The only thing better than opera: free opera

     Popular pleasures require no explanation. Nobody says, "You watched a FOOTBALL GAME on Sunday — whatever for?" Opera, alas, is not one of those assumed pleasures. I've had more readers say, "What IS it about opera?" or act like I'm constantly writing about opera, which I'm not — just a couple columns a year, two or three tops, including this one, announcing our Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric sweepstakes, which began five years ago to test the hunch that, once people actually go see and hear an opera, the mystery and fear falls away and they understand what the fuss is about. Which has proven to be the case. I was a little worried that the contest wouldn't get pulled together this year—it's like holding a high tea in a sailing ship rounding Cape Horn in raging seas—but the resourceful folks at the Sun-Times not only managed to get it together, but did so early this time. Thanks to everyone involved, both at the paper and at the Lyric.

Giuseppe Verdi

     A courtesan is not a prostitute. Let’s be clear about that from the start. Violetta, the heroine of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” which 100 lucky readers will attend with me for free later this month in the 6th annual Sun-Times Goes to the Lyric Sweepstakes, does not sell her favors for money, though she is sometimes treated that way—cash is thrown at her by her angry beau at one point in the story.

     Which leads to the question of what a courtesan is, exactly. My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “courtesan” as, umm, “A prostitute, esp. one whose clients are wealthy or upper-class.”

     Well yes, but there’s much more to it than that. Prostitutes today are not public figures (insert your own joke about Congress here) and courtesans definitely were. They were widely known as fashion leaders, party throwers, famous wits and beauties who held salons and accompanied famous men: Marie Duplessis, inspiration for the Alexandre Dumas fils novel that the opera is based on, also inspired composer Franz Liszt so much he wanted to move in with her.

     “There really isn’t an equivalent in our world,” said “Traviata” director Arin Arbus, making her debut with this production at the Lyric. “I actually think that’s one of the aspects of the opera that’s most challenging to convey to contemporary audiences.    Certainly it’s very different from our contemporary understanding of prostitution.”
     Not that courtesans were necessarily popular when "Traviata" debuted in Venice on March 6, 1853, one of the most famous fiascos in the history of opera. "Foul, hideous and immoral," one critic squawked.
     Though that wasn't the reason for its initial failure. The audience hated it, in part, for being put on in modern dress (modern then, though now, thanks to the turning wheel of time, it has become colorful elegant Italian fashion, bumped into the 1860s by designer Cait O'Connor, who added some massive wigs to give what she calls a "Victorian going for Baroque" air to the opening party). The soprano playing Violetta in the original was also portly, as sopranos sometimes are, which made her . . . spoiler alert . . . death from consumption a moment of hilarity for the audience at the debut, and not the tragedy Verdi intended it to be.
     That isn't an issue with the Lyric's star, Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka, who makes her Lyric debut with this production but is no stranger to the part, having sung Violetta in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, Florence — around the globe. She has definite opinions on the courtesan question and Violetta.
     "She was not simply a prostitute," said Rebeka. "She was like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. If you paid for her, if you had her at your party, it meant you were very rich. She was a beautiful, clever, cultured woman, but also a girl, irritated by the illness that made her subject to such changes of mood."
     To me, getting bogged down in the characters of an opera or, God forbid, the plot, is to risk missing the central point — the music — and Verdi outdid himself here. Anyone worrying about sitting through three hours of it should rest assured, "La Traviata" is one of those special operas you can listen to 100 times without it getting old: thrilling, vigorous, exuberant, mournful.
     Our time frame is compressed this year — last year we went to "Hansel & Gretel" in January. This year we're attending opening night of "La Traviata" on Nov. 20.
     Sixteen days away. Act quickly. You have from this week until Nov. 11 to go online and enter at suntimes.com/win (you'll find the full rules there) or to mail a postcard or letter (postmarked by Nov. 9, received by Nov. 11) to Sun-Times Goes to Lyric Opera, P.O. Box 3455, Chicago, IL 60654. Include your name, phone number, address and email. Winners will be notified by phone around Nov. 15.
     We give away 50 pairs of tickets, and each year about 1,500 people enter, so your odds — about 1 in 30 — aren't bad. We've had 500 people win so far, and I've never heard a complaint. The only risk you run is that you'll get hooked on opera and want more, which is the whole idea, from the Lyric's point of view.
      This is a brand new production, created here at the Lyric, and then heading on to the Houston Grand Opera and the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. But you'll get to see it first, the color and decay, the parties and loneliness, feminine wiles and male power, and the flash of real love, which of course is swept away in the profane heartbreak of regular life, with a moral you'll be chewing on long after you leave the theater.
     "One has friends only when one is well," sings Violetta.
     Well, yeah, that sounds about right.

A half-inch tall, tree-gobbling Godzilla

Emerald ash borer-damaged tree on Bryn Mawr Avenue in Chicago.

If you love trees -- and I do -- then the arrival of the emerald ash borer is a calamity. Actually, you don't have to love trees to grieve the billions of dollars that will be spent to fight the borer and repair the damage, the streets marred for years. It is extra personal for me because the one tree that has done the best in my yard is a lovely cimmaron ash planted a dozen years ago to replace a tree destroyed in the micro-burst of 2000. It's taller than the house now, and it kills me that a half inch beetle will probably spell doom for it. The tree is slightly set apart at the side of the house, and my hope is that if I keep treating it, the borer will kill all the surrounding ash trees, and then die off with them and somehow spare mine.  Futile, I know.

     That said, despite my personal interest, I'd have never thought to explore the borer situation in Chicago in detail. But my editor asked me to, and I was happy to comply, if unhappy at what I found. The news is not good: 

City worker Arce Vales inoculates an ash tree in Chicago. 

     A beautiful autumn purple ash tree stands on the west side of St. Louis Avenue, a few steps south of Bryn Mawr.
     It is healthy, so far — a little woodpecker damage — but if you want to see the grim fate awaiting this tree and every one of the 85,000 ashes on public streets in Chicago, all you need do is look west, where a few feet away stand two ash trees ravaged by the emerald ash borer, the blight that arrived from China a dozen years ago, landing in Michigan in 2002, and has been eating its way southward since, decimating ash trees in the Midwest — 20 million trees have been killed so far in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa — and causing billions of dollars in damage.
     An estimated 1 million trees in the greater Chicago area will be dead within five years if not treated, and the blight might end up costing $50 billion nationwide by the time it runs its course, when you factor in the expense of treating healthy trees — chemical inoculations will keep the beetle away, but they must be repeated every few years — plus removing diseased trees and replacing them, plus lowered property values on suddenly treeless streets.
     The bark of a blighted tree on Bryn Mawr is pulled off with a gentle tug by John Lough, one of the city of Chicago’s four full-time foresters, to reveal the telltale S-shaped trails the borer nibbles.
     Beside financial cost, the infestation is an ecological disaster.
     “It is,” he said, “widespread throughout the city.”
     Before the frost, the city finished inoculating 37,000 trees against the ash borer. Some municipalities have given up on their ash trees; not Chicago.
     "The benefits we receive from our ash trees are immense," Lough said. "They make a huge contribution to the urban canopy. We'd like to save as many as we can, to preserve the environmental benefits. We're really fortunate this year for Mayor Emanuel's insightfulness and environmental connection to the situation. If he hadn't done anything, these would all be gone."
     The treatment lasts for two years. The 20-year-old autumn purple ash on St. Louis, in front of a sign for Northeastern University's campus, is still hearty, and last month park district worker Arce Vales knelt and drilled eight holes around its base.
      She injected three pressurized puffs into each hole.
     Vales was hired in January, one of 37 inoculators who have been going around the city treating ash trees.
     Another 37,000 ash will be inoculated in the spring, and if you do the math, you'll notice that 10,000 ash trees will not be treated because they are too far gone. They'll have to come down.
     In Illinois, tree experts have been watching the blight march southward.
     "Basically the northern third of the state is infested," said Jeff Squib, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Agriculture.
     He said the beetle was first found in Kane County in 2008, but whether that was because the infestation started there or because that's where the ag department has its DeKalb nursery program to notice it is an open question. The ash borer cannot fly far, and much of its quick spread is thought to be because of human activity, such as transporting firewood. The borer was just detected in Colorado, for instance.
     "It didn't fly to Boulder," said Stephanie Adams, a research specialist in plant health care at the Morton Arboretum. "Humans are a really big problem when it comes to invasive species."
     The city of Chicago has 560,000 trees on public land; 17 percent are ash. But those are just the city's trees; the Chicago region has an estimated 12 million trees, and 8 percent of those are ash - a million trees.
     And if that seems like a big share for one kind of tree, some communities have twice that: in Arlington Heights and Wheaton, a third of the trees are ash.
     Other towns are feeling a budget squeeze; Evanston couldn't keep pace with the speed of the borer invasion and cut down 500 trees without yet replacing them. Hanover Park cut down 1,100 ash and so far has planted only 100 replacements.
     But then varying tree selection is not something communities did well before the emerald ash borer. Despite previous historic blights such as Dutch elm disease or, more recently, the Asian longhorn beetle, which attacked maples, the lesson was not learned. Ash are cheap, fast-growing and pretty; some subdivisions around Chicago are 90 percent ash
     When you project what this half-inch bug is going to do nationwide, the cost of treatment, removal and replacement becomes enormous.
     "I've heard figures of $47 billion nationwide," said Scott Schirmer, manager of the Illinois Department of Agriculture's Emerald Ash Borer Program.
     The cost to each community can be considerable. Five years ago Carol Stream set aside $2.25 million to deal with ash-borer related problems.
     Of course, what the cost is depends on what strategy is taken. Cut your ash down now and get new trees going? Or treat them and allow residents to enjoy them as long as they can?
     Now that the Chicago area is infested, ash trees are considered doomed over the long haul.
     "If an area has an infestation, all ash in that area will eventually succumb to the beetle," Squib said. "Once you start the treatments, you need to continue them. It's not a one-time treatment. You also need to realize eventually the tree will succumb to the beetle. Some homeowners will prefer to prolong the tree's life and therefore their enjoyment of it. Others will prefer immediate removal of the tree and replace it. Eventually, the beetles will move to the treated tree. But who knows? In some respects you're buying time, treating the tree to fend off the beetle. Perhaps an effective treatment will be discovered."
     Some communities are not bothering to inoculate their ashes at all, deciding it is only expensively postponing the inevitable. Some are inoculating, but not to save the trees, just to stagger their removal and not have expanses of dead ashes.
     "There's been a lot of questions whether treatment is worth it," Adams said.
     You can't be in the tree business and not look at the long haul, and arborists are trying to do that when it comes to the emerald ash borer. Some communities are passing ordinances to prevent one type of tree from dominating their streetscapes ever again and perhaps fall victim to some future scourge on par with the borer. They're also trying to change residents' aesthetic view: For centuries, people admired uniform canopies of trees. With the risk of a whole genus of trees being wiped out by invasive predators, that might be a luxury that communities can no longer afford.
     "All the same color, all the same size. You need to look at it from a dynamic viewpoint," Schirmer said. "[This crisis is] really providing an opportunity to make streets more interesting. A lot of residents live in the now, versus arborists, who have to look 20 or 30 years down the line."

Hatch Show Print

    So digital won, right?

    Film is dead, everybody reads books on their Kindles, or soon will, and listens to music compressed onto MP3s. Printing an image means designing it onscreen in about 30 seconds and then hitting a button that says "Print." 

    Yes? 
    No.
    Not quite.

    Allow me to introduce you to Hatch Show Print, a Nashville, Tennessee institution, started in 1879, responsible for iconic music posters for decades, a company which is not going out of business today, as you might expect. Rather is celebrating the grand opening of its sixth, and biggest location, at 224 5th Avenue South, assuming you are reading this Saturday, Nov. 2, brand new quarters of 10,000 square feet, double the size of their old space at 316 Broadway.

     There, you can buy posters from its glory days, but you can also make one of your own—Hatch employs six full-time designer/printers, plus master printer Jim Sherraden, who has been there 30 years. Three-quarters of its sales come from new poster work.  
    And the kicker is, not only have computers not harmed Hatch, but — for your unintended consequences file — they have proven to be good for business. In 1986, sales at Hatch were a paltry $12,000. In 2011, sales were $750,000.

   "One of the reasons Hatch is able to stay in business is, with the advent of computers in the early 80s, it flattened everything from a design perspective," said Celene Aubry, print shop manager at Hatch.   "Digital type is unable to create the texture, the tactile attraction, the layers of color. Our type is handmade, there is more depth to it." 

     I found Hatch the old-fashioned way -- blundering around downtown Nashville one day in 2007. The place was closed, but what I saw through the front window stayed with me—a vision of hundreds of posters, new, old, monotone, an explosion of colors. Web pages come and go, but a poster stays, a good one does, anyway. I have a poster from the New York School of Visual Arts on the wall downstairs; I've been looking at it for 25 years; haven't gotten tired of it yet.
     Hatch Show Print traces its roots to Rev. William T. Hatch, a northern minister who moved to Nashville after the Civil War to start a magazine, Southern Industries.  The city at the time was a center of printing, particularly of religious material. Hatch died in 1880, but not before his sons, Charles and Herbert, had opened up a print shop on Cherry Street.
     Not only has Hatch endured, like a well-designed poster, but it is going to endure, seeing that, since 1992, it has been owned by the Country Music Foundation, the organization that oversees the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The latest move was prompted by the museum expanding.
    "Their archives are bursting at the seams," Aubry said. "They needed to expand and go full bore and get Hatch its own space, designed to be a print shop."
     The lay-out resembled the 1924 shop that it had been forced to quickly vacate in 1992. 
     "Placement of type, placement of tables, the presses along an 80 foot window so people can watch us print," said Aubry. "Our typesetting process is much more ergonomic than it used to be. We are in a climate controlled building that's safe, we have access to archivists and historians."

     The phrase "living history" gets bandied about a lot, but with Hatch it's true—your poster might be printed using type that was carved 100 years ago. 

      "Hatch was born the same year as the light bulb," Aubry said. "It was the time of forms of entertainment before electricity. Traveling circuses, traveling fairs. Advertising was on paper—'Come to the fair!' -- billboards on the sides of barns --that's how Hatch made its name, carving those big woodblocks for bold graphics."

     And how big is the largest type Hatch has? Ready? Eighty inches—yes, letters that are more than six feet tall (printed one half letter at a time with 26 by 40 inch blocks, the largest their presses can handle) 

    "Crazy, isn't it?" said Aubry, who studied printing at Columbia College in Chicago and taught letterpress at Lillstreet Art Center here, and is a member of the Chicago Printers Guild and the Amalgamated Printers Association.
    People have tried to reproduce the handmade quality of Hatch, but a) they can't do it and b) it's usually just cheaper to go to Hatch, and companies around the world, from Jack Daniels distillery to a new British snack food maker, have used them. They've done book covers, movie titles, CD jackets and of course posters, both for new bands and old favorites—they've been using the same graphic elements for B.B. King for 40 years.

     Letterpress is hot all over—Chicago has a thriving scene, and Aubry mentioned Starshaped Press on North Ravenswood as particularly good. But they can't touch the tradition, the sheer inventory of typefaces, that Hatch has.

    "She does beautiful work," said Aubry, of the woman behind Starshaped. "But she's 14 years old [her company, that is] and we're 134 years old, so it's not a fair comparison."
    "We have the 134 years of continuous history, we have our collection , the tools we use every day, some date back to 1879," said Aubry. "We have big two-sheet letters carved in 1885. All born here in this shop, and mercifully, a continually operating business, through the good graces of a couple of Nashville business that saw the historical and cultural value of having this shop stay intact. So it all carries forward."

     The print shop has a definite steam punk vibe to it, and a diverse cast of quirky, creative employees -- the youngest designer is 25, and Dan Brown, who runs the presses, is 83. Nothing about letterpress printing feels moribund; in fact, it feels like part of a growing recognition that you can only automate so much.  

      "I think there's a trend in that," she said. "Letter press printing. The idea of vinyl is more popular. I think people are going back to something three-dimensional, something they can experience, something you can connect with the process, as opposed to everything being so removed from who we are and our daily lives."

     For some reason it made me think about journalism, and how some people actually believe its future lies it computerized aggregators and local news assembled by automatons in Lahore and Mumbai. It doesn't.

       "One of the things about Hatch, and I think about anything -- about journalism. There's a connection to people," Aubry said. "When people come to our shop, they're talking to the person making their poster, and connected for the five generations it took to get us to 2013, printing in Nashville. The stories that go along with that, stories our clients bring to the table in terms of interacting with those clients, what we're doing here. So much of that is related to our personalities, to the people making the connection. There is a growing pool of people who are educated what the process is, who recognize what letterpress is."

Which is a very long way of saying that, when I decided I should promote this blog somehow, the first idea I had was a Hatch Show Print poster. So I'm having 100 printed up—50 I'm going to place around Chicago—a poster wants to be hung in public—as well as hand them out to a few friends and supporters of the blog. And 50 I'm going to sign and number and sell to you, for $15 apiece plus $5 shipping and handling.

    That's the good news. But bad news is you're going to have to wait until Christmas, or even afterward, to get the chance to see the design and, maybe, order one of the rare copies. Hatch has a seven week waiting list.

Too dumb to know better.

You know what my favorite part of the paper is? Brace yourself: the columnists. And no, not just me. While it's good to get the news, the raw data you need to keep up on the world, more enjoyment is found in a good argument, an interpretation of that news. I don't even have to always agree with it, such as Thursday, when I read Mary Mitchell's column and, right there on the train, started thinking up this:

    Halloween is over, thank God. A pagan death rite morphed into a childhood misbehavior and sugar festival transformed, lately, into a randy adult Saturnalia, a kind of Valentine’s Day for couples who haven’t hooked up yet, but will, big time, as soon as enough Budweiser flows through their systems.

   Actually, scratch the “childhood misbehavior” part from the above — in our safety-mad era, an evening of Tom and Huck soaping windows and taking fence gates off their hinges would end up with them kneeling in the back of a white Homeland Security van, their hands zip-tied behind them.

     Now it’s the adults who act poorly at Halloween, either during their costume beer blow-outs or in the very act of donning those costumes.

     My esteemed colleague, Mary Mitchell, looked at an aspect of this in her column Thursday: the tendency for white folk to don blackface make-up despite the long history of mockery and humiliation it represents.

     “Are people ignorant or just belligerent?” she asked, and I actually looked up from the paper on the morning train and said aloud, “I’ll answer that one for you, Mary.”

     Ignorant. No question. And I have a certain real-life episode in mind. It was last Halloween and … oh, we should draw the veil here … a lovely young woman of my acquaintance announced she would be dressing up at her workplace for Halloween.

     "Oh," I said, smiling, in full friendly chat mode, "and who are you dressing up as?"
     "Michelle Obama," she said, nodding.
     "So ..." I said, "you'll be wearing a mask of some kind, a Michelle Obama mask?"
     "No, no," she said, dark makeup and a wig and a business suit. She was obviously proud of her creativity.

     "Ah," I said.
     What would you do? I am not one to thrust myself into other people's business, but if I can help them avoid pitfalls, I try to.
     "You know..." I continued, or words to that effect, "let me give you a word of advice here, Tiffany (made-up name), you might want to rethink that choice. I don't think Michelle Obama  is a good idea."
     "No?" she pouted, puzzled. "Why not?"
     I looked at her face, as fresh as a field of new-fallen snow and about as white. Here it would have been helpful to have had Mary Mitchell's column as a visual aid, and perhaps a felt board with a few cut-out white and black felt characters to convey the story of slavery, Jim Crow, minstrel shows. Maybe a little square of felt to be the Human Resources department where she would be duckwalked, still in blackface, to be fired.
     The conversation went on for a few days and, eventually, I don't know if my argument prevailed or she just picked a different costume. I suspect it was the latter.
     So, ignorance or belligerence? Never underestimate the pivotal role of stupidity in American society. I don't think frat louts throwing their inevitable slave auction parties are intending to strike out at African Americans. I don't think people like my young friend want to stick a knife in their black co-workers and get themselves fired. They're just ignorant.
     Then again, everyone's a little ignorant of history. Last week, WBBM radio's "Smart Quiz" question was "What year did World War II end?" That saddened me, almost as much as had the question been, "What is the name of the solar object that glows brightly in the daytime sky?" So much that when the seventh caller did not, of course, know the answer, I wasn't further saddened. I had already bottomed out. No surprise.
     So ignorance should be expected. And it is the better option. Belligerence is untreatable. If I know your history and am mocking you anyway, I'm a bigot and a bad person. If I'm just clueless, well, that can be worked with.
     It's easy to laugh at people who don't know anything about the past. It feels good — the glow of righteous indignation — but doesn't win over the ignorant person. Better to be understanding, to use the knowledge we are rightly proud of and gently explain there are many reasons to be aware of the history of race in America, and knowing enough not to cork up at Halloween is just the start of the benefits.
     It's good for all groups, not just blacks, to understand just how lightly others hold their histories. The Holocaust, the slaughter of Native Americans, the oppression of women — whatever wrong burns brightly in your mind is a faint glow, if that, in the minds of many others. They don't know and, sadly, often don't care. You need to tell them and make them care. More than a problem itself, blackface is a symptom of a bigger problem.

Halloween has always been a time of civic horror

     The low drumbeats of societal dread seem muted this Halloween. Oh, the Tribune scraped together a lengthy, usual-suspects story of panicky "hyperparents" forcing their children to trick-or-treat in church parking lots, to protect their precious ones from non-existent perils. 
     But beyond those freakish exceptions, the general hand-wringing seems fairly well confined to far left angst over sexy costumes for girls, a much more tolerable concern than worrying about your children being murdered by strangers.
     As with all holidays, Halloween is a time of nostalgia for many adults, who look around at the terrifying present, weigh their self-imposed anxieties for their kids, and then flee in their minds, back to an imagined better time.
     An editor did that 20 years ago. Chicago and neighboring suburbs were talking about banning or restricting Halloween—not much of an issue this year—and he asked me to take a look at the simple, wholesome pleasures of Halloweens past. What I found was that Halloween has always been a time of civic horror—mostly perceived, periodically all-too real—going back nearly a century. And the irony is, the halcyon past was far more brutal than the ooh-scary world of today. This story of mine originally ran in the Sun-Times Oct. 29, 1993 (I've cleaned it up in spots, to make it read more smoothly):

     Kids still may be frightened of goblins and ghosts at Halloween, but parents are scared of a menace even more threatening:

     Trick-or-treating.

     The City of Chicago has compiled a list of 500 alternative Halloween events, to remove the need for children to go out in public collecting candy. The events are aimed at avoiding incidents of tainted candy, lurking strangers and accidents.

     "It's a changing world today," said Cynthia Sproul, of Lombard, explaining why her two daughters, ages 10 and 15, generally attend parties instead of trick-or-treating. "You have a lot more single-parent families, a lot more divorced families, a lot more children unsupervised."

     Sproul has a better reason than most to fear Halloween. Eight years ago she was chaperoning her daughters while they were trick-or-treating when her youngest daughter, Karen, then 2, was shot in the head by two boys playing with a BB gun.

     She was not permanently injured, but to this day her mother finds trick-or-treating "hard to condone."

     Dr. Robert Schleser, professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said: "We look for a time or a place that we imagined was what we really want—peace, security, community. But it's a fantasy."

     In fact, the idea of trick-or-treating as an innocent activity is hard to find in reality, at least in this century. Consider the following statement:

     "It is indeed a sad comment upon our times that an entire community has to fear for their children's safety during what should be a happy time."

     The statement was made in 1972 by Forest Park Mayor Howard R. Mohr at Halloween. In that year, parents and officials waged a virtual war against trick-or-treating, the result of widespread reports of candy tampering the year before, of Chicago area children supposedly finding razors, needles and ground glass in their treats. One boy was hospitalized with mescaline poisoning.

     As always, the suburbs were swiftest to react. Also in 1972, Elk Grove Village imposed fines of up to $200 for trick-or-treating beyond curfew, Oak Park passed a resolution asking parents to accompany children, and Lombard businesses distributed penny or nickel coupons for candy.

     Ten years earlier, city fathers also were trying to reduce trick-or-treating, which at that time went on for days. "There is growing agitation to keep the doorbell ringing down to just the one night, instead of spreading it out over the weekend," a news service reported in 1961.

     The 1950s were a time of chilling Halloween stories. The Friday before Halloween, 1954, readers of the Daily News woke up to a front-page headline that read: " 'Trick or Treat' Girl Found Slain" above a story about 6-year-old Karen Mauk, whose strangled nude body was found in a cemetery, her Halloween candy scattered about, her costume, a paper hat, nearby.

     In 1933, the entire uniformed Chicago Police Department was placed on the street for Halloween, but still trolley poles were ripped out, windows broken, streetcar tracks greased and fences set on fire.      

     The Oak Park Police arrested 300 boys who were on a window-breaking spree.

     In 1924, two Waukegan motorcycle policemen died after hitting a heavy log placed across Butrick Street. The collision hurtled the two into the path of a car.

      Only Halloweens near the turn of the century have taken on the image we all seem to miss, and that was reported long after the fact, a common pattern.

     "It was good clean fun," remembered Vincent Gadacz, in a reminiscence published 20 years ago of Chicago Halloweens. "We made sure no one was around a haystack or garbage pile we set on fire. We would have died if anyone had been hurt."

The Divvy bikes will be out this winter; will you?

For die-hard bicyclists, accustomed to ripping around the city on their French 20-speed racing bikes, the Divvy bikes are laughable dreadnoughts — heavy, clunky, with only three speeds. Which is two speeds more than every bike I've ever owned in my entire life, each a Schwinn balloon-wheel cruiser with coaster brakes, not terribly different than a Divvy. (Actually, just two, now that I think of it: a green Typhoon, with twin newspaper baskets, growing up, and black Cruiser now. Which speaks to their endurance if nothing else). That does much to explain why I'm having so much fun with the Divvy bikes. It's like having a forgotten childhood pastime revitalized, adopted citywide, and added to your job description. Next, Chicago will be organizing kickball games in the middle of Wacker Drive and the paper will encourage me to not only cover them, but to play. Until then, another Divvy Diary...

     Winter’s coming. Only a nip so far, a taste of the low 30s, a kiss of frost, then a scramble back into the arms of the sunny mid-50s, which felt like spring.

     But don’t be deceived.

     Winter is coming, full bore, winter in the Midwest, another nasty, brutal, sleet-slinging three months of put on your Vibram-soled boots and your Eddie Bauer Ridgeline Parka, lower your head, lock your gaze at the trough already shuffled in front of you and start trudging Chicago winter.   

     The question I get asked, again and again, as the human face on the city’s Divvy bike-share program, is this: What’s going to happen to the Divvy bikes in the winter?

     You might guess that they’d be put away until spring, along with the sailboats, sidewalk cafes, sleeveless dresses and all the other harbingers of Chicago the eight months a year when its livable outside.
     No need to guess.

     I put the question to Elliot Greenberger, Divvy’s deputy general manager.   

    “In terms of the winter, all our stations will remain open, but we'll reduce our bike fleet on the street to match ridership," he wrote via email.
     How is that going to work? If there are problems with newbie Divvy bicyclists blundering the wrong way down one-way streets and along Lake Shore Drive, playing the role of Sweet Pea on wheels at a Popeye cartoon construction site, what's going to happen once it snows? I figure we'll need guidance, and for that I turned to that hearty, tattooed, pierced tribe of bike-in-the-winter free spirits known as bicycle messengers.
     What's the secret to surviving cold-weather cycling?
     "For me, it's staying warm," said Mike Morell, of the 4 Star Courier Collective, a delivery service formed by six messengers in 2005.
     That doesn't mean bundling up in coats.
     "You generate your own heat," he said. "Your core tends to warm up quickly."
     So light layers on the body, concentrating instead on your exposed digits.
     "Toes and fingers are really hard to keep warm," he said. For that, he recommends "a good pair of gloves that keep your fingers next to each other."
     You mean mittens? I asked.
     No, he said. Those pose a problem.
     "You can't shift as easily." The solution? "Lobster gloves," he said, sort of a compromise between gloves and mittens with a split between the ring and middle fingers, forming the hand into a Vulcan salute.
     "Live long and prosper," Morell said. "It works well for biking, and you still have the range of motion."
     For your feet?
     "Extra socks help," he said. Plus waterproof footwear. Don't delude yourself that just because it isn't at the moment actively snowing, raining, sleeting or all three, Chicago city biking won't be wet.
     "The ground's always kind of wet and you're getting sprayed," he said.
     Now that you've outfitted yourself, how does biking in the winter differ from biking in the eight months that aren't winter?
     "Just watch out for ice," he said. "The city salts the heck out of the street, still, especially on side streets."
     Pay particular attention to the streets under bridges. "Riding under viaducts, there always seem to be icy spots," Morell said. "It's really icy under the Metra tracks."
     If you find yourself hurtling across ice, don't panic.
     "When you realize you're on a patch of ice, try not to brake or turn," he said. "Try to glide on. Don't do anything sudden: When you freak out, that's when you fall."
     "When you freak out." I liked his certainty.
       Since winter is still a ways away, if you sincerely plan to commute on your Divvy, now is the time to equip yourself. Not only lobster gloves, but consider a thin biking balaclava to keep your face warm if you brave the worst weather. They're thin to fit under a helmet, which you'll need even more than ever. In the winter, you fall. Even experienced bicyclists expect to fall.
     "I'll wipe out a couple times a winter," Morell said.
     That's the bad news. The good news is, when you fall, it won't hurt so much.
     "Generally in winter, you're wearing so much gear, falling off isn't big a deal anyway," he said. "I'm usually pretty padded."
     But it's not winter yet. Not yet. I biked Monday, and it was pleasant wearing fingerless wool gloves and a leather jacket. Winter doesn't start until Dec. 21. But the average temperature in Chicago in November is 40 degrees. And November starts Friday.

Is that a spire or are you just glad to see me?

The Chrysler Building has a spire. 

     People love tall buildings.
     Which could be seen as odd, given that God doesn't seem to like tall buildings at all, at least not in the Bible, in Genesis, where He reacts to the attempt to build the first skyscraper, the Tower of Babel, by scrambling human language — up to that point, everybody spoke the same tongue — for the specific purpose of keeping us from ever reaching toward the heavens again. 
     Didn't work. We're still at it, in that selective way we have of ignoring Biblical strictures that go against our grain. The honor of being tallest is so coveted that — in a way that is almost Talmudic — the question of who's got the biggest one is not a simple matter than can be settled with a measuring tape. 

    (Of course, the "who's got the biggest" leads to another, Freudian interpretation, which one of the readers of this column, which appeared in the Sun-Times Monday, added, "It isn't the size, but what you do with it." Which serves for buildings too).

      Math problem: 

One World Trade Center doesn't (ST photo)

       If Chicago has a building, the Willis Tower, that is 1,451 feet tall, from the pavement to the roof, and New York has a building, One World Trade Center, that is 1,368 feet tall over the same distance, which city has the taller building? 

      A clever second-grader would gaze at those numbers for a moment, perhaps crinkling his freckled nose cutely, then exclaim, “Willis Tower!” and he’d be right.

      Alas, the world is not run by clever second-graders.

     That is why the people who built the WTC have dubbed the 406-foot-tall mast they’ve bolted atop the building a “spire” — aka, an integral part of the building’s architecture that should count as the structure’s official height — and through a combination of politics and misplaced Sept. 11 pity might just pull it off, as the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ponders whether to accept the deception, which can be easily seen by just looking at the damn thing.

     Among the charmed arguments that its builders have floated is the novel notion that since the building originally was designed with an actual spire, but alas, economics whittled it down to the needle of nothing actually atop the actual building in the actual world of the real, that means the design should somehow factor into the decision.

     That's nuts. If plans count, then heck, drag out Frank Lloyd Wright's drawings for a mile-high skyscraper, pretend it was built here, and lay claim to the title that way.
     And how much is that distinction really worth, anyway?
     How much civic pride do we take from the Willis Tower being the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere?
     A lot? No. I'd say, "a bit." Sometimes, guiding visitors, I will sweep my arm in the tower's direction and say, in sort of an avuncular chuckle, "Tallest building in the Western Hemisphere."
     That is a fallback, of course, from the Tallest Building in the World. But these are fallback times, and just as pride in a good career in a solid industry was replaced by, oh, pride in a good day job where you can keep the bags of chips you haven't handed out at the end of the day, so we need to take our satisfaction where we can.
     And I don't think it's sour grapes to observe that the striving cities that have actually built really tall buildings do not, on the basis of that, draw lingering significance. Taipei 101 surpassed the then-Sears Tower in 2004, becoming the tallest building in the world, a title it held for six years, and I'd wager lunch not one American in 10 can guess what country it's in. Nor has Petronas Towers skewed the world's gaze to Kuala Lumpur. Being 1,200 feet taller than the Willis Tower didn't jam the Burj Khalifa into awareness half as much as being featured in "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" did.
     The Council on Tall Buildings is based in Chicago, which you might think would tilt its hand in our direction, but it's one of those groups with international pretensions, obviously, and might give the plum to New York just to prove it doesn't have local bias, in the same way that the International Olympic Committee is based in Lausanne but has never brought the Summer Games to Switzerland and probably never will.
     I called Anthony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings, but he was in China, natch. He told the Wall Street Journal that failing to rule in favor of the WTC would disturb "the vast majority of the entire USA public for whom the 1,776 symbolic height is sacred."
     Not 'round here. You've been reading too many developer's brochures, bub. The vast majority of the entire USA public can hardly bestir themselves on 9/11 to arrange their mugs into a simulacrum of solemnity and remember that something bad happened on that date in the recent past. What they really hunger for is an officialdom — the government, corporations, yes, even the Council on Tall Buildings — that lives in the same reality-based world we do, and acts accordingly. A spire is part of a building's architecture. The Chrysler Building has a spire. That counts. An antenna is a pole stuck atop a building. The Willis Tower has two. Now look at the World Trade Center. Forget politics, forget 9/11 and Bette Midler singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings." That's an antenna, heck, almost a flagpole.
     And if that counts, then the things atop the Willis Tower are twin spires, and we can duct tape some paper-towel tubes to the end and nudge past New York. No matter what the decision is, I'm still calling it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Facts still matter.