Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

    "Voyeur" is a negative word, implying some kind of illicit sexual gratification or cruelty in observing others. Which is a shame, because there is an innocent pleasure, too, in watching other people go about their business. It seems to call for a word of its own: "observer" is too neutral, "witness" too legal.
     Whatever the term, I was taken by this office tableau, viewed from an interior courtyard during my wanderings this past week. I didn't watch them long, but there was something serene in seeing these people silently applying themselves to their tasks, oblivious of me.
     Where is this grid of windows? What business are we glimpsing? The only hint I'll say is, well, it's one of Chicago's more famous companies, and if you look closely, there's another hint.
      A special prize this week—oh, if you are the guy who is supposed to collect the Kup street sign, email me back; I noticed you sent a query, trying to set a time and then the email vanished into the aether. The sign is still yours for the taking.
      Where was I? Ah yes, a special prize. This little guy. No need to pick him up; I'll mail him to you. He's something you just can't buy in stores, at least I've never seen it. A teddy bear, dipped in wax—cinnamon-scented wax. It has been gracing my office for the past eight years, usually in its protective plastic bag, to keep me from suffocating on his aroma, but I liberated him for photographic purposes. He really is quite distinguished, and has an interested provenance, as you can read from the clips below.
     So place your guesses in the comments section. Good luck.

May 3, 2006

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP

     God, I love this job. Sometimes, anyway. Because you can start out one place, and quickly be projected somewhere very, very different.

     As you can imagine, my columns on immigration provoked a blizzard of feedback. I read most everything -- unless the author was being too much of a jerk -- and generally found them thought-provoking.

     One reader, in the middle of a lengthy analysis of the immigrant situation, offered up a paragraph that leapt out for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

     "Now, I wouldn't feel so bad about illegals if they worked a fair wage like everybody else, in other words, even the playing field. If they spoke English, so when I go to the thrift store and ask a Spanish lady, 'Where are the teddy bears' she would know what I'm asking instead of saying, 'I no speak English.' "

     The obvious reply, which I sent to the reader, was: "You buy teddy bears at thrift stores? For whom?"

     I had the image of Aunt Betty, the family crank, showing up at her nieces' birthday parties with one of her famous ratty Salvation Army teddy bears, wrapped in an old newspaper comics section. Reality dwarfed my pallid imaginings, however.

     "Occasionally I do crafts . . ." the reader wrote back, with what I felt was a trace of sheepishness. ". . . and I needed teddy bears (cheap) for waxed dipped bears."

     We had sailed off into uncharted waters, at least for me.

     "Wax-dipped bears?" I wrote back to her (I assume the reader was a woman. At least I hope so). "I can't imagine that. What are they used for? Can you send me a picture?"

     The reader sent me a link -- www.wicks-wax-scents.com/wax-dipped-bear.html -- that teaches you how to dip your own teddy bears in hot wax, to create decorative, nice-smelling wax bears that you can then dress in party clothes and whose scent you can refresh with a hair dryer.

     Make no mistake. I'm not ridiculing the practice. That would be too easy, not to mention cruel. There's something about crafts -- about making angels out of folded-over copies of Reader's Digest topped with Styrofoam balls and spray painted gold, or pebbles decorated as owls and glued to driftwood -- that removes them from the realm of criticism or even of objective thought.

     No, I'm sincerely amazed. I've been living my life all these years, brewing coffee, raising children, writing stuff, riding the train. And all this time, unbeknownst to me, people have been melting wax in enormous vats, pouring in the cinnamon and clove, then lowering cut-rate used teddy bears into the bubbling brew. God bless America.

June 2, 2006:

WAX TEDDY BEAR UPDATE 

       I must admit, after I wrote about the phenomenon of dipping teddy bears in wax as a craft project, I assumed somebody would send me one—it was the kind of marvel that cried out for what Othello called "the ocular proof."

     When the weeks rolled by and no bear arrived, I felt a pang of disappointment. Then . . .
      "Package for you," said Rich, who handles the mail for the editorial page.
      "Probably a bomb," I muttered, standing up to open it. "Cover your  face."
      It turned out to be a wax bear.
      The bear was nothing like the waxy ursine horror of my imaginings.  Quite delicate, a color and texture as if it were made of cocoa-flavored coconut.
      Of course, this was no stovetop amateur effort, but the work of Ash-Leigh Acres Candle Company, which is actually Stephanie Loitz  of Grant Park, Ill.
      "No, we don't live in the park," she said laughingly, from her home  50 miles south of the city. "We have a little farm."
      She sells the things -- the smaller version, which is quite cute, costs $12, and can be had by e-mailing her at jlsl95@sbcglobal.net.      

     But I should warn you: They're scented. I'm keeping mine in the bag.

Before we focus on tether ball....

     Arrrrggggggggggggg!!!!! 

     Hmm, that really doesn’t work, does it? Too piratey. It’s supposed to be the visceral cry of dismay that welled up inside me Thursday reading Sandra Guy’s piece in the Sun-Times about the Metropolitan Planning Council, which “invited people to submit ideas” to improve Union Station.

     Maybe, “ayiiiiieeee!!!” No, that’s something a peon screams as he falls off a fort wall in an old Sunday afternoon action flick.

     The ideas the council is exploring are widening commuter platforms, more off-street parking for buses, plus tether ball and yoga in the Great Hall. They want Union Station to be a “destination, rather than just a place people pass through.”

     Have these guys been to Union Station? How many ideas for its improvement did they receive? Because I have a few, and these are just the ones that occurred to me in the five minutes between when I got off the 7:54 a.m. Milwaukee North line train and the time I finally shuffled my way to air and daylight through the Madison entrance:

     1) Instead of trying to make Union Station “a destination,” try to make it a place people can get out of quickly. How about reconfiguring the the platforms so people who get off trains can actually exit in real time? So they aren’t forced to wait in enormous, legion-of-the-damned lines next to the ear-splitting, soot-belching train engines? How about a thick concrete wall for aforementioned engines to tuck behind upon arrival so that the passengers a yard away will have some protection from the noise, heat and smoke?
     2) How about signs, telling Ma and Pa Kettle, arriving from Booneville with Pete, their pet chicken, that Madison Street is one way and the station is the other? Not the dark placards tucked under the ceiling where they can barely be seen. Put them on the pillars. And paint those pillars a color that isn’t the current gray canvas for filth.
     3) How about cleaning the place? How about finding a way to keep the cataracts of sewer water from dumping on the heads of people on the platforms? Or does that represent suggestions so subtle and unattainable they’re beyond the long-range vision of the MPC? Did nobody mention them? Did anybody suggest perhaps the whole urban transit experience might be enhanced if, every time it rains, Union Station didn’t start peeing on our heads as we wade our way across these Stygian platforms? Nobody?
     Done? I’m just getting started. How about putting computer screens on the platforms, like half the L stations in the city, so people don’t have to walk a hundred yards back into the station to find out when their trains are coming? How about a public address system that works, that isn’t a mumbly blurt of static? Last winter, one day when most of Metra shut down because — who could have predicted? — it got cold in Chicago, they had conductors with bullhorns giving updates.
     I was in midcry when some frayed journalism nerve ending quivered, demanding I call the council to ask how they could be so blind. Short answer: They’re not.
     “The effort started with an acknowledgment that Union Station today is at capacity,” Peter Skosey, the councils’ executive vice president, said. “It’s jam-packed, hard to get on and off the trains. That’s why three years ago, partnering with CDOT, we created a Union Station master plan, a series of thoughtful improvements.” Wider platforms will permit escalators to scoot harried commuters to the streets above.
     Music to my ears. I don’t want to be the guys who demands perfection before the details are improved. And I do have a bias against planning councils. Why? Maybe the five years on the editorial board. Made me testy, listening to these groups lay out their airy Vision for the Future, which always seemed to involve a monorail circling the six-county area, and as they’re presenting the artist’s rendering of the proposed mag-lev train, you raise a finger and ask, “Given almost nobody rides Pace buses, where’s the pressing need?” They just look at you.
     So yes, by all means, plan. Dream big. Commission studies. Why have the Great Hall be a place where you only go to point out where that scene in “The Untouchables” was shot, while a handful of forlorn families kill time between trains in the distance?
     But in the meantime. Two workers on a ladder could put up plastic tarps to divert the water. Any high school art class could design far better directional signs than they have now, and produce them all in an afternoon, using tagboard and Sharpies. Give somebody a mop and a broom. Forget lingering; right now Union Station isn’t a place people want to rush through. Change that quickly. Then we can talk tether ball.

Sept. 11, 2014

   
     What does 9/11 mean? 
     We all know what it represents, why it is remembered: on Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists armed with box cutters took over four planes. Two were sent crashing into the World Trade Center towers in New York, toppling them, a third hit the Pentagon, the fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers resisted. 
     Nearly 3,000 people died. 
     But what does it mean to us today, what does the anniversary signify?
     Is it a day to recall an attack, an atrocity? Like Pearl Harbor Day? A historic commemoration? 
     That seems premature. At 13 years on, the feelings are too raw for that, at least among those old enough to remember—strange to think there is a whole generation, those under 16, who do not. In some ways, the day feels more like current events. Especially this year, when the news — ISIS overrunning Syria and Iraq, videos of beheadings, the United States reluctantly sinking our military back into the region — seems a direct result of the attacks. The world of radical Islam grabbed our country by the nose on 9/11 and we've been gazing at the horror they frequently make of life ever since.     
      This anniversary feels different. For a while. 9/11 was contracting, fading, a scab forming over the wound, the buzz of regular life drowning out the bad memories, compressing them, and our prosaic concerns squeezing that awful day into a smaller and smaller ball of pain and regret, something we could tuck away. 
       Now the process seems reversing. Sept. 11 is expanding this year. Fear is up, way up. It's even worse than in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. In 2002, 20 percent of Americans said the country was less safe than before 9/11. This year it's 47 percent. 
       And why not? Scary stuff going on.  Even before now, the nature of 9/11 made the event mother's milk to conspiracy theorists, spinning fantasies from the best documented crime of all time, finding patterns in the clouds. I got a phone call last week from a pizza parlor owner in Valparaiso, Indiana, who was connecting the dots—a reduction in trains going into Chicago, four fighter jets, he said, parked at the Gary Airport, armor plate being turned out of U.S. Steel—it all fit together, and suggested to him that invasion was nigh. I listened politely, then told him to look within.
     What does 9/11 mean 13 years on? There are the deaths to commemorate, but most of

us, thankfully, do not know someone who died.  Is it a day of infamy? A time to nurse our outrage, to puff on our glowing ember of victimhood, which cannot be allowed to cool? Another reason to be afraid? Like Hitler's birthday, a magnet for maniacs. At the train station they posted warning signs.  
      Or can we make 9/11 into something more useful? Perhaps focus on the heroism of the first responders, who raced to help and died by the hundreds: 341 New York City fire fighters, a staggering figure, and two paramedics. Surely something to be remembered and mourned. If 9/11 is to become a permanent observation, I would suggest that might be a better aspect to focus on. We are a nation of do-gooders, of helpers, of fire fighters and police and emergency medical technicians. You dial 911 and somebody rushes over, no matter who you are. When people are fleeing a burning building they run toward it. Not every country has that. In some, maybe most, places, you get sick and go die on the steps of the hospital because you don't have a bribe to catch the attention of a doctor. We have something great here and don't quite realize it. Sometimes it takes something horrible to cut through the routine idiocy and make us see it. 
    Not to make the event into something too positive, a Grandparent's Day for paramedics. Putting tragedy to good use might be necessary, but there's no reason to embrace it too blithely. I hated Sept. 11. I don't think I've ever written that before, and am relieved to say it now.  I hate it still, hate that it happened, hate that human beings are capable of such things, hate seeing the country caught so flat-footed. Maybe that's obvious, but sometimes the obvious thing must be said. It was a horrible thing done to us by insane zealots, who not only killed the innocent on that day, but murdered 100 times that in the years to come, by the time the toll of soldiers, American, Afghani, Iraqi and others, and civilians are tallied, not that it ever will or could be. I hate that we now have to remember it for the rest of history, but what choice have we?
     The message of Sept. 11, to me, is that life is precious. The attack left us humbled and united for a very brief time, and then more divided and contentious than ever, and if 9/11 is to have a meaning, it is that we betray our dead, both on Sept. 11 and all previous conflicts, by being a nation of waring boobs squabbling among ourselves while our enemies run riot. We need to use it to remind ourselves that we are still one nation, one community, at times, when need be, responding to crisis, and then the crisis passes, and we turn once again to our fractured and selfish selves. 
     I will fly the flag Thursday, maybe peek into the big envelope where I stuck the black-covered New Yorker, the papers—the Sun-Times' three extra editions, the New York Times with a fireball that my 5-year-old, when I asked him what he made of it, said he thought looked like a flower and was "beautiful." He didn't understand then. I can't honestly say I understand it much better now, except that it wasn't beautiful and becomes less so the more you think about it. The most unbeautiful thing ever. Sept. 11 is a horror we are stuck with, whose gravity deformed us from being what we might have been, into what we instead are now, for good and ill. Mostly ill.

Like us, Obama has a handy excuse to ignore evils

     There is no moral wrong so great that it is without defenders.

     The South not only permitted slavery, but rationalized, even celebrated it while disparaging those who opposed the evil institution.

     “The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders,” wrote James Thornwell in 1860. “They are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.”

     Jacobins is a reference to the French Revolution — freeing the slaves, Southerners argued, would lead to a new American Terror, with guillotines set up in every town square.  “Regulated freedom,” by which Thornwell meant slavery, is a reminder we didn’t need George Orwell to show us how to deform the English language to perverse ends.

     Did I mention that Thornwell was a minister? He was.

     In the early 20th century, women sought the vote. Bad idea, it was argued.

     “The mother’s influence is needed in the home,” J.B. Sanford wrote in 1911. “The men are able to run the government and take care of the women. ... By keeping woman in her exalted position man can be induced to do more for her than he could by having her mix up in affairs that will cause him to lose respect and regard for her.”

     Did I mention that Sanford was a California state senator? He was.

Midcentury, the South was still fighting against treating black people decently.

     In 1956, parents in one PTA suggested it was better to have Virginia cease educating children “as the lesser of two evils, the end of public education, rather than unsegregated schools.” Otherwise, the state faced “the destruction of our culture,” according to Garland Gray, another state senator.

     Enough smirking at the past. Too easy, and you get the point.

     Back to 2014, to the enlightened world. Look around. So what is the enormous social wrong that we ignore, trivialize, or rationalize in ways in ways that future generations will shake their heads at?
     Really, you don't see it? That's just so sad.
     Some 11 million Hispanic immigrants live in the United States as near-serfs, in a rightless limbo. The rationale, worn to a nubbin by armies of the indignant, is that they came here illegally. Ignoring the fact that our economy begs for them to come, and that our immigration system is such that their coming here legally is an impossibility. And that millions of Americans do illegal things for which they are not punished eternally.
     Someday — and I am hesitant to predict the future, but I will go out on a limb, because I am completely certain of this — this wrong will be redressed, the immigration system will be repaired, and people will wonder what the grandfolks were thinking when they saw those teams of Hispanics cutting grass, washing dishes, picking fruit.
     That day tarries. Barack Obama, The Cautious, tiptoed toward action, then saw the cost, did the calculus and pulled back.
     Like Eisenhower, who would dispatch federal troops when absolutely pressed, Obama does what he must, not what he should.
     The influx of immigrant children, which could have been a moment for America to display its supposed values and shine, instead became not only another shame but an excuse for the shame we already tolerate.
     "The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem," Obama said. "I want to spend some time, even as we're getting all our ducks in a row for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public understands why we're doing this, why it's the right thing for the American people, why it's the right thing for the American economy." His reason to wait.
     Did I mention that Obama is the president of the United States? He is, in theory.
     Of course he has a reason for inaction, and a corking good one. The Republicans, the party of ignoring our problems while trying to crawl back to a past that never existed, would extract punishment. Let them.
     Eventually, the slumbering Latino millions in the United States will stir and realize that another generation is dwelling in the shadows, their children even more easily marginalized for lack of a piece of paper. I can't understand why they haven't already.
     History runs in strange patterns and momentums, that which we accepted one year suddenly becomes clearly wrong the next.
     Maybe that's why we prefer to learn about past shames; doing so suggests we aren't adding fresh examples. We are.

Ronald McDonald stumbles

     You don't need shifting technology to rattle your industry. Tastes change. The world draws away from your product.
      Even something as popular as hamburgers.

      McDonald's is starting to sag, according to an intriguing front page story in Crain's Chicago Business. (The story isn't online, but if you want to subscribe to Crain's for $69 and read it, click here).

      "Ronald McDonald isn't aging well" writes Crain's Lisa Bertagnoli, noting that the share of McDonald's business represented by families with children under 12 has slid from 18.6 percent of McDonald's in 2011 to 14.2 percent today.  A small shift, but a shift nonetheless. Add to that, as the markets have surged this year, McDonald's stock has slid 4.1 percent.

     The burger giant is in trouble.
     Why? The short answer, the story dances around, is the food's crap, and parents are becoming wise to it. As are their kids, who increasingly want a burrito as a treat. Which I would file under "Refreshing Good News" for everybody who isn't a McDonald's franchise owner or investor. 

      They lost me years ago. As someone who has been eating McDonald's, less and less, for 45 years, I can vouch for the trend. The place used to be an exciting indulgence. You're on a trip, you slide by McDonald's for a burger and fries. An Egg McMuffin in the morning with a cup of coffee, maybe some hash browns, counted as breakfast. The stuff was also good for late night munchies, a milkshake and a couple cheeseburgers to sober you up for the drive home. Then the kids arrived, and they had to be brought for bribe lunches of Chicken McNuggets and Happy Meal toys. They still do big business. McDonald's still has 14,000 locations.  But the winds are shifting.

      If youth is lost, the future is lost. My boys, 17 and 18, were weaned on McDonald's, but now make a face if I were to mention McDonald's. I used to be good for a cheeseburger a year, but now I can project how I'll feel after eating that cheeseburger, the greasy-toothed, what-have-I-done feeling, and resist.
     When, during our summer vacation the family had to stop at at fast-food strip, McDonald's was scorned by the boys for Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken (I couldn't do those two either, despite being quite hungry. I pushed on to a White Castle, whose food, while no better than McDonald's from an objective point of view, still carries nostalgia and an emotional attachment. Loving White Castle is being hip to the siren lure of arcane Jack Keroac Americana. Loving McDonald's is just being a prole).

     McDonald's is actually worse than laid out in the Crain's article.  The restaurants themselves, which used to be these red and white tile gems, are uniformly ugly. You can't get out quick enough, which might be intentional on their part.
     Their graphics blow too. Who is this bag supposed to appeal to? It's just hard on the eyes. Any independent coffee shop has a better palette and more pleasing visuals.
    Plus service at McDonald's is a depressing parody of what the dining out experience should be. The one circumstance over the past three years where I might actually order something at a McDonald's is while waiting for a train at Union Station, where I might slide over to get their 99 cent vanilla soft serve cone. 

      Which you would think would be hard to screw up—frozen comestible substance balanced atop a dry sugar cone.  I'm not expecting homemade, and their cone is fine, once you get it.
     But first they have to give the assemblage to you, and here's where McDonald's really falls on its face. From the slurry mumbled greeting "Welkumcdonah, may-eyetekurder?" to the receipt wordlessly thrust in your direction, it's as if the process of buying food at McDonald's was designed to humiliate you, as punishment for eating there.

     The last time I ordered a cone at McDonald's (underline that "last" because I wouldn't go back) nobody even bothered to hand me my cone. It was just set, by a harried worker, down the counter, where it sat, while I listened to them calling out numbers, in the charmed notion that somebody would call my number and hand me the friggin' 99 cent cone. Eventually, when the numbers edged past the one on my receipt, I realized that the cone just sitting there must be mine, and snaked a hand in and took it, while the nine people behind the counter all looked at me like I was stealing the thing, and slunk off to eat it, feeling somehow debased and ashamed. 
     Half melted too. Though the worst part was just watching these miserable employees stumble about their business. I felt guilty giving money to that, like I was supporting some kind of crime akin to human trafficking.
     So good riddance to McDonald's—the downside is that it's very big, and will no doubt take a very long time to vanish. If it weren't so huge, and so dripping in bad faith and skewed values—they're the people who think Ronald McDonald is attractive—I'd hold out hope for a turnaround. Nobody wants to see a company die. But in this case, they had their run, and you can't say the world will be worse off when they're gone.

   A reader shared this video of Jim Gaffigan, America's funniest comic, nailing McDonald's. 

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Kentucky ventriloquism museum stares down visitors

     FORT MITCHELL, Ky. — What makes something strange? And why does strangeness draw us in and grip us so?

     That is a mystery.

     Something made my wife, a few months ago, standing 300 miles northwest in the gift shop at the Art Institute of Chicago, pick up Matthew Rolston’s Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, a foot-square coffee-table book containing close-up portraits of some of the 800 ventriloquist dummies at this museum.

     The intimate, unsettling photo on the cover grabbed her, enough that she lugged the 5-pound book over to me. I flipped through it and agreed when she later suggested we detour on our road trip through the South to this small town, spend the night, then tour the private museum.

Lisa Sweasy

     Credit Lisa Sweasy, the curator of the Vent Haven Museum. I don’t believe a person walking through the cluttered rooms alone, trying to meet the unblinking gaze of those hundreds of dummies and disembodied heads, glancing at the photos and the brief white placards, would derive a fraction of what she gives visitors for their $10. Which is good, because you can’t see it without her: admission is by appointment only.

     “Welcome to Vent Haven, thanks for coming,” she said to my family and four other guests, part of the thousand or so visitors who tour each summer. “This is the world’s only museum dedicated to ventriloquism.”

     Sweasy did not start out as a ventriloquism expert. She was a junior high school math teacher and one of her students was the daughter of the lawyer for the man behind the museum, William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman who, on his first trip to New York in 1910, bought a dummy as a souvenir, Tommy Baloney.

    Tommy’s on display, among the legions of now-silent totems from a little-honored art form, one whose popularity waxes and wanes — mostly wanes in recent decades, though in 2008, ventriloquist Terry Fator signed a five-year, $100 million contract to perform in Las Vegas.
     Sweasy gave us the history of the place, a hobby that became an obsession, standing outside three small cottages, explaining, "once we go in there, you'll stop listening."
     She got that right. It is breathtaking, almost shocking, to walk in. The cognitive system that humans use to process social cues is jarred: they're not alive, of course, they're dolls, puppets, dummies, whatever, though some seem startlingly close to life.
     Part of what made Sweasy so interesting is that, though she was very well-versed in the lore of ventriloquism, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, she was no shill.
     Most visitors, she said, see the dummies and "personally find them the stuff nightmares are made of—four out of five visitors to the museum have that reaction."
     She thinks what snags you is the stare. "Psychologically so inappropriate to stare at one another," she said. "When humans do it, they're either going to kiss or hit you."
     I ran by Freud's theory of the unheimlich, or "the uncanny," that uncomfortable zone between human beings and inanimate objects. A rag doll is not scary because it doesn't look alive, but a mannequin can be close enough to creep you out.
     Not that the museum itself focuses on the macabre. Rather it is a celebration, not just of the dummies, but of the craftsmen who made them and the performers who worked with them, with a large display for the most famous ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen — who got his start at a Chicago talent show in 1925 — and his Charlie McCarthy, a replica (the original is in the Smithsonian). There is a wall of mementos and photos of revered Chicago carver Frank Marshall who made dummies for Paul Winchell and others.
     The museum goes up to the present day, though I admit that the neon green, furry, muppet-like puppets held little interest for me. I think the highest recommendation I can give it is that my two boys, 17 and 18, spent 90 minutes there without a murmur of complaint.
     Again, credit Sweasy. She was a font of information. She put on white gloves and showed us how the dummies operate, their heads containing a watch's complexity worth of levers and rings that not only make their mouths move but, sometimes, their eyes, their ears twitch. Some could smoke; some had their hair flip up in surprise.
      And for your Bright People Can be Surprisingly Thick file add this: Driving away, I wondered aloud where the "Vent Haven" name came from. It wasn't the town, or the guy who started the museum. What was it?
      "Vent is short for ventriloquist," said my younger son. "A haven for ventriloquists."
      Ah yes. That would make sense.

The museum allows visitors to pose among one section of dummies. Kent and friends.

A river (of concrete) runs through it

     I got so wrapped up in recounting our college trip that I neglected to post this column that ran in the newspaper last Sunday. The story has an interesting genesis. It began because I noticed all the Prairie Materials concrete trucks coming and going at the new skyscraper being built at Wolf Point. "Hmmm, concrete," I thought. "There's a substance you don't read about much." So I phoned Prairie Materials, and went to visit them in Bridgeview. We had a very nice lunch, and they were forthcoming enough, though really didn't show me much of their operation. That was supposed to come next. Before it could happen though, I bumped into some Ozinga workmen at a job site on Franklin Street after mistaking their work gloves for lilies. Once I got in touch with Tim Ozinga, the Praire Materials aspect sort of faded into the background, which is something of a shame. To me, this story could have been twice as long; as it was, many fascinating details of the substance were left on the cutting room floor, such as the fact that concrete continues to set, for decades, not getting weaker, but gathering strength as the years pass. An example for us all. 

     Pick the most perishable substance: a) whole milk b) bakery bread c) newly mixed concrete.

     If you answered, “c,” fresh concrete, then you probably already know a little about the rivers of beige-gray flowing around Chicago this summer.

     Milk is good for about a week. Bakery bread, a day. But you have 90 minutes from when cement, aggregate and water are mixed into a batch of concrete before it starts to harden like, well, cement.

     So if the hundreds of concrete mixers plying Chicago’s roads seem in a hurry, they are.   Not only is the concrete in their drums setting, heating up as it does, but construction in Chicago is heating up too: After a long, harsh winter that was hard on the construction trade, the summer saw a jump.

     “Business is definitely headed in the right direction,” said Tim Ozinga, a member of the fourth generation running Ozinga Bros., the city’s largest concrete company. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand in the marketplace. This year is very promising.”

     From the reconstruction of the Ontario Street Bridge on the Kennedy to the Navy Pier Flyover to the expansion of the Chicago Riverwalk to the first of three towers at the billion-dollar Wolf Point project, concrete projects big and small are taking place all over the city.

     Hiring is up in construction generally in Chicago — up 5.1 percent in the 1st quarter of 2014, according to Moody’s, compared to the same period in 2012, and the national cement market is rising 10 percent a year.

     A note about those two terms, cement and concrete, since they’re often confused: Cement is a binding agent, made of powdered limestone and gypsum, that goes into making concrete, which is what you get when you add everything from gravel to fiber optics for translucent concrete, which is possible but pricey. Cement is to concrete as flour is to bread, or would be if bread were 10 percent to 18 percent flour.

     Chicago is known for its concrete buildings, not only Marina Towers, but Lake Point Tower and Water Tower Place.

      “Concrete has long been a major player in Chicago,” said Bill Baker, chief structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
     The Chicago region is peppered with concrete plants: Ozinga has 50 around Illinois, Indiana and southern Michigan; Prairie Materials has 22. The reason is so concrete can be mixed as close to the work site as possible; for really big jobs, mobile mixing plants are set up at the construction site.
     "It's a perishable product," Ozinga said. "You can only go so far with it and maintain the quality and integrity."
      A generation ago, concrete was thought of as a single substance; contractors would call up and order a truck full of "mud." But now, just as bread comes in hundreds of varieties and flavors, thousands of concrete mixture are used for all sorts of purposes - for setting underwater, weather resistance in roads, high strength in skyscrapers. There are ductile concretes that bend and porous concretes that allow water to flow easily through.
     "We really should give it a new name," Baker said. "We call it 'concrete,' but it's the stuff you see on the sidewalk and the stuff you get delivered to the site - they're both gray, but that's about it."
     The surge in tall buildings and advances in concrete technology are directly related. Trump International Hotel and Towers and Dubai's 2,722-foot-tall Burj Khalifa - both Skidmore, Owings and Merrill buildings - are concrete.
     "Today's concretes are not your father's concrete," said Lawrence Novak, director of structural engineering at the Portland Cement Association in Skokie. "Our ability to produce stronger and stronger concrete has really fueled the ability for us to go taller and taller with the high-rise buildings. If your concrete strength is low, you need bigger and bigger columns for support, and you wind up with a building that's all column on the first floor. We can make columns smaller and buildings taller and lighter."
     Illinois is something of a center of concrete materials research, not only with Portland, which was once hired by NASA to make moon dust into cement, but the University of Illinois, renown for its concrete studies.
     "Chicago for a long time has been a major leader in concrete technology," Baker said. "Chicago got used to very, very high-quality concrete."
      "People are always drawn to use concrete in very flexible and creative ways," said David Lange, a professor of civil engineering at U. of I., who explained how advances in concrete lead to design breakthroughs in architecture. "Another interesting trend is the emergence of self-consolidating concrete."
     Concrete has to flow into a form, and any kind of design or detail requires concrete to be packed or vibrated to fit into the crevice and avoid the formation of voids. That's why concrete surfaces are typically, up to now, flat and smooth. Self-consolidating concrete "flows easily into formwork without vibration, which makes possible a lot of very complex shapes," Lange said. "We seeing that come into the U.S. market."
     Chicago's most notable recent buildings, like the Trump tower and Jeanne Gang's undulating Aqua Tower, have been concrete, and more such buildings are on the way.
     "There are about 18 high-rise residences planned for Chicago, all made out of concrete because concrete gives you the ability to form it in any shape, when hardened a unique combination of high strength and fire resistance," Novak said.
     Baker said changes in technology will allow more "fluid" designs to concrete buildings. "We're looking at origami."
     The composition of the concrete isn't the only way technology affects concrete building. Trump's tower required some of the most powerful pumps ever developed for concrete construction to move a stream of it up 60 floors.
     Usually, concrete is moved in fleets of trucks (a new McNeilus standard mixer costs $185,000). Ozinga has 500 trucks, 100 of them running on natural gas, though not so much because it's cleaner but because it's quieter, a consideration in the city. Also key is size; Ozinga is developing a smaller concrete truck to better navigate tight urban spaces.
     Concrete heats up as it hardens, so much that venting the heat has to sometimes be figured into construction design, embedding water pipes that were later caulked in. Heat also sometimes required trucks to have ice poured into their hoppers to keep the contents cool. New chemical mix-ins help reduce that need.
    At Ozinga's main headquarters on the near Southwest Side along the Chicago River, trucks are filled with various mixtures of concrete for specific jobs. Getting the mix right is crucial, because there's no point hauling concrete designed for highway pours to roadways to a high-rise.
     The process is itself a mixture of high and low tech. Work orders come in through pneumatic tubes but are tallied on computer screens. An electronic gauge measures the resistance on the truck drum motors to determine each mix's "slump" - the term used to measure the consistency of concrete. In the field, workers perform the slump test (Concrete InFocus magazine called it "a sacred rite") by filling a foot-high cone with concrete, waiting, then removing the cone and measuring how many inches the pile of wet concrete slumps down.
     What happens to those trucks that don't get to work sites in time? Or find that workers aren't ready? You can "kill" the load - sugar works in a pinch to render concrete unsettable. If there's time, truck drivers hurry back to base where the concrete is poured into huge blocks, usually with a metal cable embedded in them to be moved by crane, and the blocks are used for ballast and various projects.
     And yes, sometimes the concrete hardens in the drum.
     What then? Somebody has to go in with a hammer and chisel to chip it out.

Selfie in a concrete mixer: with Tim Ozinga