Preckwinckle calls (another) Code Blue at Historic Cook County Hospital

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Will it be a successful intervention or just another �DNR�?

Five months ago, we wrote about how, despite a series of reprieves since it closed after the 2002 opening of the new Stroger Hospital next door,  the specter of the wrecking ball has never left the sky above the Beaux Arts facades of the historic 1912 Cook County Hospital building

In 1999, the Cook County Board's then President John Stroger announced the structure's impending demise. In 2004, a move by Stroger's forces to get the Board to approve the demolition failed.  In 2007, Stroger's son Todd, having inherited the Board Presidency, announced a $140 million reuse plan. In 2009, another report from Jones Lang LaSalle.  In 2010, the Cook County Board approved a $108 million plan.  In 2011, new Board President Toni Preckwinkle made renovation of the old building a central part of her own $126 million hospital redevelopment plan.

The one constant binding all these plans together is (a) a lot of consultants have made a lot of money, which really would have come in handy in covering the project's cost, and (b) nothing ever happens.  Through it all, the majestic structure stands, empty, decaying, and untouched.

Well, once more into the breach, my friends.     Kristen Schorsch of Crain's Chicago Business is reporting that Toni Preckwinkle is planning �to hire a manager to guide the redevelopment effort of about 10 acres on the Near West Side campus . . .  with an eye toward preserving the historic public hospital building . . . �  And this fall?   Back by popular demand! Before the Cook County Board for approval - still another plan.

Will the nth time be the charm? Someone's always �saving� old Cook County Hospital, but until that day when construction crews arrive on-site and renovation begins, they will persist in seeming less like saviors, than the cat that absent-mindedly toys with a mouse until it finally gets bored and swallows it whole.

Read the Full Story and see the photo gallery:

Historic Cook County Hospital soon turns 100 - will it be around to see it?

Scraping Off the Wrigley: Beginning of the End for Chicago's Historic Central Manufacturing District?

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If you look closely at the above photograph of a banner promoting Chicago's Central Manufacturing District,  the clock tower pictured has seen better days.  The background is discolored and the hands are missing.  The reality, however, is worse.  The clockface on the opposite side of the tower, shown to the right, is not only discolored, many of the background panels are bashed or missing.  But at least the building is still standing. at lease for now.  Which is more than you can say for this . . .

How much historic architecture can you replace with strip malls before a city loses its identity in a sea of junkspace?  How much can you afford to keep when no one seems to want it?

The Central Manufacturing District is as essential a part of Chicago's history and architectural legacy as the Water Tower, Auditorium Building or City Hall.  Built on a cabbage patch just north of the Union Stockyards in the early years of the 20th century, it was arguably the world's first planned industrial park,  With its hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of employees, it was a key engine in making booming Chicago the �City of the Century�.

That was a long time ago, and now one of the anchors of the once-great CMD is coming down, all but unnoticed, like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.  After six years in search of tenants, the sprawling factory complex at 35th and Ashland where, for nearly a century, up to 1,700 workers manufactured the gum that made Wrigley one of the world's most recognized brands, is being pummeled into dust and carted off to the landfill.

The William Wrigley Company was one of the CMD's earliest tenants, and it grew to a block-square complex of buildings totaling 1.3 million square feet.  Making it vanish it without a trace is going to be a big job.  In 2009, Wrigley had hired CB Richard Ellis to sell the property, with an $19 milllion asking price.  Two years later, CBRE's plan for the property had become the universal antidote for all huge abandoned industrial property: high-tech.    In a report in the Gazette, a CBRE spokesman made a brave pitch for the site's advantages - good transportation, close to power and fibre eastments, and reasonable price.

Not reasonable enough, apparently.  A year later, the Wrigley factory complex was sold to Lonbard-based Avgeris and Associates - for $5 million.  Avergis's corporate focus is in the challenging industrial property field, with its website listing over 20 sites in nine different states.  Over half of those properties are in the Chicago area, with over half of the nearly 3 million square feet of space listed on the website as �available�.  Over one half of that vacant space comes from a single facility at 4100 West 76th Street.  Avergis has only one other retail development listed on its website, at California and 47th.   It appears to completely vacant.

The multi-story, multi-building Wrigley complex is an anachronism.  It's not how industrial space is designed and built today, and Avgeris has apparently decided it's crucial to make it all go away, quickly and finally.   On Avgeris webpage for the site, the name �Wrigley� is nowhere to be found.  Nor are any structures mentioned.  The site is identified only as �3535 S. Ashland . . . just over 30 acres,� ready to �build to suit.� Reports are Avgeris is hoping to find financial salvation in that other universal antidote for urban decay: big box retailers and strip malls.  No tenants have been announced or even rumored, so why the rush to destroy?   Avgeris claims the usual, vague �safety� concerns are driving the demolition, but my bet is that not only the buildings but the Wrigley history and identity are seen as liabilities that need to be scrubbed clean from the site to make it financially viable.

Avergis's website lists another property in the CMD,  the four-story, 356,000 square-foot factory building at 3815 South Ashland.  Just a couple blocks south of the Wrigley complex, it's in another world aesthetically.  Built in the 1940's, it has none of fine detailing of the older CMD buildings.  With the demolition of the Ashland viaduct, the raw, now spalling bones of its revealed reinforced concrete frame, inset with matrices of small rectangular windows, is again on full display, its original spare elegance in full derelict retreat.

The demolition of that half-century old viaduct, the Ashland Avenue overpass over Pershing Road, marks another turning point in the CMD.  Completed in 1963, at the end point of CMD's heyday, the overpass was another lingering anachronism, its dark, slumming presence enduring long after its original purpose had evaporated.

Still, the CMD is far from dead.   If you stand on Ashland next to the mostly demolished overpass, you'll see an unending parade of tractor-trailers racing down the street.  (You have to wonder where all this traffic will go if the the proposed Ashland Corridor Bus Rapid Transit project succeeds in appropriating two lanes of roadway.)  There are still any number of going concerns doing business in the historic buildings of the CMD.

The fact remains, however, that there is vastly more supply in the CMD's buildings than there is demand.  This is critically true in the structures created in the second phase of the CMD, along what is now Pershing Road. There is where the tall clock tower was built, next a massive, now-demolished power plant.  Still rising like a mesa along Pershing Road are four massive six-story buildings, with a combined volume of 12.5 million cubic feet.  They were constructed for the mail order operations of Montgomery Ward, but with the outbreak of World War I, over half of the space was commandeered by the U.S. Army to serve as a supply depot.  The Army's presence is still found in the numerous ornamental eagles, both in terra cotta  . . .

. . .  and above the entrances . . .

From 1979 to 2000, the buildings served as headquarters for the Chicago Public Schools.  Then-superintendent Paul Vallas, calling it a �financial sinkhole�,  sold three of the massive Pershing Road structures back to the city for $1.  And then he spent $100 million relocating CPS offices to the former Edison Building at Clark and Adams, buying the structure for $8.2 million and spending another $20 million for renovations.  This year, the CPS announced it would move from that building, which it owns, to rented space at 1 North Dearborn,  which they calculate will somehow produce $60 million over the next 15 years.  The merry-go-around never stops.

I've a system that's fiendishly clever,
Which I learned from a croupier friend,
And I should go on winning forever
But I do seem to lose in the end.
         What's the Use? from Candide, lyrics, John La Touche.

In an �expose� as part of its Broken Bonds series on the City of Chicago's burgeoning municipal debt, the Chicago Tribune made the Pershing Road complex the poster child of �indiscriminate spending�, a �boondongle� sucking up $41 million in bond money for the past nine years.  Pandering to its perceived primary readership of suburbanites in the 1%, the Trib report seemed to suggest that Chicago is already Detroit, inferring that new capital projects such as police and fire stations, libraries,  and saving landmarks to sustain neighborhood character, have not only been far too expensive, but probably shouldn't be done at all.

Before it imploded in its last terms, the administration of Richard M. Daley had made supporting Chicago's industrial base a major priority, but the story of how that all played out is an object lesson in how things really work in clout city.  

Galewood Yards, 1940's, photograph: Jack Delano, Library of Congress

As reported by the Reader's Ben Joravsky and others,  the 65-acre Galewood Yards at 1900 North Central was a mostly abandoned facility far larger than the needs of the surviving tenants Soo Line and Metra.  The Daley administration had a surprisingly resolute vision of using it as an anchor for a �modern state-of-the-art industrial park,� enlisting a firm named CMC Heartland Partners to develop it, and creating the Galewood/Armitage TIF to pump in subsidies.

When CMC pushed to be allowed to switch to residential development, the Daley administration pushed back, and a year later CMC bailed, selling their interest for $6.9 million to Calvin Boender.  Originally Boender talked about how the site "would make an excellent boutique industrial park,� but by 2004, he, too, was pressing for a switch to residential.  After Boender enlisted the help of Alderman Issac Carother's and Congressman Luis Guiterez, the city threw in the towel.  It allowed a part of the site to be rezoned to allow 187 residential units and a 14-screen movie theater.    $5.3 in TIF money went to a local union so it buy a portion of the remaining acreage from Boender for a job training center.  Boender also got over $6 million for selling the land for the cineplex and residences.

At the end of 2012, the Galewood/Armitage TIF had a $23 million balance, but a ongoing paper deficit, as revenues from the TIF were used - not to support industrial development - but to float over $35 million in school construction bonds to fund the $36.5 million Jorge Prieto Math and Science Academy.

In May of 2009, Carothers and Boender were indicted by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald on fraud and bribery charges.  Boender had given Carothers $40,000 in free improvements to his home, plus other perks, in exchange for successfully pushing through the zoning change that allowed Boender, without doing a jot of development, to sell property he had bought at $6.9 million for $11.3 million within just a few short years.

In 2010, Carothers plead guilty.  The next year a jury convicted Boender.  In a secret 2008 interview with the FBI, Mayor Daley �had trouble recalling any controversy surrounding Galewood Yards.�  This elective amnesia seems to have become the Mayor's contemptuous M.O. whenever he's called to testify on the corrupt deals that have now become his administration's legacy. 

Daley's book of (inner) laughter and (outward) forgetting also infected his staff.  When his administration helped create a new, $45,000,000 Wrigley Global Innovation Center on Goose Island with $14 million in city subsidies in 2006, Daley promised not only that the Ashland Avenue factory and its jobs would remain, but that new manufacturing would spill into the spaces vacated by the Innovation Center's opening.  And he would get it in writing.  Then everyone forgot all about it.  Apparently no signature was never obtained because just one month later, Wrigley announced it was closing the Ashland Avenue plant.  600 workers lost their jobs

And so, we're back to the beginning.  The demolition of the Ashland Avenue overpass lets us see unobstructed the proud old factory buildings.  For the first time in half a century, they've been given room to breathe - will they be denied a chance to live?  

Just last January, the former Pullman Coach factory at 37th and Ashland was consumed by a massive fire.  It took months to clear away the debris.  The site is now a vacant dirt pile that stretches farther to the east than you would have imagined.

That's the magic of the CMD.  A building like the  Machinery Warehouse may seem, by its graceful facade, to be a relatively modest structure . . .

. . . until you turn the corner and see that it extends all the way down the block in an uninterrupted, 60,000 square-foot sweep.

Now the Pullman Coach factory site is a yawning gap in the Ashland Avenue streetwall of once proud factory buildings, with their tall towers built to conceal the water tanks that provided protection from fire.  How long can they hold on?  Just up the street, that building 3815 South Ashland recently acquired by Avergis is listed as essentially vacant.  Will it become the next to fall?  Will the streetwall dissolve into a smattering of buildings between surface parking lots, or - just as likely - vanish entirely for a giant strip mall?   That's seems to be Avergis's plan.  The siteplan on their website doesn't just include the Wrigley properties, but extends another block south.  A February, 2013 report by DNAinfoChicago shows a prospective plan that wipes out every building on Ashland almost to 37th, including the eight-story former Larkin Building - three square blocks erased for a big box strip mall with stores in a dozen isolated islands swimming in a sea of 600 parking places.

Last month, mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration announced a task force bringing together the City of Chicago, local alderman, labor and consultants to come up for new uses for the 50+ now-closed Dominick's stores that failed to find a buyer.  Where's the task force for the CMD?  In 2012, Emanuel announced a plan to bring high-speed broadband to the Ravenswood Industrial Corridor.  The CMD already has the benefit of adjacency to the rail right-of-way that served the Stockyards.  Why not use it to help attract high-tech to the CMD with super-speed internet?

The Central Manufacturing District is the ugly duckling of Chicago's lost pride. When you walk among the fine old buildings, when you view the great clock tower from McKinley Park, you can see
what it could become - perhaps not exactly a swan, but more a falcon or a hawk, a workaday bird of no small majesty.  Right now, it's just prey for the vultures.

Just as its buildings contain probably hundreds of millions of dollars worth of embedded energy that is being squandered through neglect and demolition, the Central Manufacturing District is a jewel of a neighborhood waiting to be rediscovered.  An essential part of Chicago's history and architectural legacy, it might easily be discarded unthinkingly, but only at enormous cost.  An infusion of attention and imagination, with the money that follows it, could restore the CMD to being one of Chicago's most valuable assets.



Read More:

Four Buildings and a Funeral - Wrigley: The Architecture that Remains after a Great Company Dies

Outtakes from the Central Manufacturing District.

Aftermath:  Some Say the World Will End in Ice . . .

Chicago Legends George Wendt and Joe Mantegna on Architecture and saving the Hull House Theater

�Not only is Chicago theater well-regarded, well renowned, obviously Chicago architecture is well regarded and well renowned.  Crombie Taylor is a noted theater architect worthy of being preserved, just on the basis of the architectural value.  We've all seen that coffee table book, Lost Chicago, and this would be another piece of Lost Chicago if we don't get these folks to change their mind and save a little culture . . . �

That was George Wendt talking about the Hull House Theater in Uptown.  Along with another legendary Chicago actor, Joe Mantegna, he had been recruited by former Organic Theater director social service association founded by Jane Addams in 1889.

Stuart Gorden to come to Chicago and run a gauntlet of media interviews - including the one you see here -  in support of the Consortium to Save Hull House Theater.  The group is mounting a last-ditch campaign to keep the historic Uptown venue from being converted into apartments by its new owner, developer Dave Gassman.  Gassman bought the property for $1 million in May, a year after it had fallen into foreclosure after the bankruptcy and abrupt  liquidation of the last remaining vestiges of the

�It's kind of like a church in a way, � says Mantegna, �because it's a living, breathing thing, because of the activity that happens within it.  When we used it for the Organic Theater, this space on Beacon Street, here was this beautiful, jewel box kind of a theater.�

It was 1966 when the Hull House Theatre moved into the new Hull House Association building at 4520 North Beacon Street in Uptown, designed by architect Crombie Taylor.  The innovative 144-seat arena-styled theater sits in the basement of the 16,000 square-foot structure, and is currently the home to Pegasus Players under a lease that runs through 2014.  Although perhaps best remembered as a Louis Sullivan scholar who was instrumental in saving and restoring the Auditorium Theater Building, Taylor's own work was �celebrated for their simplicity and elegance, with the Hull House theater �known for its unobstructed views, perfect acoustics and intimate experience. It is widely considered one of the best designed theaters in Chicago.�

The Hull House became one of the early flash points for the exploding Chicago theater scene, first under the direction of Bob Sickinger, and then when it became home to Stuart and Carolyn Purdy Gordon's Organic Theater Company, the adventurous ensemble whose artistic roster included Joe Mantegna, Dennis Franz and Meschach Taylor, and whose productions included the world premiere of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago.  The Organic's production of Mantegna's Bleacher Bums, which followed  the interactions of a group of fans watching a Chicago Cubs game, was a breakout hit - running for two years in Chicago and 13 in L.A. -  and was adapted for PBS.

�I think,� recalled Mantegna, �that Stuart [Gordon] discovered this theater existed in this Hull House on Beacon Street in Uptown and here was this beautiful space.  The look of it was not typical.  It was not the traditional kind of proscenium.  This was a kind of arena setup, where the stage is down the floor and the seating goes up like this.  Years later, it led itself perfectly to create the world premiere of Bleacher Bums, because we had no money to do sets for the play.  So we came upon the idea, if we take seats out of one section - just remove the seats - now the concrete risers become the bleachers.  We acted in that section of the theater on the concrete risers.  The audience sat on the stage in folding chairs and in the remaining seats in the arena.  It was a case where the flexibility of the space helped create a show.�

Hull House's longest-running tenant was Jackie Taylor's Black Ensemble Theater, which made the house their home for 24 years until moving to their own theater in 2011.

The Consortium to save the theater was quickly mobilized after Gassman's plans for the property became known last month, and its membership consists of �artists including Joe Mantegna, Jim Belushi, George Wendt, Jim Jacobs, William H. Macy, William Petersen, Robert Falls, Marilu Henner, Jackie Taylor and Stuart Gordon, as well as members of Preservation Chicago and local business leaders.�  A Change.org petition in favor saving the theater quickly attained over 1,800 signatures, including playwright Jeffrey Sweet and Redmoon Theater's Jim Lasko.

Said Wendt, �Stuart Gordon has been a colleague of Joe's and mine for decades, and he was the one who alerted us to the issue and that's how we got roped into it.  We feel it's a worthy cause to be roped into.�

With 46th Alderman James Cappleman and the Beacon Street Block Club in his corner, Gassman's initial response was not encouraging.  Claiming that for the 47 years since its founding, the Hull House Theater is, and always has been, illegal, violating zoning regulations, Gassman told DNAinfo Chicago he �. . . would tell anyone who doesn't like it.  Don't live in America. That's how it works.�  He said he was making a proposal to Pegasus to buy out their lease.

However, when the necessary zoning change came before the City Council Zoning Committee on June 11, after hearing the Consortium make its case, the vote was rescheduled until this coming Tuesday, June 25th, with Cappleman saying it was to allow more time for the Consortium to try to change Gassman's mind and/or come up with a proposal to buy the building from him.

When I asked Mantegna about the idea that historic buildings in some way encapsulate the spirit of a city over time, I got a very philosophical response.

�I don't want to get into a long dissertation about this, but the whole thing is that my belief system is based on the fact that the difference between somebody who's alive and somebody's who's dead is energy.  And Einstein said energy can't be created or destroyed.  So therefore, when you die, where did it go? That thing, the Lifeforce, whatever it is that makes you alive -the soul, whatever you want to call it, that's that thing.  The thing that makes us sitting here talking and being alive, and the difference from if the three of us were dead right now, is that energy, and if can't be destroyed, and that's a proven thing, that you can't destroy energy, where did it go?

�And it could manifest itself in grace,� added Wendt, getting back to the main message.  �And I think David Gassman has a chance to do the graceful thing here and preserve a theater.�

Joe Mantegna and George Wendt has a lot more to say about Chicago and its architecture.  Check out the rest of the conversation, after the break.



Wendt:  You know, most theaters are quite beautiful, especially the older ones.  I remember doing a

gig at the Auditorium Theater and I'm up on the stage, and there's several thousand people in the audience and I wanted to say, �No, no, no - don't look at us.  The show's back there�, 'cause I had the best seat in the house looking out at that theater.  It's just so beautiful.  Often times, these old houses, like the Chicago Theater . . .
Mantegna: . . . the State and Lake.
Wendt:  Yeah, the State and Lake.  Where's Book of Mormon?
Becker:  The Schubert
Mantegna:  That's where I did Hair.  My first professional play.
Wendt:  I did Twelve Angry Men there.
Mantegna:  I saw you do it.
Becker:  When you go to a historic theater, is it just sentiment or do you actually get a sense of the past from the building?
Wendt:  For me, it's just awe-inspiring.  It reminds me to bring my �A� game.  You've got to bring your �A� game, anyway, but to play in the West End of London and walk around backstage just touching bricks and thinking �Charles Laughton probably touched that brick that I'm touching right now.�  It's just amazing - Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness
Mantegna:  Gielgud.
Wendt:  Yeah.
Becker:  If someone hadn't told you, would you still know?  Would you still feel that?  If you hadn't learned it somewhere?
Mantegna:  It depends on your belief system.  Some people believe in ghosts and all that other stuff.
Becker:  What's your belief system?
Mantegna: I don't want to get into a long dissertation about this, but the whole thing is that my belief system is based on the fact that the difference between somebody who's alive and somebody's who's dead is energy.  And Einstein said energy can't be created or destroyed.  So therefore, when you die, where did it go? That thing, the Lifeforce, whatever it is that makes you alive -the soul, whatever you want to call it, that's that thing.  The thing that makes us sitting here talking and being alive and the difference from if the three of us were dead right now is that energy, and if can't be destroyed, and that's a proven thing, that you can't destroy energy, where did it go?
Wendt:  And it cound manifest itself in grace.  And I think David Gassman has a chance to do the graceful thing and preserve a theater.  Put apartments above it, maybe less than he wanted, but . .  .
Mantegna:  Yeah, I think this is an opportunity for the city, for him [Gassman], for whomever is involved to actually do something that would give him more attention, and even more commercial opportunity.  Let's also have a win-win situation, where we preserve the art.
Wendt:  The arts have generated money, as Rich Daley knew - maybe it was Maggie's idea - but to stay very supportive of the arts, because it regenerates neighborhoods in a very real, real estate way and also attracts companies such as Boeing to Chicago.
Mantega:  When we moved into that Hull House Theater in 1973 as the Organic, Argosy Magazine at the time named that neighborhood the most dangerous neighborhood in the world, because it had basically the biggest conglomeration of different ethnic types of any neighborhood on the planet.  It was a tough, tough neighborhood.  You had drunks laying in the streets.  We were there before they built Truman College, so we saw the gradual kind of gentrification of that area.  It's still not complete.
Becker:  And to go back to the importance of saving Hull House Theater?
Mantegna:  For me, it's already proved its historical value just by what's gone down there over the last many years.  What the theater scene has done in the last 40 years in this town is amazing.  It went from a center for dinner theater and Broadway roadshows to a place that sends out world renowned actors, director, writers . .  .
Wendt:  Pulitzer-Prize winners . . .
Mantegna:  Tony Award winners, Academy Award winners.  Then go back to why it's part of Hull House, the history of that.  Do you want to wipe it all away?

. . .  You go to Rome, you go to Paris, you go to London, and you see that what makes them the great metropolises, part of it is they have - yes there's so much modern, but yet they've retain and protect.  What would it have been like if they had turned the Colisseum into apartment buildings?  Or Parliament into a dandy-looking condo complex?  We have an opportunity here as a relatively young country to start taking care of the things that, hopefully, hundreds and thousands of years from now will be part of our heritage and part of our culture.  If you lose that, then you really got nothin'.  You've just got a place to hang your hat.  There's no identity.  There's no soul.  There's no heart.
Becker:  You were both born in Chicago.  What was it like the first time you came downtown?
Mantegna:  Back then you'd have to dress up.  We'd have to wear ties and stuff when I was a kid.  It was a big deal.
Wendt:  Van Buren Street was an eye-opener.  I lived on the South Side in Beverly and we'd take the Rock Island downtown on Saturdays.  There was a lot of adult entertainment, seedy things.  We were like ten years old and we'd just go, �What is going on here?�
Mantegna:  Congress and State, too.  They had those three strip clubs.   Actually what George said

photograph courtesy Cinema Treasures

about his experience with the Auditorium, I remember that aspect of it, too, going to the movies downtown and going into the State and Lake, going in the Chicago Theater, going into the Oriental . .  .
Wendt: . . . the Woods . . .
Mantegna: . . . the Woods.  I grew up on the west side.  The Marbro theatre was like that.  These were palaces.
Wendt:  Oh, yeah.
Mantegna:  These were like, �Wow!�  I remember the Marbro and the Alex.  Madison, Crawford, that's the area where I grew up.  The Marbro was a big, beautiful place so it was on par with the Uptown . . .
Wendt:  The Riviera, the Uptown.  And out at my neck of the woods was the Capitol Theater, and the

Capitol Theater,
photograph courtesy:
Cinema Treasures

Highland at 79th and Ashland.
Mantegna: Even when I went to High School, Morton East it has an auditorium that's been preserved as a historical landmark, because it's on a par with those theaters like the Marbro.
[Digressive Note: The Beaux Arts Chodl Auditorium at Morton East in Cicero is on the National Register of Historic Places.  This coming September 18th, it will host a concert of Brahms and Verdi played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti.]
Mantegna: I remember I used to do plays on that stage, and when I did my first Broadway play, Working, in 1978, I kept thinking, what's it going to be like doing my first Broadway play when I get out on that stage?  What's it going to be like?  I remember walking out on that stage and looking out at the audience and the theater, and I thought to myself, this is not as big or nice as my high school auditorium.  It was the 46th Street Theater, which was a nice theater at that time, but compared to what I was used to at Morton . . .  So even as a kid, I was impacted by the majesty of a theater.
[Historical digression:  the 46th Street Theater is now the Richard Rodgers. (I saw Bill Irwin there many years ago.) Working was an adaptation of the classic book by Studs Terkel, adapted, directed and with music and lyrics -with others, include James Taylor - by Stephen Schwartz, after Pippin and Godspell and before Wicked.  Along with Mantegna, the cast included Lynne Thigpen, David PatrickWorking was nominated for five Tony awards, but ran only 24 performances.]

Kelly, Bobo Lewis, and, about a year away from their triumphant reunion as that lovely couple down the street, the Perons, Bob Gunton and Patti LuPone.  A production of Goodman Theatre,
Becker:  So when you were kids and went to the movies, did it draw you to becoming active in theater?
Mantegna:  It's gotta help.
Wendt:  Well, it was air conditioned (laughs) and it smells like popcorn.
Mantegna:  You don't appreciate it as much as a kid, but as you get older.  I remember the Auditorium had just been rediscovered.  It had been like mothballed and then when they rediscovered it, and kind of fixed it up, all the sudden, it's a showplace.  So here's another case of something that was neglected and forgotten and now it's a showplace.
Wendt:  Legend is that Frank Lloyd Wright was involved . . . My neighborhood in Beverly had several Frank Lloyd Wright houses, and all the Wright houses are among my favorite Chicago buildings.

The Big Con Closes: Northwestern Wins the Battle to Destroy Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital

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 Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois moved for a voluntary dismissal of their complaint in Cook County Circuit Court, signaling the end of their legal challenge against the City of Chicago and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. 

At the end, even the members of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks were coming to the realize they were just part of a scam.  �I have this suspicion,� said commissioner James Houlihan, �that Northwestern has placed before us a false question.�

The false question at the bottom of Northwestern University's Big Con was simply this:  that there were two - and only two - choices.  One, you could have a new billion dollar research lab, state-of-the-art science, thousands of jobs, and countless lives saved.  Or, you stop Northwestern from demolishing Bertrand Goldberg's landmark Prentice Hospital, and find all of that  - the billion dollars, the jobs, the science, the healed lives - �melted into air, into thin air.�

Or at least that's what Northwestern's Eugene Sunshine told Houlihan when he asked what the university would do if Goldberg's building were landmarked.  �We don't really have an alternative,� was Sunshine's reply.  That's right.  One of the most distinguished institutions of learning in the world, home to cutting edge research and some of the most brilliant people on the globe, just couldn't figure out a way to keep from demolishing Prentice to create a vacant lot across from another massive two-block lot that's been vacant for five years.  When it came to finding an alternative to wrecking Prentice, all that brain power turned to quivering jello.

Hard to believe, no?  Well here's the thing.  It's not important that you believe; it's only important to appear to believe, and act accordingly. The only true catechism was acceptance of Northwestern's position atop the foodchain of clout, and a droit du seigneur that can never be questioned, only rationalized. 

Seigneur to seignuer, this is the world which Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel inhabits and understands, so it's no surprise he found himself, almost as soon as he was inaugurated, counseling Northwestern on how to mount the kind of clever PR campaign that would provide cover to its actions.  When that campaign finally bubbled to maturity, Rahm went public with a thumbs-down  op-ed in the Tribune, and the game was over.

But not before the Save Prentice Coalition mounted one of the most active and creative public interest campaigns I have ever witnessed.  Yes, I know - the patient died, but the coalition kept Prentice's heartbeat going long after Rahm's heavy pillow would have sent it flatlining.  All recognition is due to the coalition's partners, including Landmarks Illinois, Preservation Chicago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, AIA/Chicago, DoCoMoMo Midwest, The Chicago Architectural Club, and more, and to individuals such as Lisa DiChiera, Christina Morris, Jonathan Fine, Stacey Pfingsten, Gunny Harboe, Jim Peters, Eric Herman, Zurich Esposito, Brian Strawn, Karla Sierralta, Bonnie McDonald and so many others.

Lest this appreciation, given the final outcome, seem little more than sentimentality, we should keep in mind that Save Prentice did achieve: creating a textbook model of how to run a public advocacy campaign.   It appealed to excellence, in the way it brought many of the world's leading architects to lend their voice to saving Prentice.  It appealed to creativity and practicality, in how it enlisted the best of both established and young architects and engineers to come up with a dazzling array of compelling, thoroughly-researched alternatives in which Northwestern's needs could be met while preserving Prentice.  They went to court and got a judge to question whether the way the Landmarks Commission signed off on destroying Prentice really met legal standards of due process.  (When they lost, it was not the the merits, but matters of jurisdiction.)  They found a capable partner in ASKG Public Strategies, and engaged social media in a creative and compelling way.  They encouraged and organized a broad range and expert and citizen testimony at public hearings whose results had already been pre-scripted.

Even if Save Prentice was not successful in its ultimate goal of keeping an indispensable piece of Chicago's architectural legacy in place for future generations, it revealed clearly the mendacity beneath so much of Northwestern's efforts, and it set a new standard for advocacy in the architectural preservation realm.

Every few decades, Chicago allows the powerful and connected to destroy a great masterpiece - the Garrick Theater, The Stock Exchange, and now Prentice.  Every time we say, �We won't let this happen again.� and each time, we've been proven wrong.  The Save Prentice coalition has built a strong foundation that makes it more likely that the next time may be different.  And that is no small thing.

Read the full coalition statement after the break:



Statement from Save Prentice Coalition

Chicago � February 14, 2013 � Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Landmarks Illinois moved for a voluntary dismissal of their complaint in Cook County Circuit Court, signaling the end of their legal challenge against the City of Chicago and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The Save Prentice Coalition issued the following statement:


Only months ago, it was uncertain whether the landmark status of historic Prentice Women�s Hospital would be considered in a public forum. Thousands of people in Chicago and around the globe helped bring the conversation about Bertrand Goldberg�s Modern masterpiece to Chicago�s Landmarks Commission, which unanimously declared Prentice worthy of landmark designation.

We continue to believe there were significant flaws with the process that granted and then removed landmark protection for Prentice. However, we feel that the landmarks process has run its course. When challenging issues come before the Landmarks Commission, all parties share an obligation to provide honest input, consider reuse alternatives and respect the ordinances and procedures. We continue to support the practical reuse options available to Northwestern University that will grow Chicago�s economy and preserve its world-class architectural and cultural heritage.

At its core, preservation helps cities grow and prosper. It creates jobs, boosts local economies, helps reduce our carbon footprint, and makes cities more dynamic, appealing and attractive. Members of the Save Prentice Coalition have a long history of working in partnership with the City of Chicago on a wide range of preservation issues, and we look forward to continuing this work.