Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey)

The severe concrete wall that surrounds Oak Woods Cemetery gives off a distinct impression: Don't come in here. Unless you have to.

The other side of that wall is worth exploring--whilst you can. Oak Woods features 125 acres of the city's best and most pristine landscapes. Yes, there are mausoleums, monuments, tombs, grave markers and the like. But there are four lakes. rolling topography, striking vistas and a variety of trees and other plantings. A vision of heaven. At 67th and Cottage Grove.

Oak Woods was designed by Prussian-born landscape architect Adolph Strauch who helped revolutionize 19th century cemetery design using lawns, open space and ideal placement of burial markers and monuments to create a feeling of peace and order.

The designs were also a way to fashion a modern response to death. Oak Woods and other cemeteries of the age helped liberate American burial from the province of crowded church properties and desolate boneyards---just as landscape architects Jens Jensen and Frederick Law Olmsted brought a new vision to urban parks.

Walking through Oak Woods--this is not a ghoulish thing; its a very stroll-able cemetery--is like a tour through a history book. Mayor Harold Washington, Cap Anson, Enrico Fermi, Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Jesse Owens are among the notables buried here. So are many folks who are forgotten to history, including World War II Marine Corps pilot Donald Aldrich who shot down 20 Japanese planes only to be killed in 1947 while landing at an airstrip (now gone) at 84th and Cicero.

I remain moved by this child's headstone, tended with dedication and a broken heart.

Six-thousand Confederate soldiers who died at Chicago's Camp Douglas are memorialized at Oak Woods. So is mobster Big Jim Colosimo. Or at least I think Big Jim is still there. After a visit I took there about two years ago, I ain't so sure.

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(photo by Lee Bey)

Vacant apartment buildings and storefronts at 71st and Cottage Grove. 

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Sure, its satire. But the house of satire is built on a foundation of truth.

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(photo by Lee Bey)

Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette, IL, desiged by French Canadian designer Louis Bourgeois. The faith has seven temples across the globe. I've known this building for years, but just recently discovered the identity of its architect. Here's some info on the man and the building here.

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The Soul Closet has nothing to do with architecture, but is "a look back at 20th century African American pop culture: advertising, film, music, fashion."

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(photos by Lee Bey)
Foundation construction is expected to start within weeks on the Santiago Calatrava-designed Chicago Spire, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reported this week. Here's what I said two years ago--has it been that long?--on CBS 2 Chicago about a previous version of the project by a different developer.
 

I paid a visit to Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill's new offices. The former Skidmore Owings & Merrill partner and associate partner formed Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture in late 2006. Their penthouse office on the top floor of 111 W. Monroe (the true architecture nerds in town will spot the irony there) is a crisp and well-turned place with a Steinway grand piano in the reception area. Dig the logo over Gordon's right shoulder.

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(photos by Lee Bey)

Since 1973, the aged facade of Stranger's Home Missionary Baptist Church, 617 W. Evergreen has been enlivened by All of Mankind, a mural by Chicago artist William Walker. The mural is weathered and faded now, but the work's scale and power remain evident. Dedicated to the ideal of racial harmony, the mural features four conjoined multi-ethnic characters at center, surrounded by a host of faces and scenes. The mural also included the names of slain figures such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Malcolm X, Anne Frank and Jesus Christ. The NEA-funded mural took three years to complete. Walker is a supremely gifted artist and muralist whose work I've just discovered in the past year. Across town, Walker created a mural that is a counterpoint to the optimism of Mankind: the stunning Man's Inhumanity to Man at 47th and Calumet, painted in 1975. A detail of the mural, painted on the side of a single-story commercial building, is below:

At once courageous and terrifying, Inhumanity was created by Walker and fellow artists Mitchell Caton and Santi Isrowuthakul. Read from left to right, a cold-eyed Nazi and a pair of Klansmen approvingly look out on a tapestry that begins with a heroic and colorful African figure, then jump cuts to nightmarish set pieces that include flowing liquor bottles; a skull-eyed drug dealer (detail above) with a star-spangled hatband; wilted flowers; illegal pills frozen in mid-toss; a serpent; a couple embracing lustily...and a written plea for peace.

The details provide pointed social commentary: a pimp rides comfortably in a gilded convertible that is strapped to the back of a weary woman; a well-dressed white oppressor holding a bag of money stands over the body of a black man--on second glance you noticed an equally sartorial black man is standing there as well, equally pleased over the fallen state of his brother. One detail is of a man hopelessly trapped inside of a hypodermic needle. A Klansman and a black nationalist  point guns at each other in an angry, futile, stalemate.

The scenes and figures float in a dark and disturbing psychedelica, as if the Yellow Submarine surfaced in grim 1970s Chicago. Decades of sun, wind and rain had worn away the mural's colors and vibrancy, but a 2003 restoration by Chicago artists Damon Lamar Reed and Moses X. Ball returned the works visual--and visceral--punch.

At Stranger's Home MBC, the demolition of the nearby Cabrini Green housing projects is creating a new neighborhood while bringing development pressures to his now-valuable area. But what better place than a regentrifying neighborhood to restore a mural that embraces cooperation, equality and the value of all humanity?

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It still feels funny to drive down east 63rd Street between Stony Island and Cottage Grove in the Woodlawn neighborhood and see virutally nothing. Coming up in the 1970s, I remember when that stretch of 63rd was a dense near-mile of shops, a theater, bank buildings, offices, a grocery store, and restaurants topped by a roaring elevated train. In the 1970s, my oldest sister, Claudette, worked at the two Vito's Grocery stores on 63rd. My father bought his steel-toed Hi-Test workboots from a shoe store there.

Much of the street and the EL was demolished about 15 years now. Since then, east 63rd has been an urban prairie largely, with new middle-class housing coming in and inching its way westward.

But I don't want to be too nostalgic about this thing. The once-mighty 63rd Street was one of the saddest commercial strips in Chicago by the time it was demolished. It was disappearing via neglect. Stores were vacant and prone to fires. I once saw a half-block burn in 1989 one night when I was a City News Bureau reporter. So help me, the other half burned a week later.

But all of that is but pretext. Today I present scenes of a film from my youth, The Monkey Hustle--a title that would not pass muster today--from 1976. The plot is immaterial: a light, post-Uptown Saturday Night comedy with African American characters running rinky-dink hustles and street scams on each other. The inaugural scam involves the swiping of a carton of Wanser's milk. Truffaut, this ain't. There is a subplot involving the Crosstown Expressway, so give the filmmakers some credit. And I'm not saying this movie is a bomb, but I think the ATF found a spool of wire and two copies of The Monkey Hustle underneath the floorboards in Lefty Rosenthal's car in Vegas back in 1983...

Where was I? Oh yes...The Monkey Hustle was filmed in Woodlawn and watching it now is like opening a time capsule of the neighborhood. A lot of the action takes place on old 63rd Street. In the scene above, a neighborhood activists office looks out on the South East Bank building at 63rd and Drexel, if memory serves. You can catch a bit of the Jackson Park el in the background.

In this scene below, The Woodlawn Organization's (T.W.O) old HQ is clearly visible. The latticework of the now-departed Jackson Park el runs overhead.

Below: A Queen Anne styled station on the old Jackson Park line. (The line was built for the Columbian Exposition), a pretty mean pair of Afros and a glimpse of Harold's Chicken Shack #7. None of this exists today. I bet the red Ford Granada was the first to go, though.

Below: Another view of 63rd, looking southwest, if I recall. Look at  the big shop windows on the York Clothes Store. And to the right is Kham & Nate's Shoes an African American-owned business, now defunct, to the right. They used to have a location at 87th and Cottage Grove, but that's another story.

Below: Outside of Woodlawn, the movie shows us the old LaSalle Street Metra Station, which was demolished in the 1980s. The scene on the right shows the base of the Tribune Tower and the grid-faced Equitable Building as Yaphet Kotto and Kirk Calloway (who was quite good in Cinderella Liberty) join forces to chase down the people who convinced them to appear in this movie.
 

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(top and bottom photos by Lee Bey) 
These pages are an otherwise Trump-free zone, but I couldn't resist posting at least one photo of the  new Trump Tower under construction. The base and the only the beginnings of the shaft are completed and building is already rivaling the height of the IBM building to the left. And there's more where that came from. But that's not a complaint. I remember, as well as anyone, what was there before:

I am enjoying the unexpected views the new tower is beginning to provide. Walking up the stairs from Kinzie to upper Wabash last week, I found and fell in love with this one:

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A warm thanks to architecture critic Lynn Becker for mentioning me and the Urban Observer in his blog today. Overall, he makes an important point about the shrinking architecture coverage in this town. Lynn writes a fine blog himself. He does consistently great work critiquing what's been built--and  in showing how politics and clout shape development.

PS: I got a good chuckle out of this line in Lynn's piece: " Lee is in that euphoric stage, just before the postpartum letdown of realizing what a pain it can be keeping up with a blog's ravenous appetite for new content..."

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(photo by Lee Bey)
The former Tasemkin Furniture store at 46th and Ashland. You can look at the marquee to see what once drew the crowds there: household appliances by Admiral, Zenith, Speed Queen, Crown, Roper and (scratched out on the left, there) Amana, all advertised under the crisp, colorful flash of neon. Do these names mean anything anymore? Today, I bet they would generate about as much foot traffic as would a double feature starring John Agar and Faith Domergue.

Please forgive another reference here to the old tv show Crime Story, but one episode featured this great shot of the Tasemkin sign in all of its glory.

Tasemkin went out of business about 15 or 20 years ago. The Tasemkin name was pulled off that dark ribbon in the center and the building was used by a succession of discount furniture outlets, the last of which has now closed. And the superstore with the low prices and the big parking lot wins again.

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(photos by Lee Bey)
One of Chicago's best hidden gems: Auburn Lakes, a trio of lagoons north of 79th Street between the Rock Island Metra Line and Vincennes. The city and the Chicago Park District invested a chunk of cash restoring the lagoons and building Beaux Art bridges. Now if only a second wave could occur to restore some of the homes around the lakes. Would be nice if they could all shine like this one.

 Here's a view of a section of the areas as seen from the Rock Island Line embankment:

 A view of Mt Hermon Missionary Baptist Church (you can see the steeple in the upper left of the photo above):

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(photos by Lee Bey)
For nearly a year now, I've found it impossible to stay away from Michael Reese Hospital. But the reasons are architectural, rather than medical. The once top-flight institution has gone through hard times in recent decades, leaving a small collection of fairly nice modernist buildings sitting empty. 

The former waiting room above--look at the dust settling on those red chairs like old ghosts--is the shuttered Laz Chapman Pathology Institute. The institute once hosted research on kidney and lung diseases. It had the very latest in electron microscopes, animal testing labs--even an autopsy room--when it was built in 1965. Laz Chapman, for whom the building is named, was CEO of H. Kramer & Co., a brass-smelting company in the Pilsen neighborhood. His estate funded the $400,000 cost of construction. And that painting, there, above the down staircase: I wonder if that's Chapman himself looking out over the decay?

The empty circular Simon Wexler Psychiatric Research and Clinic Pavilion was designed by Chicago architects Ezra Gordon and Jack Levin. Built in 1962, this beautifully humane building was an outpatient facility with 35 interview rooms arranged around the circumference of the building. There is a skylight at the top and a research lab. Wexler was founder of Allied Radio Corp. His widow donated $150,000 of the building's $450,000 cost. The photo below (shot through a window) shows an interior staircase leading to the interview rooms. Peeling paint hangs from the ceiling and has collected on the floor.

 I'm not sure if the blood bank (below) is still in use. The lines and proportions of this low-slung, one story building are nonetheless worthy of attention.

Our visit today ends below...at the foot of the broken concrete steps of the former David T. Siegel Institute for Communicative Disorders. Built in 1970, the facility was designed to children who were blind, deaf or aphasic--or all of the above. The hospital's exterior way-finding sign, however, botches the building's name and mission, referring to the complex as the David T. Siegal Institute for Communicable Disorders.

Michael Reese represented a high-point in postwar medical campus planning and no wonder: Walter Gropius worked as a consultant to the hospital's planner Reginald R. Issacs. The hub of the campus at 29th and Ellis is a tightly-packed collection of buildings including a 1960s bedtower and a six-story main building from 1907. Things are less dense away from the center as low-rise, single- and two-story buildings dot park-like surroundings. I found one surprise during a recent visit: a monument marking the spot of the demolished Farragut Boat Club gym where the game of softball was invented.

These photos were just quick studies. What I'd really like to do is work with the hospital, walk the grounds and take the time needed to create a series of portraits for each of these buildings. And I'd love to get inside some of them. I'll let you know if I'm successful.

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(photo by Lee Bey)
I posted a link to this ingenious rock video tribute to Mies van der Rohe last week. Since then, I can’t get the song—or the images—out of my mind. So I did what any recovering newspaper architecture critic would do: I found a way to get another story out of it by tracking down the guy who created the video and the song. Meet Ted Kamp, a California creative soul who once lived in Chicago. His brother is writer and humorist David Kamp. Ted consented to a Q&A with the Urban Observer.

Q. What moved you to create this work?

A. There aren't enough rockin' songs about architecture. The master builders of the recent past have really come up with some colossal innovations and were often some mighty intriguing characters, if not outright nutjobs… I studied architecture a bit in college and I've stayed an enthusiast. For some reason, these tunes started popping up in my head in the course of reading about various architects and schools of architecture. I've been working in television for the past 12 years in a spectacularly unsatisfying career. I have decided to put my accumulated skills (writing/producing/directing/camera/editing/composing, etc) and quirky passions (architecture, etc) to use by creating my own little films to put out into the unspoiled artistic wilderness of the internet. 

Q: Why Mies? I mean when you’ve got "Louie Kahn, Louie Kahn, let me rockya Louie Kahn, let me rockya that’s all I wanna do...”

A. The Mies song has to have been with me for about 15 years. Architects like Mies catch my imagination because of the level of innovation and subsequent influence they have. I lived in Chicago for about ten years and I found not only his buildings fascinating, but also how Chicago's look transitioned through him. People in Windy City are actually more aware of architectural style because of Mies, Sullivan, Wright, etc. I remember some Second City sketches where Helmut Jahn was a punchline, which I thought unique. I chose to do the Mies tune for some practical reasons, including the availability of public domain images I could use, and buildings here in LA that I could shoot that are very directly derivative of his work.

Q. You’re the singer, the songwriter and the guy in the video? You do some mean shimmying and high-kicking in there.

A. I wrote and produced the song by myself using a midi keyboard to create various sounds, chords, etc. and loads of loops. I am the singer (and choreographer, for what that's worth.) 

Q: Do you have any other architects in mind for future songs and videos? I would imagine the Saarinens—either one—would be good. And I take this time to renew my plug for Louis Kahn.

A: I am at work on heaps of other architects. I like ones that are slightly less well-known than the superstars like Wright and Gehry (although I hear there are some hot selling t-shirts that say "Fuck Frank Gehry" - there's a rock song if I ever heard it.) I drive around the Los Angeles area a great deal, almost always with a camera or two in my car, so I keep collecting footage to use. Putting the songs together and editing takes a bunch of time, so it's been slow going. I also have a busy, schleppy life, what with the wife/kids/house/soul-crushing career/ mid-life ennui and all. But I vow that you will see more videos very soon, as this is apparently My Destiny. I'm even getting requests on YouTube, like Louis Kahn and Hans Poelzig. Go figure.

Q. I can’t wait to see more. Any parting words?

A: Say hi to everyone in Chicago. I miss them, but not the winters.

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The Chicago Transit Authority's funding problems prompted me to dig through my "Paper Skyline" files for this gem: the 1968 Chicago Central Area Planning study, which advocated pulling down the Loop el and replacing it with a vast new subway network. The proposal included an east-west shuttle subway that would have begun below Morgan Street at the University of Illinois-Chicago, run north to Monroe, then beneath Monroe to the lakefront, where it would meet a lakeside subway shuttle that would run between McCormick Place and Oak Street; and a new subway operating in a loop pattern beneath Franklin, Van Buren, Wabash and Randolph. The plan included high-quality physical connections between the new system and the existing trains coming into downtown.

Here is a subway kiosk of the downtown subway system that would have replaced the Loop el. (Look at the cars parked on the left...Chrysler 300s, 40 years before the fact?). In the top image, a glass wall on the left brings in sunlight and provides views of a sunken landscaped plaza. The image below shows one of the underground stations on the Monroe Street shuttle line.

The $1.4 billion system was slated for completion in 1975. The city needed the federal government to cover about $1 billion, but the Urban Mass Transit Administration was willing to put up only $500 million. Cash starved from the get-go, the project died before it could begin. 

Since this effort's demise, Chicago has never again dreamed this boldly--and was never again this visionary--about public transportation. Looking at it now, it's clear the project would have represented more than additional infrastructure for the CTA. This new system would have given the city's downtown a first-class rail system and provided the nucleus to revolutionize how we plan and fund public transportation in this region.

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Did "Starsky & Hutch" get reassigned to Chicago's Calumet Area Violent Crimes unit? (photo by Lee Bey)

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On South Cottage Grove. (photo by Lee Bey)

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At Kedzie and Ogden. Originally Douglas Park Auditorium, one of the many centers of Jewish life in the pre-World War II Lawndale community. In more recent decades, the building has been beautifully maintained as Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith. (photo by Lee Bey)

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(photo by Lee Bey)

First Church of Deliverance, an Art Moderne beauty at 4315 S. Wabash. The building was built in 1939 and designed by Walter T. Bailey, who was the first African American to hold an architecture license in Illinois. Those striking, terra cotta-clad twin towers, built in 1946, were designed by Kocher Buss & DeKlerk. The Rev. Clarence H. Cobbs was only 21 when he founded the predominantly black First Church congregation in 1929. The church began its radio broadcast in 1934, giving Cobbs and his 200-member choir a national reach and influence. The congregation's choir revolutionized the sound of gospel music in 1939 when its organist and composer Kenneth Morris convinced Cobbs to install the newly-created Hammond electric organ at the church. The church's gospel festivals in old Comiskey Park in the 1940s drew thousands. In 1953, the congregation became the first black church in the U.S. (quite possibly the world) to broadcast its services on television. WLS-TV carried those services live--a significant development, in retrospect--for 12 straight weeks, according to the First Church of Deliverance website. The church, designated a protected Chicago landmark in 1994, is still well-kept and in service by its congregation. And the choir still enjoys a bit of prominence, judging by this video clip.

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I found this video through the blog of Edward Lifson at WBEZ public radio. I like it. I can't stop singing the hook. And I don't think I want to, either. 

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A sweet near-miracle has taken place in Washington Park in recent years: the restoration of Lorado Taft's stellar Fountain of Time monument near 60th and Cottage Grove, just beyond the western edge of the Midway Plaisance. Built in 1922, the 102-ft long concrete sculpture depicts a procession of humanity marching before the unblinking eye of Father Time. The sculptor even cast himself as one of the figures. Taft orignally planned this work in granite. Architect John Vinci told me years ago that Taft considered bronze. But concrete was cheaper--a shame when you see the amount of detail Taft envisioned, judging by his plaster casts. Fountain of Time has an unbuilt companion piece, Fountain of Creation, planned for the eastern edge of the Midway. Here's another view of the model.

For decades, Fountain of Time looked like hell, to put it plainly. The concrete was soiled and pitted; the features hard to read; and the Howard Van Doren Shaw-designed reflecting basin--the cloaked figure of Father Time gazes across the basin--was dry and barren. The restoration led by sculptor Andrzej Dajnowski and a team of conservators brought back the subtlety and power of Taft's work. In my photo above, look at the muscularity in the man's arm or  the bridge of the woman's nose. These details had seemed long lost until now. I heard word the basin, now restored, would be filled with water again. I'll return with color photos once that happens.(photo by Lee Bey)

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I spied this Cadillac Fleetwood in traffic near 60th and Stony Island over the weekend. The driver volunteered to pull over and let me get a few shots of this magnificent piece of early 1960s Detroit metal. I've been photographing old American cars lately. I like the brashness, the muscularity, the confidence of the design. And maybe its because I'm kind of tired of driving a metal jellybean that looks like the next guy's metal jellybean. It's good to see the Chrysler 300 bring back a sense of adventure to American car design, but that's just one car. I told a contact of mine at General Motors two years ago that GM should respond to the 300 by creating an all-new Electra 225, but why should they listen to me? And Lincoln, if you're listening: Until you can once again give the public a car this visually exciting, you'll forever remain a semi-comatose division of Ford Motor Company. Anyway, if you're in a nostagic mood for the golden days of midcentury design---houses, cars, implements, etc---and you've got about 30 minutes to kill, check out the highly entertaining "The American Look," a promotional video from the 1958. (photo by Lee Bey)

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The last public housing highrise on State Street vanishes little by little, day by day, but very deliberately. Here's what this Stateway Gardens highrise looked like a few weeks ago. A skinny, four-story nub is about all that's left now.(photo by Lee Bey)

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Today's entry was going to be a screed against the regrettable state of public transit funding in the Chicago area. I was going to take to task the legislative leaders who have been unable (unwilling?) to give the CTA, RTA, Metra and Pace, the true fix that's been needed for a generation. I mean, could the stage for transit funding reform be any better set? We're paying nearly $4 a gallon for gas and spending billions more building and repairing highways that will be decaying and traffic-jammed within the next decade anyway. A good transit system can alleviate this madness for a lot of people, particularly the poor and working class. And good transit breeds better urban planning by fostering development around transit nodes instead of suburban highway off-ramps.  And speaking of the suburbs: it's easy to cluck one's tongue and pretend the transit funding crisis is a Chicago problem, as does this suburban newspaper columnist. Those inexpensive houses for sale in some remote ex-cornfield actually come with a considerable personal tax: the expense of purchasing, insuring and owning at least two cars in order to able to get around without public transportation. The cost is so substantial, mortgage lenders have created programs for the less car-dependent.

This is what I was going to say, then it hit me. It ain't just Illinois. Neither Congress nor the president has the resolve to allocate the vast amounts of cash needed to finally fix the nation's public transit. And not just this congress, or this president---none of them. Not even the batch currently running. They'll complain about gas prices and oil company profits in one session, then pours billions into highway construction and maintenance in the next. Amtrak gets no love and little money from Washington. The agency is currently asking for $1.5 billion in FY 2008. The president wants Amtrak to make due with $800 million. That's progress, I guess. In 2005 he offered the rail agency zero. I expect to see Amtrak joining the street beggars at 95th and Wentworth any day now.

Mass transit needs a Daniel Burnham. It needs someone is not only from the money-making, private sector, ruling class of Chicago who can design and articulate a plan for an entirely new regional public transportation network. The kind of person, like Burnham, who could turn fallow lakeside land into the fairgrounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition; someone who can look at the tattered produce markets along the Chicago River and envision the Beaux Art masterpiece that would become Wacker Drive.

....a person who can look at the current transportation situtation and lead us to a new one, where rail and bus service is expanded, fast, clean and efficient; with well-designed stations that are hubs of retail and residential activity. Mass transit needs a Daniel Burnham to show what this new system could look like and what it would do for the region. He could explain how Chicago can't live up to its "world-class city" boasts as long as commuters are creeping through slow-zones on a century-old train system or growing moss on their pants legs waiting for buses to come. Civic and political backing would coalesce around these ideas because the new Daniel (or Daniela) Burnham would also have the backing of the powerful...because the powerful would understand a region with a shoddily funded transportation system is not in their best interest.

The new Burnham could visit Washington and show lawmakers there how a new and properly funded national passanger rail system could efficiently link major cities, help decongest airports, and write new chapters for scores of small towns that would then be hardwired by fast rail to big urban areas.

"It'll cost trillions," Washington tell him. "We'll spend it anyway over the next two decades in an attempt to maintain the roads and systems we have now," he'll say. "And yet even that won't be enough." (photo by Lee Bey)

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Urban planning ideas in Chicago never really die; they just resurface when the time is right. Millennium Park along Michigan Avenue has an outdoor ice-skating rink, of course, but this rendering from 1957 shows the idea of skating near the boulevard had been around a while. This unbuilt rink was proposed on the south of Jackson, next to the Art Institute--about two blocks of where Millennium Park was later built. Look at the detailing. With modernism in Chicago in full bloom, planners were still willing to propose a Beaux Art rink. The light standard at right is contemporary, though. It's a beautiful rendering, by the way. I like view of South Michigan Avenue across the street...a perspective that hasn't changed that much since then: the Sante Fe Building is to the left; then the Chicago Symphony Orchestra building, the then-brand new and modernist Borg-Warner building is next to that. The broad fourth building with the columns near the top is the former People's Gas Building.

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In the city's redeveloping and regentrifying North Kenwood/Oakland community, a bit of the neighborhood's former self exists on east 43rd Street in the guise of the former Joy's Liquor Store. Its bars are drawn and rusted; its stock of cold beer and other provisions are long depleted. The store's only duty is to sit there, silent and blue, and await the change that will ultimately claim it. (photo by Lee Bey)

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I've been hooked on DVDs of "Crime Story," a drama that aired two seasons on NBC beginning in 1986. Set in early 1960s Chicago for most of its first year, the show tracked the exploits of the Chicago Police Major Crimes Unit and its commander, Lt. Mike Torello (played by Dennis Farina, a former Chicago cop in one of his best roles) as they try to capture hood-on-the-rise Ray Luca (played by Anthony Denison). It was a dark, brooding and violent show produced by director Michael Mann, a Chicago native whose better-known work, "Miami Vice" had made him a household name by then. Watch it now and it's alomst a dress rehearsal for the motion pictures "Goodfellas" and "Casino." And John Santucci's oafish but dangerous Pauli Taglia character in "Crime Story" is almost Version 1 of Paulie Walnuts on "The Sopranos." Most important for today's discussion: "Crime Story" made good use of Chicago locales and architecture. In the first scene of the pilot, the Major Crimes Unit men are awaiting a meal at Janson's, at 99th and Western when a call comes in. Torello, the tough cop, lived in Mies van der Rohe's 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive. There, he puts on a robe that has Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow as a design. I still want one of those. In another episode, the two Outfit guys--we don't call it "the Mafia" in Chicago---shove a character through the window of his Marina City apartment. The show's wounded are taken to St. Joseph Hospital, the darn-near Googie medical center at 2900 N. Lake Shore Drive. Later in the first season, it looks as if Torello has moved to the Mies-designed Commonwealth Promenade Apartments. The show's credits feature a shot of Torello and his men outside of Superdawg on Milwaukee and Devon. And mob boss Phil Bartoli lives in a circular modern house on Dee Road in Park Ridge. That's Bartoli (played by Jon Polito) on the left, sitting in the living room of the house with Johnny O'Donnell (played by a very young and scene-stealing David Caruso) and Denison's Ray Luca. The show is worth a look. A warning: Stay away from the utterly poor and directionless second season which wasn't filmed in Chicago anyway.

Posted by Lee Bey at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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Click on the above photo and check out a video clip of me rattling on a couple of years ago about Pride Cleaners at 79th and St. Lawrence.

I decided to revisit this clip today after reading the current edition of Focus, the publication of the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. There is a pretty good cover story on the need to preserve buildings of the recent past, especially those of the mid-20th century. It's a worthy discussion. Chicago closed the 1990s and began this decade with an impressive flourish, granting protected landmark status to the Inland Steel Building (1956), IIT's Crown Hall (1956) and the Daley Center (1965)--but as of late, nothing. (It still amazes me that Marina City has not been landmarked, but this building has?) 

At any rate, its time to move mid-century buildings to the forefront. It can provide Chicago with another opportunity to lead other cities by good example, given how endangered moderism is around the U.S. (Google "modernism demolition" and the toll is surprising). The city's landmarks division should be given the resources to  finally complete its long-under wraps survey of buildings built after 1940. The survey could become a tool to drawing attention to these treasures and rallying the interest and financing needed to preserve them. The effort must include the powerful ensemble to modernist towers downtown, but it must laso make room to assess the worthiness of funky Googie motels, dry cleaners and neighborhoods such as Jeffrey Manor, Marynook, Pill Hill and others that were also shaped by modernism's faith in design, technology and the future.

Posted by Lee Bey at 02:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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