Big Stick #76 The Loop

Big Stick Tales # 76

A Walk in The Loop and Views of Lake Michigan

(October 31, 2021)  I had a plan to walk in the footsteps of a great grandmother’s aunt and uncle as well as a great grandfather in downtown Chicago.  I did that but waiting for a traffic light on Madison Street and Michigan Avenue a tiny girl dressed in a pink princess dress gently forced me into the present day, away from the past.  

She reminded me of the “now” and of young new life.  Far from where I’d been walking in the stone, metal, glass, and concrete “Loop” of the old Chicago downtown circled by the “L,” the elevated tracks of commuter train lines.  Far away, too, from my college memories of taking the “I.C” (Illinois Central) train to downtown Chicago to get away mentally from college work a few times each year.

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I crossed Michigan Avenue with the pink princess and entered the long city park running along the shore of Lake Michigan.  We can thank Mr. Aaron Montgomery Ward and his profits from his eponymous department store opened in 1872 with its world’s first ever mail order catalog to have fought through four private lawsuits to keep that park “open, free, and clear” according to a city law. The park has been kept mostly open space ever since except for the construction long ago of the Chicago Art Institute and the massive new “art” and recreational installations installed with the last 15 or so years.

The Windy City. The Second City after New York. The City that Works. Chi-town.

People of all ages were dressed for a sunny Sunday walk on a Halloween afternoon.  Fans in football team colors for a game between gold rushers and furry ursines streamed from the south of Soldiers Field coliseum towards the downtown train stations, restaurants, bars, and hotels.  

As I walked towards the lake, I watched people and overheard their conversations in many different languages.  The “here and now” instead of dwelling only in the past except as echos and whispers. I looked through the trees for the big horizon above Lake Michigan which always makes me feel in Chicago as if I am on an island in the middle of an ocean. Listened to birds twittering in the trees, squirrels foraging. But, I kept thinking of both the past and present. The future? No.

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This tale starts with a photo of my Mom’s Aunt Jean as a young girl sitting in an electric wicker chair at San Diego’s Balboa Park. Jean was born with a bad heart. Her Chicago suburban family thought a winter visit to California relatives would be good. (Not until she got a pacemaker in the 1970’s was her heart healthy. Hearing it click as she had me press an ear to her chest I recall as if that happened moments ago.)  She was a luminous beauty, kind and gentle, and there she sits in Balboa Park dressed up like the most elegant princess imaginable back in the 1920’s.

She’d had an invite from her Mother’s aunt Emma Hossack Scott who had retired out to Pasadena.  Emma was the daughter of John Hossack, the first man to ship wheat on the new Illinois and Michigan Canal to Chicago.  He’d come to North America in 1815 from the Highlands of Scotland after “The Clearances” of tenant peasants by the absentee aristocratic landowners who preferred more profitable sheep to what they considered “nonessential” people.  He came to North America with pretty much nothing.  Worked as a teenager in Quebec at a relative’s candy store, then farmed nearby as well as in Manitoba, then helped to dig the Sault Ste. Marie locks and canal, and the first canal in Illinois to connect Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River.

I often wonder if he ever gave much thought to the Native American Indians who had been recently “disappeared” from the Illinois prairie thanks to European diseases, wars, and torn up treaties.  I do know he was a champion of anyone yearning to “breathe free” as he said in a speech in a Cook County courthouse in Chicago after he was indicted and jailed for harboring Jim Gray, a runaway slave, in 1859.

By the 1920’s Emma was widowed after her marriage for 49 years to John Scott.  They’d met in Ottawa, Illinois where she’d grown up and he and his family had a dry goods store.  He joined forces with fellow dry goods merchants in Peoria, Illinois, and with them was a founder of the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store in downtown Chicago.  Not until after I’d graduated from college was I aware I was a blood relative of a founder of that store.  I’d descended from a “poorer” branch of that family!

Today, that company, has been merged out of existence.  Probably it’s most famous now for being the second and longest owner of the first “Chicago Style” retail steel skyscraper building with ground floor massive plate glass display windows, and embellished with very fancy leafy aesthetic style decorations on its lower levels. On the National Register of Historic Places as a landmark building.

Designed by Louis Sullivan it was built in 1899 six years after Sullivan had fired his assistant Frank Lloyd Wright for taking on one too many “private” clients but not until Louis had helped inspire Frank with his own “organic” and simple stripped down “prairie” architectural styles.

In college, I went inside the downtown Chicago Carson, Pirie, Scott store once but by then that store was struggling, a bit grubby and downmarket.  I preferred its old competitor, the slightly less grubby Marshall Fields, a couple of blocks away which still had its pretty “ladies who lunch” tearoom where one sunny winter day I had a late tea at that Walnut Room.  I’d gone there to buy Marshall Fields’ “Frango” mints which I could later buy for many years at the Macy’s in Palo Alto after that department store chain bought out Marshall Fields.   Not until after Macy’s retired the Marshall Fields’ name in 2006 did I learn in a book by one of its pre-WW2 lady buyers about its successful days when the managers empowered their lead floor salespeople to buy what their customers actually wanted.  Mr. Field’s “Give the lady what she wants!” strategy instead of bean counters physically and emotionally far removed from the customers.

My Mom’s mother told me more than once about an old  Dutch landscape painting she’d seen for sale in the 1930’s at that downtown Marshall Field’s flagship store. It often held estate sales in those days. She loved that painting. Went to see it several times but could not bring herself to buy it since it would take up too much of her carefully planned household budget. But, she made sure to introduce me at museums to her favorite Dutch artist Frans Hals whom I will always associate with Marshall Fields and its Frango mints.

Today, the Carson, Pirie, Scott building houses a Target store and Marshall’s is a Macy’s.  The Loop is still a shadowy canyon of cold winds blown ever stronger by the Venturi Effect as more skyscrapers are built ever higher.  The beleaguered current City Mayor has big red protestor barriers plopped all around the Baboon sculpture by Picasso at her City Hall’s plaza.  I walked by there and thought the Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood, are needed badly for comic relief on that spot right now.  All of my immediate family bugged out of Chicago pretty much by the 1940’s and most were gobsmacked when I wanted to go there for college.  They thought Chicago had become an unredeemable mess.

The last time I’d been there was a quick late summer stopover with an “L” ride to visit an aunt and uncle of my Mom’s in the northern suburb of Evanston. One night with them and an early morning walk on a beach near their apartment before getting on a train heading west to the High Plains.  I just walked around Union Station and that was it for me and downtown Chicago.  Once they had both passed away I thought I’d likely never be back to Chicago except perhaps with a curling friend who like me enjoys baseball, art and architecture.

 - - -

I turned my back on The Loop walking towards the lake following the little pink princess skipping across Michigan Avenue with her family headed towards Millennium Park.  I’d planned to check out the new ice skating rink and The Bean there, and then cross the BP bridge and see The Ribbon ice track at the Maggie Daley Park. 

Daley. The infamous Chicago multi-generational political machine.  The one time I voted in Chicago in college I voted for its mayoral opponent Harold Washington. I walked with a small bunch of fellow students from my dorm a few blocks south to our polling place and the next day in the Chicago Tribune we saw *exactly* the reported number of votes for Mr. Washington for our precinct.  Among ourselves at our dorm lunch table we could account for every vote.  We just laughed and rolled our eyes.  It took many years for my name to be removed from the Cook County voter rolls despite my best efforts. “The tombstones vote!” was the old local saying there.

One of my favorite college history classes was “Boss Politics & Urban Reform.” We learned all about New York City’s Tammany Hall.  How big political power always becomes corrupted, then politicians go way too far, reformers pop up, the voters install the reformers, power corrupts.  The cycle always continues.  Only enforceable legal checks & balances of all kinds can hope to stop the worst of political corruption which is why I love the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and its companion law in California, the Brown Act.  Ralph M. Brown from Modesto wrote the Brown Act open meetings law enacted in 1953.  Thanks Mr. Brown, of no relation to California Governors Pat and Jerry Brown.

Right after Mr. Washington won, we students eyeballed the street from the Lake to the front door of his Hyde Park/Kenwood apartment house get repaved within days in a neighborhood which was most of the time a sea of potholes thanks to years of not being a Daley team player. To this day, I believe, the University of Chicago centered in the Hyde Park neighborhood within the City of Chicago still has the largest U.S. private police force.   Inside a ”Hotbed of Urban Delight,” a motto we’d put on t-shirts.

“Fondly,” I recall a weekend dorm lunch with a resident head who did admissions at the UoC biz school regale me about the local gang warlords who met on the Midway Plaisance right in front of our dorm in the late 1960’s (or early 1970’s?).  Each gang advanced on a section of the Midway’s lawn, one from the east, the other from the west. Chairs where placed by minions for their leaders to sit upon and make a “deal.” Is that truly any different than what the Daley machine or any other big political machines do behind closed doors?

I noted as I planned my day’s walk a “L” transit stop in the south Loop is now named for Mr. Washington right next to a new public library also named for him  The library was mostly paid for by the Pritzker family.  Hyatt Hotels and retirement home money.  Jay, the current Illinois Governor and Penny, a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce were involved in that donation.  I figured the newest updates to the lakefront park would illuminate past and current local powers given what I knew about Chi-town.

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The McCormick Tribune Foundation ice rink ($3.2M budget) was forlorn.  No one but me was there.  Its warm season indoor/outdoor cafe was closed.  There were some nasty legal moves to keep its food and beverage sales’ profits tax free which caused a brief public kerfluffle in the local newspapers and TV news. Leaves skittered over the rink’s concrete pad with no ice.  I had a “good” view of cyclone fencing protecting the cafe’s roof repairs.

Just to the south of the hockey rink is the Crown Fountain.  Lester Crown and his family donated $10M of the total design and construction cost of  $17M. The Crown family was given for that cash complete control of the design. Three cheers for some of their profits from their General Dynamics military supply company and their ski resorts holding company going for public art. The fountain has two 50’ tall LED towers with water spouts and cascades into a very large and shallow rectangular pool.  There was local controversy about those 50’ towers violating city codes about such super tall structures violating the “open, free, and clear” lakefront  park City law.  But they were deemed “art” and thus allowed to bust the code’s height limit. Much of the time during warm weather the towers show a face of a local person spitting out a stream of water.  The fountain is very popular as a wading pool in summer.  Kids love to stand under the spouts in hot weather, which amazingly, the fountain designer did not anticipate.  I admit I just thought it was an annoying TV advertising billboard when I walked by it.

I wonder if it ever is used for ice sports in winter.  Its black granite pool is 48‘ by 232’ with a water depth averaging 1/4th inch.  Perfect for a “Carnie” outdoor curling rink or games of pond hockey.  How about an ice show with ice dancers?

“The Bean,” officially called the Cloud Gate, had a crush of people taking selfies from a small spot under it.  It is made of highly polished stainless steel and designed by a British artist, Anish Kapoor.  Privately funded for $23M [sic].  Almost every park bench in its AT&T Plaza (originally funded by a Ma Bell subsidiary for $3M) was full of people watching The Bean scene.  It seemed the sporting thing to do to take a photograph.  I do like that sculpture a lot.  I hope it stands the test of time.

Peered into the Lurie Botanical Garden.  Its entrance had a wooden walkway, the first non-cement or stone footing since I stepped off the Blue Line from O’Hare into The Loop.  A shock!   

 Ann Lurie established the garden’s maintenance fund endowment with $10M with a build cost of $13.2 million.  It opened in 2004. She worked as a nurse before marrying a local real estate investor with whom she had six children before he died expectedly.  He was a college fraternity brother and later partner with Sam Zell in their massively successful private equity company, Equity Group Investments, a holding company for a vast portfolio of real estate properties.  It was bought in 2006 by the Blackstone Group in the then to date biggest leveraged buyout in U.S, history for $36 billion.  As part of the largest green roof in a city, the Lurie Garden honors the city’s motto "Urbs in Horto,” Latin for "City in a Garden.”  She put her her Gold Coast downtown Chicago house on the market and moved to Wyoming to live with her new movie producer husband. In a wedding picture she wears a lacy white dress and barn coat and he wears an Austrian loden cape as if he is Captain Von Trapp hiking away from the Nazi's in "The Sound of Music" as they stand on the snow in front of an old wooden barn.  What seems like a golden doodle sits between them.

Turned around to see an outdoor amphitheater named for Jay Pritzker, the current Illinois Governor.  How odd.  Reminded me of the San Jose Municipal Airport being renamed the Norman Mineta International Airport after a still living former U.S. Secretary of Transportation who is also a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, past member of the U.S. Congress, and board member of Lockheed, partner in Hill & Knowlton public relations company, and a vice chairman of L&L Energy starting in 2010.  He was the U.S. Secretary of Transportation on 9/11.

I had to laugh when I looked up Mineta’s career history, that L&L which specialized in coal production, processing, and selling in mainland China was de-listed from NASDAQ in 2014 and the next year its CEO got a 5 year prison term for securities fraud. You can’t make these things up!

Should not one wait to die to have such public monuments like U.S. postal stamps or multi-million dollar public park features or airports  with one’s names upon them?

BP Bridge got its name from a donor of $5M towards its construction: British Petroleum.  Designed by Frank Gehry who refused to sign a contract until both the bridge and the amphitheater next to it he would also design were fully funded.   Reminds me of my Dad saying no sane printer in San Francisco would ever take a political printing job without cash on the barrel head before any work started since they were ***all*** deadbeats as debtors whether winning their elections (“power corrupts!”) or losing (“blood from a turnip!”).

I’d been noticing BP gas stations for the last week all over Wisconsin and Illinois.  More stainless steel for that “art” bridge. Hardwood slates for its walkway.  A few slats were buckled with weather damage which made the bridge seem alive as I walked across it and an occasional slate made a popping sound. At every bend people stopped to admire the scenery and/or take selfies.  Lots of the trees nearby had a golden yellow fall color below a bright blue sky.  It was visually a glorious bridge.

However, the bridge is closed in the winter because its ice build-up up can’t be removed with current Chicago technical prowess from the wooden slats to make the bridge safe.  Very poor design.  A multimillion dollar bridge which can be used only half the year?!?  According to Wikipedia, its designer still lives in his house at 1002 22nd Street, Santa Monica, California.  Despite being born in Toronto, Canada and living there for about 18 years, he’s been based in Southern California most of his life and hasn’t a care in the world about Chicago winters. The bridge as “art” to get around the “Montgomery Ward” rules means the artist has a federal artist copyright on it and can stop any modification to it.

I had vision of myself picketing his Santa Monica home with a sign saying, “Hey Frank! Fix your Oil Company bridge for winter use!!”  Or, guerrilla painting a sign in winter to the same effect under it on Columbus Drive.  “Blame F.G. for this unusable bridge.”

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Midway across the BP Bridge, I could see cars whooshing by far below on Columbus Drive and peered into the old dark downtown streets of Chicago underneath the skyscrapers. Those old streets were covered long ago by higher streets built to be above the old river’s floodplain.  Long ago, I felt like a real Chicago native when I could drive a car through all those subterranean streets or navigate its underground sidewalks and tunnels without a map. I knew exactly where the Billy Goat Tavern was on lower Michigan Avenue between the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times buildings. And, that tavern owner’s legendary 1945 curse against the Chicago Cubs not broken until 2016. But, I still am confused how the City changed the hydrology of its rivers over the years except to have made its main river “run backwards” to flush most of its sewage uphill away from the big lake, its beaches, and “nice” lakeside neighborhoods; and also dye it green for St. Patrick’s Day.

Walked into Maggie Daley Park named for the mother of the last (for now) Chicago mayor from that dynastic political machine. When I lived in Chicago it was an open rail yard and car park for the Illinois Central. Below my feet was a massive green roofed car parking lot with its car exhaust outlets carefully hidden in foliage and garden folly structures.  By 2019 it was so underused thanks in part to that star-chitect “half-year” pedestrian bridge, the City was leasing spaces to car dealerships and thinking about renting other spaces for warehouses, self-storage, and urban gardening under grow lights. New meaning for giving people “the mushroom treatment.”  Shove them into the dark and feed them… well, it rhymes with “twit.”

Maggie Daley Park has suffered other troubles. By Spring 2021 after a pile of lawsuits from injuries at its 25’ tall slide tower, a centerpiece of the Play Garden. The multi-story high slide has now been removed. There were ugly accusations in law courts the City’s Park District ignored that dangerous thing over at least 6 years of confirmed reports of many, many, and many more broken bones.

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Sat down on a bench within view of the eastern side of the BP Bridge and the Play Garden’s mini-golf course. I’d guess about 5% of the pedestrians I’d seen so far were wearing Halloween costumes.  Mostly small kids in store-bought costumes. 

I waited to see an adult not wearing all-dark clothes as if going to a funeral.  It took about 15 minutes. There!  Coming from the direction of the new highrise luxury condos and hotels of the new Illinois Center complex a lady wearing a white winter double breasted formal tailored coat. Long brown bouncy curly professionally dyed hair exactly like a Miss America candidate. Touches of gold at her ears and around her neck.  With a man casual-elegantly dressed. I could tell he gets regular professional manicures, hair done at a salon, good quality dark brown leather loafers very well shined and not yet resoled, and that was a very expensive thick cashmere sweater in an understated muted brown-green color coordinated with his dry cleaned khaki colored high quality wool gabardine slacks.

I started humming the Sam Cook tune “Wonderful World” he wrote with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert while thinking of Mr. Cook’s youth in the Bronzeville neighborhood just 10 minutes to the south and the “project” highrises built after most of it was leveled for “urban renewal.”  He was so cool and elegant.  At least Ida B. Welles’ and Nat “King” Cole’s old homes sill stand, I think.  Not sure about the homes of Jesse Owens, Joe Lewis, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Quincy Jones, or Herbie Hancock. Urbanites without political power get their neighborhoods flattened to make “new land” for new highways or other big taxpayer-funded projects financed with long term government bonds paid off with high interest rates.

Three 20-somethings came by all dressed in beer can costumes.  I gave them a thumbs up and said aloud, “Love your costumes!”  One of them called back “Love yours, too!!” That made me laugh.  I was just wearing black slacks, sneakers, a bright red wool pullover, and a mostly off-white western American Indian-patterned Pendleton coat which besides the Miss America lady was the only pale coat falling below the knees I saw all day long as I travelled between O’Hare Airport and downtown Chicago.  I guess I really was wearing a costume that day.  But, everyday is Halloween, no?

  - - -

Suddenly: the pink princess and her family walked off the BP Bridge.  She had been joined by a tiny bright yellow princess. They headed off towards the Play Garden.  Wondered if their costumes were “official” Disney company pink-Aurora and yellow-Belle costumes.  Did those two skipping girls know they are being “groomed” to be consumers of Disney consumer products?

l’d watched The Ribbon be built in news photos many years ago and was curious to see it in use.  It took me a while to find it in the mature landscape obscuring it from the walkways.  Almost no one was there in that part of the park.  Did not hear anyone using the tennis courts on two sides The Ribbon.  Too bad, that quadrant has some of the best views of Lake Michigan.

 I was surprised to see no one using The Ribbon. It had its geometric “bear” in the center which is supposed to be a climbing wall. It looked very much like the grizzly bear mountain at Disneyland’s California Adventure fake-log water flume ride in SoCal. The Ribbon’s curving pathway loop is designed for roller skaters half the year and ice skaters the other half.  Bizarrely, loud rock & roll music blared from loudspeakers for just me, two other pedestrians (one of whom was dressed as a Star Wars/Disney Inc. Stormtrooper), a foraging squirrel, and sparrows flitting through the conifers and scratching for food on the ground. 

I walked around The Ribbon. A real Zamboni was parked in the sunlight.  A “shoulder” season for The Ribbon between its ice and no-ice seasons.

- - -

Walked north to Randolph Street.  Stood on the fake hill of the ceiling of the Maggie Daley parking structure and looked far downhill at the intersection of Randolph and Michigan Avenue.  I’d heard countless times growing up on that very corner my great grandfather Frank M. sold newspapers as a child “in all weathers” after he’d become an orphan and was “sold” to a newspaper vendor.  

While in college every time I walked up the stairway to that intersection from the I.C. train station below I’d get a shudder thinking of him cold on those windy streets. No truancy officers to make his guardian send him to school. Long before decent child labor laws were enacted.  The setting sun was low and the intersection completely in the shadows.  At The Ribbon minutes ago, I could walk around in full sunlight, no breeze and in shirt sleeves. But, here I had to put on every item of clothing I had with me.  And, button up!

Approaching the corner I heard one pushcart vendor calling out, “ELOTES!!”  Spanish for “hot corn.”  Pink and blue cotton candy in clear plastic bags on tall sticks.  The corner vendors’ signs homemade using cardboard.  Not a newspaper seller in sight anywhere on the downtown Loop sidewalks of Chicago.  But, there were plenty of people glued to their telephone screens as they walked around eyes down.  If cellular or landline telephone Wifi signals ever go down will they be in psychotic withdrawal?  Literally paralyzed?  Imagine!  No news. No maps. No email. No QR codes on screens. No streaming movies.  No social media “life” on a screen.

I voice told me to, “Look up!” as I was getting depressed looking at the sad cardboard sign of a cotton candy seller bundled up against the cold wind with only her eyes showing. I felt it was a message from my great grandfather who was born around the time of the 1871 Great Fire of Chicago.  And, there was the glorious Greek/Roman Chicago Public Library built in 1897.  I’d never noticed it there before.

Pink Princess crosses Michigan Avenue.

Maybe if those fancy street lamps were lit when this empty ice rink space become shadowed it might be more inviting.

Crown Fountain. One of two 50' LED towers about to spout water out of the video mouth. Telephone zombie did not look at the fountain.

Chicago Bears v. SF 49er game day.  Nagy is the Bears' coach who lost the game that day.

Pink Princess is so excited she's now on a leash.

Off duty Imperial Stormtrooper at The Ribbon.

The library at Randolf and Michigan is now the Chicago Cultural Center.

A Halloween green dragon in a onesie with a Target bag on the L to ORD seems fitting.

Only L rider not wearing a mask besides me.  He also had a clothing item with the SF 49ers logo.  Clearly a rare "X" person.

End of the Blue line at ORD, Terminal 2.

Quickest way from bell captain's left luggage at the Hilton to the terminal is via street level.  Signage at ORD is so contradictory and wrong to be virtually useless to fine any mass transit, rental car shuttles, or the hotel.  Scavenger hunts without clues but oddly satisfying when one finds an objective.

Airtran at SFO with 2 fellow riders with colorful Pendleton clothes. I am so "done" with not seeing peoples' faces anymore and most dressed as if going to a funeral.

My Pendleton coat which was a "costume" in Chicago.

Shall we hum the tune "Wabash Cannonball"?

CPS store detail

CPS corner main entrance.

Was at LaSalle and Adams streets in the future South Loop.

CRM and FRM at 243 74th Street

FRM and FM

FRM and CRM

FM and FRM

Label on CRM framed photo

CRM and the quilt she made for FRM and EPM, dated 1934 as a wedding gift. She designed and sewed it at her second marital home 2449 E 74th Street.

Pix are woefully out of order.  This is the Target in the old Carson, Pirie, Scott store. The embellished tops of the original columns are still visible.

The elegance of the main corner entrance still remains.  But what would Louis Sullivan think of that light feature?

More people dressed for a funeral complete with executioners' black masks.  Two wear indigo dyed heavy cotton jeans originally designed by Messrs. Levi and Strauss for California Gold Rush miners. Glad to see a long pale coat.

Air vent in the corner lobby of CPS.

He’d been saved by that library system as a small kid after its first branch opened in 1873 a few blocks away at LaSalle and Adams streets inside an old water tank. Those public libraries are where he would get warm. Read everything in sight. That led to him becoming educated and then a teacher in the Chicago school system where he met a fellow teacher, Clara R., my great grandmother who had also been orphaned.  I whispered a big thank you to the Chicago Public Library system and the people of England who shipped over 8,000 books after the Great Fire to kickstart the City’s first public library.

Fingered my day pass on the Chicago Transit Authority system I’d purchased at O’Hare Airport.  I thought of the “Chicago” rock band originally named after the C.T.A. and their first logo created after they moved to Los Angeles by Dean Torrence of the Jan & Dean duo.  Dean based it on the Coca Cola company logo. Adler and Albert wrote “Wonderful World” with Sam Cook which was one of his biggest hits.  Such a small world. I started humming Jan & Dean’s ”The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” . and more Cook tunes.  Time for me to get on the Blue Line and go home. “California Here I Come.”