That's the slogan of the National Building Museum. They're a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and exploring our built environment from the viewpoints of construction, urban planning, design, architecture, and engineering.
What a beautiful day for a walk. What a bonus that I wandered aross this bit of history lingering on the north face of a building on the 1900 block of Bissell in Lincoln Park. (It's now a single family home, but must have once been a storefront.)If you click on the photo, it becomes a bit larger. The "Eventually" is written on a diagonal across the top left, and in smaller letters on the bottom right is the "Why Not Now?"During (1907), Washburn, Crosby launched its long-running advertising slogan, "Eventually-Why Not Now?" B.S. Bull, the company's advertising manager, is credited with the creation of the slogan. As the story goes, he was editing a wordy text about the superior quality of Gold Medal Flour and found, that when he was finished he had edited out all the words except 4: “Eventually." He then added, "Why Not Now?"
Having had this brilliant idea, he was struck with self-doubt and tossed the paper into the wastebasket. It was said to have been found by a young member of the firm, James Ford Bell, who later became the first president of General Mills, Inc. (The slogan was used on billboards, company trucks, train cars, flour bags and in the company's printed advertisements, appearing as late as the early 1950's. . . . "
"You won't allow someone to add a dormer to their cottage, but you're going to allow a skyscraper on top of the New York Life Building?" asks Jonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, which included the structure on its 2002 list of "Chicago's Seven Most Threatened Buildings."
From the quiet beginnings with a snare drum, the relentlessly recurring theme moved in a slow, continuous crescendo from section to section, to the strings, to the woodwinds, each having their own solo turn to shine, before climaxing in blaring brass and full tutti that collapses into a brief, precipitous coda like a lover after climax. The audience leapt to their feet in one of those rare, unforced standing ovations that comes from the giddy delight only great music-making can provide.If you read the entire article, you'll see why I so appreciate his expertise and his service to a better built environment. He makes the leap for the reader from the structures to their relevance in our everyday lives. He recognizes that architecture can be transcendent when it makes the leap . Becker gets it. Chicago deserves that.
We live in the rabid stages of a market economy that seeks to bring every activity to its cheapest, most "efficient", lowest common denominator, whether it be Walmart driving out all local competition and the variety it provided, or Federated destroying the department store as a local institution as it rushes to smear every last one with the Macy's name. To hear the CSO firing on all cylinders is a bracing reminder just what this chronic leveling robs us of.
It is hard to believe that the Chicago Humanities Festival chose "Home & Away" as their theme long before Katrina hit. The timing is uncanny. It's almost as if the universe knew we would need to be talking about this kind of stuff right about now.
I started to post yesterday about the overall situation with the evacuees -- thousands of us out on the road and looking for a place to land. An entire culture on the move. In one place on this forum, I saw us compared to those waiting in Casablanca for the plane to Lisbon. That's as apt as any, since there's an element in us that's not going to be happy until we get out of where we are and back where we belong. Where we are is safe -- and that's exactly what's wrong with it.
Ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are made for. New Orleans is, as much as New York and a few other cities, a combination of the terrible, the unique and the sublime. Often all in the same room and sharing the same table.
I wangled media credentials for trip over the Crescent City Connection early this morning. We drove past the badly-looted Wal-Mart on Tchoup (carts and racks are scattered for blocks). The place is now a military staging area.
We went down Tchoup, right on Second, left on Constance and left on Third before we parked near Parasols (which lost its awnings, but that's about it). Lots of downed trees and power lines, but brick buildings appeared to have more damage than wooded ones (note to Laura -- your house appears untouched). We lost only one small upstairs window, which I covered with a plastic trash bag.
Down Third, right on Annunciation, then right on Fourth because we were blocked by a crushed truck. I was taking a picture when I hear men talking to Kim nearby. I turn around and see her with three National Guardmen, heavy weapons drawn. Turns out they were chasing a looter who had vanished between houses.
Up to St. Charles, right to Jackson, then back to Tchoup and out the way we came. Took 90 to Houma, Morgan City, then up to Lafayette and finally here.
Weird thing last night wasgoing through the I-10/I-12/I-59 interchange in Slidell. It's usually lit like Vegas on Christmas, but now it's this inky, velvet black except for the headlights. Iffy power until you get to about Covington.
Lots of emotion today. I'm still processing. More later after I catch up.
Area Man Drives Water There His Goddamned Self
We spent a lot of the weekend packing up grocery bags of supplies for Katrina victims. My alderman had sent out a list and notified us of two trucks leaving from Reebie Storage on Clark Street.
My son cleaned up a Power Rangers scooter he had outgrown. He sprayed it with the orange cleaner we use on the kitchen counters and wiped it dry with paper towels. He rode with us to the moving company. Then, he hoisted it to the truck loading bay and watched the Reebie folks move it to a pile with the bedding and canned goods and bottled water.
"When will the trucks get there?" he asked.
I predicted this morning. Was I right? Did it make a difference? Whose little boy is riding the scooter now? Many blessings to them all.
(The header above is borrowed from The Onion's Katrina headlines.)
The Best of New Orleans' Great Space
Here is a summary of the "Great Public Places" in New Orleans via the Project for Public Spaces. I found myself wanting to know more about what might have been lost or saved in NOLA. Thought you might wonder the same.
Artillery Park A combination urban scenic overlook, river overlook and informal
amphitheatre for street performances.
USA
City Park A large city park with activities ranging from weddings to paddle boats to an art museum.
Crescent City Farmers Market A gentle farmers' market made distinctive by its location: the walls of the parking lot are covered in beautiful full-scale murals of rural farming scenes.
French Market New Orleans once had markets in nearly every neighborhood; this place, with the longest and most colorful history, is the last in operation.
French Quarter
Colonial Spanish architecture, great New Orleans food and jazz, plus the highest
concentration of colorful characters in the whole USA.
Jackson Square This lively and heavily trafficked park in the French Quarter is a popular site for artists, street performers and musicians who entertain tourists and locals.
Latrobe Park A small park with ample seating and lush planting.
Lower Garden District Neighborhood with an extensive collection of 19th-century residential and commercial buildings, many pre-dating the Civil War.
Pirates Alley A pedestrian walkway between historic buildings, The Saint Louis Cathedral and the Cabildo.
St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Line Historic avenue, greenway and transportation corridor
Vietnamese Farmers' Market At 5am each Saturday, over 20 vendors set up shop in a dilapidated shopping square, spreading out produce on blankets; live ducks, rabbits and chickens wail to a background chanting of Asian pop music.
I have lived in Illinois almost all of my life. And, there is one unwavering truth about this state: you can't escape Abe.
Trees teach us about perception or, rather, self-perception.
As some environmental historians, like Michael P. Cohen, have intuited, "most people ... choose a tree that speaks to their condition," and the same can be said for a town, region, or nation.
New Englanders "drifted toward" (p. 65) the elm as a regional icon, a tree narrative that explicates a very unconventional but highly imaginative and revealing self-portrait of nineteenth-century American regional attitudes.
This is the allure of studying the cultural history of trees--the pleasant surprise that its analysis reveals less about botany than human culture.
If, as Campanella cogently suggests, "in trees we see ourselves" (p. 4), the American elm shows us to be a nation of city dwellers, left to understand ourselves in these places in ways that should include our relationship to trees.
Vermaas published the review on the H-Environment Discussion Network (aka listserv) out of MSU, and it was cross-posted to the H-Urban listserv.
Sign up for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Discussion Networks here.
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.
