Of $300 million pork barrel Roller Coasters and the Sweet Scent of Chocolate in the Chicago Air - why newspapers still matter

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The prognosis for newspapers, especially in Chicago, is deeply problematic.  The Sun-Times continues to throw parts of itself - including a lot of talented people - overboard, just to scrap together enough cash to get through another day, while over at the Tribune, the company is stripping its namesake newspaper of assets and loading it up with debt just before pushing it out as an independent company, a stripped vessel pitched on treacherous seas.

apologies, as always, to Stanley Tigerman.  Related story here.

What makes it more painful is when you see what newspapers, even ones in diminished states, offer what no web-based news aggregator can or ever will.   For the moment at least, both papers still have crack investigative teams that uncover scandals and outrages and campaign - often successfully - for reforms.  For example, this Sunday's edition of the Sun-Times, which wouldn't let the Koschmann case be buried, tells us how corrupt former Cook County President Tod Stroger has again found his way onto the public payroll, while  on the art's beat there's also a great profile on the restoration of historic Thalia Hall and a Hedy Weiss' QandA with Mary Zimmerman.

Thalia Hall

Over at the Trib, there's another Zimmerman interview from Jennifer Weigel, plus David Kidwell's The man who knew everybody, a great profile of John Bills, the machine fixer charged with rigging the bidding for Chicago's Red Camera contract, plus an overview of the life and work of improv master Mick Napier.

We hope to be writing later this week on Rahm Emanuel's plan to slum up Lakeview with a tornado-like path of destruction for a third-of-a-billion dollar roller-coaster Brown Line overpass just north of Belmont, but in today's Trib, Blair Kamin has beaten me to the punch with a detailed analysis on why this is such a bad idea.

Last but not least, I've written about the wonderful Blommer Chocolate plant before, but today Phil Rosenthal has a great piece Inside Blommer Chocolate, giving us a look at the previously off-limits factory, and detailing the history of a 75-year-old Chicago institution that fended off a hardball campaign by mega-conglomerate Cargill to acquire it, remaining a family-run business that handles 45% of all cocoa beans processed in the United States.  An entire new residential neighborhood has grown up around the handsome, light-colored brick plant at 600 West Kinzie, including a new park just across the street.  Blommer remains an unique part of the character of Chicago, wafting the faint aroma of chocolate throughout River North whenever a new batch is being made.

The aroma used to be a lot stronger, and drift a lot wider, before the EPA teamed up with NIMBY's to have it classified as a health hazard, as I wrote about in A Bureaucrat Triumphs and a Little Bit of Chicago Dies.

I also wrote about the new park, which, I argued six years ago, should be officially renamed the Chocolate Park.

Great Sunday Reading: Kogan on Graceland, Borrelli on Complexity and Contradiction at The 606

The Trib's architecture critic Blair Kamin gets a run for his money with two great pieces by his colleagues in this Sunday's edition.  (You can see the stories in the print edition, or via free digital subscription on the Trib's website.)

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Rick Kogan on Graceland
First up, Rick Kogan has a great story on Graceland Cemetery, and the restoration by Bill Bickford of Holabird and Roche's 1888 arts-and-craft chapel.  Kogan reports that the cemetery could well become the final resting place of legendary film critic Roger Ebert, which would extend Graceland's role as a sort of Pantheon for important Chicagoans.  Especially architects - Graceland's got everyone from Daniel Burnam to John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan, Bruff Goff, Marion Mahony Griffin and Mies van der Rohe  In 2007, a new memorial was dedicated to William Lebaron Jenney, a century after his ashes were scattered over the cemetery.

Read:  Graceland, and restored chapel, a wonder to behold.

Christopher Borrelli on The 606

Even better, however, is Christopher Borrelli's consideration of The Bloomingdale Trail, now rechristened, as we wrote about Friday, The 606.  Borrelli faces head-on what is, in the end, the key question about the project:  when you take a rotting piece of real infrastructure and transform it into a public park, do you wipe out the very identity that make the place worth saving?  

And make no mistake, the Trail exists, even today.  As Borrelli relates, although every single one of them are illegal trespassers, the Trail attracts a large number of people who see past the broken glass to walk, jog, and even practice yoga while enjoying the Trail in its very distinctive current state . . .

The old Canadian Pacific rail, which hasn't been used in decades and runs along Bloomingdale Avenue (hence the trail's name), has rusted into chocolate autumn browns. The dark wooden tracks running beneath those rails have splintered. And the ground, littered with broken stones and glass shards, sprouts tufts of lilting greens and long grasses and sporadic fields of dandelions, is so dense in places you wonder if, given a few more decades of unimpeded neglect, a prairie could return to the West Side.

Standing on the Bloomingdale Trail feels like standing inside a Terrence Malick movie.

It is a ruin, and it is real.  What will replace it, in the words of the Trust for Public Land's Beth White, is �a giant, seamless artwork.�  Borrelli counters that it's already art.  �But it's not safe,� is Ms. White's reply.

And there's the rub.  The 606 is a Haussmannian-scaled intervention.  It involves not only the gentrification of the 2.7 mile rail line, but the replacement of a great deal of existing artwork such as the charming dog murals at Churchill Park.

Those interventions happened over time, neighborhood by neighborhood.  Although designed for variations, and with substantial community input, The 606 is a unitary, imposed design which, most likely, will speak less about the Chicago out of which it arose than the Chicago the leadership would like it to become.

Today, Paris wouldn't be Paris without those broad boulevards Haussmann smashed through the crowded older city.  On the other, hand Paris would also not be Paris without the narrow streets of the maze-like districts that survived the transformation. 

What I really like about Borrelli's take on The 606 is how he gets the complexity of architecture, and how its inextricably intertwined with culture, commerce, politics and life as it's lived day-to-day, moment-to-moment.  He has an acute awareness of the larger issues that sometimes eludes Kamin, who often seems most comfortable treating buildings as autonomous objects.

As I wrote on Friday, the new name The 606 is indicative of the pervasive, generic leveling that is a hallmark of our supply chain economy.  The new Bloomingdale Trail, assuming it delivers on its promise, will be a handsome new civic amenity, but, as Borrelli observes . . .

How do you sand down the rough edges of a place like this and make it accessible to the entire community without removing the raw beauty that makes the place so unusual and memorable?

Read:  On the Trail of Art

Also:

• If Dogs Ruled the Art World:  Canine-ized Matisse, Dali and Seurat at Churchill Park
• Major Jenney Garners a Salute
• Sour Disposition Friday:  Vue53 and The 606

Grossman and Kent's Final Word on how Chicago's Good-Old-Boys network rallied to Wreck Prentice

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It's the Chicago Tribune story that the Chicago Tribune would rather you not read.

The paper's Ron Grossman and Cheryl Kent have done a bang-up summary of the clout-ridden process that doomed the landmarking of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital.  If you're one of the Trib's pathetic handful of digital subscribers (half that of the Sun-Times), you can read it.   For anyone else, it's carefully stuck behind their paywall.

Even if you don't read the Trib, it's well worth picking up  a copy today. (Try not to be shocked by the fact that the Trib just raised the price a whopping 50%, to $1.50.)  When politics get in the way doesn't really include anything we haven't written before in our own copious coverage of the battle for Prentice, but it fleshes out the details and mechanics of how the good-old-boys-network that runs the city - of which the Trib, which shilled relentlessly for Prentice's destruction, sees itself as a key member -  circles the wagons to support its own, in this case  Northwestern University, who has turned their substantial chunk of Streeterville into a kind of high-tech colonial plantation where the rules that constrain all the rest of us don't apply and truth is whatever they want it to be. 

Grossman and Kent document how Chicago's Department of Housing and Development simply dumped facts and figures they got from Northwestern into their report calling for Prentice's demolition.  Nothing was vetted or substantiated.  The Commission willingly became part of Northwestern's propaganda machine.

from left: Rafael Leon, Ernest Wong, Andrew Mooney, James Houlihan

In its portrait of Landmarks Commission Chairman Rafael Leon, the article is especially damning. �I personally don't know all the details,� Leon told them, �We believe Northwestern.�  Leon was part of a cynical remaking of the Commission by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that dumped four commissioners and stuffed the body with connected associates, none of whom were architects, in direct violation of the directives of the Landmarks Ordinance.  Among them was former Cook County Assessor James Houlihan.  According to Grossman and Kent, he's also a senior consultant with a firm that brags about lobbying the city on behalf of over 25 clients.  Christopher Reed, the only commissioner to vote against demolishing Prentice, quit. �I was disgusted,� he told Grossman and Kent, �The process was hijacked by City Hall.�

Grossman and Kent underscore the uselessness of these appointed bodies.  As with the Plan Commission - which began as independent entity - the concept is that they provide an essential check on city government, representing the larger public in objectively vetting important city actions.  That role has long since been abrogated.  They have become rubber stamps that never - and I emphasize never - do anything other than follow the scripts they've been handed by the mayor.  At a time when the city is closing schools for lack of money, a Landmarks Commission that is nothing more than an expensive extension of the mayor's PR office is a pointless luxury we can no long afford.  Keep the staff; abolish the Commission.

Read:
Landmarks Commission Unanimously Votes Itself Completely Useless
A Modest Proposal: Abolish the Commission on Chicago Landmarks
An Open Letter to Mayor Emanuel on Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital