WHO LOVES A PARADE? WE DO!

FLIGHT!
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More news from Wabash Avenue in Chicago: yesterday’s old fashioned art school carnival.  This one’s “Manifest” at Columbia College.

Despite the current vicissitudes of higher ed. these students are up for acting arty, in the cold, drizzle, and dim of a Spring Day.  

Here’s a DIY parade:  squint quick through these snapshots for a history of flight, from kite to aeroplanes and aviatrixes and it all starts with a Big Girl, Head in Clouds.

These days college, learning, are all twisted up with big money, big debt, big career, big pressure.  Primary Source has been sensing a change in students and right now we’ve got a good crew of them out there.  They’ve put their little aviator’s caps on and we think they’re trying to get things right!  Ready for take off, here they come!

Congratulations from Primary Source to all the ones of all ages graduating on behalf of the many not the few.  Ready for take off!

Look up
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Primary Source is taking a reading day today and invites the Primary Source community to do the same.  Here’s a picture from the Ryerson Library inside the Art Institute of Chicago.  When our day has bits and pieces of overlooked time we can always snatch them for even the smallest bits of reading.  Even fifteen minutes on the pages can give us a feeling of being part of something very old.  A little reading every day can give us that geologic peace the dinosaurs might have felt.  And since it is now truly Springtime, we can take our precious minutes to a park bench and when we look up see a ring of trees around us.  Springtime, as the French say, time to turn the page.

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
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WHAT’S IN A MAKEOVER?

Looking for Light
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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

ONE THING HIDES ANOTHER

Congestion
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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
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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.

HAPPY EASTER FROM “THE CITY THAT WORKS”

E. Bunny Goes to Work
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Happy Easter in the most secular or seasonal cyclical way for today it is and Primary Source was quick and lucky enough to catch this rare photo of Easter Bunny on his way to the job.  Unable to disclose Mr. B’s daily reading material at this time.  Updates possible.

Once more, from Primary Source, your source for the historical debris of our time, a non-controversial wish of Happy Easter, daffodils, jelly beans and all of that until sundown.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3 in our current photo essay Too Fast, Not Furious Enough,  Change in One Chicago Neighborhood. 

STAND STILL IN SUNLIGHT (MORE SPRING)

Lounging on State Street
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If there’s doubt about the season just take a look at State Street (yes, still a “great street”) in Chicago.  As this photo shows, people are now lingering again.  Yesterday we documented actual shirtsleeve lounging.  People stopped their forward thrust, stopped consulting the palms of their hands, looked at each other, finished the sentence, listened to the other guy and enjoyed the sunlit conviviality of an early Spring morning.   Soon we’ll be used to this kind of comfort and return to jet propelled endless device gazing but yesterday, today, people are smarter than their phones.  They’re out there doing what people do best, stopping for a chat in the sunshine.  This is not what computers mean by “live chat.”

IDENTITY CRISIS – IT’S SPRING

Not Storks 2014
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This pair turned heads in downtown Chicago yesterday.

It was warm enough to stop and gawk so sidewalk superintendents of how birds should act did that.  What would’ve been appropriate, if unsettling, would have been a couple of storks nesting in a chimney, in Alsace, for example.  That picture would have made sense although one always wonders what it’s like, living around the fireplace above which storks launch their world-wide baby delivery & overpopulation conspiracy.  But these are geese.

If Canadian geese have not yet honored your town you may think this is just plain cute. But if they have overstayed their welcome where you live, they’re likely an infestation, fouling entire park systems and destroying the citizens’ right to picnic and roll around carefree on the grass.  These geese overreached, no way around it.

And here is another pleasure ofSpring time in Chicago and our return to a concocting as many Canadian Geese-based insults as possible.  Should you think this harsh, please spend the summer with us.  We’ll have a picnic!  You bring the blanket.

GOLDBERG VARIATIONS IN THE SPRING

What’s Left in Spring
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Looking for signs of Springtime in Chicago — you might find UNESCO-protection-worthy piece of mid-century modern architecture near the end of demolition.  Here’s a picture of what’s still left of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital for Northwestern Hospital.  For a beautiful photo of the building in its glory and glimpse of the unsuccessful fight to save it last year, go to the Chicago Historic Landmarks website.

Right now, now, there’s still time to stroll by on a Spring sunny day and admire the last view of it and think of what Jean Gabin said to Michelle Morgan in Quai des Brumes…”You still look good (t’as de beaux restes, tu sais)!  That tough line of dialogue a love poem to damaged beauty.  In early Springtime beauty is in our minds early, when nothing has happened, no green, no leaves, no blossoms.  We’re working on beauty from memory and we can do that much with even a fragment of this lovely lunar building by Bertrand Goldberg.  And we can continue to do it until the institution that owns it has completed its attempt at complete erasure.