Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey) 

Mad for Mod? Check out this link on the website of the preservation group Landmarks Illinois. School of the Art Institute graduate students, led by Landmarks Illinois' Jim Peters have surveyed 700 buildings built between 1935 and 1975 in Chicago's North Shore and northern suburbs. It's a fascinating collection of schools, industrial buildings, shops, etc. They even got one of my favorites, the Pedian Rug Co building on Lincoln Avenue in the town of Lincolnwood.

The Pedian building and that great sign, unfortunately, were demo'd in 2007--reminding us all of the fragile nature of modernism and the need for the SAIC study. But then again, there's always hope: Seattle just landmarked a boarded up Denny's restaurant from 1964.

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

I'm convinced Chicago does not like the Aon Building. Probably never has.

Completed in 1973, this tall, granite-clad box east of Michigan Avenue on Randolph never really earned a place among the city’s most-loved skyscrapers, despite it being (for now, at least) Chicago's second tallest building and the third-tallest in the U.S. With its near-white color and vertical sweep of deep-set windows, the former Standard Oil headquarters looked more like a fluted column; an intentional deviation from the dark, steel-and-glass modernism expressed in the work Mies van der Rohe, C.F. Murphy & Associates and Skidmore Owings & Merrill. 

(Above: A view of the second floor lobby as the elevator doors close) 

“Architects, like women, are susceptible; what is currently fashionable influences them,” the building's architect Edward Durrell Stone told the Chicago Tribune during the building’s construction. “And what has been currently fashionable is the glass box.”

(Above: My office is on the 22nd floor of the Aon Tower. The views are striking.) 

Stone clad the 80-story tower with 14 million pounds of marble from the mountains above Carrara, Italy---the quarries where Michelangelo himself selected marble four centuries earlier. Within a decade the marble panels were in danger of falling off so the tower was re-clad in granite at a cost of $60 million, half the building’s original $120 million construction price. Still, Aon Center boasts a number of great features including virtually column-free floors and a bi-level plaza.

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(photo by Lee Bey) 

You know what I like? The last scene of the original "Ocean's 11." The caper has gone wrong and the Rat Pack is walking down the Vegas strip, dejected while passing marquees with their real names on them. If I owned this cleaners, a film camera and a 1960s suit...

..for that matter, this place in Highland Indiana, too. In the meantime/in between time/EE-OO-ELEVEN....

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

Okay, its not Cuba. It's a auto junkyard at 95th and Colfax.

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(photo by Lee Bey) 

Sorry for the decrease in posts this week. The cold weather and the day job have conspired again. 

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(photos by Charles Caldwell) 

My brother-in-law Charles, who got back into photography recently, dug up a ton of his negatives of from the mid- to late 1970s. What a blast. Above is a young Nikki Giovanni speaking at Iowa State University. I think I found some images of activist Dick Gregory as well. Many of the images he took were in and around Chicago's Harlan High School while he was a student there.

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Well...not quite.

But I do appear on the Chicago Sun-Times website in this installment of reporter Mark Konkol's stellar "Real Chicago" series. Photographer Rich Hein, who my go-to guy for architectural photography when I was architecture critic there from 1996 to 2001, does the video work here. You'll note in the set-up that I talk about a few buildings that we never got around to discussing in the piece, but never mind. It was fun hanging out with the old gang and the package proves--once again--that the web has emerged as the place for coverage of architecture and urbanism.

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(photo by Lee Bey) 

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

The recent discussion over the fate of William Walker's All of Mankind mural in the old Cabrini Green area got me to thinking about other murals in the city. The above artwork is painted on a store at 79th and Maryland.

^Beneath an underpass on west Garfield Blvd.

^Near 45th and Michigan

^Near 67th and Cottage Grove

^ Young woman working on a mural at Archer and Clark in 2006

^At 90th and Commercial

^87th and Bishop 

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

It's too cold to go outside today. So let's stay indoors and look around a Lustron house in Beverly Shores, IN.  

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

It was nearly ten degrees Sunday in Anchorage, Alaska. It was six degrees in Chicago--if you were lucky. I spent some time in the northwest suburbs and my normally generous car thermometer read three degrees. The wind was like razor blades running down the street with all the freedom of the bulls of Pamplona. Except running only made it worse.

(What's the Hawk? Ask the great Lou Rawls)

Yet the city shrugs off the cold. Chicago will be Chicago. No matter how cold it gets, people will shop, work, travel, gather and laugh. Only they will bundle up first.

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(photos by Lee Bey) 

I just ran across a batch of photos I took in 2005 and 2006 of the decaying Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, IL. The mall opened in 1966--and closed about 10 years later---is best known for getting trashed by the Jake & Elwood Blues in the 1980 movie "The Blues Brothers." This trailer shows the scene at the 1:10 mark. But the whole thing is worth watching.

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(Photo by Lee Bey) 

Heavy drizzle leading to significant snowfall in the late evening and overnight. 

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Today's Election Day in Illinois and although the Urban Observer is not partisan, he does appreciate a good campaign commercial when he sees one. This one is by Jay Paul Deratany, who is running against long-time incumbent Joseph Berrios for a seat on the Cook County Board of Tax Review.  

Substance-wise, the commercial is typical for self-styled maverick politicans: You paint the incumbent as dishonest or inept, then tie him in the dishonesty and ineptitude going on in government generally. But the 30-second spot does it with a catchy jingle, effective voice overs and rather manic animation.

(For the sake of equal time, here is Berrios on Comcast newsmakers.) 

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(photo by Lee Bey) 

Modernism devotee Joe Kunkel of the great group Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond has turned me on to the work of an under heralded modernist, Edward Humrich, who designed a score of nature-embracing homes along Chicago's North Shore in the 1950s and 1960s. Above is a home he designed in south suburban Olympia Fields. Read more about him here and here.

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