like me, turned into a profound meditation on beauty, time and how we choose to live our lives. If you haven't read his collection, "The Fiddler in the Subway," you should buy it right now here.  The book contains some of the best-rendered, most heartbreaking, thought-provoking and worthwhile columns ever written. Reading it is awe-inspiring, like looking at the stars at night. I could never come anywhere close, but it made me proud to belong to the same profession, to be part of the same cosmos.       

     Besides being a professional inspiration second only to, perhaps, John McPhee, Gene has lately been a cautionary tale that has steeled me to meet whatever professional doom is hurtling toward me.  At the end of 2021, he tripped over his humor — fall-out from an offhand joke he made about Indian food that ran afoul of our exquisite cultural sensitivities. The Washington Post unceremoniously showed him the gate, a shocking coda that sadly encapsulates our moment in professional journalism.  Though it brought me both sadness and a strange kind of reassurance, almost comfort: if Gene Weingarten could be cashiered over a crack about curry, then I can be burnt at the stake and have no reason to complain nor feel fate had been unusually severe to me. In fact, I will lower my head, accepting my due, thanks to him. If he can take it, so can I.
     Not that Weingarten has surrendered quietly. Not his way. He launched a vibrant substack, "The Gene Pool." I signed up, and hope you do too. I asked him to tell us a little about it, and he honored EGD by agreeing to say a few words. Take it away, Gene:

     On my 21st birthday, when I was just out of college, where I was editor of the newspaper, I began my first day on the job as city hall reporter for a small afternoon daily in Albany, New York. The newsroom was dingy, the manual typewriters ancient and balky. The walls of the city room were faded to a wan yellow-orangish-green color that resembled the interior of one of those 1950s movie hotel rooms with a blinking neon sign outside the window ("Eats"), peopled by unshaven men in ribbed undershirts chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes down to the smallest stub, and looking nervously toward the street. Let's call the color "you'll-never-take-me-alive copper"
     Then the city editor told me what I was going to make: Just $72 a week. My jaw dropped. I was gobsmacked. These idiots were going to actually pay me for something I would have done for free.
     The Earth wheeled fifty times around the sun. I began earning a lot more money with jobs that had a lot more prestige at a succession of larger newspapers, until I arrived at The Washington Post in 1991 and nailed a great gig that gave me international prestige and rewarded me with significant prizes. And then, last year, when I turned 70, they jettisoned me.
     It's not easy getting a new position at 70;. A book proposal went nowhere. But the folks at Substack, a new online site that delivers publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure. Would I be interested in starting a newsletter? It's a grueling endeavor that usually is not terribly lucrative.
     "Yes," I said, immediately. And I did. It's a blog-like thing and reader interactive chat called "The Gene Pool." It's doing pretty well. It has subscribers in 49 states and 72 countries. I am earning about a third of what I did at The Post. People have asked me why I did it. Why not just take a victory lap and retire? Here's why:
     These Substack idiots are going to actually pay me for doing something I'd have done for free.