Bottomless

 

     Our son works in the Financial District in Lower Manhattan. So when we visited him last week, we got a hotel room next to the new One World Trade Center, steps away from the site of the old, and of course we paused to contemplate the 9/11 Memorial, "Reflecting Absence."  

     If you've never been, the footprint of the north and south towers of the old World Trade Center have been preserved, two squares formed by bronze parapets, listing the names of the 2,983 people who died that day in the terrorist attacks, plus those lost in the 1993 precursor bombing.
    Water cascades 30 feet down each side — the largest manmade waterfall in North America— and in each pool, what I consider the brilliant stroke, is "a smaller, central void," in the words of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Those two square pits you can't see the bottom of, a perfect physical evocation of endless grief after profound loss. You yearn to see a bottom, but there is no bottom. Only emptiness.

    The design, by the way, was done by an Israeli-American architect, Michael Arad, his work picked out of more than 5,000 submissions. While not generally a fan of memorials, some events are so enormous, our humanity demands it. Which makes me wonder how we will commemorate COVID. Arad has proposed something interesting to honor the 50,000 New Yorkers who died of COVID: a "floating sanctum" at the bottom of the Central Park Reservoir.  It would only appear when the water is lowered for maintenance. Most of the time it would be out-of-sight, which is fitting, since even the most terrible events submerge in our consciousness. Time heals whether we want it to or not.

     “I liked the idea that for one week each year, you could access a place in the city that at other times is just a submerged memory,” Arad told Architectural Digest. “The Reservoir exhales, the level of the water sinks, and the dam appears so you can traverse it on foot.”

     I imagine, on that one week a year, it'll draw quite a crowd. For a long time. But not forever. Nothing is forever. Not even grief.

Encounter with an owl

     If human eyes were as big as owl eyes, relative to our heads, they would be the size of oranges. Then maybe we, too, would be able to swivel our necks 270 degrees, the way owls can—out of necessity, since their eyes are not mobile eyeballs, like ours, but tube-shaped, like a pair of binoculars, ideal for hunting small animals from the air at night. 
     This is an Eastern Screech-Owl—the hyphen looks odd, but if it's good enough for Sibley's, it's good enough for me— encountered Friday on the south bank of the Chicago River, just west of Orleans. 
     I was hurrying to catch the 5:12, noticed a group of city dwellers along the riverbank, fishing—the Friends of the Chicago River, having an event—and then saw this fellow perched on the leather gauntlet of Natalie F., who works for the Brookfield Zoo. I detoured down the stairs to the river bank to take a closer look.
     Eastern Screech-Owls range across the entire United States east of the Rockies. Screech-Owls west of the Rockies are Western Screech-Owls, aptly enough, and almost identical, except they have no red varieties. Their loss, as the red is quite pretty.
      This owl, I was told, is named "Weasley," obviously a nod to the red-haired Weasley clan in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, whose use of owls as messengers has to count as one of the more creative uses of owls in fiction.
     Though not the only one. The best magic-based kids book series before Harry Potter also prominently features owls. In fact, chapter four of C.S. Lewis' "The Silver Chair," the fourth book of his Chronicles of Narnia, is called "A Parliament of Owls," his description of a gathering of owls to discuss their business of the day (and itself a pun on Chaucer's allegorical poem, "The Parliament of Fowls"). The term stuck as a collective noun to denote groupings of the bird.
     When our boys were growing up, my wife and I read them "Owl Babies," an excellent picture book by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Patrick Benson. It has a very simple plot. Three owlet—the term for young owls— siblings, delightfully named Sarah, Percy and Bill, wake to find their mother gone, and the entire plot is their fearful wait for her. (Though I'm not an expert, mom looks like a Spotted Owl to me).

"Malle Babbe" by Frans Hall

     Publisher's Weekly called the book "hauntingly lovely," and years ago, when I went over for tea and chocolate cake at Ann Lander's East Lake Shore Drive condo, I brought her a copy of "Owl Babies" as a present, knowing she collects owl figurines and images. She was pleased with it.
      I'm tempted to sail off into owls in art, where they represent everything from the devil and madness, such as in Frans Hals "Malle Babbe," a 1630s painting of a drunken madwomen, to wisdom and calm. In ancient times Athena, the goddess of wisdom was often depicted with an owl mascot. 
    Well, maybe just a little side trip. The most famous ancient Greek coin, the tretradrachm, featured Athena on one side, and an owl on the other, starting the tradition of putting animals on the backs of coins, and in ancient times the coins were referred to as Owls. 
     Coveting the thing and wondering how available they are, I went on eBay, and was surprised to see specimens of the 2500-year-old silver coin for as little as $400. Then again, the owl tetradrachma is perhaps the most forged coin of all time, so buyer beware.
    I think I'll do without. Besides, there is no need to spend big bucks and reach back into antiquity to find what may or may not be an authentic  Greek owl coin. Greece struck a number of modern versions, including 1 and 2 drachma coins, issued by the military junta in 1973, a nice example of which can be had on eBay for $4.
     

Danish notes #1: Spiral city

 

Church of Our Savior, Copenhagen

     "Leitmotif" originated as a German word, used by critics picking apart the works of Richard Wagner. A fitting term to start my reflection on Copenhagen, as Danish is a Germanic language. It means, roughly, a recurrent theme, and in the case of our recent visit to the capital of Denmark, the theme we kept returning to was, of all things, spirals.

Eliasson bridge

    The overture began hours after we landed, with an enigmatic tower glimpsed from the canal tour my wife cannily put us on, in the sound theory that we'd been traveling all day and would need some low energy activity to introduce us to the city. It worked. We saw all sorts of wonderful sights — a bridge designed by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson that looks like a sailing ship and collapses in on itself to let boats pass. The Rem Koolhaas-designed Danish Architecture Center, which I immediately tweeted at Lee Bey ("EAT YOUR HEART OUT!" I wrote, having decided years ago it is hysterical to taunt Lee, our architecture critic, when I see noteworthy architecture abroad. I can't hope he finds it as funny as I do; but he hasn't asked me to stop, which I take as license to continue). We even locked eyes on the backside of the Little Mermaid statue, sparing us the need to carve out time and face the throng for the obligatory visit.
     Above all, the Church of Our Savior, whose spiral steeple is unlike anything I've ever seen atop a building. Gold and black, we could see tiny figures working their way up the staircase. I wanted to be one of them.

Dragon Spire

     Moments later, we cruised past a second spiral steeple, the Dragon Spire atop the Old Stock Exchange, hove into view, evoking my favorite German saying, Einmal ist keinmal und zweimal ist immer, or "Once is never but twice is always."

     I noticed a trend, but did not expect a third spiral. The next day, however, we were wandering away from the Rosenborg Castle — delightfully downmarket, compared to palaces in Paris and Madrid — and happened upon the Rundetaarn, or Round Tower. We were looking for a particular marketplace, to lunch on their brand of open-faced sandwiches, and I figured atop the tower would be a good vantage point to eyeball it. 

     Don't let the bust of Tycho Brahe outside the tower fool you — the Danish astronomer died in 1601, in exile in Prague, while the Round Tower wasn't completed until 1642.

     The tower has no stairs, but a spiral path  winding seven and a half times around the building, the way the tower of Babylon is depicted. We paid our eight Euros and marched gamely upward. 

     "What's with Copenhagen and spirals?" I typed into Google, expecting all sorts of sites rhapsodizing bout Spiral City. Nothing. A lot about Church of Our Savior.  And that's about it. Nobody seemed to have made the connection before. 

Path up the Round Tower

     So the field is open to me. Readers might remember how in 2015 I used four shapes as a lens to view Chicago — the parabola, the circle, the square, the triangle. A spiral is the perfect representation a city, which also unwinds out from a central point over time — in "The Wizard of Oz," remember, Dorothy starts skipping along a spiraling Yellow Brick Road that leads her to the Emerald City. 

     The Round Tower went up in 1642. The Church of Our Savior spire was added in 1759. So I assumed the former inspired the latter. Not so. The Church of Our Savior website says it is based on the Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome, and I have no reason to doubt them.

     Those are the only two spiral church towers in the world I could find, which is odd, because spirals are an omnipresent natural design form, from starfish to galaxies. They've been used in architecture since Greek times — the capital of an Ionic column has a pair of spirals. Trajan's Column in Rome, built over 2,000 years ago, still has its spiral staircase inside. Modern buildings use them — Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim comes to mind (though honestly, as a museum warrior, I'm no fan of that ramp). 

    I started to see them elsewhere in Copenhagen, pausing in the middle of the street to snap this spiraling brick chimney, the likes of which I've never seen before.

The Treetop Experience

    The Danes are still twirling. In 2019, a 148-foot-tall spiral ramp the Treetop Experience opened in Gisselfeld Klosters Skove,, a forest an hour south of Copenhagen. The structure is 12 loops around a hyperboloid, for you geometry geeks (an hourglass shape for everybody else) offering visitors a treetop view of the surrounding area. I didn't visit; next time (kidding; there never is a next time).

     My wife wanted to go to Christiana, the hippie commune turned tourist attraction, and I cut short her consultation with bus schedules by suggesting we bike there. 

    On the way, we saw the Church of Our Savior, first in the distance, then looming before us. Turns out, the church is a block from an entrance to Christiana. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. We parked our bikes at the church, and after wandering about Christiana, enjoying an ice coffee, we went up the spire, which, rather than opening out on an observation deck, basically got narrower and narrower until you were jammed into an endpoint below the giant golden ball. It was not something pleasurable to do, but definitely something worth having done.

Fence around the Church of Our Savior.

How can we miss Elon Musk if he won't go away?

     Hunkering down is a survival skill. There are times to fight, and times to flee, and times to keep your head low and wait.
     That last option seemed the only thing to do when Tesla mogul and Space X founder Elon Musk rode into town as the new boss of Twitter in late October. Yes, I began ballyhooing my stuff on Mastodon, or whatever they call their imitation of tweets ("PUBLISH!" the purple button says). But the service is even more random and ineffectual than Twitter, which is saying a lot, given how little traction my work gets there. Mastodon seems more like storing a few gallon jugs of water stashed in the basement — a symbolic gesture that won't really help much should  disaster occur.
     Besides, whatever change Musk was fomenting — inviting antisemites out of their holes to strut around in the light of day, banning a few journalists who had the temerity to write stories about him — didn't affect me in any direct sense. Twitter has always been a free-fire zone of malice and 99.999 percent of the stuff flying around I never see anyway. It's a breeze upon which to send my little balloons of writing wafting off into the aether.
     Honestly, I wouldn't have noticed a change except that I lost about 400 followers. I was closing in on 10,000, which is nothing in the larger picture, but a milestone in my dusty corner of the Sunset League. Now I've sunk below 9,500 and falling steadily, though I can't tell whether those are people more moral than myself fleeing the service, or robot followers being evaporated by some more efficient purging system put in place by the new regime.

    Now Musk has done one of his spurious polls to see whether he should step down as the head of Twitter, and the answer was a resounding "yes"—57 percent of 17 million voters said, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Elon." Never mind that those polls can easily be manipulated by the spambots and web robots that supposedly proliferated after the people in charge of getting rid of them were fired, or quit, when half the staff left upon Musk's arrival. It seems as if Musk will ignore the result anyway, in classic MAGA it's-only-fair-if-I-win style.
Last week I did ask myself if, by staying, I'm passively enabling evil, the good German sweeping his front step and not looking at the smoke coming from the crematorium. But all human systems are freighted with bad, and tweeting once a day doesn't seem like participating in wrongdoing any more than paying taxes or buying products. Leave reaching for moral purity to the vegans. Donald Trump was president for four years and I didn't go anywhere; how is this different?
     Musk has said he will abide by the people's choice, and maybe he will. Hard to tell when you're dealing with such an established hypocrite and liar. He could always bring in some even bigger asshat to run the thing. One hopes he goes back to running Tesla's, whose stock cratered in his absence, losing a third of its value over the past six months (including the 5 percent leap for joy it did Monday on learning Musk might stop spending his days sniping at people on Twitter).
     The poll strikes me as a fig leaf. With both Twitter and Tesla hemorrhaging value, the farce is bound to end sooner than later, as adults nudge Musk aside to a setting better suited to his ranting and preening.

     There's a reason children are warehoused in schools and not put in positions of authority. Ego is poison, attention an addictive drug, and people without the moderating influence of humility, maturity and good sense should avoid flailing around in public. Elon Musk spent $44 billion — most of it other people's money, of course — to cement his reputation as a bully with the impulse control of a toddler. From the public point of view, that might be a service, long term. Now we know. At least he was born in South Africa, and so can't be elected president of the United States. It's happened before.
     And then Trump went away. Or at least is in the painful, protracted process of going away. Waiting works. I've worked for my share of bad bosses before. They tend to move on down the pike if you just are patient. They arrive, manifest their inability, flail around, and then head off to explore new horizons while those behind heave a grateful sigh. The model I used was a previous classic business disaster, when Quaker Oats bought Snapple for $1.7 billion in November, 1994, twice its actual market value, ran the brand into the ground, and sold it for $300 million, half its actual worth, in March 1997. The entire fiasco didn't take three years to unfold, start to finish. I can't imagine Musk lasting that long. Heck, at this rate, he'll be gone by springtime.

Flashback 2011: The Main Event—Replacing city's century-old water mains

City workers repairing a water pipe (Sun-Times file photo)

     This week I was talking with someone in the water department regarding an upcoming story, and mentioned this column from 2011 which, to my surprise, I've never posted here before. What I remember most about this is piece how it came about. I was having coffee with Rahm Emanuel—mayors other than Lori Lightfoot did that kind of thing—and he said something like, "You never write about me," and I replied, at least in memory, "You're not interesting."

     Unfair! The mayor said: he had just gotten approval for this big water main project. 

     I explained that if I wrote about the funding, I'd just be ballyhooing his administration. But when the pipes actually went in the ground, I'd be right there. And so I was. It took a while to get this in the paper, and I remember bumping into him—mayors other than Lori Lightfoot went about in public, and you could run into them—and him saying, "Where's my water story?" or words to that effect. 

     Water is the most democratic thing the city of Chicago does. Residents of the fanciest penthouse to the meanest flophouse expect clean, cold, Lake Michigan water to flow whenever they open a tap.
     Everybody pays the same: $2.01 per thousand gallons, whether at Navy Pier, next to the Jardine water plant, or every one of the 125 far-flung suburbs that buys Chicago water.
     At least until Jan. 1, when the price jumps to $2.50 per thousand gallons, the hike intended to pay for Mayor Rahm Emanuel's ambitious 10-year plan of infrastructure improvements, a massive effort to correct years of neglect.
     Chicago is crisscrossed with 4,300 miles of water mains, from enormous trunk lines five feet in diameter to the little six-inch feeders that run down residential streets, a billion gallons a day coursing through the system.
     In the past, the city replaced these mains at the rate of about 29 miles a year.
     Which sounds impressive until you do the math: At that rate, each main is replaced once every 148 years.
     That's bad.
     Bad because pipes do not last forever, particularly not in Chicago, with its 30-below-zero winters and 100-degree summers.
     Buried iron pipes expand and contract, eventually cracking. Small leaks undermine the ground beneath the pipes, causing them to sag and snap. Inside, minerals from the water build up, like an artery choked with cholesterol—a process called "tuberculation"—so that a six-inch main only has the capacity of a three-inch pipe.
     Meanwhile, the outside corrodes, the walls grow fragile.
     How fragile?
     One length of water main replaced this fall on West Superior between Leclaire and Cicero was laid in 1894 and 1900. Crews couldn't dig closer than two feet to the old main; any closer and the 40 pounds of pressure inside might burst the pipe.
     "The pressure of the ground is basically holding the pipe together," said resident engineer Steven Skrabutenas. "Then you've got 600 gallons of water a minute flowing into your work trench. It doesn't take long to fill up a hole, and you have to do an emergency shutdown and repair it."
     About 20 percent—roughly 1,000 miles—of Chicago mains are a century old or older, according to the Department of Water Management.
     They must be replaced, at a cost of about $2.2 million a mile, including the cost of replacing the street.
     That's why, in mid-October, Emanuel released his new budget calling for a boost in water bills, 25 percent now, then 15 percent every year for the next three years, the increase going to repair Chicago's decrepit mains and sewers.
     "We need to invest in our infrastructure to maintain the quality of life for people across the city, protect our homes from flooding and our cars from sinkholes," said Emanuel. "If we don't invest and proactively make upgrades to our system, we will continually be forced to react and make emergency repairs at a greater cost to everyone."
     The plan is to raise the rate of replacement toward 90 miles a year over 10 years.
     A monumental task, as can be seen by watching just one repair job—"Item 120"—the installation of 1,974 feet of eight-inch ductile iron pipe along three blocks of West Superior.
     The first shovelful of dirt was turned on Sept. 29, with an exploratory hole dug to take a look at what's down there—you can't just start digging on a city street, which conceals not only water and sewer pipes, but also gas mains, AT&T cables and buried electric lines. You have to figure out what's where.
     "Everything is records," explained Skrabutenas, who carries around a little orange notebook filled with his meticulous engineer's handwriting. "Everything I got is here in record books. I got the pipes. I know where everything is at, what we did, how many feet, the pieces, the locations, what parts I use."
     He took out plans, large technical maps of the underground as Chicago believes it to be. He uses them as a guide but also constantly updates and fills in gaps—about 5 percent of the network under city streets isn't recorded, because the information was lost, set down wrong, or never noted to begin with.
     Sometimes things show up that aren't supposed to be there or are there but unmarked. A gas line that's labeled inactive might turn out to be live.
     "I'll give you an example," Skrabutenas said, spreading the plans across the hood of his truck. "This is the location of each house. This is No. 3042. From the line, the location of this is supposed to be 166 feet. I verified and saw the line, and it's not, it's 159 feet. So I upgraded it to tell them how it really is. . . . You want to check everything."
      Infrastructure is in three dimensions, so they need to know not only where these lines are, but also how deep.
     "Do I have room to go over, or do I need to do something else?" he asked. "I want to verify where it is so it all works."
     Once they knew what was under West Superior, work began in early October, with a machine crushing the pavement in a four-foot-wide stretch along the south curb, and then a backhoe digging a trench five feet deep—water mains in Chicago must be at least that deep or they'll freeze in winter.
     The trench is dug by a track excavator with a two-foot-wide bucket.
     Backhoe operator John Dombroski worked a joystick, following the hand signals of his "top man" standing at the lip of the trench.
     "I won't even watch the bucket, I watch his hand," said Dombroski.
     "He's so good he could comb your hair with the teeth of the bucket," added Skrabutenas.
     An additional benefit of Emanuel's plan, besides critical infrastructure improvement, is the addition of 1,800 construction jobs—both at the water department and its contractors and suppliers.
     Working a water crew is a good job but at times a tough one.
     Because water goes everywhere in the city, water crews find themselves in places where they're happy to be inside a trench.
     "This isn't the best place to work, danger-wise," said foreman Stan DeCaluwe, noting that most at risk are the area residents. "The last site, two men were shot on the corner about 120 feet away from where we were digging."
     But gunplay is a rarity.
     "Mostly our problems are theft on the job site," said DeCaluwe. Tool lockers get broken into.
     The new main is eight inches in diameter—to increase the capacity to larger buildings that might be built in decades to come.
     The new pipes are 18 feet long, and their manufacturer suggests they're good for 300 years, coated with a protective resin outside, wrapped in plastic and lined with concrete. They are also ductile iron, which has a little more give.
     "You've got more forgiveness," said Michael Sturtevant, deputy commissioner for engineering services.
     One of the more surprising aspects of the process is that the new main was set in place, then covered back up with dirt.
     "You can't leave these trenches open," said Skrabutenas. "I can't shut this block down for a month."
     The new main was pressure tested—100 pounds for two hours, to check for leaks, then flushed with chlorine for 24 hours, to sanitize it and prevent bacteria from being introduced into the system.
     On Nov 17, after 34 days of work, service was transferred to the new main, house by house, and the old main was shut off. It's left in the ground—there's no point to remove it.
     From now until April, the water crews will focus on leaks.
     "If something is going to fail, typically it fails more often in the wintertime," said DeCaluwe. "Everything's hampered by cold weather."
         —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 27, 2011

Roll on, Big O....

     The mind's a funny thing.
     When I was in Japan, I saw Lawson stores everywhere; they're the second most popular convenience store in Japan, after 7-Eleven, with some 11,000 outlets all over the country.
     And I immediately knew I was familiar with them.  That before 7-Eleven, before White Hen, there had been Lawson's in Ohio, where I grew up.
     Lawson's began as a dairy in Akron, Ohio, in 1938. As the stores spread, they threatened the milk man monopoly -- you didn't buy milk in stores, y0u had it delivered. Lawson's began the practice of selling milk in gallon jugs, and battled milk inspection laws as they spread their stores —as many as 700 in Ohio and three neighboring states, 200 in the Cleveland area alone.  They also fought the Ohio blue laws that kept stores closed on Sunday.
     But I really didn't think about their sudden appearance all around me. I hadn't seen one in decades. Lawson's sold out to Dairy Mart in 1985 and the stores were renamed. I hadn't seen the familiar, comforting, familiar, fat white milk bottle on the blue shield in 30 years. But I instantly accepted its presence, a survivor in the Far East.
     All I thought was "What a great logo."
     It wasn't until I got back home that the full memory returned. We were having breakfast Sunday morning. Edie had set out some orange juice, a new brand, and I was reading the ballyhoo on the label. "Squeezed daily" it said.
     Rollllllll on, Big-O,....
     Suddenly, I was hearing music in my head.
     Get that juice up to Lawson's in 40 hours. 
     A TV commercial, making heroic "The Big-O Orange Run," rushing fresh orange juice up to vitamin C deprived Ohioans.
     Now one man sleeps while the other man drives, on the non-stop Lawson run.
      Of course the commercial is on-line.
      And the cold, cold juice in the tank car caboose, stays as fresh as the Florida sun.
     Now we're used to living in a small world. If our roses come from South America, our bricks from China, well, that's how it works. But once upon a time racing that OJ up from Florida was a big deal. It was something to sing about.

Destroying Meigs Field

      Fifteen years already? That went by fast. When Richard M. Daley dug up Meigs Field in the dead of night, on March 31, 2003, it seemed an unhinged, illegal act, the worst thing the mayor had done during his administration—we didn't realize then just how badly he was mismanaging the city's finances, digging a hole that Chicago struggles to crawl out from to this day.
     I loved Meigs Field, and was lucky enough to take off the tiny lakefront airstrip once, in Susan Dacy's stunt biplane, to do barrel rolls and loop-de-loops over Lake Michigan.   
     This column ran in 2012. What impresses me most is that, six years ago, I'd actually phone the mayor's office to try to get his reaction on something. Now that's inconceivable, because I can't imagine him giving a candid response on any subject whatsoever, nor anybody caring if he did.

     Rahm Emanuel is a controlled, close-to-the-vest kind of guy. Despite his reputation when elected, there are no spontaneous explosions from him, alas. No colorful sputterings of public outrage for us in the media to have fun with. Especially when it comes to the various chronic urban problems created by his predecessor, the unlamented former mayor, Richard M. Daley. Emanuel has gotten quite good at addressing some inherited problem while pretending it just popped spontaneously into being, as if an act of nature, and wasn't dumped into his lap by the carelessness and folly of his old pal.
     So it was odd to see Emanuel this week seem to defend Daley's biggest lapse while mayor: the surprise, probably illegal 2003 destruction of Meigs Field, the city's downtown airport that . . . well, why re-invent the wheel?
     "Meigs Field was an urban jewel and a unique lakefront asset that will never be replaced," the Chicago Sun-Times wrote in 2005. "As tragic as its loss was to the vibrancy of downtown Chicago, worse was the dead-of-night manner in which Mayor Daley destroyed it two years ago, without question the most extreme abuse of power he has committed in a decade and a half in office - well, as least the most extreme we know about."
     OK, OK, it was me who wrote that in the Sun-Times in 2005. But wait, we're coming to the best part:
     "Even if it were a good move—and it wasn't—he did it the wrong way. I might want an omelet for breakfast, but that doesn't mean I want Mayor Daley to break into my house and prepare it while I sleep."

 Granted, I'm an airplane fan. What man with a pulse isn't? I've always rejected the argument that you had to be a bigwig using Meigs to jet from deal to deal in order to benefit from the field. Many, particularly kids, liked to see the aircraft come and go. The terminal was a small gem of late 1950s modernism. The place had a lot of history. Going for a ride with Bill Lear, who was showing off his new Learjet, a Daily News reporter looked out his window and said that scant Meigs runway looked "like a stick of gum."
     The city has mile after mile of underutilized lakefront park, and it made no sense to destroy Meigs just to add a few hundred yards more.
     So ruining Meigs was a mistake, and Daley doing it in his I'm-the-King-of-Chicago-I-can-do-what-I-please manner made it worse.
     Time is a balm, however. Asked if digging up Meigs was the right thing to do, Emanuel initially said, "It is right, yes, on this level, this way: Meigs Field is no longer there."
     But that seemed to be saying that the ends justify the means. Whatever works, just do it.
     "I'll leave it to others to make that judgment," Emanuel continued. "I think it was the right thing to do."
     Which is it? Since I wasn't there, I thought clarification was in order. Perhaps the mayor was flustered by my colleague, Fran Spielman—a no-nonsense, tough-as-nails, Front Page, honed-razor of a newspaper reporter who will cut out your heart and make you comment on it as you die. If she asked me the time, I'd start to cry. I thought, to be fair, I had better check with Emanuel's office. So he approves of Daley's most power-mad act?
     "No way, no how," his office replied.
     Well, that's a relief. So does that mean—follow-up question!—that the mayor is not laying the groundwork for his own extra-legal, unilateral acts? That he won't, oh, decide to fill in Belmont Harbor? Because really, who enjoys that? A handful of rich boaters. That's all. Why indulge them when the city could seize the lagoon and fill it in. More campground for poor kids! And the Water Tower—it really jams up the intersection. Why not pull it down in the dead of night and reassemble it south of Roosevelt Road, where congestion is not such an issue? And why go through all the bothersome hearings and preservationist thumb-sucking and hobbyhorsing that are the hallmarks of a free country, or were, when a powerful mayor can simply decide it's the best thing to do and then command his quivering underlings to see that it is done while nobody's watching?
     Again "No." Emanuel is celebrating his ill-gotten gains, but not the act that got them.
     I suppose he can't, at this point, put the airport back. Too late for that. And, looking forward, as he wants us to, transforming Northerly Island to prairie might turn out wonderful. The idea of camping there, with the stunning cityscape arrayed before you, is enticing. I'd sure give it a try, for a night.
     But I think it's too early for anyone to shrug off what happened to Meigs. It was a crime. Daley ripped up the runway while planes were still parked next to it. It cost the city more than a million dollars in fines, and sent a chill down the back of Chicagoans, or should have. The city kept re-electing the guy, and now it's got another mayor for life, whose office insists he is definitely not, no way, no how, testing the waters to see what the public will accept. Let's hope not.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 19, 2012

Flashback 1990: `Working poor'? It's a state of mind

     Reacting to anything Darren Bailey says is probably pointless. He's a downstate dope spraying his ignorance around in the mistaken belief that doing so might get him elected governor. Barring tragedy, he won't even be a political footnote.
     And yet he flails. One tactic that goes over big in his world is slurring Chicago, since insulting Black people directly is no longer fashionable, even in his milieu. So he uses code; a combination of racism AND cowardice. Though those two qualities are really just two sides of the same coin.
     When Bailey called Chicago "a hellhole" twice at the Illinois State Fair, my former colleague Monica Eng, now at Axios, asked him if people living in Chicago also believe they live in a hellhole, and he replied "Actually, I believe they do. Because it's unsafe."
     He believes. He doesn't know because he hasn't asked them, and hasn't asked them because he's barely set foot in Chicago. He believes that to be the case because he is a practitioner of the classic Fox News mind-reading trick, whereby bigots try to give a sheen to their loathsome thoughts by projecting them upon others. I would bet that for every Chicagoan who thinks they live in a hellhole, there are 50 who think Bailey is an idiot, or would, if they'd ever heard of him.

     Common sense — the common sense that Bailey so obviously lacks — tells us that most people anywhere, no matter their condition, do not consider themselves to be living in misery, never mind a hellhole. They have pride in their homes, modest though they might be. Troubled though they might be.
     This reminded me of a story over 30 years ago when one of the geniuses at City Council declared alderfolks like herself to be the "working poor." Editor Alan Henry's eyes lit up with that sort of glee that has become rare in newspapers nowadays. He gave me an assignment that was more like whittling a splintery pointed stick to shove up the politician's backside, a task that I understood immediately and executed with pleasure, hurrying to her ward, finding the most abject residents I could, people literally grovelling in the mire, collecting aluminum cans, and asking them: "Do you consider yourself poor?" 


"We are the working poor."
          — Marlene Carter, $40,000-a-year alderman of the 15th Ward, arguing last week that aldermanic salaries should be raised to $65,000.

     On bleak, garbage-strewn streets of Marlene Carter's 15th Ward, the real working poor are too proud to call themselves that.
     Marvin McKinley, pushing a shopping cart filled with a broken bike frame, a spool of garden hose, crushed cans and assorted castoffs, doesn't think of himself as poor.
     "I'm middle class. Middle class," said McKinley, 34, savoring the words. McKinley estimates he earns $8,000 a year selling scrap. "Aluminum. Copper. Anything you can make a dollar off."
     Willie Lee Lewis, a father of 12 who earns $7 an hour raking up sludge and trash in an empty drive-in movie parking lot, doesn't see himself as poor, either.
     Nor does he think Ald. Carter deserves a 62 percent raise.
     "I never see her around here yet," he said, gazing into the distance. "You want a raise, you should be around here. I've been here 10 years, I haven't seen her yet."
     "The only time I see her is on television," said Willie Luckett, 74, standing in the doorway of his daughter's store, waiting patiently for 63rd Street to offer up a customer.
     Far from being "poor," — the U.S. Commerce Department poverty line for a family of four was $11,611 in 1987 — Carter has an income approximately double that of the average Chicago family.
     According to 1979 census statistics, the median income for a typical Chicago household was $18,776. The newest census data, observers agree, will show a slight increase to approximately $20,000.
     In 1979, aldermanic salaries went from $17,500 to $22,500.
     Since then, they have almost doubled, while Chicago's median family income increased by less than 10 percent.
     The Public Works Department reports median family income in some wards is as low as $7,325. The median in the South Side 15th Ward is $18,391 — less than a third of the proposed $65,000 aldermanic salary.
     Even the richest families — those in the 13th, 18th, 19th, 23rd, 41st and 43rd wards — earned a median income of between $25,000 and $30,000, a full $10,000 less than Carter earns as alderman.
     Or, in other words, the $25,000 raise the aldermen are requesting is equal to the total average pay of families in the wealthiest wards.
     As a rule, those closer to Carter's salary level tend to be more understanding of some aldermen's desire for more money.
     John Pawlikowski, owner of Fat Johnnie's hot dog stand, 7242 S. Western, sympathizes with Carter.
     "Who can live on $40,000 a year?" asked Pawlikowski, who supports a raise for Carter. "She does a good job. This place was loaded with hookers."
     "I see no need why there couldn't be some kind of increase in income," said Phillip Whorton, 61, a contractor overseeing tuckpointing on the New Zion Grove Mission Baptist Church, 64th and Wolcott. "Though 62 percent is a little high."
     Other residents are adamantly opposed to the size of the proposed increase.
     "I'm against that," said Bob Anderson, selling fruit off the back of a truck at 63rd and Yale. "That's a big jump. Everybody's entitled to a raise, but I don't think they are entitled to that much."
     "They don't need no raise, they need to give somebody a job," said McKinley, angrily, searching the side of the road for scrap. "A man needs an eight-hour-a-day job."
     Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry President Samuel Mitchell reflected the view of most business and civic group leaders when he said aldermen must first agree to give up any outside incomes and jobs before they can "seriously call for a pay increase."
     Officials of the Chicago Civic Federation said aldermen should also agree to curb City Council spending before considering any kind of wage increase.
     The opposition expressed by residents of the 15th Ward is mirrored across the city. A WBBM-Channel 2 News telephone poll found a resounding 96.6 percent of Chicagoans opposed a pay increase.
     One of them is Roger Eugene, 41, who stooped to pick aluminum cans out of the mud covering a vacant lot in the 15th Ward.
     "I sell the aluminum at 59th and Bell," said Eugene, who gets about 50 cents a pound. "On a good day, I get 13, 14 pounds — never less than eight."
     Eugene, a disabled Vietnam vet whose rent is $150 a month, begs to differ with Ald. Carter on her vision of herself.
     "Oh no," he said. "That ain't poor."

Flashback 1991: Black Jews assert claim to faith

Rabbi Capers Funnye preaching in 1991 (Photo for the Sun-Times by Al Podgorski).

     Facebook dangles potential friends, and most I don't know so let drift on by. 
     But I could not pass up Rabbi Capers Funnye, because in the early 1990s I visited his synagogue and wrote about him.  I really liked going to his synagogue, and meeting people who follow my faith, not because of the accident of their birth, but because they found it themselves and embraced it. Judaism meant something to them. 
    I had just seen his tallis, a few years back, in the Smithsonian's collection of African-American artifacts, along with Dizzy Gillespie's angled trumpet and Oprah Winfrey's microphone (reflecting, somewhat smugly, that I had met all three: how often does THAT happen at a museum?)
     The story stands out for several reasons. First, an editor, Larry Green, did not want to put it in the paper. What, he wondered, was "the hook?" What made it news? It was news, I said, measuredly, trying to contain myself, because people didn't know about it. Then he wanted me to somehow include Sammy Davis Junior, as a topical peg. Cause he's JEWISH. That I would not do.
     And just to show that no good work goes unpunished, it ran, and the complaints rolled in. I had written a sidebar on the Falashas, Ethiopian Jews, and they were aghast that I treated their origins as subject to speculation, and not descendants of the Queen of Sheba, or whatever myth they choose to embrace. I think I heard from every Ethiopian Jew in Chicago. 
     Then, to top it off, Rabbi Funnye complained, quite vehemently if I recall. The photo, which I remember running on the front page. It showed him with his mouth open. He didn't like that, thought it was bad, and I couldn't convince him otherwise.
     Plus there was my own disappointment at how warily mainstream white Judaism treated people who voluntarily took up their heritage. It struck me as mere bigotry, and made me embarrassed, not for the first or last time, that organized Judaism can be as myopic, unwelcoming and mistaken as organized anything else.

     Exodus 25 is not the most exciting chapter in the Bible. It contains complex instructions on how to build the Holy Ark. It includes lists: "violet and purple, and scarlet, twice dyed, and fine linen, and goats' hair. . . ."
     Seven men in succession rise and read the ancient Hebrew words. Some read fluidly, almost singing. Others hesitate and struggle.
     When they have finished, Rabbi Capers Funnye Jr. stands before his congregation and explains how the 5,000-year-old Scriptures apply to the average black Jew living on the South Side of Chicago today.
     "Why are (the passages) so detailed in saying precisely these measurements of the sanctuary?" Funnye asks, marking off the air with his hands. "Why these measurements? They could have just said, `They built the temple.' "
     The two dozen people at Beth Shalom Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, 5304 S. Winchester, listen carefully. Occasionally, someone cries out, "Teach on, Rabbi!" or, "Cane, cane," Hebrew for "Yes, yes."
     "It is to teach us to have perfection in our lives, that's why," Funnye continues. "It is so detailed because we're supposed to pay attention to the little things. To learn to take life a step at a time, day by day, mitzvah by mitzvah."
     The congregants of Beth Shalom, and those of at least eight other black synagogues across Chicago, practice forms of Judaism.
     But are they Jews?
     Mainstream Judaism for the most part says no.
     "You can't stand on the corner and say, `I'm Jewish,' and be Jewish," said Rabbi Mordecai Simon, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. "You can study Judaism, you can practice Judaism. But being Jewish is based on being legally a Jew. In Israel, 80 percent of the Jews do not practice Judaism, but they're still Jews because law says if you are born of a Jewish mother, or converted in accordance to Jewish legal proceeding, you're Jewish."
     Funnye said he was "rankled" by the idea that a person without knowledge of Judaism, whose mother is Jewish, is automatically a Jew.
     "He can walk into a Jewish community, and he would be accepted wholeheartedly, and I would have a problem," said Funnye, whose credentials as a rabbi are questioned because he received them from an unrecognized black school in New York. "They would have to quiz me to see what I knew."
     Chicago has as few as several hundred or as many as 8,000 black Jews, depending on your source and your definition of a Jew. Beth Shalom is without question the most traditional by mainstream Jewish standards. Funnye and his family have undergone ritual conversion to the faith. He works for the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, and his children attend Akiba Schechter Jewish Day School in Hyde Park, along with other children from his congregation.
     "He's very sincere, very committed," said Miriam Schiller, principal of Akiba Schechter, where seven of 44 children in elementary school are black. "He wants his children definitely to be Jewish and be educated Jewishly."
     Most black Jews were not born Jewish. Nor are they Ethiopian Jews, whose roots go back millennia (see story, next page). Rather, they were attracted to the idea of Judaism's sense of victory over slavery, an aspect felt particularly strongly at this time of year, with the Passover seder celebrating the Exodus from Egypt.
     "I could take you to the Torah and show you any number of places that apply to a people who had lost their identity, who came by ships," said Tyrone Handy, a member of Beth Shalom.
     Michael Bridge, born and raised a Baptist in Chicago, voiced the common black Jewish belief that it is the white Jews who are newcomers, historically, keeping the nest warm until blacks could return to the faith.
     "The converts came into it when the real people went to sleep," he said.
     "In the majority of blacks who identify themselves as Jews, there is a quest and a thirst that Islam does not satisfy," said Funnye, "that no form or facet of Christianity satisfies."
     Observant Jews would recognize most parts of Beth Shalom's service, which takes almost three hours. There is the reading of the Torah scroll, with the traditional blessings before and after each reader, and the reciting of the shma, the key prayer in Judaism. The men and boys sit on one side of the aisle, the women and girls on the other, as demanded by Orthodox Jewish law.
     The sanctuary—once a living room, with the blond wood paneling still in place - would be recognized also as a Jewish synagogue, albeit a modest one. The Ark is plywood, covered by a threadbare ceremonial curtain salvaged from a wealthier, white synagogue. Overhead is a simple eternal light. To the left, a menorah. To the right, a shofar (ram's horn) on a stand.
     But a few aspects would be unfamiliar. In this house of worship, God is called "Yah," from the original Hebrew name for God, unpronounced in white synagogues. There is a testimony, where members of the congregation stand, as the spirit moves them, and talk about their week. On this day one speaks of the death of his grandmother ("She is out of her pain"), another of the impact of Paul Robeson, and a third on the joy of faith ("It's a blessing to be in this life and have an idea what you are"). And Funnye and his congregation sometimes inflect their Hebrew with a hearty gospel growl.
     Other black Chicago Jewish congregations have looser definitions of themselves.
     "We're a different branch," said Rabbi James Hodges of the House of Israel Temple of Faith, 7130 S. Chicago, where congregants wear skullcaps and prayer shawls and observe Jewish dietary laws. "We don't profess Judaism in its religious sense; we profess Judaism in its national sense. We are Hebrew Israelites; the original Jews descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We have constructed our own service form."
     Despite the publicity of tense black-Jewish relations, black Jews say they rarely experience anti-Semitism.
     "In our community, it's more a lack of understanding," said Charles Hickman, who also uses the Hebrew name Ben Cayil. "When they visualize `Jewish' they think of white guys with long beards. They don't understand how an African can be a Jew."
     He said that within the black Jewish community, there are differences in perspectives toward the religion.
     "The last time I went to Rabbi Hodges' synagogue, they weren't doing the week's Torah portion," said Hickman. "That is an integral part to me."
     Others include Jesus in their service, which baffles Hickman. "They've got off the path in some way," he said. "Ain't no God but God."
     "I think Judaism appeals to us because it is deeply rooted in the African heritage," said Rabbi Robert Nolan, who heads a congregation in Harvey. "I recall as a child growing up in the Southern part of the United States. There was this sense of Jewishness in the black community."
     "There are a wide variety of different kinds of black Jews," said James Landing, an associate professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has been studying black Jews for years. "There are those who refer to themselves as Orthodox Jews, incorporating a lot of Judaistic trappings; symbols, skullcaps. They may speak Hebrew."
     He said others were Old Testament Christians or Baptists "under a veneer of Judaism."
     Landing said black Jews in Chicago did not display "a legitimate interest" in Jewish teachings in their contact with the mainstream Jewish establishment.
     "They wanted financial help," he said. "They wanted buildings. They wanted to be donated old synagogues. But they were not interested in participating in white Jewish life."
     Simon, who has been in contact with the black Jewish community for 20 years, disagrees: "It's not a scam. The black Jews I know are very serious and very concerned with their religious faith, which they describe as Judaism. The organized Jewish community has tried to offer assistance in religious education - supplies, books, texts - which have been received lukewarmishly. They don't want the incursion of the white establishment. They don't want to be patronized; they're proud of what the y're doing."
     Funnye finds it ironic that mainstream white Judaism, which itself is divided into four distinct varieties—reform, conservative, Orthodox and Hasidic—should deny black attempts to form their own interpretations.
     "There are four strands in the white Jewish community; each one of those had a right to define Judaism as they understand it," he said. "Yet, it seems they want to deny our right to define an understanding of Judaism. We have people who are learned, yet black Jews tend to be more an object of curiosity than accepted as sincere."
     Nolan said: "We feel that there is enough historical basis that we have a right to exist as Jews. We don't have to have the approval of someone else.
     "We want to develop and maintain close ties with all Judaism. Jews are the color of the rainbow. It's not a black-and-white issue.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 31, 1991

Happy birthday to ... well, not me

Peru—Machu Picchu, Morning Light (left); Road—Mesa with Mist (center top);  Spring (center bottom) and
The White Place in the Sun (right) by Georgia O'Keeffe (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Hurrying toward the Ivan Albright show at the Art Institute of Chicago a few weeks ago, I passed a quartet of paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and had to pause and smile. 
    I first saw those paintings, not in a museum, but in an apartment, above a pair of white sofas in Gabriella Rosenbaum's Michigan Avenue high rise. 
    Rosenbaum had promised to donate them to the Art Institute, and I was sent to find out who she was and why she was giving the paintings. The photographer Robert A. Davis went with me, and we had one of those moments that lives forever in mind. 
    We were setting up her portrait, and there was the challenge that she was in a wheelchair, while the paintings were high on the wall. So rather than raise her up, Bob simply brought a painting down, abruptly seizing it with both hands, lifting it off its hook, and setting it down on the floor next to her. The room sort of froze at that moment.
    "The sound you hear," I said, "is every lawyer at the Sun-Times going like this." And I cocked my head to the side, as if listening for a sound far away. 
     She died five years after this column ran, in 2000. Her name is very small on plaques by the paintings—plus another, enormous canvas of clouds in a stairway, she had already given—and I thought I'd share a bit of her story today, since it ends with her birthday party, and my birthday is today. There is no better way to celebrate your own birth than to focus on somebody else. 

     The Nazis didn't get her. The temptations and traps of wealth failed to snare her. Age, which claimed so many of her friends, has been kind to her.
     And now, at 90, Gabriella Rosenbaum seems poised to cheat Time itself, creating a legacy which still will be benefitting her beloved Chicago long after she has gone to her well-earned rest.
     A woman who shuns the public eye, she nevertheless has affected some of its most revered institutions. The giant Georgia O'Keeffe masterpiece "Sky Above Clouds IV" at The Art Institute of Chicago was donated by Rosenbaum, as was the ARTiFACT wing of the Spertus Museum. Programs at Hull House and elsewhere are funded by her two foundations, which have pumped $ 10 million over the past decade into local philanthropy. She paid for the splendid garden in the park just north of the Drake Hotel.
     A visitor to Rosenbaum's Gold Coast home may at first be dazzled by the artwork on the walls -- who could not be impressed by five fantastic O'Keeffes in her living room? Or a lovely Klee? Or an Egon Schiller? Or a Calder?
     But sit down and talk to her, and listen to her relate her extraordinary life in her hushed, soft accent, and if the vibrant colors of the O'Keeffes do not precisely dim, they certainly are challenged by another, altogether different radiance.
     Gabriella Kramer was born in 1905 in the town of Nitra, in what was then Hungary, in a home that was brimming with artistic endeavor.
     "We were three sisters," she begins. "My oldest sister graduated from the Budapest Music Academy. She was a very accomplished pianist -- and when there was any artist performing in Nitra, she was the accompanist, and they would visit our house."
     Even then, her family was good at business. They were manufacturing asbestos roofing at a time when most houses were roofed in thatch. They made the first artificial ice machine in the region.
     At 16, she went to study art in Vienna: "the town of song and wine."
     "I had no head for studies," she says, "but I had an artistic leaning."
     From art she became involved in eurythmics, a discipline combining movement and music. She danced. She choreographed dance.
     "That was a revelation," Rosenbaum says. "Because for the first time I, a very introverted person, could express myself without being criticized."
     Her new confidence helped her meet her husband, Paul Rosenbaum, on a streetcar in 1933. They began to form their life together at the very moment the greater world of European Jewry was about to come apart.
     The deteriorating situation began to affect their lives. Gabriella Rosenbaum, now teaching movement and gymnastics at a school she owned, lost the chance of working at the eurythmics headquarters in Munich because she was Jewish. Her husband traveled to America to join his brother Max, who had a successful business operating penny-candy-scale concessions in movie theaters. She credits their partnership as helping them see what was in store for Europe.
     "It was my husband and me. That was our marriage -- it was a partnership," she says. "I was a prodigious reader and I knew what was happening. I knew what Hitler meant. So many Jews hoped that they could just somehow get along."
     Her escape to join her husband in America was dramatic, almost cinematic. When the Germans partitioned Czechoslovakia, the visas were at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, and she was across the border in Nitra. Gabriella tried to cross with her two daughters, dressed as peasants, but she couldn't convince the guards that she was on her way to sell a goat and was turned away.
     They ended up on a sealed train, traveling through Germany, two days before the war broke out. They crossed the border into France on Aug. 29, 1939, the day before the Germany-France border was closed to Jews. The trip is still very much with Gabriella Rosenbaum.
     "The children felt the tension as we went by train through Germany," she says. "Everybody was silent. You know how people talk on trains? Everybody was just plain silent. The children sat and were good."
     After waiting in France several weeks, they slipped across the Atlantic in the cargo hold of a banana boat. The crossing took 10 days.
     The family moved to Chicago's South Side in 1941. Her husband manufactured soda vending machines and developed the first fresh-brewed coffee machine.
     She settled into a life of raising her daughters. Her artistic skills were put to use designing posters for the PTA. But in 1964, she was in California when she read an article about an artist who intrigued her -- Georgia O'Keeffe.
     "I was looking for something for Paul's 70th birthday," she said. "At the time, Impressionists were in big vogue, and they were very expensive. When I saw her paintings, I said, 'Who is she? That is sensational. I don't have to pay ridiculous prices for Impressionists when we have a painter like her right here.' "
     She journeyed to O'Keeffe's studio in New Mexico. She met the artist in her garden, and the two sat and listened to Beethoven together, then had lunch.
     "We clicked," says Rosenbaum. "I understood her and she understood me."
     Rosenbaum bought three pictures and, later, when she realized that nothing else could quite share wall space with them, two more.
     All will end up, eventually, in the Art Institute, where Rosenbaum is credited with, quite quietly, transforming its collection into one of the preeminent holdings of O'Keeffe in the world.
     "She is a woman who never emphasizes her own extraordinary breadth of taste," said James Wood, director of the Art Institute. "She was someone who understood the importance of O'Keeffe as an artist, as well as the necessity to keep these works in Chicago. She exemplifies the idea of civic support for the arts. She not only believes in art, but feels strongly about making a contribution back to the city."
     At her recent 90th birthday party, in a private room at the swank downtown restaurant Spiaggia, about 100 people gathered to wish Gabriella Rosenbaum well. Ald. Ed Burke read a proclamation from the City Council. Her devoted daughters, Edith and Madge, made a few remarks. Down below, the lights of the garden she donated, in her name and the name of her husband, who passed away in 1982, twinkled brightly in the crisp winter air.
       —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 16, 1995

‘Everything went wrong’ — the Great Chicago Fire at 150

     I volunteered for this one. Working on a book about Chicago history, of course I noticed the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was looming, and poked my bosses, months ago. Not something a newspaper wants to forget. My approach was dictated by a single fascinating—to me anyway—fact, the one that begins the story. From there, the structure of passing the narrative from witness to witness presented itself. I knew that my piece would appear after the Tribune had been hammering on the fire for weeks, and hoped to provide something fresh and different. 

     The summer of 1871 was terrible for Mary Todd Lincoln. Her adored younger son, Tad, 18, died in July, a month when no rain fell in Chicago, the city where the slain president’s immediate family moved after leaving the White House in 1865. Mrs. Lincoln, a woman heavily veiled in black who “suffered periods of mild insanity,” lived with her only surviving son, Robert, a lawyer, on South Wabash Avenue. By autumn, she sank even deeper into anguish.
     “As grievous as other bereavements have been, not one great sorrow ever approached the agony of this,” she wrote to a friend on Oct. 4.
     And then the city burned down around her.
     One hundred and fifty years after the Great Chicago Fire, much about the epochal event that recast our city and its people is unfamiliar to current residents. Not one person in a hundred knows Abraham Lincoln’s widow lived here and endured the calamity, while the one thing many believe they do know about the fire, that it was started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern, is a baseless ethnic slur, a scrap of mocking calumny preserved in amber like an insect’s leg, surviving all efforts to dislodge it. Even though universally agreed to be untrue, or at least unsupported by any evidence, the lie endures.
     The most common causes of fires, the Chicago Fire Department had reported the previous March, were not cows or lanterns, but defective chimneys, carelessness with flame, and arson. There had been an average of four fires a day in Chicago the first week of October, started by tossed cigars, mischievous boys and oily rags bursting into flame.
     This was a city heated by coal, lit by gaslight, strewn with hay. The sidewalks and even some fire hydrants were wooden. Blistered by drought, “the dust was almost intolerable, the ground became parched,” wrote Chicago Theological Seminary student William Gallagher. “A furious wind from the southwest had been blowing steadily all day Sunday.”
     Whatever the cause, the fire certainly started in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary and their five children at what was then 137 DeKoven Street, on the city’s near Southwest Side. The hardworking O’Learys already had gone to bed. And they didn’t own a cow; they owned five, plus a horse and a calf. A drayman named Daniel Sullivan, out enjoying the evening, saw fire through the cracks between the boards of the O’Leary barn.
     “Fire! Fire! Fire!” he shouted.
     Sullivan went in the barn and untied the cows, thinking they would save themselves. They didn’t. He dragged the calf outside, badly singed.
     Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, a 20-year-old reporter on the Chicago Evening Post, arrived almost immediately, about 9:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 8, 1871, to find himself in a part of town he had never visited before.

     “I was at the scene in a few minutes,” he later recalled. “The land was thickly studded with one-story frame dwellings, cow stables, pigsties, corncribs, sheds innumerable; every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood — not a brick or a stone in the whole area. The fire was under full headway in this combustible mass before the engines arrived, and what could be done?”
     The fire engines — steam pumpers, drawn by teams of brawny horses — were delayed because the alarm was slow being turned in. A pharmacist refused the alarm box key to a resident who’d seen the fire. Mathias Shafer, the night watchman in the Cook County Courthouse tower, saw the orange glow but thought it was light from the gas works. When he did send an alarm, he sent the firemen to an address a mile and a half from the fire.
     Later asked to describe what went wrong, one fireman would reply: “Everything went wrong.”

To continue reading, click here.

"A little disappointing"

     Today's initial post is just a re-jiggering of yesterday's—kind of a rip-off, really, for regular readers—so I thought I would offer something fresh. Since today is the 75th anniversary of the opening of Mount Rushmore, it seems appropriate to share this chapter from "The Quest for Pie," the unpublished memoir of my trip with the boys out west in 2014.

     Gutzon Borglum is not famous. Though he should be, if only for embodying the truth that you can do something great, something truly great, that you can create a masterwork through tremendous personal effort, a masterwork that is known around the globe, leaving behind a shrine to yourself and your genius in the bargain and still be completely, utterly obscure.
     And if you are the one person in a thousand who knows who Gutzon Borglum is, well, you should feel good about yourself, because you are extraordinary too, in your own way.
     Borglum sculpted Mount Rushmore. He worked on it for more than 14 years, aided by some 400 workers. The job was finished after his death in 1941 by his son Lincoln.

     Maybe because we first stopped by the small museum to Borglum in town, on our way in, before visiting Mount Rushmore itself, and viewed up close Borglum’s competent but soulless bronze of Lincoln, sitting on a bench by the curb, as if waiting for a bus, in addition to Borglum’s other artless, static metal creations. But by the time we got done passing all the tributes to Borglum, not just the museum in town and the studio shrine at the Mount Rushmore site, plus various busts and plaques peppered all around, I began to suspect that the whole endeavor was a deliberate ploy on Borglum’s part, an artist’s trick to drape honor upon himself, using America’s presidential greats as a pretext. It seemed almost post-modern.
      Not that Mt. Rushmore wasn’t impressive — it is. Big and impressive and patriotic. Sometimes a hugely famous artwork is a let-down when you finally see the genuine article. Michelangelo’s David, for instance. By the time I got myself to Florence, on that vexing trip to Italy with my father, and we laid eyes upon David, it struck me as a well-wrought garden sculpture. I had seen it too many times already.     
     Not Mount Rushmore, whose scale allows it to survive the hype. It really is enormous, and enormous is one quality that is hard to sap away with trinkets. I was particularly intrigued, as we hiked the “Presidential Trail” around the mountain, to catch the four faces from different angles, peeking through the trees. For some reason, we always get Mount Rushmore reproduced from a single, head-on perspective, as if it’s the only view possible, and it felt marvelous, almost subversive, to see Washington in profile. It was surreal, like glancing at your change and noticing a penny with Lincoln gazing directly at you.   

      Yes, Mt. Rushmore memorializes four men who need no memorializing. Nobody says, "Oh, right, George Washington, I forgot about him. High time somebody did something in his honor.” And Jefferson, well, he doesn’t really resemble Jefferson here — his nose is wrong. (That is, he doesn’t look like Jefferson as commonly depicted in portraits and statues — it isn’t as if anybody has a photo).
     But Mount Rushmore is patriotic, and there’s a joy in patriotism, a sentiment you ruin if you think about it too intensely — here it probably helped to skip Wounded Knee. I felt very God-Bless-America-y, so long as I diligently ignored the various aesthetic disappointments. Mount Rushmore is also a reminder of how generally polite the world can be — had France at some point decided to erect the massive heads of, oh, Louis XIV, Charles De Gaulle, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne, carved into a peak in the Pyrenees, we’d never stop laughing at them. The world is very kind to Americans when it comes to Mount Rushmore, or maybe they just mock us out of earshot in languages we don’t bother to learn.
     The boys and I had lunch — another let down, since Ross, an avid film buff and Alfred Hitchcock fan, discovered, by reading the signs, that Hitchcock didn’t actually film “North by Northwest” here, except for some outside establishing shots. The scene where Eva Marie Saint guns down Cary Grant was not filmed in the room where we were having our $27 worth of tepid foil-wrapped cafeteria cheeseburgers, but in a studio in London.
     Having just seen the Badlands and the Corn Palace in Mitchell, I couldn't help but place Mt. Rushmore in league with the latter. The Corn Palace is a brick building, not made of corn, but decorated anew each year with corncob designs, honoring the local crop and, not incidentally, drawing the dupes off the highway to buy popcorn and postcards, which also was Mt. Rushmore's original purpose — that’s why the local boosters contacted Borglum, to create a magnet to draw visitors to the Black Hills of South Dakota. As is its purpose to this day, once you blow away the mist of unfocused patriotic zeal that the park service sprays over the place. Give them credit: it works.   

     We tramped around, probably longer than we should have, and it struck me that on our way here we had passed a thousand more dramatic mountaintops, carved by the wind and the rain, and we make a big deal out of this one and flatter our own abilities because of the crude likenesses of ourselves we managed to blast upon it. Omnia vanitas.
     My boys were even cooler than I to Mt. Rushmore.
     “A little disappointing,” Ross concluded. “Nature is more wonderful than anything we can build.”
     “The Badlands were better,” Kent agreed. “Man-made creations don't compare to nature.”
     I was surprised, pleased, proud and a little unsettled to hear the line from Bernard Pomerance's “The Elephant Man” that I had delivered in the Badlands echoed back to me, in slightly altered form, a day later. Here I thought I was a Polonius-like blabbermouth whose constant stream of platitudes are completely ignored by his sons. But kids are listening even when they don’t seem to be listening. Keep in mind that whatever you tell your children they'll eventually tell you.