ChicagoRound: Iroquois Theatre

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.

When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains anyway). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Less than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)

The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.

Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.

Today, the stunning Asian-baroque Oriental Theatre [update: now the James M. Nederlander Theatre] sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.

There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.

Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

ChicagoRound: The John Hancock Center

Chicago’s most recognizable skyscraper, with its delicate tapering and its iconic X-bracing, is only the city’s fourth tallest building.

Erected between 1965 and 1970, the Hancock Center actually sits on landfill from Chicago’s great 1871 fire. As legend has it, a mountebank named George Wellington "Cap" Streeter ran his steamboat aground on a sandbar 450 feet off Chicago’s north shore in 1886, convinced post-fire contractors to dump debris between the shore and his boat, and over the decades sold deeds and collected taxes on the growing mass of landfill he called the United States District of Lake Michigan.

The area is today called Streeterville, and the Hancock Center reportedly occupies the spot where Cap Streeter’s boat stood for over a decade.

100 stories tall, the Hancock Center houses stores, restaurants and about 700 condominiums. That swirly structure behind the building in this awesome satellite photo is the ramp to the parking garage, which sits on floors 4–12.

ChicagoRound: Essanay Studios

Most people—heck, most Chicagoans—don’t realize it, but Chicago was an important player in the development of America’s motion picture industry. And the Chicago studio that was once home to early film legends like Gloria Swanson, G.M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson and Charlie Chaplin—along with screenwriter-turned-Hollywood-gossip-columnist Louella Parsons—still stands in Chicago’s storied Uptown neighborhood:

Essanay Studios—founded in 1907 as the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company but eventually renamed Essanay after the initials (S and A) of its founders, George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson—turned out about 2,000 shorts and features between 1907 and 1917.

Its first film, An Awful Skate, or The Hobo on Rollers, was produced in and around its first studio location at 946 Wells Street (now 1300 N. Wells after Chicago changed its street numbering system in 1908). It starred Ben Turpin, who was then the studio janitor, and it cost just a couple hundred dollars to make. But it grossed perhaps as much as $10,000—close to $216,000 in modern dollars—when it was released. Suddenly flush with money and success, Essanay Studios moved to its giant new location—and into its golden age—at 1333-45 W. Argyle St. in 1908.

Chicago’s weather—and it’s always about Chicago’s weather—along with the growing popularity of westerns, also prompted Essanay to open what they called the Essanay-West Studio in Niles, California in 1913.

The Chicago studio produced many of Essanay’s most famous movies, including:
• The first A Christmas Carol (1908)
• The first Jesse James movie, The James Boys of Missouri (1908)
• The first American Sherlock Holmes (1916)
• And some of the world’s first cartoons, including a popular character called Dreamy Dud

Aside from Anderson, Chaplin, Parsons and Swanson, other notable (to some, but I had to look them up) Essanay alumni include Edward Arnold, Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Lester Cuneo, Helen Dunbar, Ann Little, Tom Mix, George Periolat, Rod La Rocque, Ben Turpin, Virginia Valli and director Allan Dwan.

Chaplin actually lived in Chicago for less than a month and filmed only one notable movie here: His New Job. But his is the most famous name associated with the studio, and it lives on in the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium of St. Augustine College, which occupies the site today.

Esssanay Studios dissolved in 1918, but the building still stands on a leafy residential street. It was designated a Chicago Landmark with this plaque on March 26, 1996:

ChicagoRound: AT&T Corporate Center

Here’s my reward for getting up at 5:45 every morning to meet my trainer: a glorious, neck-straining view of Chicago's tallest building peeking out from behind its fifth-tallest building as the sun rises over the steel-and-stone canyons of the Loop:

That’s Willis Tower (née Sears Tower) in the center. At 108 floors, it’s the tallest building in the United States and the seventh tallest building in the world. Completed in 1974, it comprises nine square tubes bundled into a 3x3 footprint and rising to different heights with dramatic, efficient setbacks. You can clearly see the two tallest tubes in this picture ... though from this perspective they don't look at all like they tower over the city.

(The next three tallest Chicago buildings in order are the brand-new 96-floor Trump International Hotel and Tower, the 83-floor Aon Center and the 100-floor John Hancock Center.)

The building on the right is the fifth-tallest building in Chicago and the taller half of the 61-story AT&T Corporate Center complex, which is actually two buildings (the other is the 35-story USG Building) connected by a grand (and I mean over-the-top, Art-Deco-meets-Prairie, worth-a-stop-to-stare-up-and-gawk grand) 16-story atrium.

Constructed in 1989, the AT&T Corporate Center effortlessly represents the personality and exuberance of postmodern architecture. It takes the clean, efficient aesthetics of modernism and elevates them beyond the movement's midcentury austerity with ornament, technique and stylistic references. Obviously the dominant reference here is Art Deco, with soaring verticals, pale colors, dramatic setbacks and low-relief detailing.

Here’s a shot I stole off the Internet showing the complex from the USG Building side. Notice how the vertical channel in the center of each face expands as it rises—a fabulous twist on standard Art Deco detail that makes the building seem both taller and wider:

ChicagoRound: Fort Dearborn

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson bought a massive parcel of land from Napoleon Bonaparte that stretched from New Orleans to what is now the northwestern tip of Montana. While the Louisiana Purchase didn’t include the land that is now Chicago, it made the trade routes through the area—specifically the intersection of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan—significantly more important to the expanding United States.

To protect the area, the army built a fort on the south side of the intersection, across from the cabin of Chicago settler Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable (who was once described to me by a well-meaning Chicago Historical Society docent as “an African-American from Haiti”). The army named its new fortress Fort Dearborn in honor of U.S. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn.

The fort endured as a vital military garrison until August 1812, when it was burned to the ground by the Potawatomi Indians in the aptly named War of 1812.

A second Fort Dearborn was built on the site in 1816. It survived eras of peace and conflict with a number of other tribes until part of it was demolished to make way for a new Chicago River channel in 1832. The rest of the fort was destroyed by a fire in 1857, and the few surviving outbuildings were leveled by the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

Today, all that’s left of the fort are the outlines of its footprint, marked by plaques embedded in the sidewalk where Wacker Drive meets Michigan Avenue:

Here’s what the site looks like today. I took this picture facing north, where Michigan Avenue starts being called “The Magnificent Mile” (but only in marketing materials—I’ve never heard a real person use that term in general conversation).

ChicagoRound: Chicago River, north shore

I love this block where State Street crosses the Chicago River. It houses a fabulous juxtaposition of architectural styles and shapes and ideas.

The roundish buildings in the center of the picture are Bertrand Goldberg's iconic 1964 Marina City towers. Known colloquially as Chicago's corncob buildings, they're most famous to people of a certain generation as the implied office location of Bob Newhart's psychology practice. The twin 65-story towers contain a collective 900 pie-shaped condominiums with semi-circular balconies atop two 19-story spiral parking ramps. The complex comprises two other organically shaped buildings: a mid-rise hotel supported by abstract Gothic arches (hidden by the towers in this picture) and the saddle-shaped House of Blues concert hall, which you can see crouching in the bottom left corner. (Incidentally, the sharp corner sticking up over the House of Blues is my old office building.)

In stark, austere contrast to Marina City's explosion of curves and shapes and movement, the square building to the right (on the other side of State Street) is Mies van der Rohe's 330 North Wabash building (originally the IBM Building). It was finished in 1973, four years after van der Rohe died. This modernist black-box aesthetic clearly espouses van der Rohe's "less is more" philosophy: efficient construction, modern industrial materials, simple rectilinear and planar forms, clean lines, pure use of color and—above all—a conspicuous lack of ornamentation.

The building at the far right is Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's still-under-construction Trump International Hotel and Tower. Slated for completion in 2009, it promises to become the second tallest building in Chicago, after the Sears Tower. While I loath almost everything about the building's blowhard namesake, I'm really liking this gracefully curved, tastefully shimmery highrise. And I love the way its three setbacks will nod to the heights of the buildings around it: the Wrigley Building, the Marina City towers and 330 North Wabash.

ChicagoRound: City Hall

Chicago's City Hall, built between 1905 and 1911, is a classical revival structure that's both imposing in its heft and nondescript in its standard-issue city-hallishness. It's situated as the old-school corner of a triangle of downtown government buildings that include 1965's black-box Daley Center and 1985's spaceship-in-a-bowl-of-tomato-soup Thompson Center. I've never been beyond the first floor of the City Hall building, but I've always loved its vaulted hallways that maintain their austere symmetry as far as you can see:

Chicago citizens have a range of reasons to visit City Hall, but in my case it's always to clear up fuckups related to owning a car. I spent the last business hours of 2007 traversing these vaulted hallways to pay fines on a license plate sticker that had expired because the renewal form had been sent to my old address. Even though I went in person last January to make sure my address had been updated in every possible city database. Even though I asked repeatedly for confirmation that there was no possible way my old address still existed on something important like maybe a sticker renewal form. But the city's fuckups are always our fault, and I'm now $148 poorer for it all. Which probably was needed to offset the cost of the holiday displays:

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.