Reflections on Chicago
Six Iconic Monuments of the City
Like an interpretive space ship, the “bean”
looks back at the city with a clearly distorted view.
CLUI photo
Millenium Park
Chicago’s redeveloped waterfront is the most visible face
of the city, and the showcase for civic projects that promote
Chicago, from the most famous World’s fairs, to the museums,
recreational lands, and now Millenium Park, possibly the most
dramatic urban public art site in the nation, at the moment. It
includes the Pritzker Pavillion, a Frank Gehry bandstand that
appears to be frozen in a state of extreme exfoliation, as if
from some full frontal blast, facing a huge lawn, covered by a
suspended, swooping Tron grid for hanging speakers and lights.
Named after the originator of the Pritzker Prize in architecture,
and built by a Pritzker Prize holder, the pavillion is a doubly
certified landmark in architecture. The Crown Fountain, another
popular piece of public art in the park consists of two fifty
foot high glass block videoscreens, facing each other, and showing
closeups of peoples faces, making various expressions from joy
to sorrow to pain. Water flows down the face of these faces, and
in the space between them is a shallow fountain for people to
walk around in, or not. But perhaps the most popular part of the
millenium monument triad is Cloud Gate, a reflective ellipsoid,
conceived by British artist Anish Kapoor. Designed and built by
Performance Structures of Oakland, California (in a shed next
to the former CLUI headquarters), the giant steel “bean”
is sheathed in highly polished stainless steel, and makes for
dramatic reflections of the city that surrounds it. A great place
to take the parents, Millenium Park is like an architectural funhouse,
guarded by a fleet of security on segways. Located on Michigan
Ave., between Randolph St. and Monroe St.Union Stockyards Gate
The back side of the fire academy building
reveals another front altogether.
CLUI photo
Pillar of Fire Monument at the
Chicago Fire Academy
One of the most famous stories of this celebrated city of architecture
is the moment of architectural erasure that occurred in 1871, when
much of downtown was lost in the Great Fire. Ms. Oleary’s
cow probably didn’t start the fire, but someone did, and it
does seem to have started in her barn. There is a statue at the
site where her barn stood, the Pillar of Fire monument, but what
is especially interesting at the site is the fact that it is now
one of the city’s main fire training facilities. In addition
to classrooms and displays of old fire equipment is an unusual false-fronted
building. On the street side it looks like a wall of flaming red
brick. But on the other side, it is a high bay training hall, with
an exterior wall facing a paved lot that is a stylized version of
an apartment block building, not unlike the notorious public housing
projects found around town. The department is pretty open to having
people take a look inside the training prop area and to watch rapelling
exercises on the false front. Located at 558 W DeKoven St., one
block north of Roosevelt Rd.
Arch enemy of animals everywhere, the Stockyards
gate now leads nowhere.
CLUI photo
Union Stockyards Gate
What was once the nation’s largest and most infamous packing
site has now been turned into a business park. Like many monuments,
this one is impressive not for what is there, but for what was there.
The Chicago stockyards were the most famous stockyards in this nation
of meat. They operated for over 100 years, employing 30,000 people
at their peak, processing over a billion animals over the years,
leaving the local river rotting with remains. Though Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle, published in 1907, was written about the yards, and
the disgusting conditions he described had an immediate effect on
food safety, leading to the federal Food and Drug Act a year later,
it had relatively little effect on worker’s conditions or
on the nation’s appetite for meat. Encroaching urban and suburban
development was one of the causes of the demise of the yards, and
competition from distribution points closer to the rangelands. In
1955, the stockyards at Omaha surpassed Chicago’s in volume,
and the Union Stockyards were finally closed in 1971. Just one of
the archways was left as a relic, with a stone carving of a mounted
cows head, peering out blankly to posterity. Located at 850 West
Exchanger St., just west of Halstead.
A piece of the rock, not forgotten by the
scavengers from the Chicago Tribune.
CLUI photo
Tribune Tower’s Monument
of Monuments
This grim gothic tower’s form was inspired by other architectural
monuments, like Notre Dame cathedral, but its exterior walls are
actually (partially) composed of pieces of other “monumental
places” around the world, many visible, and touchable from
the public sidewalks around the building. It seems to have been
a pet project of one of the newspaper’s more flamboyant
owners, Colonel McCormick, who ran the paper for more than 35
years. The Colonel instructed his writers and friends to bring
back samples from the exotic places they would visit. Some were
collected with permission, some were not. Embedded in the walls
are more than 120 examples of this “site sampling,”
each identified by an adjacent engraved plaque. They include pieces
of such global landmarks as the Pope’s residence, the Parthenon,
the Taj Mahal, the Coliseum in Rome, the Great Pyramid of Cheops,
and the childhood home of Hans Christian Andersen in Odense, Denmark.
Also included are at least one piece of some place in each of
the 50 United Sates, including the Alamo, Harvard University,
Mount McKinley, William Henry Harrison (9th president of the USA)’s
house in Indiana, and a piece of petrified forests in Arizona,
and near Calistoga, California. A curious curation indeed, and
a deconstructive distillation of the architecture of the World.
Located at 435 N Michigan Ave.
Less is Moore: Nuclear Energy sculpture
at site of Fermi's discovery.
CLUI photo
First Chain Reaction Site
On this spot, now a plaza in the University of Chicago, was the
squash court under the grandstands of Stagg Field, where Enrico
Fermi and assistants created the first sustained nuclear reaction,
in December, 1942 - the nuclear genie’s first glance at the
world outside the bottle. In 1967, 25 years later, Henry Moore made
a sculpture he called “Nuclear Energy,” to be the monument
for the site. The radioactive remains from the experiment, meanwhile,
including pieces of the lab at Stagg Field, were buried in the Red
Gate Woods, in Palos Hills, a few miles southeast of downtown. A
stone monument there warns people not to dig. The lab site and Moore
sculpture are at 5651 Ellis St., between 56th and 57th. The relocated
radioactive parts of the lab are near Archer Ave. and 107th.
The entrance of the abandoned Acme Chicago
Coke Plant.
CLUI photo
Acme Coke Plant
America’s steel/rust belt extends from south of Chicago and
into Indiana along the south shore of Lake Michigan. Here are the
great furnaces, sheds, and slagpiles of most of America’s
steel production. Though many of these landmarks are visible from
public roads, and accessed by dedicated explorers through gaps in
fencing, many are still engaged in business, privately owned, and
less than friendly to the harmless, curious visitor. The exception
is the immensely scenic and visitable Acme Coke Plant, which closed
in 2002, with the last intact structures from Chicago’s steel
industry. Acme turned coal into coke used by the Acme blast furnace
across the river, which was torn down last year. The plant is in
limbo, as local preservationists are in the midst of raising money
to buy the site. If they are successful, the site will slowly be
transformed into a labor and steel industry museum, and probably
become part of the I&M Canal National Heritage Corridor, which
is expected to cut its interpretive swath through this former industrial
zone. But, for now, the place is raw and alive, a partially torn
down, but mostly intact monumental relic of industry. Located at
110th Street and Torrance Ave.
