That's the thing --- the one thing that really struck me about RWB is, in most documentaries, the "panel of experts" aren't very memorable. You remember the overall tone of the film, but if you were asked to pick the faces of the interviewees out of a lineup, you couldn't.
But for "Red, White & Blue"...these are people that audiences will remember and won't be able to stop talking about. Their honesty has been striking. The moments we had the opportunity to capture ranged from raw anger, to deep pathos, to over-the-top hilarity, and Amelia and I felt a great bond with everyone we spoke with. I find myself going over the weekend in my head again and again.
If the energy from the room translates to the screen --- and I think it will --- it bodes very, very well for the rest of the project.
The idea for a rehab center on Northerly Island started gaining momentum in 2003, shortly after Meigs Field was abruptly closed. The area falls along a migratory flyway used by more than 300 species of birds. One survey by the Field Museum suggests the annual death toll reaches into the thousands.I interviewed Robbie Hunsinger earlier this year for an article on her organization, Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, and she said the survival rate of birds who are picked up and treated is extremely high. This is good news as our city gets millions of birds, a meaningful portion of which are rare or endangered, flying overhead every year.
Bob O'Neill, president of the Grant Park Conservancy and Grant Park Advisory Council, heard about the statistics and started talking with conservationists about how to save injured birds. In April 2004 he organized a symposium with architects, birders, scientists, biologists and members of the Chicago Ornithological Society to brainstorm. Then he started lobbying anyone in government who would listen.
Last winter officials at the Park District started listening.
"They said, `You're right, we could use this at Northerly Island,'" O'Neill recalled. "It's right on the flyway. It's perfect."
So far, district officials have promised to give wildlife specialists one or two of five small rooms that line a long hallway near the terminal entrance, said Jim Chronis, the district's chief operating officer.
The site is temporary until planners decide the layout of the preserve, but conservationists say they hope that once the center is functioning, it will be given space in the new design.
The two rooms would provide enough space to set up a reception area, where birds could be evaluated, registered and weighed, and to segregate injured songbirds from the bigger birds of prey, said Dawn Keller, a wildlife rehabilitation specialist at the Flint Creek Wildlife Center in Barrington.
Keller, who will operate the Northerly Island facility once it opens, hopes to secure all five of the small rooms so that rehabbers can create a mini-hospital of sorts, with three bird sanctuaries, an X-ray room and space for emergency surgery.
"We could really become a premier city for bird rehabilitation," Keller said.
Dr. Buchman is Alan Buchman, a gastroenterologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. For more than a year, he has been fighting for a tree the way some men fight for God, country and playoff tickets.
The object of Buchman's ardor is an old silver maple, and he has called me about it over and over, along with environmentalists, other news media and City Hall.
"I've never encountered anyone like him," said Vi Daley, the 43rd Ward Alderman. "He's very sensitive to the trees on his block."
Buchman and his wife, Diane, live on Burling Street in Lincoln Park, on a block so gorged with new luxury development that, he says, construction vehicles are often triple parked.
Recently, when he said, "Good morning" to one of the few remaining old-timers, the man, accustomed to developers on the prowl, snapped back, "Not for sale!"
The imperiled maple stands on city property, in a patch of buckled brick, shading Buchman's townhouse but impeding driveway access of a big new next-door house proposed by a Maine developer.
Buchman's tree fight has kept the lot empty.Buchman says that this contest between new development and old trees extends all over construction-crazed Chicago--and that the trees are losing.
(Beatrice) Braidwood's mural, like 17 others in the Sherman Park fieldhouse, was thick with soot and varnish. Worse off are the murals that have split with cleaving plaster underneath. Others were subject to vandalism.Our murals really are a joy to see. I'm going to make an effort to take photos of some of my favorite to share with you. I couldn't find a comprehensive website, but this book is considered one of the main reference books on Chicago's murals. Even though the descriptions are brief, the color reproduction is solid.
The Park District is expected to approve $188,000 in matching funds Wednesday for a restoration project that will require thousands of hours of labor and cotton swabs to remove decades of decay and repair damages.
There are 58 murals in 11 Park District fieldhouses. The Chicago Conservation Center, which has nearly finished a similar but more extensive restoration of murals in the city's public schools, has raised corporate and private funds to match the city's contribution.
A neoclassical mansion designed by Daniel Burnham in 1896 could be demolished this summer in the Kenilworth, Ill., a Chicago suburb with no zoning ordinances to protect its many historic houses.
Last week, the new owners of a house designed by Prairie school architect George Maher, who lived in Kenilworth and designed about 40 houses there, tore down the structure to make way for a new house.
Our project documents the disease of abandonment of the built environment and its treatment. We aim to reveal the odd interaction of social and ecological forces that lead people to build, abandon and reclaim buildings and structures. Thus, we draw upon the fields of history, urban archaeology, ecology, sociology and architecture to investigate the troubled urban areas of the Midwest.
