Chicago Shapes #4: The triangle

    Since last October, when I examined the parabola, the circle and the square through the lens of Chicago, readers have been besieging me with requests to continue the series, the obvious next candidate being the triangle. So I....
     Oh, that's a lie. Nobody cared whether the series continued or not. Now you can see how very disappointing life can be, at times, for a guy who could even imagine they might. Zeroing in on shapes is the kind of esoteric investigation that I seem to do for my own amusement, at best tolerated by you, my very indulgent readers. I've been meaning to push forward for months and now, theoretically on vacation, seemed the perfect moment to pull my triangle notes together. Though I hit a hitch right out the gate, as you will see if you make it to the end of this.


     Let's start with the Triangle Package Machinery Company.
    —"Why a Triangle?"
     "You'd have to talk to our marketing department. Kim Magon. But she's not in today, so you'll have to call back on Monday."
      —"Can I have her telephone number?"
     "I can't give that out. Call the main number."
     —"Okay."

    So let's not start with the Triangle Package Machinery Company. Though we'll get back to them. Let's start with something else.    
     Let's start with Chicago architect Harry Weese.
    "Harry Weese seems to have been obsessed with triangles," Jay Pridmore notes in "A View from the River." Indeed, there are two buildings in downtown Chicago with pure triangular bases—the Metropolitan Correctional Center, at 71 W. Van Buren, and the Swissotel, 323 East Wacker Drive—and Weese designed both. 
    The MCC's floor plan is an isosceles right triangle, meaning it has two equal sides, one 90 degree angle and two 45 degree angles.
(Triangles, for those slow on the uptake, have three sides and three angles, from whence they get their name: "tri-angle," a word some 600 years old).
      Such a triangle is seen in the floor plan for the MCC at right, which is a cross section of the building above.  A quick glance will remind you of the drawbacks of triangular buildings: instead of big square corner suites you get these narrow points. The ratio of linear wall to floor square footage of such a building is .... nnggg, doing the math .... 34/50. On a square building it is 20/50. So you need 70 percent more wall to enclose the same about of floor. Quite extravagant, really.
   The Swissotel is an equilateral triangle, meaning it has three sides equal length and three angles of 60 degrees.  A cross section of its floor space looks like this. 
     At first I thought Weese was being pigeonholed based on two buildings out of the hundreds his firm designed. But when you look at what they are, Pridmore's use of the word "obsession" seems apt. 
      Take a gander inside Weese's First Baptist Church of Columbus, Indiana. Notice anything? He also designed the distinctive, if not in my mind pretty, Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist, on Wacker Drive, which is not triangular, but very round, though even that has a hidden irony: it sits on an unwieldy, triangular site which Weese masks with its circular auditorium. 

First Baptist Church, Columbus, Indiana

   His 200 S. Wacker Drive is a conventional square building, but Weese made it two conjoined triangular buildings, one seven stories taller than the other.
    And then there are his River Cottages which you may have seen and wondered about, just north of Wolf Point on the River. Ugly buildings, without question, that look both dated and out-of-place: I'd expect to find this kind of thing on the Sava River in Zagreb. 
    Why a triangle? Some see them as pushing back against the grid brutalism of the modernists.
     "If the Weese vs. Mies opposition is to be believed, this would seem Weese’s clearest rebuttal: triangular instead of square," Ian Baldwin wrote in "Places" journal   
     Not to suggest that Harry Weese is the only thing triangular about Chicago.  There is the "Viagra Triangle," referring to the bars on Chicago Avenue and State Street, with Rush serving as the hypotenuse.  The "Polonia Triangle" formed by Ashland and Division, with Milwaukee Avenue as the hypotenuse. This is the Triangle that shows up in Nelson Algren stories, such as this, from Never Come Morning:

    Udo had been restrained and credit restored, subtly, to the poolrooms and taverns of the Triangle.

    Chicago proved unable to rename a street for Algren (those honorary brown signs don't really count) because residents complained they would need new stationery. So the Triangle seemed an apt spot for a fountain honoring Chicago's bard of the night court. When it was unveiled in 1998, some wondered how the famously-bitter Algren would react. Though if representatives of the Polish Roman Catholic Union could declare no hard feelings and show up (when Algren's books were first published, some in the Polish leadership felt his books painted a dim picture of their community and tried to ban them) I assume Algren would have found it in his aggrieved heart to show up as well, particularly if there were hors d'oeuvres and cocktails after. 
     There's more: the Old Town Triangle,  bounded by North Avenue, Clark Street, and what is charmingly referred to as "the Ghost of Ogden Avenue." There is the "Triangle Offense," used with great effect by head coach Phil Jackson during the Bulls championship runs in the 1990s (the triangle is created by the center, who stands at the low post, the forward at the wing, and the guard at the corner, and if you know what that means, you're a better man than I).

Won't return phone calls.

     We haven't even touched on the symbolic aspects of triangles, when it comes to trinities and love triangles, plus their sturdiness when it comes to supporting loads, as seen in the cross-bracing on buildings like the very non-Weese John Hancock.  I wish there were some folklore aspect triangles suggesting bad faith or laziness, so I could circle back to the beginning, but I can't find any, so we'll have to just grab the lever and pull hard.
    Returning, reluctantly, to Triangle Package Machinery. I must have called them six times over a span of days. Maybe more. Kim Magon-Haller, their supposed marketing representative, never picked up the phone. Never called back, or returned emails. I tried a David Mustiel and he never answered either. Even left a message for the Triangle president, Bryan Muskat—the Full Boy Scout Try, I call it. I just wanted to know, though at some point I suppose it became a quest, a point of honor. No reporter wants to be thwarted by the Triangle Package Machinery Co. Eventually, I thought, "The hell with them" Though they're a fairly large company. I shudder to think what their dissatisfied customers go through. And based on my experience, my guess is that there must be a bunch of dissatisfied customers.   

Triangle fire still burns

     The March for Our Lives was inspirational, as people across the country, mostly young, gathered Saturday to refute the culture of death that our leaders have allowed to take hold of our country.

     While it was certainly historic, it is also a reminder that change is seldom easy, and that common people ALWAYS have had to win basic human conditions under which to live by protest and action. 

     Sunday happens to be the anniversary of one of the most horrendous workplace tragedies in history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City. Many of the safety changes in place today—the sort of standards threatened by the Trump administration—were put in place in the wake of the fire.

     I wrote this piece to commemorate its centennial. Note the third paragraph from the end, and remember that promising to enact change, and actually changing, are two very different things.

     At 3:40 p.m. today, Chicago time, it will be exactly 100 years to the minute since someone tossed a cigarette into a bin of scrap cloth on the 8th floor of the Asch Building on New York's Lower East Side, touching off what for the last century has been known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

      It was a Saturday, so only 600 of the usual 1,000 employees—500 women and girls and 100 men—were working. Their 12-hour shift over, they had put their street clothes on, collected their pay envelopes—$6 a week—and were waiting for the bell. Ten minutes later the place would have been empty.
     The fire raced through the eighth floor, fed by piles of lint, linen hanging on wires from the ceiling and oil stored in the open to keep the machines running. It spread to the ninth and 10th floors, sending panicked workers running to the two fire escapes. One was anchored to the outside of the building, down into the alley. The other was inside.
     The building was 11 years old, considered both "modern"—it was served by four elevators —as well as "fireproof." But the ladders between the levels of the outside escape were missing—those who fled there couldn't get down. And the doors to the inside fire escape were locked, to prevent theft.
     The first fire engine company to respond arrived in minutes, firemen dodging what at first they thought were bolts of cloth being tossed from the burning building.
     They weren't bolts of cloth, but workers leaping to escape the flames. The firemen raced to set up their ladders, but they needn't have hurried—their ladders fell 20 feet short.
     The streets filled with onlookers watching in horror as those trapped above were squeezed between burning and falling to death. Most were teenage girls from immigrant families—Italians, Russians, Germans; most "could barely speak English." The weight of the women on the back fire escape tore it from its moorings and sent it crashing into the alley, killing everyone on it.
     The crowd on the street shouted "don't jump!" but the seamstresses had little choice.
     Five girls watched from one window as the firemen tried to work a ladder to them but couldn't reach. "They leaped together," the New York Times reported the next day, "clinging to each other, with fire streaming back from their hair and dresses."
     A 13-year-old girl hung by her fingertips for three minutes from a 10th-floor ledge before dropping to her death.
     There was heroism. Three of the four elevator operators kept at their posts, making repeated runs to the smoky eighth floor, returning packed with survivors. When one operator finally fled screaming "fire!" into the street, a New York University law student took over and made four more trips before the flames destroyed the shaft.
     It was all over in half an hour—146 workers had died. Examining the charred bodies, the New York City coroner was seen "sobbing like a child." There had been warnings aplenty, which the factory owners ignored.
     "This is just the calamity I have been predicting," said the city's fire chief. "Look around everywhere; nowhere will you find fire escapes. . . . Only last Friday a manufacturer's association met on Wall Street to oppose my plan [for a] sprinkler system, as well as the additional escapes."
     That night at the morgue, another hellish scene unfolded as bereaved relatives gathered to identify loved ones, "the sobbing and shrieking mothers and wives and frantic fathers and husbands of those who had not been accounted for." Many victims, burned beyond recognition, were identified only by the heel of a shoe or the scar on a knee.
     The next day, the police at the morgue turned away many curious New Yorkers: well-dressed businessmen and groups of schoolgirls who came to "see the sights."
     Ironically, the year before, the International Ladies Garment Workers had struck the Triangle, demanding higher wages and better working conditions, the first mass strike by women in the United States. The owners promised to meet their demands, and the strike ended. No changes were made, of course—instead, one by one, those involved in the union were fired, and so were not there that fatal day, but lived to press for the reforms that came in the wake of the disaster.
     The Asch Building was indeed fireproof—largely undamaged by the fire, it stands today, part of New York University.
     Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were charged with manslaughter but acquitted. Their insurance company compensated them handsomely for their loss.

                    —Originally published in the Sun-Times March 25, 2011 

Flashback 1998: Hometown is just a distant memory

    I was supposed to be back in my hometown this weekend for the wedding of my friend's daughter, a girl I've known since birth. I felt bad missing it—originally, I tried to schedule the surgery for AFTER the wedding, but my wife put an end to that, and I saw her point: if I damaged my spine waiting a month to go to a wedding, not to mention the travel, and the dancing, and whatever, I would never forgive myself. Nor be forgiven. 
    As it was, I had this column about my hometown already cued up and ready to go. Last month I was friended on Facebook by the prettiest girl in Berea High School in 1978, the homecoming queen. We messaged a bit, in a convivial fashion, and I reminded her of when I asked her to prom—not seriously, I knew she already had a boyfriend; more as a piece of personal performance art, something a newly-confident 17-year-old would do as a lark, because he could, maybe to show he could face the rejection that any ambitious person is going to face every single day. She was very kind about turning me down.
     I mentioned that I had written a column about our home town, 20 years ago. I've considered reprinting it in the past, but it never seemed to quite pass muster. A little flat, maybe. 
     But the beast must be fed, and I think this rises to the standard for a quiet Saturday in August. Besides, there is an interesting tidbit about how this column was received. The Sun-Times editor-in-chief at the time, a flamboyant, pink-cheeked, white-haired slab of a New Zealand press lord, Nigel Wade, phoned me the evening this ran, perhaps a bit squiffy, and accused me of slipping a parody of the Tribune's treacly sentiment-junkie and fellow Ohioan, Bob Greene, into the newspaper—somebody must have suggested that to him. 
      That kind of call didn't happen often—it might never have happened, before or after— and I remember taking a breath, and evenly explaining that I would NEVER do that. I was indeed born in Ohio, in Berea, and that every word in the column is true. Furthermore, just because Bob Greene has wrapped his thick fingers around Nostalgia and is squeezing with all his might doesn't mean he has murdered the emotion for others, and I'm entitled to feel maudlin about my dying home town. I distinctly recall saying, "If he can do it a thousand times, I can do it once." 

The Army-Navy surplus store in my hometown. Growing up
in Berea, I never noticed anything unusual about the name. 

     BEREA, Ohio—The Fashion Shop is shuttered. The movie theater, too, its green and yellow marquee blank. The bank is now an antiques store. You can step behind the counter, right up to the gleaming stainless steel vault door and admire the pristine gears and massive pins inside. Within the vault itself, lacework is on sale.
     For the last two decades, whenever I returned to my hometown of Berea—every year or so—I marveled at how time had passed it by, this little town of 35,000, just west of Cleveland.      
    And pondered a haunting question. 

    How could a business such as the Fashion Shop survive, with its window filled with the same ancient, chipped mannequins modeling what always seemed to be the same pale blue or green checked house dresses? How could the movie house, where "The Sting" played for a solid year in 1973, hope to keep going, with huge multiplexes opening in towns all around?
     The answer is they couldn't.
     I missed the foreshadowing. All the new discount stores on the road between the highway and downtown. They should have been a tip-off. Who'd settle for the Fashion Shop when there is a big outlet mall? Who would go to Milton's Shoes—also gone—when there is a giant discount shoe store?
     Nobody, that's who.
     I tried to tell myself that this is good. That the only constant is change; the sole reason I care is that this is my hometown. I reminded myself what a grim place Milton's Shoes had been, with its scary middle-age clerks, scurrying under the hawk eye of Mr. Milton to retrieve boxes of Buster Browns and Red Ball Jets from the mysterious back room. The stock of shoes, so limited, that in order to fit my EEE feet my mother eventually had to give up and drive all the way into Cleveland, to the palatial Scientific Shoes (yes, that was the name; do you think I could make that up?)
     Hard not to look at the town and feel a little sad. Not only is the place losing its charm, but it's doing so because of bad choices.
     In the 1970s, Berea demolished a big hunk of the downtown to build an open-air mall of charming brick storefronts. It seemed a dynamic step, but it turned out to be a blunder. The downtown stores were just hanging on in their turn-of-the-century buildings. Nobody could afford the high rents in the new mall; the entire thing went under. Every store. Now the mall's an old-age home.
     Don't get me wrong; God bless the elderly. But it does something to a town to put a nursing home at its center. Two, now that I think of it. The old hospital is a nursing home, also.
     The downtown in Berea faces a green triangle—The Triangle, they call it, home to a Civil War memorial, the same stone soldier who stands watch over many small towns. During my visit I saw a panoramic photo of the Triangle from 1928. Then, it was a broad expanse of green trees, with a gazebo and a lot of park benches.
     Now, the Triangle is much smaller, whittled away by street widening and parking space, a last attempt to lure people to the shops, shops that aren't there anymore.
     No more benches. No people downtown to sit in them anyway. Who has the time?
     I tried to tell myself that this is only what is happening in small towns all across America. In comes Wal-Mart, out goes the general store. Up in Evanston, Chandler's, the stationery store, and Hoos Drug are both closed now. A decade ago you couldn't go to Northwestern and not have a funny story about trying to get some Hoos family member to cash your personal check. And seeing Chandler's close was like having the post office go out of business.
     This is the way of the world, I told myself. Someday kids will wax nostalgic about DigiLand and SaveMax, when they are being replaced by whatever comes next. Onward and upward. Excelsior!
     I told myself this. But I didn't believe it.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 30, 1998

"Remember the Maine!"

 

     Many communities have a square, a little park at the center of their downtown. My hometown, Berea, Ohio has a triangle, aptly called "The Triangle," and I was strolling around it with the friends we were visiting in May, on our way out to Virginia for our younger son's graduation.     
    "Wait a minute," I said, breaking away from our group. "I want to go look at that plaque made out of a piece of the Maine."
     I hadn't seen it in a decade or two, but I knew it was there, somewhere. It took a bit of searching. For an uneasy moment I thought it had been carted away. Not every tribute that is taken down is done so because it's become offensive; some just are irrelevant. 

     But there it was, an actual memento, cast from a piece of the ship that blew up in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898. That fact must have impressed me as a child and stuck in mind. "Cast from metal recovered from the USS Maine," it says on the plaque, the way after 9/11 pieces of the Twin Towers were worked into memorials. 

     It was a similar attack, maybe, with a considerable loss of life. The USS Maine sank with a loss of most of its crew. Hit by a mine, it was believed at the time, and the sinking was cast as provocation and atrocity and blamed on the Spanish, who were trying to put down a Cuban independence movement. "Remember the Maine!" became a rallying cry, and the U.S. entered into one of its more lopsided imperialist wars.

     I pass it along as a reminder that monuments do, in fact, influence us. I know what the Maine was, not because of any history class, but because of this green oxidized slab of bronze that I passed regularly for the first 18 years of my life. The memorial doesn't mean I particularly venerate the Maine—some historians suspect it was blown up, not by a Spanish mine, but through some ineptness in the management of the ship's engines and coal supplies. I could see that. My concern was nostalgic, not historic. Some U.S. history books never even mention the Maine, and probably just as well. You can't remember everything.

     Though there is a value to the story. The moral of the Maine sinking is to remember the dubious excuses we use for going to war—like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. They seem so important at the time. But they're really not. We say we remember them, and we do, for a time. Then we forget and move on.

Ohio back in the fight

Berea Triangle, postcard circa 1960.

     There's a line in the Pete Townshend song "White City Fighting" that crosses my mind every time I find myself back in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. Standing in its little downtown triangle featuring one monument to the Bereans who fell in the Civil War and another to the USS Maine, blown up in Havana harbor in 1898, helping spark the Spanish-American War, made of steel recovered from the doomed battleship.
     "I couldn't wait to get out, but I love to go home."
     That's true. To pass the familiar stores — and the increasing mix of unfamiliar ones. To mark the spots where something once stood — here was the Berea movie theater, with its green and yellow marque. Here was Southwest General Hospital, now a nursing home. This was Wallace Lake, now a silted in, half muddy field, half swamp.
     Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" came out when I was a senior at Berea High School, and as much as I loved the MetroParks, running a few blocks from my house, and the bone deep block by block, almost foot by foot familiarity that comes from growing up in a place, I just knew that my life, whatever it would be, would not unfold here.  Eighteen years and out.

     "And maybe I'm damned if I never get out, and maybe I'm damned if I do..."
     Not that the departure was without melancholy. I remember, the summer before I left for college, standing in the dry cleaner's — there was only one — and rotating the little metal rack with all the yellow tickets and reading the last names, the Campbells, the Cherrys, the Corenos. I knew them all, and I realized, with a certain indelible sadness, that I would never again be in a place where that would be true. 
     I wasn't attuned to Ohio politics beyond what I gleaned from my mother being a member of the League of Women Voters — the name itself vibrating with 19th century idealism. The mayor of Cleveland was the homunculus Dennis Kucinich — he's still on the political scene, a member of the shabby crew of third-rate failures surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His wife Sandi was a teacher at our high school, and he showed up before the performance of "The Wizard of Oz" and I noticed that students, teenagers, were turning away and busying themselves with makeup and such rather than notice him and shake his hand.

     But I thought of Ohio as a fairly down-to-earth place. We made stuff — in US Steel, the Ford Plant and the Chevy Plant, Youngstown and Lordstown. Glidden, General Electric, and Goodyear in Akron. Ohians farmed, and fed the world. So yes, we had Republicans, naturally, but they were of the Robert Taft Jr. variety — our senator. I still have the letter that my class at Fairwood School received from him after we sent letters expressing our concern about pollution "It is admirable that so many young people are concerned about this problem," the grandson of President William Howard Taft wrote.
    That was back long before the the Republican Party had swapped business for fantasy and become a cult, dancing around the golden calf of Donald Trump, buffing his statue with their long hair. Now a Republican star, Ron DeSantis, can declare war on one of Florida's largest employers, Disney, basically over a few press releases, and nobody bats an eye. Crazy is the new normal.
     Now the junior senator from Ohio is the loathsome piece of shit named J.D. Vance, who parlayed "Hillbilly Elegy," his book celebrating Appalachian poverty, into election to the senate. Cosplaying as a regular working person, the hedge fund investor became the first Ohio senator to take office with zero government experience. The graduate of Yale Law School at first saw Donald Trump clearly enough, expressing valid concerns that "he might be America's Hitler." Then he smelled personal advantage, and got in line for the proto-fuehrer's benediction. "The best president in my lifetime," Vance gushed, while Trump ridiculed him. "J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so much,” Trump sneered, before giving it, lowering his ring to waist level for Vance to smooch. And he did. And does.
     It saddened me that my home state could slide into nationalistic fervor. Ohio seemed so grounded in practicality — home to eight presidents, the aforementioned Taft plus William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren G. Harding. Not exactly an honor roll of excellence. But more commanders in chief than any other state, and not a radical among them. Warren G. Harding, long considered a nadir of corruption and cronyism, was Cincinnatus compared to the 45th president. 
     But maybe the days of Ohio as a bastion of stability and decency are not forever lost. Hope flickered anew Tuesday, with Ohio's referendum on whether the citizens could mute their ability to amend the constitution — a Republican ploy to game the system, and prevent voters from controlling their lives, trying to keep Ohio from following other states in enshrining women's reproductive rights constitutionally.  A referendum would move the vote needed to amend the constitution from 50 to 60 percent. Beyond the reach of the current divide.

      About 57 percent of Ohio voters said, "No, we'd like to keep our ability to decide how we live our lives." Some 43 percent voted to have that power taken away (Good thing they have those notional babies they can pretend to be saving, because otherwise, I'd think they're just hot to meddle in the sexual choices of women they've never met).

       My general relief that the totalitarian charge might be turned away was mixed with nostalgic pride. “You can fool all of the people some of the time," begins a popular 19th century saying variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln or P.T Barnum. "You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.”
     Ohioans, having been fooled for a while — they threw their support behind Trump twice — seem to be moving from the second to the third category. Whether they stay there, and whether the rest of the nation follows them, is an open question. But it is good to see Ohio back in the fight, on the side of the good guys once again.

Handy concept #4: Pattern recognition

     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with a phenomenon which inspires a great deal of American nuttery.

Pattern Recognition 

    A twig snaps. You freeze, staring into the darkness. A form gathers itself into a bear. You run and don't look back.  If it turns out to be a bear-shaped bush that sent you dashing across the savanna, well, you'll probably never know your mistake.  You're gone and, like those with the most acute pattern recognition, you live to reproduce, and pass down your sharp eyesight and honed reflexes. Fear is protective. There's no upside for standing there too long, blinking into the darkness, thinking, "Hmmm, now is that really a bear?"
    Thus human beings are good at finding meaning in patterns, and acting on those meanings, even when the meaning is a spurious one. It worked well for tens of thousands of years.
     Doesn't work so well now.  Modern life doesn't serve up many predators to detect lurking in the shadows. But our complex world still deluges us with information, more so than any rain forest, and people still want to find meaning in their half-seen perceptions and passing glances. 
     Often it's benign. Who hasn't felt a frisson of pleasure, detecting bunnies and ducks in the clouds? Who hasn't gazed at an object and suddenly recognized something hidden, such as the cheerful face in the photo of the red Austin-Healey Sprite above?  There's a harmless pleasure in it. 
     Sometimes the pleasure is not so harmless. The Sept. 11 attacks are among the best documented crimes in modern history, but naturally, a few facts among the multitude don't easily fit, or don't seem to easily fit, and to those of a certain twist of mind, it is natural to apply their finely-honed pattern recognition to that bare framework of inconsistency and then stretch the most elaborate fantasies over it. Suddenly, to their eyes, the official version of what happened is a lie, and this flimsily supported fabrication is the truth. It's as if some viewers convinced themselves that giant bunnies were really lurking in the clouds and started demanding that the Air Force shoot them so we could make rabbit stew.
     Why do people conjure up these conspiracies? Epic events — like 9/11, like the Kennedy assassination—create vast volumes of data, enough to provide grist that some people, inclined to reject the standard narrative by an intrinsic suspicion, can stare into the sea of information and recognize whatever pattern or plot they care to find. They find a validation in it, a false power, a way to elevate themselves among the common herd, who credulously believe that World War II actually happened. Thus every smudge in the sky, every blurred light becomes an alien mother ship, every plausible explanation is discarded for a malign one backed by a few scattered twigs of evidence. That there are actual conspiracies, from time to time, only makes matters worse. Those also back up their belief that they have secret knowledge, and they insist that anyone who questions them is being willfully blind and a dupe.
     There is no question: pattern recognition can be useful, leading us to draw valid insights out of masses of random information, recognizing significant designs and meanings. Sometimes there really is something dangerous in the shadows.   
     More often there isn't, and pattern recognition leads us down the road to over-reaction, self delusion and folly. The key is applying rigorous thought to immediate impressions. Before you bolt, ask: what am I really seeing here? Examine all the facts, not just the ones that line up with the dots you want to connect. Is that really a bear? Or is it a bush? Gather all the facts, don't just cherry-pick the ones  propping up your hunch. Are we seeing instances of a new trend? Or is it the "three examples make a movement" lazy lifestyle reporting you see, even in respectable newspapers?
      The key to pattern recognition is to use it, rather than let it use you. Otherwise, one salient detail pops out and suddenly you're fleeing in misplaced terror across the veld. Some people can be set off by a single observation. They see an inverted triangle, and the epiphany hits them: "Oh my God -- Lou Malnati's ... Illuminati! How clearly do they have to spell it out?!?!" There are a lot of people who think like that; try not to be one of them.

Baha'i celebrates a bicentennial: "People can just walk in."

  

    Chicago is a center of so many things—the blues, candy, pinball—it's easy to lose track of some of the quieter examples of this, such as the Baha'i faith, which isn't as fond of violence and repression as most religions are, and so tends to be overlooked, with the exception of its one magnificent local manifestation, the splendid Baha'i Temple in Wilmette.
     Today, Chicago Baha'is are celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Mirza Husain-ali Nuri, or Bahá’u’lláh as he came to be known, "Glory of God." in Iran in 1817. He was the messenger of the other totem of Baha'i, the "Bab," whose bicentennial is in 1819.
     If you feel like partying, you can go to the South Shore Cultural Center tonight—here are the details—for the rest, I thought it an apt moment to unearth my look at the Baha'i faith and Temple at the building's centennial five years ago.

     Ask most Chicagoans what they know about the Baha'i faith, and they might mention the House of Worship, a magnificent domed edifice of delicately latticed concrete on the lakefront in Wilmette.
     The temple is hard to miss—at 191 feet high, you could easily tuck the Jefferson Memorial inside.
     "It's on people's radar that this landmark, this unusual building is there," said Glen Fullmer, a spokesman for the faith. "But they're largely unaware of what it stands for or where it came from."
     The Baha'is have just completed a 10-year, $20 million restoration of the building, the oldest and, in their view, holiest of seven Baha'i temples scattered around the globe. The work is completed just in time for a celebration at the end of April to mark the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the building's cornerstone.
     "It does not act as a church with a congregation," said Fullmer. "All the Baha'is don't go there for their weekly worship. That building is considered a continental house of worship, a symbolic building. Most worship is happening in people's homes and little community centers."
     That might come as a surprise. Press Chicagoans for details of Baha'iism, and you'll most likely draw a blank, which is too bad, because in many ways the faith is unique among global religions.
     In a world of controversial priests and fiery imams, there is no Baha'i clergy whatsoever. Anybody can conduct a service. Administration of the religion is handled by elected boards without spiritual authority. They have no rituals. Services tend to be readings from the holy books of other faiths—the Bible, the Torah, the Quran—as well as singing.
     They don't proselytize vigorously—Baha'i missionaries will never come to your house and try to convert you. "It's very much a do-it-yourself religion," said Fullmer.
     Nor will they ask for money—they only accept funds from other Baha'is.
     The religion's central belief is that the earth is one country and humanity its citizens, that all religions reflect the will of a single God and all are equally valid. They stress education, equality and an elimination of prejudice.
     The faith started in Persia—in what is now Iran—in 1844.
     Its central figure was a man named Mirza Husain-ali Nuri, who took the name Baha'u'llah, whose teaching and writings form the foundation of the faith.
     The Baha'i consider him on par with Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Buddha, who all share equal status as divine prophets.
     About 5 million people follow the faith worldwide, with about 170,000 in the United States, with 2,000 of those around Chicago, where in 1894 an insurance salesman named Thornton Chase became the first Westerner to adopt the religion.
     Within five years, there were several hundred Baha'is in and around Chicago. They quickly decided to build a temple to house the growing religion. Representatives from Chicago went to what was then Palestine to meet with Abdu'l-Baha, the son of Baha'u'llah, who had taken over as leader following his father's death in 1892. He encouraged them to build a temple, and the dedication was something of a carrot to get him to come to Chicago, which he did.
      Several years were spent scouting a location. Jackson Park was considered, but Wilmette was settled on for its rural setting and inexpensive lakefront land.
     Despite his presence, the May 1, 1912, dedication was something of a bust, as far as cornerstone ceremonies go. First, the guest of honor was two hours late. Second, the ceremonial trowel would not pierce the thick springtime grass and somebody had to run and borrow a shovel from a nearby road crew.
      And third, there wasn't actually a cornerstone, but only a chunk of limestone scrap that a woman had begged from construction workers and taken to the site on a horse-drawn streetcar.
     Money still had to be raised. Construction did not begin until 1920, and the temple was not completed until 1953.

   Still, the crude cornerstone remains as a symbol of the do-it-yourself quality of the faith, to this day surrounded by a triangle of velvet ropes in the ground floor visitor's center at the temple.
     Above, the temple seats 1,200, and is accessed by nine doors—the number nine is highly significant in Baha'i, representing unity.
     Work on the nine gardens around the temple is just now being completed, the final stage of the rehabilitation project.
     "We repaired the entire temple itself, cleaned it and got it ready for its next 100 years," said Scott Conrad, a California architect who has been project manager on the refurbishing.
     About 25 percent of the surface area of the building was rebuilt, including the steps, which were completely replaced.
     To clean the intricate concrete work, skilled mountaineers were hired from Alaska and Colorado to rappel down the building, cleaning the facade with brushes.
     "It is considered the world's most exquisite concrete building," said Conrad, standing among a mass of purple flowers being planted in advance of the centennial. He said the gardens were never before quite up to what the founder's son had hoped for when the temple was first planned.
     "These gardens are completely new," he said. "In the Baha'i community, the gardens are part of the temple, and these gardens are a fulfillment of Abdu'l-Baha's wish."
     Now, what they would like is for Chicagoans to visit.
     "There is a misconception, 'Oh, this must be secret,' " said Fullmer. "The temple is open every day. People can just walk in, sit and enjoy the spirit and serenity of it, regardless of their faith. It's a sacred place they can go. That's really the hope of the Baha'is, the main purpose of it."

           —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 22, 2012

Sometimes you just play pool

    I have problems that nobody else has.
    Well, maybe not nobody. I haven't met everybody. 
    Let's say problems that I assume are unique to writers doing the kind of writing I do.
    For instance, I can have a hard time figuring out whether I'm working or not. Whether something should be written about or just enjoyed. Private or public? My wife, at odd moments, will say, "I don't want to see that in the paper." Invariably at something I would never dream of putting in the paper.
   And sometimes I have that thought myself.
    Last week, when I went to meet a reader at Chris's Billiards, it was because he had read a reference of mine to "second tier treasures," to spots like the old Division Street Russian Baths, that feel as if they could slip away at any moment. Chris's was another one, he said. Would you like to see it? Sure, I said. I'll let you in on a secret: I tend to go where I'm invited, because I don't get that many invitations to go places. Not to places I want to go, anyway.
     Plus I'd be meeting a person. I like meeting people, in the main, unless I don't.
     To be honest, the idea that it might be a column, or a blog post, or something, did not occur to me until he started to explain how to play 9-ball. I had never played 9-ball before, always 8-ball. However he explained the rules of 9-ball—I can't tell you what that was, because I didn't write it down or tape it—made me wish I had a record of it. A week later, I remember only the wish, and the narrow triangle of nine balls set within the rack.
     We had just met. I'm not so far gone I'd walk into a billiard hall with a tape recorder in my hand. I could have whipped out my notebook and written down some of what he said, after the fact. But I was trying to absorb the rules. My notebook stayed in my pocket.
    We shot pool, we talked about our kids and our jobs, about the city and growing up and life in general. I can't reconstitute that conversation either.
     I wrote one sentence down: "This is really the last one left." Big pool halls in Chicago, I assume. I did take a few photographs.
    When I got home, I realized that Chris's is featured in Amy Bizzarri's "111 Places in Chicago That you Must Not Miss." A book I just wrote about last month, when I went to get a cup of coffee in Englewood. I was kinda glad I didn't know, that I hadn't gone to check another place off the list. 
     Leaving, after 90 minutes of pool, I had been conflicted. On one hand, I had lost an opportunity: This interesting pool hall, featured in "The Color of Money," with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise.  A vast, cavernous space, with pool tables and snooker tables and dark recesses.  
    And on the other, I had deliberately given work the cold shoulder. I was ... I realized with an inner smile ... doing something normal.  I'm allowed to do that. You can't work all the time and shouldn't try. Sometimes you just have to relax, and shoot some pool. Even noble Homer dozed.

Books on the nightstand: "Phineas Finn"

 

Morgan Library

   Saving money isn't everything. There is also supporting local establishments which provide service and community that no web site could offer. So I make it a practice to shun Amazon, whenever possible, and stroll over to the Book Bin, my local book shop, to order the books I'm looking for. 

     I was in the process of paying for Alberto Manguel's "Curiosity," based entirely on a rapturous review in the Economist, when one of the Book Bin's friendly, helpful clerks, Allison, pointed out that I have been neglecting my "Books on the nightstand," section of the blog—a number of months have gone by. I apologized and told her I would get right to it. 

     That was weeks ago. And numerous times I meant to set down the novel reviewed below and report on it here. But I didn't want to pull myself away from reading it. As soon as I finished though, just last night, and while it is still fresh in mind, I want to use it to revivify the "Books on the nightstand" section o the blog, where I'll post this, and next week I'll tuck a review of Amanda Palmer's "The Art of Asking."

Phineas Finn,  by Anthony Trollope (Everyman, 1997)

    I don't read many novels, because they generally strike me as untrue. Whatever fantasy world is created is pallid compared with reality, the characters jerky with quirks and irrationalities, unbelievable puppets, compared to actual people, moving through un uninteresting tale.

    But occasionally a novel grabs me. 

    This was an improbable choice. Even Adam Gopnik's tribute to Anthony Trollope on his 200th birthday in the New Yorker in early May might not have prompted me to order it. I have an aversion to 19th century British novelists. I think I've read two Dickens novels, Great Expectations, in high school, and A Christmas Carol, several times, and as marvelous as those were, I was happy to leave it at that. 

    But Gopnik's 2008 essay on Samuel Johnson had set me off on a deeply satisfying journey into Johnson's vastly fascinating world, not only reading the biography he was reviewing—Samuel Johnson by Peter Martin—but tackling Boswell's epic Life of Johnson, a pure joy.

    So I figured, he didn't steer me wrong with the Great Cham of LIterature; perhaps I should trust him here, too. 

     So into Phineas Finn, an 1869 novel about a young Irishman who is put up for a seat in Parliament, his world of ministers and functionaries, plus assorted characters such as Quintus Slade of the People's Banner, one of the greasier journalists  to be found in literature, approaching those in real life. There are alluring, strong women characters: Lady Laura Standish, wed to to the rigid Robert Kennedy, and the buoyant Violet Effingham.

    The romantic ... well, not a triangle, more like a pentagram, when you include Madame Max Goesler and Mary Flood Jones, his sweetheart waiting patiently back at home—did keep my interest, but I was able to march through its 650 pages mainly due to the book's political tone, which rang a most contemporary note. Here is Finn and his friend Laurence Fitzgibbon debating how a vote will fall between the Tories and the Liberals.

    "But the country gets nothing done by a Tory government," says Phineas.

    "As to that, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other," replies his Fitzgibbon. "I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything. Give a government a real strong majority, as the Tories used to have half a century since, and as a matter of course it will do nothing. Why should it? Doing things, as you call it, is only bidding for power—for patronage and pay."

     That could be the Illinois government right now.  The cynicism of the book, 150 years old, is startlingly contemporary, such as when the hypocrisy of British leadership is painted as a good thing, at least compared to the sincerity of Americans. In Britain, rancorous Parliamentary debates end with the participants marching off arm-in-arm.

     "It is not so in the United States," writes Trollope. "There the same political enmity exists, but the political enmity produces private hatred. The leaders of parties there really mean what they say when they abuse each other, and are in earnest when they talk as though they were about to ear each other limb form limb."

Anthony Trollope

      The shabbiness of low level government is deliciously laid out by Trollope, who worked as a postal inspector in Ireland for years—some of Finn's friends express sincere condolences at the calamity of his election. But the higher levels fare little better.

     Here is  again is Fitzgibbon—who blithely reneges on a loan that Finn has signed for in an act of misplaced trust, causing Finn to be plagued by a colorfully dogged creditor—explaining the candidates for Prime Minister. 

     "There will be a choice out of three. There is the Duke, who is the most incompetent man in England; there is Monk, who is the most unfit; and there is Gresham, who is the most unpopular. I can't conceive it possible to find a worse Prime Minister than either of the three,— but the country affords no other."

     "And which would Mildmay name?" asks Phineas.

   "All of them,—one after the other, so as to make the embarrassment the greater."

    "Mildmay" points to one of the flaws in the book, Trollope's tendency toward illustrative names. There is the timid Mildmay, the radical Turnbull, the revered Duke of Omnium. Not quite Piers Plowman's wife, Dame Work-While-I-Am-Able, but uncomfortably close.  

     Still, I found myself eager to get back to the book, the mark of good fiction.  Trollope is a first rate writer, tossing off lines that should be epigrams assuming they weren't already when he used them: "But we all know how the man well spoken of may steal a horse, while he who is of evil repute may not look over a hedge." 
     Or, even better: "After all, money is an accident."

     Phineas Finn plunges readers into a world that is foreign—after Lady Laura flees her husband, the grim Mr. Kennedy threatens to go to law to drag her back—yet all-too-familiar. There's something reassuring about it. If our leaders are going to be dolts, at least we can comfort ourselves with the realization that we didn't invent the practice. The greatest recommendation I can give is that there is a second book, Phineas Redux and I am going to seek that out and dive in, just for the pleasure of hanging out with Phineas, Lady Laura, Madame Max and the rest of their diverting circle. It is summer, after all. 

     

      

     

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.

A liberal burns Old Glory for Flag Day

     I love to fly the flag — it's so beautiful. On all the patriotic holidays: Memorial Day, July 4, Veteran's Day. I even throw in a few extra, that aren't technically patriotic holidays: Labor Day, Martin Luther King's birthday, D-Day.
     But all this flapping in sun-kissed Northbrook takes its toll on a flag. The deep blue of the canton — the proper name for the square displaying 50 stars — faded to sky blue. A few white stripes had rust streaks from cheap flagpoles.
     Standing on the porch June 6, hand over heart, reciting the pledge, I saw light through a gapping seam. Still, with our nation in the hands of quislings, a faded and tattered flag seems appropriate.
 

Chicago flags and specialty orders are sewn by hand at W.G.N.

   But readers have been upbraiding me for my flag's poor condition. I like to actually consider what people say, to weigh the possibility that those who disagree with me might be right — it's my superpower. And with Flag Day approaching, last Friday seemed a perfect time to make the change. So I folded my worn-out flag into a triangle and headed to W.G.N. Flag & Banner at 79th Street and South Chicago Avenue.
     "Let me get three options for you to choose from here," said Carl "Gus" Porter III, setting out three boxes in his company's cluttered front room, patrolled by Nala the cat.
      "You've got the standard nylon for $31.60," Porter said. "The heavy-duty polyester for $38.90. And then this is our deluxe nylon. These are $40. They have the larger stars with the silver woven into them, and you also get a one-year fade guarantee."
     "I do believe that's the no-brainer of all-time," I said, popping for top-of-the-line. "I'll take it."
     W.G.N. Flag has nothing to do with the radio and TV stations of the same acronym. The flag company began in 1916, founded by Porter's great-grandfather, William George Newbould (readers wondering what the W.G.N. initials stand for will be referred to this sentence for further study).

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The cluttered store has been in the same location since 1947; the company itself began down the block in 1916.