ChicagoRound: The Chicago River at Night

I took this picture last night from the LaSalle Street bridge facing east toward the lake. Wacker Drive separates the river from the buildings on the right, but the buildings on the left butt up right to the river with only a small public river walk separating them from the water.

The Chicago River originally flowed into Lake Michigan, but as Chicago exploded in size in the 19th century, the river became a dumping ground for garbage and sewage—especially from the city's massive slaughterhouses. The pollution moved directly into the lake, contaminating the city's fresh water supply and creating severe threats to public health. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago managed to reverse the flow of the river in a remarkable feat of engineering and sheer willpower. While the change stopped the pollution of Lake Michigan, the river continued to be a dumping ground all the way up to 1990, when a cleaning and beautification initiative by Mayor Daley made the river the appealing attraction it is today.

Because the bridges that cross the river are built as flexible bascules that raise and lower to allow boats to pass underneath, they actually bounce when traffic crosses them. So it was impossible for me to get a clear picture of the view last night as I stood on the bridge with cars and buses rumbling past me. But I think the blurry effect is kind of cool.

ChicagoRound: Palmolive Building, 1936

This picture, which I lifted from the Chicago Tribune archives, looks like it was taken near North Avenue looking south toward North Michigan Avenue:

The shiny building in the center of the picture is Holabird & Root's iconic Palmolive Building, at the time one of the tallest skyscrapers in Chicago. It was built between 1927 and 1929 in high Art Deco style with soaring vertical lines, dramatic setbacks and a 97-foot tower topped by the Lindbergh Beacon, which could be seen all over the city and even by airplanes 225 miles away. The Arthur Rubloff Company renamed the burgeoning North Michigan Avenue shopping area the Magnificent Mile in the 1940s in an effort to brand it as a retail destination in consumers' minds. In 1967, the Palmolive Building was bought by Playboy magazine and became the Playboy Building. Two years later, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill built the John Hancock Center on the lot immediately behind the Playboy Building in this picture. At 1,127 feet, the Hancock Center dwarfed the once-mighty Playboy Building, and the beacon had to be turned off so it wouldn't shine directly into the Hancock's residential units. The building was rechristened the Palmolive Building in 2002 when it was converted to high-end condominiums and, of course, high-end retail shops.

ChicagoRound: Water Tower

Chicago's iconic Water Tower on North Michigan Avenue was one of a handful of downtown buildings to survive the 1871 Chicago fire. It originally housed a 138-foot standpipe to equalize water pressure coming from Lake Michigan. The tower was connected to a tunnel leading the then-revolutionary length of two miles into the lake to ensure water coming into the city was uncontaminated by sewage and runoff. The standpipe was removed in 1911 when it was rendered obsolete by the installation of rotary pumps.

The soaring Water Tower and the turreted Pumping Station across the street were modeled by architect William W. Boyington on a medieval castle and constructed of Joliet limestone between 1897 and 1869 in what's called the castellated Gothic style. The two buildings have stood for over a century as symbols of Chicago's resilience after the fire. The ornate tower offers a striking counterpoint to the modern consumer architecture around it, and it looks especially stunning at night:

The Pumping Station is still in use today, though it also houses a visitor welcome center, the Lookingglass Theatre and a Hot Tix office. The Water Tower is now home to a rotating gallery of photographs, and it holds court over a small fountained plaza in a manicured park on the west side of Michigan Avenue. In the winter, the city hangs canopies of lights over the walkways in the park. We took a stroll under the canopies last night after our annual pilgrimage to hear the always-spectacular Chanticleer kick off the holiday season in the Gothic splendor of nearby Fourth Presbyterian Church.

ChicagoRound: Do Not Parking

A homemade sign on a LaSalle Boulevard condo construction site south of North Avenue, in the Old Town neighborhood.

Old Town, just northwest of Chicago's tony Gold Cost neighborhood, was almost completely consumed in the 1871 Chicago fire. It was rebuilt in the Victorian style that was prevalent at the time, and the neighborhood housed some prominent artist colonies in the 1930s. After the neighborhood's so-called "white flight" to the suburbs in the 1950s, it became home to counterculture hippies in the 1960s. Then the gays moved in. And you know what happens once the gays move in: The trendy straight people follow, property values soar and the neighborhood goes into a constant state of renovation. Old Town today is packed with grand old homes, ’60s eyesores and trendy boutiques … along with a few remnants of its counterculture past like The Second City improv/comedy revue, which has occupied a space at North and Wells since 1967.

ChicagoRound: Graceland Cemetery

We took the Chicago Architecture Foundation's two-hour walking tour of Chicago's pastoral Graceland Cemetery on Sunday afternoon. The tour is only ten bucks for non-members, and it gives you a sweeping overview of Chicago history, politics, architecture and society. The cemetery, founded in 1860, was designed by landscape architects H.W.S. Cleveland and Ossian Simonds in the Victorian park style, with winding roads, lush native foliage and man-made lakes that work to create a serene, inviting space for visitors. Everyone who's anyone in Chicago history is buried at Graceland, and many of the monuments and mausolea are architectural icons designed by the city's most famous architects. Here's a mere sample of the architecture and the stories the cemetery contains:

This heavenward-facing angel welcomes visitors to the cemetery. In true Victorian fashion, she's the embodiment of lyric Romanticism, and she becomes so entangled in vines that she has to be hacked free at least once a year.

Lorado Taft's iconic Eternal Silence is perhaps the cemetery's most famous monument. Built in 1909 for the family of Chicago pioneer, hotelier and spooky-boneyard-name titleholder Dexter Graves, it features a hooded figure whose dark receded face stands in arresting contrast to the bright patina of its robes. The monument was recently cleaned and restored, but the face was left dark, presumably to freak out little children who wander too close:

Taft's 1931 Crusader was erected to honor newspaper publisher and philanthropist Victor Lawson. The figure is as solitary and heroic as Eternal Silence, but it features the smoother surfaces and sleeker lines of the Art Deco movement, in contrast to the overwrought turn-of-the-century emotion of Eternal Silence.

Potter Palmer, proprietor of Chicago's iconic Palmer House hotel, is entombed next to his wife, Bertha Honoré Palmer, in a pair of sarcophagi under an austere 1902 Greek revival temple featuring a stately colonnade of pillars. The Honoré family monument, in a Gothic splendor reminiscent of Notre Dame Cathedral, sits just below the Palmer monument. But apparently I forgot to take a picture of it.

Marshall Field's 1906 family plot features a seated figure holding oak leaves, a traditional symbol of strength, in front of a private reflecting pool in a grotto of foliage. The twin caducei on the front of the base are the traditional symbol of the medical profession, but our docent on Sunday said they're also a traditional symbol of commerce. My attempts to confirm this via Wikipedia and dictionary.com only confuse the matter further.

I'm afraid I can't remember whom this monument—featuring the traditional Victorian figures of faith, hope and charity—was built for. But what struck me (and everyone else in our group) was a line of five small headstones at its base marking the remains of an entire family—two parents and three children—who were killed in the Iroquois Theater fire on December 30, 1903. The fire, which started when a lighting fixture ignited a curtain and quickly exploded into a giant fireball, killed 602 people during a matinée of the popular musical Mr. Bluebeard, starring Eddie Foy. The deaths were attributed to corrupt fire inspectors in combination with fire exits that opened inward, trapping everyone inside as bodies piled up against them. This disaster is the reason that all fire doors open outward to this day.

Louis Sullivan is often credited as the creator of the modern skyscraper. The development of cheap, available steel in the last half of the 19th century suddenly allowed buildings to rise higher than architects had ever imagined. And since their outside walls didn't have to bear the weight of the extra floors, they were suddenly free to be ornamental. Sullivan helped define a graceful visual vocabulary for buildings that soared into the outer reaches of perspective, and the mighty skyscraper was born. While Sullivan coined the phrase "form follows function"—meaning a building's practical use should trump superfluous aesthetics—he often gave his buildings lush Art Nouveau or Celtic Revival ornamentation ... like the intricate cast-iron latticework that graces his Carson, Pirie, Scott Building in Chicago and the terra cotta detailing on the Peoples Savings Bank in my hometown. Despite Sullivan's epic achievements in architecture—including some of the most notable monuments at Graceland Cemetery—he died penniless and alone due to his alcoholism and his uneven temperament. And his gravestone is little more than a rock with an ornament bearing his silhouette.

Architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham was the director of works for the 1893 World's Fair (read all about it in Devil in the White City) and the architect of such notable structures as Chicago's Reliance Building, Washington D.C.'s Union Station and New York City's Flatiron Building. He also created the great 1909 Chicago Plan, the first comprehensive blueprint for controlled growth of an American city. Despite his vast, ornate architectural oeuvre, his grave marker is a simple plaque on a rough-hewn stone. But his family plot occupies a private island in the cemetery's Lake Willowmere. Interesting fact: When Lincoln Park Cemetery was deconsecrated in the 1800s and its bodies were reinterred at Graceland, the broken headstones were used to line Lake Willowmere. You can still see etchings on the stones that border the lake.

Ruth Page, the first American ballerina to dance with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, was also the first American choreographer to employ Rudolf Nureyev after his defection from the Kirov Ballet. She helped bring modern dance to the masses, and she worked with some of the early 20th century's most influential artists, including Irving Berlin, Aaron Copland and Anna Pavlova. She's interred in a grotto surrounded by some of Graceland Cemetery's most avant-garde and unusual grave markers, an apt tribute to her life and her work.

Architect Mies van der Rohe founded the International Style, the fabled "less is more" school that eschewed ornament over sleek dark facades and pure functionality. Dirk Lohan's polished granite slab marking his grave echoes the austere aesthetic of van der Rohe's architecture, which includes Chicago's IBM Building and New York City's Seagram Building.

Essays: The Red Dress

She came from the poorest elementary school in the district. So many of her peers qualified for free lunches that the school served everyone free lunches to eliminate the stigma. The school even employed full-time staff members to act as surrogate parents, driving to kids’ houses when they didn’t show up for school, taking the kids to doctor or social worker appointments—doing everything they could to provide the support the kids might not be getting at home in the hopes of creating an environment where the kids wouldn’t be too distracted from their studies.

Hers were among the parents who didn’t offer a lot of support. None, actually. By the spring of her fourth-grade year, her teacher hadn’t even met them, despite repeated attempts to schedule parent-teacher conferences.

But despite overwhelming odds against her, the little girl actually stood out as an academic leader among her peers. In fact, that spring she was named the school’s outstanding student—an award bestowed on one child from each elementary school across the district based on a range of factors including intelligence, ability, motivation and leadership skills.

The award included an afternoon away from school for a formal recognition ceremony with the outstanding students from all the other schools in the district. The ceremony was designed to be a Big Deal, and it would be attended by dignitaries from the school district, the city government and even the local media.

Embarrassed that she didn’t own anything nice to wear to the ceremony, the girl walked a mile and a half to Goodwill one weekend afternoon and found a slightly frayed red dress. It cost almost all of the six dollars she had to her name, but she thought it would make her look pretty—elegant, even.

The day of the ceremony, she rose early to shower and wash her hair and try to find a way to make it especially nice. She worked for quite some time, brushing it and rolling it around her fingers to make it curly and bouncy like the women she saw on television. It ended up as flat as it always did, though—so she found an old scrunchie and wrapped a red scrap of material from her blanket around it to match her dress. Then she pulled her hair back into her usual ponytail, carefully packed her dress in her school bag and headed to school.

She kept her dress with her by her desk all morning. Before she was set to leave for the ceremony, she took it to the bathroom to get dressed. But it had never occurred to her to try it on—and she discovered to her horror that it was many, many sizes too small. After a good 20 minutes of struggling and sucking in her tummy and wishing it to fit, she had to admit defeat. She went to get some help, but not even her teacher—always able to work magic for her students who were conditioned to expect so little—could get the dress pinned together for her. So the girl had to wear her dirty old coat over her pretty six-dollar dress.

The girl’s parents weren’t interested in coming to the ceremony, so her teacher drove her there and waited in the audience to bring her back to school.

She accepted her award all alone that warm spring day—in a used dress that didn’t fit, hidden under a dirty coat that made her look completely out of place. She stood on the stage with all the other kids, who were combed and dressed and fussed over. There was a constant flashing of lights as the other parents took pictures. Her teacher counted eleven video cameras. But there was no one else there to smile up at her and congratulate her with a warm parental hug and share whatever pride she could muster over the event.

And while the other kids left with parents in one hand and award certificates in the other, headed to celebratory dinners at their favorite restaurants, the little girl climbed into her teacher’s car and sat quietly for the ride back to school.

And when her teacher—my little sister, who was in her first year of teaching—got home, she sobbed.