Flashback 1997: It's all water into the crib

Harrison crib, left, built in 1900; Dever crib is to the right.
(Chicago Department of Water Management photo)

    I was chatting Saturday with a young person about, ahem, stochastic mathematics, when the subject strayed to the water intake cribs, the purpose of which she'd recently discovered. I mentioned that I'd visited several of the cribs, years ago, and would dig up that column and share it.

     Five big cement trucks floating two miles offshore. A cellular phone with a rotary dial. Gas-powered toilets. Solar electric panels near what might be Chicago's last coal bin still brimming with deep black cubes.
     Welcome to the strange world of the Chicago Water Department's six intake cribs, a string of whimsical, round, fortlike structures studding the lake horizon. Cribs that not only serve as the business end of the drinking straw from which the city and 118 suburbs thirstily suck, but offer an odd blend of contradictions: old and new, latest technology and relics of the past.
     From north to south, the cribs are: Wilson Avenue, Carter Harrison, William F. Dever, Four-Mile, 68th Street and the Edward F. Dunne. Only Dunne is now drawing from the lake, feeding to the 79th Street water treatment plant.
     The Dever crib also was working until July, feeding to the Jardine Treatment Plant north of Navy Pier. Then the 106-year-old tunnel of its adjoining Harrison crib collapsed, threatening the quality of Dever's water and, in the bargain, closing two lanes of northbound Lake Shore Drive until early spring so the shore end of the damaged tunnel can be sealed off.
     That's where the cement trucks come in. Not only is the tunnel being bulkheaded off at Chicago Avenue, but also at the Harrison crib, 2 1/2 miles out. The cement workers accompanying the trucks on a barge seemed slightly dazed to find themselves in the middle of the lake.
      "This is an extremely odd job, once-in-lifetime job," said Dave Potter, a driver escorting 350,000 pounds of concrete.
     Harrison and Dever — the two are connected by a spindly, 30-foot metal walkway — are crawling with activity. Not only do divers wait to funnel the concrete 100 feet down, but electricians are updating the living quarters on Harrison.
     Though no longer drawing water, the Harrison crib is being renovated because it still will serve as living quarters. For decades, people lived nearly full time on the cribs — a two-man crew in summer and a four-man crew in winter, plus a cook. The rooms seem from another age: iron beds, a rotary phone (albeit one hooked up to a cell site). The cribs always have been bypassed by time: In 1953, a visiting reporter noted the presence of a tulip-horn Victrola.
     In summer, the men scraped debris and hapless crabs and fish from the screens. In winter, they dynamited ice from the intake ports. And year-round, they provided security and monitored a weather station.
     The live-in crews are gone now, their duties no longer needed.
     Zebra mussels forced the removal of screens over the intakes (debris is now screened out at the treatment plants, where chlorine spray keeps the zebra mussels at bay). Motion detectors provide security.

     The weather stations are gone.
     Still, the living quarters are used, mainly by workmen on major repair projects and those caught on the cribs by storms.
     Ice is still a problem, but rather than stay out full time, workers travel to the cribs on the icebreaker James J. Versluis. Ice is kept from the intake ports with the same technology used 100 years ago: one-third sticks of dynamite, lowered on a chain.
     Usually the man on the other end of the chain is Ray Perkins, the city's head crib keeper.
     "He's our only crib keeper," said Francis Blake, deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Water Pumping. "Our only holdover from that group of guys who used to live on the cribs."
     "It was boring," said Perkins, 65, who joined the department in 1956. "Fun at times. When we first started, there was no TV. Mostly radio, and crossword puzzles. Some guys painted. A week out here could be a lifetime."
     The history of the cribs is anything but boring, however, rather a wonderful tale of rescues, fires, explosions, high drama and odd events.
     Coast Guardsmen with rifles were posted at the cribs during World War II to prevent sabotage. One day in March, 1914, a crib keeper who had drowned the previous November and his successor, who drowned in February, washed up together at Oak Street Beach.
     In 1929, a storm so caked one crib with ice that the men inside had trouble breathing. "We were trapped like rats in a caulked barrel," said the keeper.
     Then there was the huge alewife assault in the early 1960s.
     "Billions of fish out here," remembered Perkins. "We were taking them out in wheelbarrows. Finally there was no place to put them."
     Perhaps the dramatic highlight of the cribs occurred in the frigid January of 1948, when single-digit temperatures forced the crews into a 30-hour losing battle with ice. Despite the detonation of 55 sticks of dynamite, the Wilson crib intakes froze completely, cutting water pressure to the North Side.
     Just to give an indication of the vital role of the cribs, that drop in water pressure forced schools to close, hospitals to take emergency measures and all Chicagoans north of Fullerton to boil their drinking water.
     Until the Harrison tunnel is sealed, the Jardine plant is drawing its daily 750 million gallons of water directly from the lakeshore - the water is dirtier there and costs more to process, which is why the aging cribs, in the relatively clean water several miles out, are still valuable.
     Perkins gazed at the small vortexes of water forming on the surface of the interior of the still-active Dunne crib and summed up what all the fuss is about. "You can't do anything without water," he said.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 16, 1997

When the news isn't new

"Napoleon's Return from Elba," by the Charles de Steuben.

     This Epstein thing, just goes on and on and on.
     Which is so puzzling.
     What about it is new? There are all these photos of Donald Trump partying with creepy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. We've seen them for years. They're not in any way inconsistent with everything we know about Donald Trump, and his pussy-grabbing, porn-star-schtupping, daughter-sexualizing ways.  The man's a major creep, scuzzball and swine. Married three times, most recently to an Eastern European soft porn model.
    Suddenly, some part of the MAGA world, indoctrinated for years to the Epstein saga, looks up from its silage and snaps to the fact that the Epstein files they were promised, whatever they are, aren't materializing. That Trump and his henchmen, who had promised to release some kind of explosive information, or list, or whatever, aren't doing so. 
    My God, it's almost as if the man were a liar!

    Or at least the liberal media is viewing it that way.

    "Because of Epstein, Americans are Finally Seeing Donald Trump," the Lincoln Square newsletter headlined Wednesday morning, going on to observe. "For all his talk about making American great again, people are noticing that he has instead pulled us all down into his sewer of lust, power, ego, betrayal, greed, pettiness, and cruelty."

    Are they? Really? Noticing. Pretty to think so. Or even if they are? Noticing, that is. And then what?
    This isn't something I'd normally react to. I don't traffic in the obvious.
    So why comment now? Well, my column for tomorrow got held Tuesday afternoon — something about necessary insurance forms not being signed, believe it or not. It'll make sense when you read the column.  Friday.
    Nothing in the paper today. But this space here can't be left blank. 
    So returning to Trump, and Epstein, and the latest developments, and my only reaction, which is a phrase I sometimes use in conversation:
     And Napoleon escaped from Elba.
     What does that mean? Napoleon, the emperor of the French, was undercut by his disastrous Russian campaign, then sentenced to exile in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. He arrived to the island off the coast of Italy on May 3, 1814, brooded there about 10 months, and escaped.
     What does that have to do with Trump?
    Well, Napoleon's escape was big news, obviously. At the time. Two hundred years ago. Now it seems, to me, as symbolic of something which isn't really news anymore, because everybody already knows about it, or should.
     Hence Trump and Epstein. If you are discovering the president is a liar and a perv, well, welcome to the party. But pardon me if I don't share your excitement, because you're discovering the painfully obvious.
    I would struggle to muster some enthusiasm if I thought this might change the situation. And while anything is possible, this just seems to be setting up yet another limbo bar for the MAGA faithful lower themselves beneath. However this works out — there could be videos of Trump committing some unspeakable illegal perversion — and his faithful end up face down on the floor, salaaming, as always. 

Hog wild

 

   My stock of Yiddish phrases is not very deep. But I do know "shonda fur di goyim" — a disgrace in front of the gentiles. Usually directed at a member of the tribe who, by playing into some ethnic stereotype, has embarrassed his religion before those who are too quick to scorn us anyway.
     I've always viewed that attitude with skepticism. It seems predicated on the mistaken notion that haters are making judgments, gathering facts. When they begin with their conclusions, and cherry pick only the facts that fit. I don't have many rules as a writer, but "Don't write for people who hate you," is one of them. People who consider Jews cheap are going to do so whether I pinch pennies or not.
     I also don't write for the easily embarrassed. When I wrote Friday's column about ordering a pork chop at the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, DC, I had my concerns — it was a trivial, share-my-high-life kind of post. I decided not to mention that the pork chop cost $35. Class distinctions inflame, why pour gasoline on the fire?
     I also didn't put in a few sentences explaining that YES, I know, I'm a JEW ordering a pork chop. Deal with it. First, I've said exactly that before. And second, I only had 790 words to tell a story that ended up being complicated. I decided to accept what flack I got for being who I am.
     In the end, it was only one guy. Let's call him David, since that is his name. David writes:

     I have been reading and enjoying your column for years. It's one of the reasons I still subscribe to the Sun Times. However, I was disturbed by your Friday column restaurants and pork chops.
     I personally don't care what a person eats or if they choose to consume something that might not fit in with their culture. Live and let live has always been the way I've conducted my life. In this case though, coming from a Jew, which I am too, I think glorifying pork chops complete with a picture sends the wrong message to many of your readers.
      Some readers, particularly non-Jews, may be confused thinking pork chops are off limits to Jews and I think to most Jews, that's where they draw a line. Virtually all of my friends who do not keep kosher avoid eating pork and bacon.
     In my mind, a Jewish guy writing a column about pork chops is inappropriate. As I said, you have every right to eat whatever you want but to see you, who occasionally writes about things Jewish, which I appreciate, writing such a column was very disappointing.
     I will continue to enjoy your column but please, at the very least, publicly respect a tradition that goes back thousands of years. You don't have to keep kosher to do that.

     I might not have answered at all. But he was, he said, a fan. He deserved a response of some sort. I thought carefully and answered this way.

     Let me start by saying that I appreciate that you have been reading for so many years. I appreciate your loyalty, and should probably just leave it at that.
     However. It troubles me that, despite this steady readership, so little of my worldview seems to have worn off. Perhaps you've read, but not for comprehension. Perhaps you've been skimming. If that is the case, let me urge you toward greater focus. Because if anything is clear from my column, it is that, while I am a proud Jew, I am not what they call a shomer shabbos Jew. I have never suggested I am any kind of role model or, indeed, anybody other than who I am. This can't be news to you. In fact, I've even addressed the pork chop issue, and quite recently. Here, please read the top of this. That's why I didn't take time in Friday's column to try to ward off a letter such as yours.
     Since you are a regular reader, I'll only ridicule you a little, in a gentle fashion. Here's what you said: while you yourself don't care what a person eats, you nevertheless care enough that I should pretend not to eat pork, or at least not admit to it in print. Because non-Jews, mistakenly, think pork chops are off limits to Jews. And we need to encourage that error so ... here I lose the thread. So they don't think less of us? I can't imagine doing the same thing for other faiths, castigating Christians for missing Easter services, or Muslims for not praying five times a day facing Mecca. Are these not personal choices?
     You go on: since "most of your friends" don't eat pork — how could you possibly know? Have you asked them? — I should pretend not to eat pork too? In case we ever become friends?
     Honestly, David, if I were to compare both our lapses: my enjoying pork chops in print, and you feeling that Jews need to present a unified front, pretending to engage in practices which few of them actually do — and up to 85 percent of American Jews do not keep Kosher — I would humbly suggest that I am the one displaying the more traditional Jewish values, at least to the degree that we still value honesty, individuality, sincerity and the like.
     I think that's enough. If you don't mind — and even if you do — I think I'll post this on my blog on Tuesday for the benefit of my most loyal readers. But don't worry, I will shield your name, to protect you from embarrassment. I recognize that it takes chutzpah to write to a newspaper columnist, and respect you for making the effort. But I hope you then accept my response in the spirit it was intended.

     No answer of course. Reading this a second time, I worry I was too hard on a landsman — another Yiddish term, for a fellow Jew from your general area. Sometimes I can be heavy-handed. Should I have gone for a lighter touch? 

Trump's executive orders on homelessness: 'Inhumane ... ineffective and counterproductive'

     A homeless man has been sleeping on a low flagstone wall at the corner of Shermer and Walters in Northbrook for the past few nights. A block from my house.
     The first time I saw him, while walking our dog with my wife about 9 p.m., I steered us in a different direction, worried he would, I don't know, leap up and stab us. It happens.
     The second time I saw him, I had a very different thought: "You know, we have those extra bedrooms. Maybe we should put him up for a few nights ..."
     Two very different reactions — fear and kindness — that neatly bookend the general reaction to pervasive homelessness in American society.
     On the one hand, we're afraid. Even though the unhoused are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than the cause of it. Not just for our own safety, but for the health of our communities as a whole.
     Few motorists driving along Lake Shore Drive, I imagine, see the tents sprouting in Lincoln Park and think: "Cool. A welcoming city provides safe space for its most humble citizens." Not the city beautiful Daniel Burnham had in mind.
     On the other hand, we recognize life is hard. There are many ways to fall through the cracks: addiction, mental illness, divorce, unemployment, poverty. Some unfortunates struggle to maintain the barest fingerhold on society.
     Who among us wants to tread on their fingers? I doubt many Americans wake up and wonder, "How can I make life more difficult for homeless people today?"
     Such people exist and now have a strong ally in Washington. America is in the midst of her Golden Age of Fear. It's like we're cycling through vulnerable communities, one by one, to see who can be demonized and oppressed next.
     Trump 2.0 came out of the blocks swinging at immigrants — who now can be arrested on sight by masked police, without due process, and shipped to foreign countries while we race to build our own domestic gulags.
     Then trans people, who now can be cashiered from the military for reasons that had nothing to do with their ability to serve.

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'Manifest Destiny'

Detail of "Manifest Destiny," by Alexis Rockman (National Portrait Gallery)

     When methods of communication are being discussed, there is of course our drug, passion and universal solvent, social media. Then a passing glance at radio and television, with a sigh of parting for the fading old ways: books, magazines and of course my own ever shrinking ghetto, newspapers.

     Oil paintings don't even make the cut. Which is a shame, considering the drama and power they are capable of. Consider Alexis Rockman's mural "Manifest Destiny," noticed in the National Portrait Gallery during our recent visit to Washington. It is kind of hard to miss — an enormous expanse of sunbaked orange, crumbling infrastructure and suffering wildlife.

      Though its placard understates the case:
     "What might happen if we don't exercise responsible environmental stewardship?" it begins.
     "What might happen"? Ya think? I'd say it bleeding well is happening, right now, and quicker than we expect. "If we don't exercise responsible..." This ship has freakin' sailed on that one, has it not? We elected Mr. Damn-the-Windmills-and-Dig-Baby-Dig.

     "The painting shows the Brooklyn waterfront as it might appear several hundred years in the future if human-induced climate change continues unabated." Another underestimate. As with Hemingway's description of bankruptcy, these changes are happening gradually then suddenly.
     You can see why Trump came for the Smithsonian, almost right out of the box. In March he signed an executive order to “remove improper ideology” from the museums, forbidding exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
     Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery —  the star of the Smithsonian — stepped down even as Trump was firing her for expressing "anti-American ideology."
     Looking clearly at the future, like accurately accessing the past, is apparently no longer an American value. Being concerned for the rapidly deteriorating state of the planet is no longer an American value. Facts are un-American.

     At least at the moment. In some quarters. But it will change. Eventually.

     If you think sentient Americans curse Trump now, imagine how residents of that sun-blasted world — maybe decades, not centuries away — will revile his name, and the blindered rampant ignorance  he represents. He isn't dooming us — he's doing something worse. He's dooming our children and grandchildren.

Rockman's mural is eight feet tall and 24 feet wide.

Demolished house

      The house was small. And white. On Catherine Street, two blocks from my own. With black shutters that never closed once — decorative. Grasping, along with the coach lights, toward some whiff of colonial splendor that almost seems a joke when you think about it. A symbolic white handkerchief of elegance in a neighborhood where people build gigantic faux farmhouses. Where some build enormous homes, live in them a bit, then, decide these estates just aren't big enough, buy the lot next door and double the size of their already huge house into some kind of super huge house.     

     I've thought of knocking on the door and demanding a tour — "What do you do with all that room?" A bad idea, at houses where I've literally never seen a person outside, coming or going. Not in years.

     But that wouldn't go over well. Not my place, literally or figuratively, not as a local dog walker and humble senior citizen, newly enrolled in Medicare. With a half price Metra pass freshly installed in my wallet, awaiting its first use. 
     The chain link fence went up weeks ago,. Maybe months. Then last week, the Caterpillar excavator arrived, signalling the brink of doom for the old home. I tried to imagine the years of life unfolding there, the new couples arriving, the babies squirming, the children running around. The gradual deprecations of time, ignored as always. Or as Mary Oliver writes:

We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.
When seedlings blossomed in the eaves,
When branches scratched upon the door
And rain came splashing through the halls,
We made our minor, brief repairs,
And sang upon the crumbling stairs
And danced upon the sodden floors.  

     A vague and haunting image of happy life when it is past. Though honestly, I failed completely, conjuring up the lives unfolding here. Hard to imagine the life of someone you know, a person standing in front of you. Hard enough to remember your own, sometimes. Doing so from the architecture of a house about to be torn down is impossible. At least for me.
     The house is ... what? 1930s? That would be my guess, but I'm not knowledgable about such things and invite correction.  Colonial revival was a style throughout much of the 20th century — some 40 percent of American homes built in the 1920s reflected it. 

     I didn't dwell on the house being pulled down, which couldn't take an hour. There's enough cause for melancholy in my own life without channeling anybody else's. Two days later, when I passed again, the house was rubble, the bricks already palleted up — old bricks are a hot commodity. Apparently, we just can't make them like we used to. Something about the minerals in the clay. Or maybe we could, but don't bother. The current not-quite-so-nice bricks are good enough.

      Someday soon my wife and I will stroll by this empty lot, and she'll say, "I don't remember what was there." And at least now I'll say, "I have a picture, if you're really interested."

    The Oliver poem ends this way:

For years we lived at peace, until
The rooms themselves began to blend
With time, and empty one by one,
At which we knew, with muted hearts,
That nothing further could be done,
And so rose up, and went away,
Inheritors of breath and love,
Bound to that final black estate
No child can mend or trade away.

Top quality restaurants don't resemble 'The Bear'

   

Leidy's Duroc pork chop with cheddar grits soufflé and bacon-braised swiss chard.

     Chefs are rock stars. Waitstaff are coveted. You know who never gets their due? Even though they're the key to restaurant excellence, as important as food or service?

     Management.
     "I think you might have something there," said Rich Melman, founder of Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants, the wildly popular family of eateries. Most new restaurants fail, but Lettuce has been in business over half a century and owns, manages and licenses more than 130 restaurants in a dozen states. They know what they're doing.
     This epiphany struck me this way: my wife and I recently helped our son, his wife and new baby move from Jersey City to D.C. I must have really stuck my landing, because toward the end of our two, count 'em — two weeks — helping, my wife announced that she would take me out to a celebratory lunch at the venerable Old Ebbitt Grill.
     Reservations proved impossible. So we just showed up, and were told the wait was 45 minutes. Parking ourselves at the bar, we ordered drinks. My wife requested an ice tea.
     "I'll get it," said a manager at the end of the bar who overheard the order. That struck me as unusual, like a company vice president stepping out of his office to mop the floor.
     "Let me comment on that," said Melman, when I described the scene. "I think very small. And that's how we got big. You're probably dealing with the manager in charge of the bar. In busy times, they have key people watching over whatever is going on. There might be another manager watching the dining room. Another manager watching over the kitchen. It's like a great shortstop/second base combination. You know what to expect. You know each other's moves."
     Why do some restaurants work and others don't?
     "I think it would be called restaurant leadership," Melman said. "There's got to be somebody who has the passion and the knowledge and the stick-to-it-ness to make something work. That becomes the culture of the organization. What impressed you is how the team works. There is a lot of teamwork in a good restaurant. Covering for one another."
     Speaking of teams, I haven't mentioned the astounding part. I order the Leidy's Duroc pork chop with cheddar grits soufflé and bacon-braised swiss chard.
     The chop shows up, a thick, 16-ouncer. A thing of beauty. I reach for my phone — dead after a morning snapping photos. Sure, I could have used my wife's phone. But I had more pressing things to do, like digging into that pork chop.
     Regret came later. How could I write about this spectacular pork chop and the organization serving it up without a photo of the pork chop in question? I considered going back the next day and ordering the chop again. But that's seemed nuts.
     So I did a Hail Mary, and called Clyde's Restaurant Group, which runs Old Ebbitt. Did they happen to have a photo of their pork chop?

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