"Our Andrew is no more"

     Shocking, sad news Tuesday morning that Andrew Patner, WFMT stalwart, Sun-Times classical music and opera critic, and my old friend, passed away suddenly. "Our Andrew is no more," said his longtime partner, Tom Bachtell, adding that Andrew died after a very brief battle with a bacterial infection.
      He was the voice of cultural sophistication in the city, a lifelong Hyde Park intellectual, and good friend to so many.

      I owe my entire book publishing career to Andrew.  In the late 1980s, I barely knew him, but he offered me his agent, David Black, when my own agent couldn't seem to sell my stuff. Andrew was a supportive, tireless advocate. I learned to value his intelligent, delightfully world-weary opinion on all matters. He did not sneer at my amateur forays into opera, as another expert might have. Being a guest on his radio show was a pleasure. His brief biography of I.F. Stone is a classic. 

     The first column I ever wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that had my photo atop it was about Andrew, though I didn't name him. He helped me sort through the complicated view that straight men can have toward gays, particularly a quarter century ago, and if I developed a more enlightened perspective sooner than most, Andrew deserves much of the credit. He made me a better person, and I will miss him. This originally ran Nov. 4, 1990:
  
     By the time a man gets to be my age, the friendship dance card is pretty much filled. With the ceaseless grind of daily obligations, there isn't time to see the handful of friends I already care about, plus my wife, never mind letting just anybody else join the club.
     Maybe that makes me odd. Maybe most guys are like that. I don't know.
     So it was with a bit of surprise, and not a little fear, that I found myself recently becoming friends with a gay man.
     At 30, I wish I could say that I've had lots of gay friends, shared in-depth talks about their situations, participated in their lives. It would fit in with my neat, cosmopolitan view of myself. "Some of my best friends..."
     But it isn't true.
     Two years ago, when I met this guy — a journalist — I didn't know he was gay. He didn't manifest gayness in all the cliche ways I expected. If he had, I probably wouldn't have gone to that first lunch with him. Not out of prejudice. That would be wrong.
     Prejudice against gay people is not an accepted 1990s attitude. But then, I suspect that much of the Standard Party Line liberality everybody says they adhere to doesn't really jibe with their reflexive daily actions and unspoken meannesses of the heart.
     I didn't know he was gay. I went to lunch.
     He never laid his hand on my knee, but due to a tactful, unspoken inquiry, I figured it out: this guy was gay and wanted to find out if I was gay, too, so we could be gay together.
     The overture offended me greatly.
     The idea was rattling. I worried that I manifested some sort of gayness, heretofore unknown to me, that he had picked up on. Then there was an uneasy vertigo. Who can walk past the Scenic Overlook without, if only for a passing moment, imagining an impulsive leap over the edge? And here comes this guy, shouting, "Jump! Jump!"
     I was also peeved by the thought that he hadn't sought me out for my obvious fine and personable qualities. But for something dark and sexual, slithering below the surface.
     Had he not been such an interesting person, it would have ended there. "I'm sorry, but you've dialed the wrong number." However, I really liked him. He had all the admirable qualities I imagine in myself. I held my ground. Presenting my heterosexual credentials (a love of women; no attraction to men) I decided I was liberal and big-hearted enough to be friends with this gay person, who was smarter and more successful than I.
     The friendship simmered on low at first. Recently we've been talking more, perhaps because his roommate was dying of AIDS.
     As he reeled off this terrible situation — a good friend dying horribly, his office persecuting him — I was surprised by my lack of sympathetic reaction. After knowing him, and soaking up all those big Life magazine photo essays and everything, I think I was still shocked to find an actual person, suffering.
    In other words, the reaction of a bigot; the dry crust of indifference extended to people who are too unlike yourself.
     Realizing this has helped me regenerate a bit of the humanity sapped away by years of joking about fags with my buddies.
     His friend died. The last time we talked, he was fulfilling the mournful duty of bringing the obituary around to the papers. As he left, I thought: "He's at risk, too. How does he live with it?"
     Next time, I'll ask him.

"Crowded together as sheep are"

     So here's the conundrum:
     Human beings love company but hate crowds.
     We don't want to be lonely, but prefer nobody sits next to us on trains.
     We hate litter, as evidence of the lunkish carelessness of our fellows. But admire the soft patina their hands rub over the years on a brass handrail or, in Union Station, these footworn stairs, almost resembling a geologic formation.
     I never really thought about it until Friday, after a post, about how Amtrak shouldn't break its arm patting itself on the back for putting $12 million into Union Station, a figure that probably is not enough to give the filthy, smokey netherworld a good scrubbing. 
    In passing, I mentioned the stone steps. Amtrak had said they were going to be repaired, and I wrote that they shouldn't do that, that the dips that nearly a century of feet have worn into them was the closest thing Chicago has to the ancient feel of Jerusalem or Rome.
     That lone comment was what most readers focused in on. People love those steps, not only for being in "The Untouchables," but for the same quality I noticed.
    "Don't replace the worn marble stairs unless you also have a contract to rehab the Parthenon," wrote Tom Golz, in the comments section, echoing a common refrain that the Great Hall should be left alone.  (On Twitter, a reader pointed out that the steps are not "marble," as the Tribune imagines, but travertine, a form of limestone, which the AIA Guide to Chicago confirms).   
     Why do people we encounter in the present — the line in front of us in the grocery, the fellow hikers spoiling the quiet of our trail — so often annoy, while those in the past, whoever trod these steps, intrigue and inspire us?
    A pretty easy conundrum, when put that way. We are inconvenienced by our fellow citizens now: they brush against us in our seats, delay our paying for our groceries, take our parking spaces. There's something about other human beings that repulses us.
     "Of all animals, men are the least fitted to live in herds," Rousseau wrote. "If they were crowded together as sheep are they would all perish in a short time. The breath of man is fatal to his fellows."
     ("Crowded together as sheep are"—sounds like he's been to the South Platform at Union Station).      
     On the other hand, people safely relegated to the past, well, they're gone and not coming back, so thus make less demanding companions. When I wrote about why earthlings imagine UFOs are space visitors, the most common theory is that we can't stand the idea of being alone in the universe. So the same folks who would give you a dirty look if you asked to sit next to them on the train, who protest a condominium being built down the block, because the neighborhood of course reached its full saturation with the arrival of themselves, will confabulate every streak in the sky into a mothership, so as not to be alone in the universe.
    A contradiction. But one that makes sense, in a perverse kind of way, and points toward strategy we can perhaps use to improve our lives. Maybe our petty impatience with our fellows masks a deeper need, for fellowship, and if we could somehow conquer that, we would be happier. Maybe the deep truths we expect to get from outer space are available from those individuals moving in down the street, if we only could overcome our displeasure at their arrival, our fear of inconvenience and proximity, and sought them out. Maybe a bit of the romantic affection draped over these worn stairs could be expended toward those who are wearing them down right now, to this very day, the motley passengers camping out between trains on the wooden benches nearby in the Great Hall. Now there's a thought.

It's just lunch. Really.

     "Hey, want to do lunch some time?" I asked, breezing past the desk of a colleague, making her brief arc across the sky of professional journalism.
     "No," she replied.
     Years have dripped by, but that "No," still echoes.
     Lunch can be confusing.
     Maybe she thought I was asking her on a date. Yes, she's married, and I'm married, and while some guys don't let that get in the way, I wouldn't consider "Let's have lunch" as being in the same realm as "Hey baby, let's get it on" or whatever the current pick-up phrase is now.
     Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm an annoying, rebarbative person who she just couldn't bear the thought of sitting across from, never mind while eating food. That possibility is not beyond my imagining, alas.
     But I like to think it's lunch. People have trouble with lunch, particularly at work.
     "Media power lunches are out," the New York TImes declared recently "Crumbs in your keyboard? In."
     Uh-huh. Lunch being out is one of those evergreen newspaper trend stories, like hats being in, that are regularly reported despite being demonstrably untrue.
     If lunch is dead, then what explains all those restaurants serving lunch? The National Restaurant Association reports sales up, 3.6 percent last year.
     If lunch is dead, the Times has been performing its rites for years.
     "These days, more and more employees consume their lunches from the comforts of their cubicles," the Times reported in 2007.
     "As lunch has come under increasing pressures of time, budgets and health concerns," the Times reported in 1999. "The leisurely two-hour interlude has slipped back to an hour or less and, for many, into carryout at the desk or sandwiches in the conference room."
     My gut tells me, rather than lunch being out of fashion, it's the idea of lunch being dead that is eternally in vogue. We want others to think we're all too busy flinging pixels to do more than turn our heads to suck nutrition out of a catheter tube.
     Does anyone really consider that a flattering image?
     To me, it's the opposite. I'm not against homemade lunch, but usually the get-out-of-the-house chaos is too hectic to prepare one, so grabbing lunch out is faster. If I've got the morning under control, I can make a big salad before bolting for the train. It's cheaper and faster on the eating end. Though you have to have the ingredients, and instead of an hour, eating it is over in five minutes and you're back at work.
     I think you suffer, not taking that break. And I have support. A new British study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science says that walking at lunch—they used an exercise program, but it holds true for walking to a restaurant—makes you a better worker.
     “There is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,” one of the researchers told the Times, which has the lunch beat sewed up. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.”
     The researchers did have trouble finding male volunteers for their study. Men have a harder time leaving the office at lunch. So maybe, as a man suggesting going somewhere to eat, it isn't the creep factor, but, rather gender inappropriate behavior, as if I were suggesting we go get our nails done.
     With technology triumphant, the risk of working 24 hours a day is already great. Skip lunch, and next thing you know you're wearing Depends to the office, because going to the restroom takes time too.
     Garry Marshall visited Northwestern, years ago, and met students putting on a musical. Trying to impress the famous director, they said how they had worked all night getting the show ready.
     "A professional goes home at night," Marshall replied, words I've taken to heart. If you know what you're doing, if you're good at it, you can eat, sleep, do all sorts of non-work activities which makes you even better when you do work.
     I hope that doesn't make me a creep. I had an interesting conversation with a colleague at the paper while we were getting our coffee, one that seemed worth continuing. I suggested lunch, and she said I should email her.
     "When can I buy you lunch?" I emailed.
     "Lunch won't be necessary as I bring it to eat at my desk most days," she replied.
     Ouch. Gee. When I read that, to be honest, I thought, "Oh God, kill me now. I've become Bob Greene, putting out some scary creep vibe, frightening the youngsters."
     Sorry about the invitation. No harm intended. But you haul yourself to Au Bon Pain enough, sit in the back in the little room all alone, reading the paper, you start to think, "This would go better with another person."
     It is not only good for you--the walk, the food, the company--but ultimately sound business. Years later, when the former columnist who blew off lunch with a brusque "No" was now rattling a cup in public relations, pitching stories -- a fate I found as satisfying as if she were rooting through Dumpsters -- she contacted me. Was I interested in writing about whatever nugatory PR pap she was ballyhooing?
     "No," I replied.

Rahm's a jerk, but he's our jerk

     This was an assignment. I don't have a Sunday column, and don't usually attend editorial board meetings. But my boss asked me to sit in on the mayoral "debate" at the paper Friday morning and write something. Not that I minded. The 2015 mayoral election is a dreary affair, and taking aim at those involved was as difficult as shooting a duck in a bucket. If this piece seems a tad sharp, it's because of the unpleasantness of contemplating what passes for political discourse in this city.  The Occupy Chicago rhetoric seems to have infected the general view of Rahm Emanuel. Everyone hates him—his personality makes that easy, I'm not fond of him either, but knee jerk contempt overlooks that he's making all these hard choices for a city that was busted long before he got here. People seem under the delusion we have vast resources, that Emanuel's closing mental health clinics because it's his idea of fun. 
      How anyone can pretend to care about the city yet back one of the crew of misfits running against him is beyond me. I'd never met Willie Wilson before; he seemed uncertain where he was or why he was here, and began by saying he had no interest in the Sun-Times endorsement. Bob Fioretti I knew; I drove around his ward with him once—and see his campaign as the standard end-of-career lunge. I was actually fond of him, despite his shutting down a business in his ward, Felony Franks, because he didn't like its name. But that was before watching him mudsling, trying to make something stick to the mayor.  Repellent. Rahm is Rahm. I'd never met Dock Walls, but thought he passionately expressed the views of the big chunk of the city who are African-American and disenfranchised. Jesus Garcia I've been trying to shadow for a column for the past month, but arranging it seems beyond his press secretary's ability. I don't suppose we'll get that set up now. 

     A baby, a bozo, a jerk, a firebrand and a stiff.
     Or, if you prefer, Willie Wilson, Bob Fioretti, Rahm Emanuel, William "Dock" Walls and Jesus "Chuy" Garcia.
     The quintet of men who would be mayor for the next four years stopped by the Sun-Times Friday for a debate, of sorts, 90 minutes to talk about their vision of the city.
     It wasn't pretty.
     Let's go in order, left to right.
     Wilson is a political novice, a millionaire running for mayor because he's missing

whatever gene keeps you or me from doing embarrassing things that we aren't capable of accomplishing half well.
     In my case, I suppose it keeps me from auditioning for "Swan Lake." With Wilson, who built a successful medical supply business but is missing that gene, he's running a campaign half as a mission from God—he closed his remarks with a prayer—half as a how-can-we-lose-when-we're-so-sincere, Charlie Brown run at the football.
     "I'm running for mayor wanting to make some definite changes," he said. "I want to come from the heart."
     Given that his transit of Chicago history will end Feb. 24, it would be cruel to focus too much frank assessment upon him. Wilson points out that his formal education ended after one day of eighth grade, and perhaps after the campaign he can use his example to inspire kids to stay in school.

    Fioretti — well, "clown" is a harsh assessment, especially since he dialed his hair color back, though his smile is still a chilling, facial appliance that walked off from "American Horror Story." He was a competent, block-by-block alderman before his ward was redistricted away. Now he is hammering away below Emanuel's belt, dragging the mayor's son into the campaign for getting mugged, hoping for a miracle. He continued his unfair flailing Friday, tossing everything that comes to mind into the blender, reaching back to the Clinton administration, accusing Rahm of having been "an advocate of cutting welfare benefits," as if that were a bad thing.  I almost blurted out, "That was the most successful social change the federal government initiated in the past 25 years." But I was here to listen, not talk, so I was able to hear Fioretti blame Emanuel for the assault rifle ban expiring, and for in general wrecking the city. 

     "Chicago is moving in the wrong direction," he said.
     The mayor needs no explanation. We all know. He seems to have sincerely believed his high opinion of himself would simply be imparted to the voters by osmosis, and is hurt to discover otherwise (though $30 million of TV ads ought to gin up some affection, or at least the required number of votes). He did not actually say anything jerkish Friday. He was the same as always, reptilian, his voice a little softer, which to me seemed restrained fury, an I-spend-four-years-trying-to-save-this-frickin'-city-and-THIS-is-the-thanks-I-get!? seething resentment.
     Unlike the others, however, he actually has a record.
     "In the last four years, we've presented four balanced budgets without a property, sales or gas tax increase," Emanuel murmured. "Four years in a row we increased our investments in after school, summer jobs and early childhood education."
     Walls was the surprise. In my mind he dwelled in the realm of perennially ambitious street hustlers trying for a legitimate score—I wasn't 100 percent sure he was a different person than Wallace "Gator" Bradley before now. But he came on strongest of the five.
 

   "There's two Chicagos," Walls said. "There's a world class Chicago and there's an underclass Chicago. The world class Chicago is beautiful, safe tourist-friendly robust, full for resources and unlimited opportunity for Rahm Emanuel and the other 1 Percenters. That's the Chicago the media loves to brag about.. Then there's the underclass Chicago that nobody wants to talk about: decaying neighborhoods, unsafe streets, people dodging potholes and bullets."
     Too true, and well-put, though he jumps to a surprising conclusion.
     "Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago is the most racially segregated city in America," Walls said. He didn't add: and under Richard M. Daley. And under Harold Washington. And under Jane Byrne. And under Richard J. Daley. And under Martin Kennelly. 
     The question is, what would Walls, who said he was retired from a t-shirt business that grosses $40,000 a year, do about it? 
     Garcia carries himself like a man balancing phone books on his head, like the profile off a coin, a minor bureaucrat in a small country who should be wearing a red sash and applying wax seals to official documents while ceiling fans slowly turn.
     "I have been living in the same bungalow for ... 24 years, 34 years married to the same woman," he began.
     Well Jeez, why didn't you say so? Here's the keys to the city.
     Chicago's problems burst the confines of our 90 minutes; we really only talked about the ballooning pension disaster and the crumbling schools. None of the would-be mayors connected one to another, as if cuts in the schools were being done for the heck of it. All seemed to toss airy notions at the former—Wilson brought up the will-o-the-wisp of a Chicago casino, Fioretti a tax on LaSalle Street trading, Walls would encourage small business like his t-shirt operation. All except the mayor discussed schools as if we had all the money in the world, and Rahm just hates to spend it on poor folk.
     "They want to put children at risk, that is intentional," Walls explained, calling charter schools "a diabolical plot."

     Listening closely for 90 minutes, I didn't hear one promising idea, one exciting proposal, from anybody. When Tom McNamee, the editorial page editor, ended by asking the men to give their vision of Chicago's future 20 years from now, he merely lit the fuse on a blast of bromides. 

    "The future of the city of Chicago rests in redeveloping the neighborhoods and the former industrial belt," Garcia said. "Chicago has the potential to maximize its position and its advantages especially given the great assets that we have in the field of transportation: rail, highways, air, and its port.  Those are tremendous assets that put us to become a hub for tremendous economic activity."

      "Chicago hasn't had an industry to call its own since the stockyards," Walls said. "Our best hope rests in small business. Many of those small businesses are gems waiting to happen...We cannot exist as a service economy. That's like eating at your own flesh."

     You get the idea. Emanuel made sense—"Twenty years from now Chicago is still going to be a very diverse, vibrant economy," he said. "My number one goal is to make sure it's also a city middle class families can afford to live in and raise their children in... Chicago's diversity is its strength." Wilson, of course, added  a surreal note. "We must make sure Midway and O'Hare reflect the neighborhoods they serve." I'm still chewing on that one; it has to be an oblique reference to who gets concessions there, or just gabble. 

     I can't vote in this election, not living in Chicago -- as I'm sure you'll point out, trying to undermine the plain truths outlined here. But watching the spectacle, I kept thinking, "Rahm may be a jerk, but he's our jerk." You might not like what he's doing, but at least he's doing something. Garcia seemed to think that the parents, once consulted, would close the schools themselves. The airy, let's-put-on-a-show speculation of the other four was truly frightening, given that, through some wild longshot, there might be a tiny fraction of a chance one could be mayor: say 1 out of a 1,000. 

    Walls speaks a good piece but has done nothing to make anyone suspect he could do the job. The others have neither the language nor the experience. Voters seem resigned that Rahm Emanuel will win. Looking at his opponents, I can say with confidence: not only will he win, but he should win. God help the city if he doesn't.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    John McPhee once wrote an article about a geologist who could identify a particular stretch of beach, anywhere in the world, just from a handful of sand.
    And while it might seem unfair for me to expect you to be able to determine exactly where this lovely tropical scene is to be found—what island, or peninsula, or other locale—my faith in you is such that I know you can do it.
     Where is this sun-drenched tableau, which I thought might perk you up on this late January day, with snow on the way? There are lots of clues—the particular style of boat, the distinctive color of the water, the rocky beach, and of course those give-away palm trees in the distance.
      The winner will receive one of my brand-new 2015 posters, suitable for framing, certain, almost, to be a collector's item decades from now, complete with its own custom made container manufactured by Chicago Mailing Tube. Post your guesses below. Good luck. 

Poet Donald Hall pens a guide to old age

     Could it be that human beings are supposed to die at 60?
     That all of our supposed medical advances will be seen, someday, as a blind alley, a mistake? That a world where men die of cholera at 45, when women die bearing their ninth baby, will be seen as preferable to the coming gerontocracy of extended decrepitude, of living corpses idling away meaningless years in tiny rooms waiting for their prolonged, tortuous deaths?
     I'm not saying I believe that. Given that half my readers seem to be 80, I'm not suggesting you should all be dead. I'm glad you're here, just as, when I turn 80, I imagine I'll be glad to be here, too.
     At least I hope I will.

     But I have to wonder, especially having just read Donald Hall's new memoir, Essays After Eighty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: $22).
     Though I am the rare person who goes to poetry readings and buys poetry books, I had never heard of Hall, poet laureate of the United States in 2007, until I read a rapturous review in the New York Times, and ran out and bought his book, as a kind of preparation, the way I read Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance on the way to hike in Colorado. I figure, old age is coming, eventually. Might as well know what to expect.
     A futile task, Hall explains, because we arrive at old age and are shocked to find ourselves in "an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae." Pleasant or annoying, the aged "are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial."
     Sounds awful. But if you object to that; blame him, not me. I'm just the reporter.
     The old are ignored, trivialized, condescended to. A guard at the National Gallery of Art explains to Hall that the sculpture he's looking at is by Henry Moore, in singsong, as if to a child, while Hall manfully resists pointing out that he knew Henry Moore, personally, and wrote a book about him.
     The book is at times quite funny. The highlight, for me, is when Hall is awarded the National Medal of Arts. He goes to Washington to receive it from Barack Obama and, well, let him describe it:

     A military man took my arm to help me climb two stairs. . . . I told the president how much I admired him. He hugged my shoulder and bent speaking several sentences into my left ear, which is totally deaf. I heard nothing except my heart's pounding. When my friends watched on the Internet, seeing the president address me, they asked what he had said. I told them that he said either 'Your work is immeasurably great' or 'All your stuff is disgusting crap,' but I couldn't make out which.

Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter

     Humor is the bulwark against dolorous age, though Simon Rich this is not. Much of this brief book, 134 pages, is taken up by Hall's cherished memories — driving from Vienna to Greece with his new wife, Kirby, in 1952. Interesting enough, and punctuated by the occasional bracing flash of self-awareness.
     "One feature of old age is gabbing about almost-forgotten times," he writes, and his almost-forgotten times involve quizzing Dylan Thomas about "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" and meeting Mrs. Fiske Warren and her daughter, whose portrait, "Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter," was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1903.
     While tragedy has certainly visited him: his first wife lost to divorce, his second to leukemia, Hall has it a lot better than most, living on the New Hampshire farm that has been in his family since 1865. His memories include Exeter and Harvard and Oxford. He has a quartet of women seeing to his needs, including lover Linda, and while he relates his good fortune, he doesn't seem to grasp it.
     The awards roll in, and he likes that, after the ritual faux pooh-poohing. A lot of the book is spent receiving honors, which reminded me how the importance of career flares up in old age, the irresistible impulse to valorize your past, to reassure yourself that it all Meant Something. The damning thing for me was the book flap biography, which reads, in its entirety: "Donald Hall, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, awarded by the president. He lives in New Hampshire."
     I know those aren't necessarily written by the author, but were it me, I'd sit at the book warehouse with a scissors, snipping those off the flaps before I let that go out.
     I left the book reminding myself: vanity is a black hole whose gravity grows as you age. If fate sentences you to live, try your hardest to tear your gaze away from the black star of your ego, and think about other people. Hall's children and grandchildren are ghosts in the book. He might have focused a little on them, but the task eluded him. Still, the book's worth a read.
     "There are no happy endings," Hall writes, "if things are happy they have not ended." Indeed.

Union Station: fix the gross part, save the sagging stone steps

     Union Station is a hell hole — loud, crowded, smoky, cold, in winter, airless in summer, dripping cascades of what please God is water all year round. 
      So news that Amtrak finally plans to toss $12 million into fixing has to be welcome, although anybody who has spent anything on home repair has to immediately wonder how far $12 million is going to go. Announcing a $12 million facelift of Union Station is like me saying I'm spending $600 to put in a new bathroom in my home. Given that the "multibillion dollar" master plan to truly update Union Station, can $12 million even give it a good scrubbing (a skepticism reflected in headlines such as Time Out's, "Amtrak Commits $12 million to make Union Station less gross." Less gross. To totally eliminate grossness  would cost $120 million. Easily).  And there is the very real possibility that the years of construction work and inconvenience of the repairs will dwarf whatever improvement they actually achieve. That would surprise no one. 

      Still, to the degree they might enlarge the South Platform, even maybe drill another exit route down there, is to be applauded. It might means travelers won't have to queue in endless, we're-all-gonna-die-down-here-someday lines, waiting forever, our ears next to throbbing locomotives, just to get out of the place. 
     Although. One detail of the plan gave me pause. Not that they're listening to me, or any of the 120,000 commuters forced to descend into Union Station's stygian horrors every day. The geniuses in charge have announced they're going to fix the marble stairs into the Great Hall, steps gently worn over the decades by millions of feet, in Oxford wing tips and sandals and wrapped in rags. Chicago is not an ancient city, and those sagging stone steps are the closest thing we have to an old stairway in Jerusalem or Rome. So while God knows I would never argue with any kind of improvement at Union Station, I would say, fix those marble steps only after you've fixed everything else. Which is a code for "never." 
    That said, they'll probably fix them first.