South Grant Park Sculpture &c.

The thing to do when walking to the southern reaches of Grant Park in downtown Chicago on a warm Friday afternoon is take a look at some of the less-famed artworks installed there. That’s what I’d do, anyway.

Such as “Hedgerow” by Chicago sculptor Lucy Slivinski, composed of vehicle exhaust pipes and reflectors and other auto oddments.

HedgerowIt was created in 2006, a nearby sign says, as part of an exhibit called Artists + Automobiles, for which the artists were “asked to use salvaged auto parts as the inspiration and primary material.” Yep.
HedgerowFurther south, and closer to Michigan Ave., is the more conventional equestrian statue of Gen. John A. Logan. He’s remembered by Civil War aficionados, but by not many others, I’d say, even in Illinois, despite the part he played in the war or in establishing Decoration Day.
Logan memorial, Chicago, May 1, 2015There’s a John A. Logan Museum in Downstate Illinois. I didn’t know that. Its web site describes him this way: “Who was John A. Logan? General Grant’s favorite officer, one of Illinois’ most powerful Senators, Founder of Memorial Day as a national holiday, and among Mark Twain’s favorite public speakers.

“Or as historian Gary Ecelbarger has said, ‘John A. Logan may be the most noteworthy nineteenth century American to escape notice in the twenty-first century.’ What pushed him from becoming Abraham Lincoln’s bitter rival to campaigning for Lincoln’s re­election? How does an avid racist and author of Illinois’ Black Laws become an advocate for African American Civil Rights and education?

“Visit the General John A. Logan Museum and maybe you will better understand why Frederick Douglas [sic] said, if a man like Black Jack Logan can have a change of heart, then there is hope for everyone.”
Gen. Logan, May 1, 2015His statue is on top of a (probably manmade) hillock. It’s no ordinary equestrian statue, though — it’s a Saint-Gaudens. Any statue by the creator of the Double Eagle is all right by me. Much more about the creation of the statue, which was supposed to be erected at the site of the ’93 World’s Fair but instead came to Grant Park, is at the informative Connecting the Windy City blog. When the statue was originally put there, the site wasn’t an obscure patch of a city park, but very near Central Station, an intercity passenger terminal for the Illinois Central RR, gone now for 40+ years.

Not far from Gen. Logan, I took a look at some of the concrete lampposts in the park, picking up on some details I’d never noticed before. A fair number of them look like this.

lamppost, Grant Park, May 1, 2015Atop the posts are globes, ringed by the zodiac.

lamppost, Grant Park, May 1, 2015Note the Municipal Device.
lamppost, Grant Park, May 1, 2015Once you learn what it is, you see it everywhere in Chicago.

Football, You Bet

May Day was a genuine spring day this year, clear and warm enough for the season. I spent some of it on a walkabout in downtown Chicago, starting west of the Loop and wandering more or less east and south until I reached Grant Park. At Congress Pkwy. and Dearborn St., I noticed barricades in front of the Auditorium Theater Building. A long line of people, many of them wearing football jerseys, stood behind them.

Then I remembered hearing on the radio that the NFL draft was being held in Chicago this year, and giving it no more thought. If I had, I’d have guessed it was in a major hotel ballroom somewhere, but it turns out it was in the Auditorium Theatre.

There, and at a large white temporary tent in Grant Park, across Michigan Ave. at Congress. As the NFL’s senior vice president of events, Peter O’Reilly, explains on league’s web site: “Every year we can’t really satisfy the demand for fans that want to be inside the theater, so now we’re creating this Draft Town in Grant Park, just across from the Auditorium Theatre, in order to allow more fans to experience the excitement of the draft.”

The line of people, a block long, was waiting to get into the tent, and I’d bet they paid hard gold coins for the thrill. A large electronic sign on the tent said, “Look, Another Profit Center for the NFL!”

Actually, it said “Chi-Town is Draft Town.”

The sidewalks along Michigan Ave. were lousy with fans wearing football jerseys and lanyards with plastic badges, which probably let them into the tent. Cops were everywhere, presumably to keep a lid on any sports riots later. (Which were probably no new thing even at the time of the Nika Riots.)

The NFL draft wasn’t on my mind when I started walking, and it didn’t remain top of mind very long. I pressed on toward the far southern end of Grant Park, away from crowds, cops and mass-market sports.

Grant Park, May 1, 2015I don’t remember the last time I was in this part of Grant Park. It was a fine place to be on a warm Friday afternoon.

The Gustave Brand Murals at Carl Schurz HS

Saturday is Anzac Day, and not just any anniversary, but the centennial of the landing at Anzac Cove. Here’s a remarkable collection of images from last year’s commemorations (published by a British tabloid, no less).

Speaking of anniversaries, I’d never heard of this disaster until today, the 75th anniversary of the Rhythm Club Fire in Natchez, Miss.

Last Saturday our tour took us inside Carl Schurz High School, which is on the Northwest Side of Chicago. Its library has something few other school libraries can claim: a domed ceiling and murals by Gustave Brand. The murals were painted in the late 1930s by Brand, a German immigrant who was then pushing 80, so he had some help by former Schurz students. Brand had originally been sent to Chicago by the German government to paint murals in that country’s pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and he must have liked it here.

The works were restored in the late 1990s. At the back wall is a large alcove featuring “The Spirit of Chicago.” The text under the painting says: “The Spirit of the Pioneer lingers here. Where once the Redman roamed, a City vast Lifts its proud Skyline to the Morning Sun. A Monument to service nobly done.”

Schurz HS, April 2015A closeup of the centerpiece.

Schurz HS, April 2015Looks like a collection of allegorical figures under the protection of the Spirit of Chicago. I take that to be the City, not Columbia with her torch and flag, because of the Y on her chest, the Municipal Device of Chicago. To the left is the Fire, and to the right the ’93 world’s fair, among other things.

On the ceiling, around the dome, are four more murals by Brand, who clearly had a lot of energy for an elderly man. They depict the evolution of the written word, fancifully done, but fitting enough for a library.

Here are Stone Age men — presumably — carving in stone.

Carl Schurz HS April 2015Egyptians devising their hieroglyphics. Seems like Brand had a thing for fancy headgear.

Carl Schurz HS, April 2015Medieval monks doing their part to preserve the written word. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAnd Gutenberg.

Carl Schurz HS, April 2015What I did see at my high school library when I looked up at the ceiling? I don’t remember exactly, but it must have been acoustic ceiling tiles.

Carl Schurz High School

One of the other destinations on the Schools by Bus tour was Carl Schurz High School, a Chicago public school at 3601 N. Milwaukee Ave. As the name suggests, the neighborhood used to be heavily German. Work on the school began in 1908, with wings on either side added later that look a lot like the original structure.

Without a wide-angle lens, it’s hard to get an image of the whole structure, so expansive is it. This is the original building, plus part of one of the wings on the right. All together, the structure forms a squared C shape, with a large lawn filling in the C.

Carl Schurz HS April 2015“Commissioned by a reform-minded school board headed by Jane Addams, the project was one highlight of a broad program for rescuing the immigrant poor from the ignorance and isolation engendered by the industrial city,” the AIA Guide to Chicago says about the building.

The school board’s architect from 1905-10 was Dwight Perkins, who did the original Schurz structure. “Chicago’s typical Dickensian public school before 1905 was a poorly lighted and ventilated box, set into the city grid with no significant playgrounds,” AIA continues. “Toilet facilities were archaic and located in the basement.

“The forty-odd schools that Perkins designed between 1905 and 1910 changed all that, creating a building type with grass and trees, sunlight and fresh air, safety from fire, and good sanitation.”
Carl Schurz HS, April 2015Good for him. From our fairly comfortable perch here in the 21st-century First World, I doubt that we really appreciate the squalid conditions that spurred action in the Progressive Era.

I didn’t know this until I read about Perkins, but he also did the Lincoln Park Zoo Lion House. We were there earlier this month.
Lion House, Lincoln Park ZooA nice use of brickwork.

Inside El Centro

Inside El Centro, a campus of Northeastern Illinois University, you not only can find gender-neutral restrooms (see yesterday), but also a lot of cool pipes near the ceilings.

El Centro, Chicago, April 2015El Centro, Chicago, April 2015It’s something more buildings ought to do, at least if their pipes are exposed. El Centro has more surface colors than most buildings, certainly most educational facilities, and on the whole it works.

The hallways put natural lighting to good use. That, by contrast, is no rare thing in newer buildings. Turns out that cutting people off from natural lighting isn’t considered good for them any more. How is it that took decades to figure that out?

Anyway, in the afternoons, one side of the building catches light like so.

El Centro, Chicago, April 2015Some of the artificial light placements were interesting, too.
El Centro, Chicago, April 2015As our tour group wandered down one of El Centro’s halls, we encountered another tour group. They were architectural historians in town for the Society of Architectural Historians 68th Annual Conference. The conference seemed to have a lot of tour options, one of which was “Provocative New Architecture in Chicago: The Work of JGMA,” led by Juan Moreno, the designer of the building we were in.
He paused and spoke to us for a moment. He didn’t say anything earthshaking, but it was a nice thing for him to do.

El Centro, Northeastern Illinois University

El Centro, Chicago, April 2015I came across this sign on Saturday afternoon. That’s the first usage of “gender neutral” I’ve ever seen at a restroom. (There ought to be a hyphen, but never mind.) I wondered whether it’s an up-and-coming usage to replace “unisex” or merely is supplementing it.

The gender-neutral restrooms  — one of three options, along with standard gendered rooms — were at El Centro, a satellite campus of Northeastern Illinois University that was completed only last year. It was one of the schools we visited as participants on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Schools by Bus tour. Unlike the Churches by Bus tour last fall, only one bus was enough for everyone. As the docents explained, this was the first tour of its kind by the CAF, compared with the churches tour, which has been going on for 20 years.

The schools were interesting, but the churches were more beautiful. There’s no escaping the utilitarian nature of a school, even if the overall design is good. Still, El Centro was well worth a look. The glass structure’s covered with fins: blue on one side, yellow on the other. Stand at one spot and it’s yellow.

El Centro, April 2015Move, and it starts a transition to blue.

El Centro, April 2015Then it’s blue. Or move the opposite way, and it goes from blue to yellow.

El Centro, April 2015Just as remarkably, the building manages to work well despite standing hard by the always-busy Kennedy Expressway.

Last fall, Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote that, “Chicago architect Juan Moreno, a Colombian native who in 2011 won attention for a striking charter school built for the United Neighborhood Organization in Chicago’s Gage Park neighborhood, wisely saw the Kennedy as an opportunity, not a monster.

“Instead of setting his three-story, steel-framed building far back from the highway and sticking a parking lot in between, Moreno slid El Centro almost alongside the road. Rather than turning out an ordinary box, he bent his long, linear structure like a boomerang to turn its southern end toward drop-dead views of the downtown skyline. Then he sculpted its exterior for reasons both formal and functional…

“In the crucial move, 20-inch-wide fins — their faces blue to the south, yellow to the north — are layered atop El Centro’s glass skin, ostensibly to shield the building from the sun’s glare. But there’s no denying that the fins endow the building with visual rhythms that express the highway’s rushing motion and reveal the influence of the Pritzker Prize-winning London architect Zaha Hadid.”

The Lincoln Park Conservatory

The Lincoln Park Conservatory dates from the 1890s, when Gilded Age Chicago wanted a splashy new Crystal Palace-like conservatory. Architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee designed the structure in collaboration with architect M.E. Bell, and their work still stands in the early 21st century.

Lincoln Park Conservatory 2015It’s one of the city’s two great conservatories, with the other in Garfield Park. Somehow I feel that Garfield Park’s the greater of the two, though not by much. I can’t argue that position very thoroughly, since I’m no authority on plant diversity or glass-and-iron construction or conservatory aesthetics, but never mind. I’m always glad to stroll through the Lincoln Park Conservatory, as we did on Easter Saturday. It’s luxuriant.

Lincoln Park Conservatory 2015It also sports some odd plants. How is it that I visit conservatories periodically and always manage to see plants I’m certain I’ve never seen nor even heard of?  For instance, the aptly named Sausage Tree (Kigelia africana), native of tropical Africa. Granted, it’s been a few years since I was at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, but you’d think I’d remember the Sausage Tree. But no.

Lincoln Park Conservatory 2015The plants have also made themselves at home even on the conservatory structure.

Lincoln Park Conservatory 2015There’s also a fern room. Ever conservatory worth its salt has one of those.

Lincoln Park Conservatory 2015And a place for orchids. A Vanda orchid (Vanda orchidaceae).

Lincoln Park Conservatory 2015One more thing. We took a 151 Sheridan bus from Lincoln Park to Union Station for our return home, and at a Michigan Ave. bus shelter, I saw this from the bus window.
Michigan Ave., April 4, 2015Anti-Rahm bills plastered on an ad. He won the runoff election on Tuesday, but at least the electorate made him work for it, by obliging him to win a runoff. No Daley ever had to do that.

The Lincoln Park Zoo

Easter Saturday was a pleasant day in Lincoln Park in Chicago. The view south from the Lincoln Park Conservatory at about 2:30 pm.

Chicago, April 4, 2015This is how old our children are. Us: Want to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday? Them: Nah, we’d rather stay home.

So they did, while Yuriko and I went to the city, enjoying lunch at the always delicious Ann Sather Swedish restaurant on Belmont (serving cinnamon buns imbued with ambrosia), a short visit at the DePaul Art Museum — only open since 2011, so we’d never seen it — a walk to Lincoln Park, a stop at its conservatory, and then some time at the zoo. Except for the restaurant, all free attractions.

At the other end of the lawn pictured above is a statue. Of course I had to take a picture of that.

Schiller 2015It’s Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. Why is he here? Y asked. There used to be a lot of Germans here. After World War II? No, after 1848. Also a bad time in Germany. They wanted out — and came to places like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and… central Texas. The statue is a copy of one near Schiller’s birthplace in Marbach, Germany, by Ernst Bilhauer Rau. It’s been in this spot in Chicago for nearly 130 years.

I’ve been visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo occasionally since 1984, when my friend Rich took me there during my Labor Day weekend flyup to Chicago from Nashville. This time around, many of the animals weren’t outside — still too cool for them, or maybe it was their day off — but we saw some of the primates, the sea lions, and a few felines.

I was astonished then, and I am now, that there’s no admission. That probably adds to the crowds, especially on a pleasant weekend in spring, but the zoo holds its crowds well. It isn’t like Disneyland — you don’t have to wait an hour in line to see a lion.

Lincoln Park Zoo Lion, 2015Leo here would periodically park himself on top of this rock. He had an audience.

Lincoln Park Zoo, April 4, 2015Mostly he would lie there (being a cat, after all), but sometimes he’d open his mouth, and he also roared a bit. It didn’t quite sound like the roars you hear in movies.

The Yeomen of the Guard

The Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co. drew a solid crowd for the matinee of The Yeomen of the Guard on Sunday afternoon. Not a full house, but a decent turnout, including a small busload of seniors from somewhere or other. But unlike at some events, I wasn’t one of the younger members of the crowd. There was a good mix of ages.

Yeomen of the Guard 2015Mandel Hall was the venue. A handsome place on the University of Chicago campus — I’d like to see it in this light — and almost as old as Yeomen, since it was originally designed in 1903 by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. Not the Savoy, but what is?

Though done at a college, the show wasn’t collegiate. The highly accomplished company goes back to 1960, and, according to the program notes, “has a policy of alternating the signature operas with the obscure, taking into consideration anniversary years and programming by other local companies.” This was its seventh production of Yeomen, with HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Gondoliers also done that many times over the years. (At the other end of the spectrum, Utopia, Limited and The Grand Duke have been done once each in 55 years.)

Good fun, as G&S should be, but also not quite as much levity as you’d expect in a romantic romp of switched identities, instant attractions, and lines like this: “These allusions to my professional duties are in doubtful taste. I didn’t become a head-jailer because I like head-jailing. I didn’t become an assistant-tormentor because I like assistant-tormenting. We can’t all be sorcerers, you know.”

Spoken by Wilfred, the head jailer and assistant tormentor of the Tower, portrayed by Brad Jungwirth, a bald slab of a baritone, whose voice and character I enjoyed the most. The rest of the cast turned in fine performances as well, in as much as I’m qualified to judge, as did the University of Chicago Chamber Orchestra.

Maybe there should be more romantic comedies in which love doesn’t quite conquer all, as in Yeomen. After all, it ends with three couples paired up, two of which involve less-than-enthusiastic participants, and one of which leaves a sympathetic character (the merryman Jack Point) as the odd man out, much to his anguish. Then again, I guess a movie that ended that way wouldn’t test very well among focus groups.

The New Seminary Coop Bookstore

Last year, I noticed that the Seminary Coop Bookstore isn’t where it used to be, in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary at 5757 S. University Ave in Hyde Park. Over the years, I’d popped in now and then to enjoy that cave of books. And I bought a few things there, such as The Greeks and the Irrational (E.R. Dodds, 1951) and Daily Life in Ancient Rome (Jérôme Carcopino, 1940). How could the floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with books on a wild array of subjects, and the twists and turns and nooks, be the same above ground?

Last year, I wrote: “It didn’t seem right. At the basement location, there was no room for anything but books and more books…. the new location still has a ‘maze aspect’ and Stanley Tigerman did the design (himself or Tigerman McCurry Architects staff?), which I guess counts for something.”

On Sunday, we went into the new store and looked around. The new iteration isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a fine store, stocked with the same wild array of subjects. But it also doesn’t have the je ne sais quoi of the old location. The new design is formed by shelves at various angles to each other, so it isn’t a standard bookstore with parallel shelving. Even so, it seems more like an homage to the cramped old shelves than anything else, a little maze-like but also a little too orderly.

I guess they had their reasons for moving. Maybe the store lost its lease, or maybe patrons had a way of wandering into the further reaches of the book cave and were never heard from again.