SPRINGTIME, WET CITY

Best to be in the city when there’s no sun, the sky’s pewter and it’s raining or maybe it isn’t.  We dress for it, we carry things for it, our mind is set to “just in case” and by the end of the day we aren’t sure if any of it was necessary.  We feel the fools, won’t make the same mistake tomorrow and then tomorrow we’ll get a good and proper soaking.  Always a day late and a dollar short they say, that’s city living in the Springtime.

We feel like “it” wants to get us, too many clothes or not enough, caught out hot or cold and then the sneezing.  But this is what we know through all of that, when the season’s drear the best place of all to be is right here, downtown somewhere downtown anywhere.  When stone’s wet, glass is wet, all pavements wet, reflecting everything that’s lit up. Then it’s the best place to be, right downtown.

And what about this, let’s take a vote: every year and new Spring, who among us doesn’t think just once, “This time, this year, I’m going to beat ‘it’!”  Coats on, gloves off, just you and me Spring.  Because we’re all so much smarter than the last time, aren’t we?

From Wells Street Bridge, Rainy Day, City Sun
nan turpin photograph   

WHAT’S IN A MAKEOVER?

Looking for Light
nan turpin photograph

Spring is the actual true season for beginnings, not our unconvincing New Years of contrived resolutions.  In this season we have  momentary clairvoyant vision of a different future produced by impending change, etc. etc.  Looking for the light and all that.  Agreed.  

Primary Source will argue this morning that Springtime is the Historical season because it is the time we anticipate change, the future, with optimism and not dread.  Right now we are all saying “But I love the Fall or Winter’s my favorite season” but you take my point: which is that in those precious times when change promises good things, we can admit the transitory nature of all and sundry and “historicize” the whole shebang.  

Primary Source is just going to go ahead and say that while that’s not always a comfortable way to proceed, it’s probably useful.   

 

And this brings us to this morning’s newspaper and the Chicago Tribune story on Nordstrom’s department store’s big freshening project.  This Nordstrom’s is inside a shopping mall on North Michigan Avenue and, mall-style, is sealed off from daylight.  That will change now and the day as well as the outside world will become part of the shopping experience.  Store spokespeople call it an effort to remain “relevant” to what shoppers want.  This is something that retail likes to do periodically.  

Primary Source loves these relevance-adjustment moments, especially when they are made tangible like this one, part of daily life, part of shopping.  This morning’s story talks about different departments in the store that will be re-designed, rebuilt for different, changing shopping practices.  The customers are changing the way they do things because their world is changing, what they expect is changing.  

Part of it is that the way they are stimulated, or as we used to say the way they get information, is changing, the way people perceive each other, interact with each other or don’t is changing, all of that.  And all of that affects the way they spend their money or don’t.  A tangible store, one that isn’t a hologram, like a store in a real shopping center, has to compete with on-line effervescence and that’s just one thing.   So Nordstrom’s is making a really big window to the world (see 17th century).  

That’s a very big change.  It’s a “makeover” among all the many makeovers that we love to watch. It’s another before and after moment in our daily life, even if we don’t really shop, it is happening out there.  And that’s a little bit what history is.  Looking for lipstick a whole new way.  Seriously.

 

 

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Bobby G. for the Business pages

Thanks to Joan and Brian for great big daffodils from Michigan

DECIPHERING THE OBVIOUS

LHS
nan turpin photograph

Primary Source has a simple test for the morning news.  If, on first read, we have a “nagging question,”  move on and see if in an hour we can remember what it was.  If we can (remember), the question is quite possibly the question whose answer will begin to explain all that is unexplained.  

This morning, one hour later (the timer just went off) the question is still a real one.  Here’s the situation: Chicago Tribune, front page story on Vatican canonization of  two popes, one’s Polish, that’s front page in this town, fine.  Not the question.  A few inches into the story, the reporter(s) describe both pope saints as major figures (“giants” actually) of the (here it comes) “…post-Word War II…era…”  

Five years ago that was a typo, short and sweet, don’t give it a second thought.  But now, ankle-deep in the Digital Age, the question stirs.  Was it a typo (for “post-World War II”)?  Or was it carefully preserved by a beleaguered editor who assumed that Office Suite had a new Word version called Word War II.  

Doubt stiffened when Primary Source moved to the next column, a heartfelt story on valiant efforts by some forward thinking educators (peds agog) to teach math, science, history and up up to the stars by video games.  

Said one proud 12-year old, using the video game to create an energy supply grid for a whole city, out of your own head, was a way of “…understanding how something might have actually looked or happened.”  Mebbe.

Since old familiar words like “knowledge” are still part of that teaching world, Primary Source thought she should climb inside her own head, plump the cushions, make a pot of cerebral tea and consider that the 6th graders might just be getting this one right.  Who are we to say?  And if it’s true, then, back to Word War II in the story next door.  Sometime today Primary Source will be checking the contents of the latest generation of the Office Suite.  She might have to upgrade to Word War II, small price to pay for staying a current citizen of her world. 

But why the photograph at the top of this column, right?  

The connection’s sideways to be sure, so follow me to the land of oblique:  This is a detail of the ornament on the old Carson, Pirie, Scott Building on State Street, now Sullivan Center with the Target store the main tenant.  Louis Sullivan was the architect, Louis Henry (Henri) Sullivan, LHS.  

For all the thousands or tens of thousands of times one has past that entrance, admired the ornament and moved on, not once did the architect’s signature reveal itself.  Two days ago Primary Source took the Sullivan tour lead by Frank Y., volunteer docent for the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and it was Frank who said look closely…keep looking…et voila!  

Thank you Frank, thank you LHS, thank you Word.  Message transmitted.

ONE THING HIDES ANOTHER

Congestion
nan turpin photograph

Here’s what we like in the older parts of the cities:  those close, closing in spaces, where words and lights and buildings and girders and intermittent lots-of-noise, all scrum together and you’re caught in the middle of it, if you want.  Your call.  This is Wabash Avenue in the Chicago Loop, with the elevated train overhead, the best that 19th century engineering has to offer and what’s left of the old jeweler’s district overhead on the other side.  Here’s where all the time zones huddle together, three centuries now, 19, 20, 21.   On a Sunday afternoon, when there’s not so much competition for sidewalk space back here on Wabash, you might just stop and have a good look around and enjoy a breath of fresh Spring breeze and old time urban congestion.

SATURDAY MORNING IN THE ‘HOOD

Safe Keeping
nan turpin photograph

Saturday morning in the neighborhood which is Chicago Loop.  Sunshine and shoppers, zealots, culture cravers, and some people working.  This little alley, invisible until a bridal veil-length of welder’s sparks catches the eye.  Keeping the little treasure safe a little longer.  Everything about it is quiet, on the q.t. except this stream of fire in Springtime.  And yes, the identity of this building is protected the better to protect it.

THEY’LL BE BACK

Coming and Going
nan turpin photograph

Primary Source is out looking around today and will show and tell tomorrow.  

Thanks for looking in and listen closely today, you’ll hear things growing. 

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF TRYING

100 Years Ago Yesterday
nan turpin photograph

Even White Sox fans could not fail to be moved by Chicago’s grand opera of yesterday afternoon.  The Chicago Cubs and their beleaguered, legendary fans celebrated the 100th anniversary of the park -April 23, 1914, a mere couple of months or so before the start of World War I.  Blair Kamin’s front page Chicago Tribune story yesterday gave all the details you could want including a handy timeline graphic of changes made to the park.

The afternoon game vs. the Arizona Diamondbacks (team named for a snake=what good comes of that?) was a birthday party as well. By the ninth inning, budweisered bleacher bums clutched souvenir blue and white anniversary cupcakes like winners.  Until then a Cubs’ birthday win seemed impending.  That would be a triumph to undo the 20th century curse (see Goat) and the misspent enthusiasm of The Quintessential Cubs Fan, (see The B-man). No need to go into what happened next.  Read the sports pages for that.  This is not the time or place for a gratuitous Southside taunt.

At the end of their losing century a subsequent birthday defeat was the deepest cut of all.  One lady fan of a certain age said in the funereal procession out of the Bleachers, “Losing on your birthday…that just sucks.  Oh, excuse me.”  And a man who looked like he might actually own an old blue Ford pickup watched another man get crapped on by a Wrigley gull, laughed the wincing laugh of the Cub fan, “That’s adding insult to injury.”

What is moving about the Cub fans is that after a hundred years of it, they still take losing hard.  Losing has kept all its freshness in their world and their beautiful ballpark is the shrine to the dark side of the culture outside the park that worships “winning.”

We can be in Wrigley Field and know that there is still one place where there is no shame in Mudville.  There’s just the abiding melancholia and 100th Birthday Cupcake.  Happy Birthday Cubbies. Your fans do you proud.

The photo essay that follows is meant to be a tribute to the Cub Fan:  

URBAN MOODS, GETTING THEM RIGHT

 

THE CITY CALMS…
nan turpin photograph

North America is a place where so many of us are apart from the ones we live, the family, the friends.  Someone’s in trouble and someone else must stay put and know about it.  Any given day our sidewalks bear the unknown portion of those who would be elsewhere, at the side of the dear friend or family.  We go about our days as if we knew no more than yesterday.  

In Chicago, city of broad measure as well as “broad shoulders”  we can find the quiet place to think within five-minutes’ walk of some of the most exciting cityscape on the continent.  And every day that’s what’s happening here.  

It makes Primary Source wonder if, in a place like this, the people who live in it are able to be attuned to their moods because they can, should they wish, get to just the place they need.

This column is dedicated to Francois and Rose-France.

 

THE CITY EXCITES

LOOK UP, SPIN AROUND, ARCHI-CRUSH CHICAGO

TOP TO BOTTOM,
3 LAYERS
nan turpin photographs

HAROLD WASHINGTON LIBRARY ELEVATED STOP, CHICAGO

Foreign visitors to Chicago sometimes say they come for the architecture and that’s to be expected in this town probably.  But if we press them for more explanation many will say they come for the varieties of architecture, for the stunning, surprising combinations of architectural styles, for the extant, visible record of technology – masonry to steel frame, stair to elevator buildings, small windows with ornamental framing to glass curtain walls, all of it there all around us if we look up.

Chicago bard and historian Greg Borzo, who literally wrote the book on the “El” argues the Chicago Elevated has contributed importantly to saving some of the old building stock around it.  The more expensive per square foot more modern towers built blocks away from the Loop El because who would pay top dollar to look at and listen to a train.  Primary Source is charmed by Greg’s argument.  

Primary Source likes to walk with head in the clouds, panning across all the buildings that crush together in our very own and local tapestry of how it all came to be.  (But also to keep a keen eye on Chicago’s other trademark, cracked and irregular pavement.)

Additional Source: Greg Borzo, The Chicago El, for full reference, see Greg’s website http://www.gregborzo.com/.  He presented his Chicago El study last night at Hafele, an architectural hardware firm.

ABLE TO LEAP SMALL MARKETS IN A SINGLE BOUND

It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s…
nan turpin photograph

This was a cold storage building in the Fulton Market neighborhood of Chicago, refrigerated lockers for tomorrow’s steak dinner.  

Soon it will be a new regional headquarters for Google.  No sooner was the Google rumor out, the building scraped clean of old non-digital crud, than it also became the big brood hen for all the little “start-up” tech companies that would be warmed to life by mere proximity to the beast that cannot fail.  Unless its bobbling stock needs more and more explaining.  

And now the community is meeting and now a modest deli owner well southwest of the construction site says tech money is moving west along 18th St. toward him.  And buying delicious take-out sandwiches in his wonderful shop, so who’s complaining and yet, right?  

And that’s the pickle the west by southwest by northwest side of Chicago is in right now.  Google & ilk:  they mess with the local dollar culture because what do they care because they have lots o’ dollars.  They smell good.  They stink pretty/purty, like our Dad used to say.  They have that heady perfume of “inevitability” the google that always was and always will be:  I have googled the future and it is, etc.  Until the business pages start running convoluted, apologetic stories about why Google stocks are actually just fine and why tech stocks don’t really need a “valuation” check by their investors.  

So recalibrating a city’s economy on a single industry, now tech, our mayor wants it, should simply proceed because what could possibly go wrong.  Chicago has a mayor who seems to enjoy this new toy of a city that he can save from its own pension fund.  What we see with the Google/tech company onslaught here is the latest attempt to solve all municipal shortfalls by a mono-economy.  

It had been the tourist industry, until serial recessions changed convention/conference culture, corporations and technology switched to conference calls and webinars, and Chicago hotels were hit with higher and higher taxes.

Chicago has seen two mayors now whose public statements and policy direction indicated they place financial hope in increasing the property tax revenue stream.  Give significant perks to magnets that can attract greater residential density and continually raise property taxes.  The classic “win-win” with its classic dark-dark side.  

There are in the world places that have policy-driven modest, stable property taxes, to allow stable populations.  People are not forced into property tax migration and the “social fabric” is quite different.  Not so American cities like Chicago.  

Here’s what can happen when the meat lockers of the Fulton Market Cold Storage Building are future-filled with meta data:  tech workers those who service them will be able to afford to live in the larger central urban area until their big bite of the current economy performs the way things tend to like to perform in that financial system (erratically).  They will then be “underwater” on the prairie where the winters can be very cold and long.  

And then the city will be saved by yet another mono-syllabic mono-economy.  Etc.  Panacea-on-Prairie, USA.

 

Acknowledgements:

*See the Chicago Historic Landmarks Commission’s preliminary report on the Fulton Market district landmarking status, at their website.  Their preliminary staff reports are treasures.

*Thanks to Barbara B. for the west side deli discovery!