Connecting the Windy City

Just a few items from the past week or so. . . .

Jill and I like to walk, and up around Belmont Harbor a while back we came across two geese. One was doing the standard goose-in-the-water thing. The other, I will call him Jesús the Goose, was performing a miracle. He was, as you can see, walking on water.



A couple days later I was riding the old 151 downtown to lead a tour. The bus was crowded, and I took the last seat. Slumped across both seats behind me a frail woman with blank eyes mumbled to herself, her mahogany hands twitching as she fought with some internal backstabber.

Her struggle remained under control until the bus passed the entrance to the zoo at which point the tormented soul screamed into the back of my head, “Don’t be trustin’ no PO-lice. I knew they come into that house.”

It’s this way in the city. Crowded bus . . . everyone plugged into their I-pods or thumbing away on their Blackberrys. It’s a normal trip downtown until the wrathful shadow of the anti-Jah swipes its fare card and barks for attention.

Usually no one looks up. At least not right away. That would be too voyeuristic, too public an acknowledgement that something in the predictable world had gone awry. But most eventually do look. On this particular day, they had to look through me to get a peek at her.

There were two more outbursts, one at Banks and the Inner Drive, one at the Randolph Street stop. There either was or was not someone in the house and the police did or did not respond. And NO ONE would ever be trusted ever again.

That’s a long story to get to the most poetically impromptu lines I have heard spoken, actually shouted, in a long time. In the midst of the last rant, concerning all that she had done to protest the break-in, real or imagined, the poor exile behind me screamed, “I told everyone they come into that house. I got knots in my hands and bees in my fists from all the writin’ downtown.”

Translate it into Latin and you could carve it in stone.


Finally, this was the view from our living room most of last week. But we have jonquils on the dining room table, and abundant hope for warmer weather, sooner rather than later.

Bruce John Graham, one of the greatest architects of the mid-century era of Modernism, died in Hobe Sound, Florida on Monday. For as long as they stand the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Building, Graham’s two most well-known (and well-designed) buildings will be dressed in black.

Over a dozen years ago Graham sat down for a lengthy interview as a part of the Chicago Architects Oral History Project that the Art Institute of Chicago was underwriting. Often portrayed as a gruff and demanding figure, Graham reveals a sensitive side along with an intolerance of anything that is done without passion and honesty.

In a town in which so many architects over the years have been so successful in sharing their passion and honesty with the world, Bruce Graham’s voice spoke just as loud as Sullivan’s or Root’s or Mies’s. It’s interesting to listen to some of the things he had to say about his career, about the field of architecture, and about the city he loved.

Born in Columbia and raised in Puerto Rico along with six brothers and two sisters, Graham began thinking about architecture at an early age.

“I used to draw cartoons for my younger brothers and flip them for them. I used to draw people, trees. And I took drawing lessons. I was also interested in the city of San Juan,” Graham said. “I used to plot the slums of Puerto Rico. I made maps of them. I loved it.”

Finishing high school in three years, Graham applied to the University of Dayton. He said, “. . . you have to remember that I really had only heard of two or three universities: Notre Dame, because it was Catholic, the University of Pennsylvania, because my brother George went there, the University of Virginia, because my brother Charles went there, and Harvard. I originally didn't know any others. But I got a scholarship to Dayton, that's why I went there.”

He finished the undergraduate engineering program by the age of 15. “But that's nothing, because my brother was thirteen,” he said. Graham joined the Navy Air Force at 17 and entered a pre-officer training program at Case School of Applied Science, concentrating on civil engineering.

He washed out of the flight program because “I had an accident with an airplane,” and entered the Navy’s radar training program at Chicago’s Navy Pier.

The young recruit was impressed with Chicago’s ethnicity. In the 1988 interview he lamented, “But it's not the same any more. Once you built the expressway, the wealthy left downtown for the suburbs after the war. That was the biggest curse on urban planning in Chicago, but not only Chicago, in the entire United States. These expressways were funded in a terrible way by a gas tax that can only be used for building roads. So the more you drive, the more roads they build and the 'highway road gang' loved it. Even though you don't need the roads, and we proved that a number of times, they built it anyway.”

After serving in the South Pacific. Mannis Island and the Philippines during the invasion of the Philippines, Chief Petty Officer Graham came back to the United States to attend the University of Pennsylvania, convinced that he wanted a career as an architect. He experienced some frustration with the Beaux Arts focus of the curriculum.

While in Philadelphia Graham made a trip to Chicago to see Mies van der Rohe. His observations on that first meeting as well as on a number of other aspects of his long and distinguished career follow.

On Mies van der Rohe
. . . he received me. He was a very nice man, a very simple man. You know the story of why he never moved into the top of 860 Lake Shore Drive?

I heard him say in his old apartment, he had an easy chair, with a table and his cigars and his martini, and all the furniture against the wall. Somebody asked him—I forget who asked him—why he didn't move into that building, and he said, "There's no place to put the furniture. I was born in a little village of Germany. I can dream and imagine this new world, but I can't live in it."

On the artistic sensibility
. . . painting is two- dimensional. And sculpture is three-dimensional. But music is four- dimensional. There's an element of time. And that's architecture. When you design a building, that's a shape, a sculpture. It has to have a sense of space, it has to have a sense of... What's the beauty of Chartres Cathedral? Not standing outside and looking at it. It's going into that space. The first time I walked in there, they were playing Mozart's Unfinished Requiem, there was a funeral. I had to cry . . . I had a feeling for the whole time, not just for the epoch, when I walked in there. That's not true in painting and sculpture. There isn't a sense of movement, of going through. A building can tell you, give you a hint, of what's going to come, but more important, where you were. Ballet is the same way. Ballet is movement in which you remember where you were, and you get a sense of where you're going. That's architecture. That's why a city, a building, is not by itself architecture. It has to be in a locale, in a place, be it in a jungle or be it in a city. The sense of movement through it and to it...

That's why I tell you that the architecture in each part of the world should reflect the ecology of that place. The ecology shapes the people, not the other way around. Man destroys the
ecology and then he has to live with that non-ecology. The ecology is the basic formation of the culture. The Nile made Egypt. It wasn't the other way around. The Mediterranean made Greece, they didn't make the Mediterranean. You have to make the buildings sympathetic with God's
designs.


On a choice of “career path”
I don't think that designing houses for wealthy people is a problem. It's a non-problem. The problem is to make the city beautiful.

On the Middle West
I'm sure that America, the power of America and the character of America, is strongest from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. You take that part of America out and it's just another European nation. It's the power of the water, and the land, and the steel mills that makes the United States . . . From the top of the Standard Oil building I showed some Arabs the lake and they wondered what sea it was. I said, "That's not a sea, it's a lake." They said, "We'll trade you all our oil." That's the power of America. Without that, and the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Chicago, we would never have won the war. What were we going to do? Throw rocks from California at the Japanese? Or from Oregon? It's the Middle West that makes us wealthy.

On Nathaniel Owings (Founding partner, along with Louis Skidmore of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill)
That guy, he knew everybody. I don't know how he did it. He knew absolutely everybody, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Portland, Oregon. People in the government. He could be very attractive . . . He scared me most of the time. He went around firing people like they were going out of style. He fired Harry Weese. And Harry said, "You can't fire me. I quit."

On Ego in Architecture
And historically in architecture, an architect without craftsmen doesn't exist. He's nobody. This is true today that architecture is not a personal art. It's an art that, number one, involves a community to start with.

On Frank Lloyd Wright
He was a mean old man . . . one time he came to an AIA meeting in which he was invited to give a talk. He came in with his cape and his hat and he ran up the aisle and went
up and said—we were celebrating Sullivan—he said, "Oh, you killed Sullivan!" and he got up and walked out. What an animal! "Oh, you killed Sullivan!" He was meaner to Sullivan than anybody else.

On a uniquely “American” architecture
You can't build the same thing in Florida that you can in Alaska. You can't build the same thing in Florida that you can in California. Maine is different, Chicago is different. We have to stop thinking about all this one... This country is too big to think about a single architecture that covers everything. You have to have one in Florida that comes out of the sun and the land and the heat. And one in Maine that comes out of the snow and the rocks. That's what architects have to search for locally.

On Sears Tower
It was very simple, there were no big stainless steel interiors. There were white plastic elevators. And the building was very simple. And who was the sculptor? Sandy Calder. What have they done now? They've changed the lobby and made the ceiling higher and they changed the proportions of the Calder. They're animals.

Originally there were more tubes, it wasn't just nine. The original design had six more tubes, so it was fifteen, a series of tubes going up and down. Harry Weese cried one night and said "Bruce, I wish I had thought of that." It was the best compliment I ever got from Harry Weese. We were in a bar under Wacker Drive.

When the chairman—at that time Sears was different than it is now, it was strictly a marketing department and it did not have all the corporate things that it does now—the chairman wanted to build downtown. He first wanted to move out, those were the two choices, move out or build downtown. Mayor Daley and he made a deal, so he decided that he would move downtown. It was not so much to occupy a monument—in fact the building that they had in mind was only sixty stories high, but with a massive floor. I told the chairman that if you ever move out of this building, nobody else is going to be able to occupy it and it will be a black cow in the middle of the city of Chicago. So he agreed. And I made the tube thing so that the top floors would accommodate smaller floors and I made the other floors smaller too so that they could be used by other users than Sears Roebuck.

The cigarette pack story in his own words
One of the things—the chairman's name [of Sears], by the way, was Gordon Metcalf, and he was brilliant—Gordon said that he didn't want any of those damn diagonal things like the Hancock building. So by this time, I was working with Fazlur Khan on a lot of tube buildings, like the Shell Plaza building. It's very efficient, and costs a lot less than any of the New York skyscrapers, and you can build taller. We had built so many single tubes that I took out my cigarettes and I said to Faz, "Why don't we build a whole bunch of little tubes that stop at different heights?" This was at the Chicago Club . . . So I built my cigarette structure and it worked. And it doesn't need diagonals because the structures go through.

On the difference between Chicago and New York
Chicago is a city of skyscrapers. New York is not. New York is a city that's a huge rock that has been carved out to make streets . . . I was actually standing in front of the Empire State building with Roy Allen and a couple asked me where the Empire State building was. I said, "You're standing right in front of it." They didn't have any idea. You have no sense of the buildings. Rockefeller Center was the first one that you could see, and after that there were really none. Even Mies tried to do that by setting the Seagram back and then the architect next door took his building back, so it takes away from what Mies was trying to do which was to salvage a little plaza that was surrounded by buildings so that you could see the Seagram. So in Chicago, most buildings you can see. People love living in apartment buildings. They move there deliberately. In New York you can't help it. My son lives in New York and he can't help it, he's got to live in an apartment building. But in Chicago, people actually fight to see who's going to be over the twenty-first floor. You never build an apartment building less than twenty-one stories in Chicago, forget it. You can see the lake and the city and the airport.

Listen to the conversation in the New York subway sometime. They really think that apples came out of the factory. They're totally unrelated to the land or to anything. They're one hundred percent abstract people. The businessmen are abstract and you should just talk to any of the insurance people there. They're totally abstract. They have no visual capabilities whatsoever. Zero. That's New York, and New York is always going to be New York, because that's the rule of people. Those people are mathematically oriented, they're not visual people.

On Chicago’s construction unions
My personal experience with Chicago construction workers was terrific in every sense. The union trained them . . . Who else trains them? If you think the schools on the South Side train them, they don't. They're trained by the union. Apprenticeship. That's the way architects used to be trained. How do you think Sullivan was trained? He was an apprentice. How do you think Frank Lloyd Wright was trained? He was an apprentice . . . I learned architecture by working at Holabird and Root as an apprentice and at Skidmore as an apprentice.

On Fazhur Khan (called the "Einstein of Structural Engineering")
It's quite a different thing to visualize the structure in mathematical terms in your head, which Faz could do. And he could explain it to architects. That's why people loved him. He was the only engineer I ever met who could explain structures to architects in a poetic way. He had a very gentle way.

He was the best architectural engineer in the United States of America, if not the world, there's no doubt in my mind about that. Not only did he understand the mathematics, but he understood the architecture. Most engineers don't . . . The purity of his structure and the purity of his thinking was what I fell in love with.

On Chicago’s Early Architects
In Chicago there was an architect named David Adler. He designed most of the houses for the very wealthy. He realized that most of these people were industrialists who were uneducated and had never gone to a university and didn't know the difference between Michelangelo and Richard Haas. Adler used to travel and bring back postcards of buildings in Europe. When he went to a client, he would flip through them until they would find one that they liked. Then he would say that they were going to have a palazzo like this or that. He would design that. But he went beyond that. He told them what furniture to use, how to cook meals, what wine to drink. Think of what these men were. These clients were brilliant and brave, but they were animals. None of them had gone to any university. They just came west to Chicago from the East Coast. Look at pictures of Chicago from before the fire and then after the fire. It was ugly, badly built. Then the fire gave Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan the great opportunity to rebuild in a vision of a beautiful city. They loved it because they were powerful men. I loved those men, they were pioneers. They built the city of Chicago and they influenced the world.

On bringing the Henry Moore sculpture (Large Interior Form) to the Art Institute
So we came to visit Moore about Three First National Plaza and when we were having dinner and I said to Henry, 'You know, Picasso gave his piece to the city for free. Miró gave a piece. Calder gave a piece. Why don't you give a piece for free?" He had agreed that the bronze for Three First National Plaza would not be reproduced, which was very unusual. Usually he could make five copies and keep one or two, sell two and have one for the owner. He said, "You know, I've always wanted to see the child inside the mother and child. What if I give that one to the city of Chicago?" I said, "Why don't you give it to the Art Institute?" He said he thought that was a good idea.

On art and architecture
Architecture contains life. People move through it. Part of life—perhaps the most neglected part of life, although maybe less in Chicago than elsewhere—are the arts . . . I like to see not just sculpture and painting, but poetry and music in the piazzas, for example. In most cities in the world, they use the piazzas that way, but we don't in Chicago. There should be music playing in First National Bank Plaza. Look what's surrounding it: Inland Steel, Helmut Jahn's Xerox building, and Walter's Harris Trust building on another corner. It's a great place to have music. It should be the same in the Civic Center Plaza.

On the double role of architect and businessman
Sometimes I wouldn't charge a client for the time that we spent because I didn't think that we had earned it. That's not being a good businessman. But it does mean that you are being honest, and that I tried to do all my life. I tried not to cheat the clients, not cheat the employees, but to treat them fairly. I happen to think that's one of the things that good businessmen are not doing now, and that's also bad.

On architecture and urban planning
The problem in the United States is that in the schools, they're split when they teach urban planning from architecture. That's a mistake. The great urban planning in the United States has all been done by architects, if you think about it. In New York, Olmsted did Central Park. They don't even teach urban planning in the landscape architecture schools now. Urban planning has almost become the enemy in-house and a lot of planners go on to work in the government. Some graduates with an urban planning degree haven't studied any architecture at all. That's the mentality of it; they study the laws and the government, not the structure and the architecture of it. I think that the greatest visions of buildings, even imperial ones, were from architects, not urban planners . . . You can't teach it in school. But you do it as an architect. You teach architecture and architecture includes exterior spaces. You can't think of a building without thinking of where it fits or the spaces it creates . . . The Parthenon wasn't casually done by a graduate of urban planning of the University of Pennsylvania, it was done by architects.

On the Future
I think that the major cities are in such disaster that the great opportunity is for visionaries to repair them. The solution is not going to be office buildings alone. It's got to be in residential communities and rearranging the cities visually and structurally. Chicago is an easy one because you still have the transit system. But you must destroy things like the Taylor Homes . . . It's just a terrible mistake to put all the poor in one area, it just makes a ghetto. You have to destroy that and make it possible for the poor to move to any part of the city.

John MIlton ended the well-known sonnet On His Blindness with these words, "They also serve who only stand and wait." Bruce John Graham served by avoiding, at every turn, the temptation to stand on blind traditions and cultures that he felt were harmful to the beauty of the urban environment. The buildings that he designed will stand as monuments to his genius, his honesty and his passion.

Fresh from the spanking they received at the State of the Union address, the Supreme Court justices must be thrilled to see Jeffrey Skilling’s lawyers skipping up the front steps. Skilling, you may remember, was sentenced in 2006 to a couple dozen years in jail for securities fraud, insider trading and lying to federal investigators.

Now the former Enron executive who directed a company so fundamentally dishonest that its 20,000 employees lost their jobs and an estimated 1.3 billion dollars in its implosion, wants a new trial, his lawyers arguing against a law that requires executives to behave honestly.

Geez . . . and then those brave souls on the Potomac wonder why the average American Joe is just a bit touchy these days.

If you step back, though, and look at this country’s rich history of big guys who loved living large, the Skillings, the Madoffs, Lays and Kozlowskis are pretty poor runners-up.

When it came to making money at the expense of everyone and everything else, you have to go back a century or so. I had the chance to do that in January on a visit to Whitehall, Henry Flagler’s 55-room winter cottage in West Palm Beach.


Flagler was one of the larger-than-life rags-to-riches figures that populated the last quarter of the nineteenth century in this country. Born in New York in 1830, he left school after the eighth grade and moved to Ohio where he ultimately met John D. Rockefeller, a fellow grain merchant.

John D. wanted to get into the oil business and Flagler loaned him a hundred grand to start the partnership that would become Standard Oil in 1872. In an ordinary man this would have been enough to make a legendary career. But Flagler was no ordinary man.

In the mid-1880’s, seeing the warmth of southern Florida as an untapped source of revenue, Flagler scaled back his involvement with Standard Oil and purchased the Jacksonville, St. Augustine & Halifax Railroad. With a way to get people to the state, he began work in 1885 on the 540-room Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine.

Less than ten years later Flagler extended the railroad to West Palm Beach and built the 1150-room Royal Ponciana Hotel, followed by the Palm Beach Inn, which is today The Breakers, the most exclusive hotel in the area.

A series of severe freezes in 1894 and 1895 convinced Flagler to extend the railroad south to a warmer area surrounding Biscayne Bay, where he created the infrastructure necessary for a resort city. When the city was incorporated in 1896, its citizens wanted to name the new town "Flagler". The developer nixed the honor, persuading the grateful citizens to use an old Indian name, "Mayaimi". [Henry Morrison Flagler Museum]

Finally in 1902 Flagler contracted with two architects who had begun their careers as draftsmen with the prestigious New York firm of McKinn, Mead and White to design a winter retreat as a wedding present for his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan. John Carrere and Thomas Hastings created Whitehall, a 60,000 square foot mansion that the Flagler clan used for six to eight weeks during “the season,” Finished in just 18 months in one of the most remote locations in the country, the mansion had 22 bathrooms, electric lighting, central heating, and a telephone system. When it was completed the New York Herald called it, “more wonderful than any palace in Europe, grander and more magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world.”

The main entrance of the mansion is reached by strolling through palm trees and orange trees. The two-story entrance portico, on the east side of Whitehall, is 101 feet across and 18 feet deep. It is divided into five bays by grand Doric columns that rest on large plinths. Surrounding the portico are white marble steps interrupted by pedestals in front of the columns. The two pedestals on each side of the main entrance hold large marble Grecian urns. [Historic American Buildings Survey]. The whole thing is a dazzling white that reflects the tropical sun.


The entry hall is of marble, lots and lots and lots of marble, including a blue-veined stone used in the columns that I have never seen before. As near as I can tell, it was shipped from somewhere in South America. The “front hall” is 110 feet long and 40 feet wide, and the ceiling is 20 feet high. A dome in the center represents the “Crowning of Knowledge.” Allegory abounds with medallions, statues and panels representing Earth, Sea, Air and Soil, Peace, Science, Pensiveness, Prosperity and Happiness. Originally a Persian rug was a part of the interior. The Kirmanshah pattern covered a space that measure 42 feet by 27 feet, the largest such carpet in existence. Today a new Kirmanshah 4 x 7 foot rug would cost close to $40,000.


On the south side of the main hall stands a nine-foot high clock, done in bronze. It represents Time riding the world in a cloud. The top is topped by rays of sun, and below the bronze is made to show the earth's bounty. [New York Hearld, March 30, 1900]


Passing through the Library, just to the south of the Main Hall, you enter the Music Room, which measures 66 x 21 feet. The room has a domed ceiling with a canvas painting of the aurora. Elaborate crystal chandeliers hang at each end of the oval dome. The pipe organ was one of the largest ever placed in a private home. It must have rattled the crocodiles in Lake Worth, sunning themselves in back of the home in what they supposed was a wilderness area.


The Grand Dining Room is 41 by 23 feet and is finished in satinwood, a tree native to the Florida Keys and the West Indies. The long table, also of satinwood, occupies the center of the room. Flagler kept a strict timetable, as one would expect of a railroad man, and if you didn’t show up for a meal on time, you didn’t eat. Meals were known to last up to three hours. The carving on the cabinets and the mantel is rich and detailed. Some of it is so fine that “a magnifying glass is needed to see the details of the work.” [New York Herald, March 30, 1900]


Just to the east of the Dining Room is the French Salon, 42 x 30 feet, finished in a Louis XVI design. The grand piano, done in silver and gray, is a commanding presence in the room and one can imagine the guests leaving the table after a three-hour feast and walking a few steps into the salon for the evening’s entertainment.

The Flagler’s hospitality extended to famous people of the day such as the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, opera stars Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso, Admiral and Mrs. George Dewey, and such other notable figures as Woodrow Wilson, Elihu Root, and John Jacob Astor. [Historic American Buildings Survey] Imagine downing a couple cognacs with that crowd.


On the second level are located at least 17 bedrooms, including the two largest rooms that Mr. and Mrs. Flagler occupied separately. Off Mrs. Flagler’s chamber is a bathroom that measures 11 by 17 feet. The floor is of marble, and the double sink is of onyx. Like her chamber, the bathroom’s windows look out toward Lake Worth, which is now part of the Intercoastal Waterway.


“Helping others is like helping yourself,” Henry Flagler was fond of saying. Flagler opened up the state of Florida, virtually created the city of Miami, and ran a railroad at great expense all the way to the Florida Keys. In the process, from the looks of his winter home at Whitehall, he didn’t do too bad a job at helping himself.

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
--Soren Kierkegaard

Oh, Soren, you make my heart sing . . . what a nice thought from a guy whose most well known work is Fear and Trembling.

Well, I’m taking the advice of Existentialism’s papa, and I’m walking around a lot these days. At least I think I’m walking. And if I think I’m walking, then I probably am.

I’m hoofing it because the knees don’t take too kindly to running anymore. Running around in circles or going nowhere on a treadmill kept me busy for a number of years. But all those miles haven’t brought me any closer to deep and soulful insight. And they haven’t taken me any farther away from the things I’d like to avoid.

So I’ll save a couple hundred bucks on running shoes each year.

Another reason I'm walking is that I tripped over February awhile back and found myself at the beginning of March with no ice on the lake and a blue sky overhead. Even though it was only a couple degrees above freezing today, the sun was shining and I was hatless and I had that school kid feeling that spring wasn’t too far away.

It helped that the melting snow was forming puddles on the sunniest of the sidewalks and the geese at North Pond were bending their long necks toward tufts of muddy grass that had been uncovered in the thaw.

Mostly, though, I’m walking for the exercise. And for the view.

A guy like me can burn off over a hundred calories for each mile of the stroll up Michigan Avenue. Experimentation over the past week or so has shown me that a leisurely pace will get you a green light all the way from Jackson to the Water Tower. You try to push the pace too hard, and you’ll get a red light about every third intersection.

The things you can see while walking, though, those are important, too. Just today, on my walk from Jackson to the Lincoln Park Zoo, I saw a greyhound with an argyle sweater and little purple boots.

I’m guessing that at doggie school he gets bullied.

On Huron I saw a carriage driver pat his horse on the muzzle and feed him a carrot. It’s difficult to chew on a carrot with a bit in one’s mouth. I never realized how difficult before. Dobbin tossed his head as I passed and his sad horse eyes instant messaged . . . What are YOU looking at?

In the long walk from downtown all the way to the zoo I saw exactly one woman in a fur coat. Dark. Ankle length. The tall gal wearing it didn’t look like she was worried about medical insurance. In fact, she didn’t look like she was worried about much of anything. A dysfunctional Congress wasn’t going to stop her from leading the parade into Neiman Marcus.

Funny, five years ago you couldn’t have walked ten feet down the Mag Mile without seeing a pelted dolly or two. Hard times? Democrats in charge? Fear that naked P.E.T.A. volunteers will set them on fire? It would be fun to find out.

As I entered the protective canopy alongside what used to be Phillip Maher’s lovely Farwell Building before the Ritz-Carlton Residence folks killed and skinned it, an elderly woman heading my way stopped to adjust her scarf. In the process her three-pronged walker capsized. It seemed no big deal to take a few steps toward her side of the walkway and upright it for her. She seemed appreciative.

It’s the kind of thing you see people doing in Chicago all the time. It’s a good city with big-hearted people. The current President is one of us, good and big-hearted. He would have picked that frail woman’s three-pronged walker up, too, although he would have gotten to it before I did.

He knows what any compassionate citizen of this great country must surely know. He knows that there are folks who, through no fault of their own, need some help. In the last analysis, a few steps out of our way won’t break the bank. That's the way we do it in the Windy City.

With that in mind, I’ll just be walking on.

Months ago I wrote of my surprise at seeing an exact replica of Chicago’s Standing Lincoln across the street from The Houses of Parliament. No altruistic act is simple, straightforward or without conflict, but the partnership that was formed between England and the United States to place Lincoln’s statue on London’s Parliament Square would have made Basil Fawlty and his crew look like five-star innkeepers.

By way of review . . . way, way outside the empire, back in provincial Chicago, old Eli Bates kicked off in 1881 and left enough money behind to erect a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish immigrant and the foremost sculptor of his day, conceived and executed the work, which was dedicated in 1887 and which still stands at the head of Dearborn Street in Lincoln Park.

To get to London, though, we have to go by way of Cincinnati, a city that had a fair shot at becoming the mid-continental superstar, if only the City with the Big Shoulders hadn’t muscled all the other players out of the way by getting the canal built first, hogging the title of Stacker of Wheat and Player with Railroads.

Just as old Eli Bates had done in Chicago, a wealthy Cincinnati department store and hotel owner, Frederick H. Alms, left a $100,000 legacy to place a statue of Lincoln in a place of prominence to honor the centennial of Lincoln’s birth n 1809. Mrs. Alms established a committee of five influential Cincinnati citizens to choose a sculptor.

Everyone agreed on George Grey Barnard – except for Mrs. Alms, who wanted her husband’s gift to underwrite the work of Gutzon Borglum. But what does a woman, especially a woman stricken with grief, know about such things? Borglum only went on to wrest Mount Rushmore from the Dakota badlands.

As The New York Times reported on December 17, 1910 . . . “Rather than have any further wrangling over who should give to the City of Cincinnati a monument to Abraham Lincoln, Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft, the former a brother of President Taft, volunteered on Thursday to give the $100,000 necessary for that purpose.”

Barnard, the beneficiary of Taft’s generosity, was born in Kankakee, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris and, like Saint-Gaudens 20 years earlier, had found success in a conspicuous space, having finished the sculptural work for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Once chosen to execute the important work, Barnard’s plan was to sculpt Lincoln in a way that portrayed the president as a workingman who had risen to greatness. In a sense the work was to be about the country as much as it was the president – a country in which even a farm boy from the hinterlands of Illinois could become the head of state. So the statue, necessarily, was as much prairie farm boy as it was savior of the union.

It wasn’t until March of 1917 that the benefactor’s brother, the former President of the United States, William Howard Taft, unveiled the statue in Cincinnati. In the elation that ensued Charles Taft made an announcement that he would pay for a replica of Barnard’s Lincoln, that statue to be sent to London where it would stand outside the Houses of Parliament.

The former President’s brother had reason to believe that his gift would be accepted. Some years earlier the American Peace Centenary Committee had been established to figure out ways in which the hundred years of peace between the United States and Britain, formalized in the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, could be celebrated.

Anticipating that the love you take is equal to the love you make, the American and British Peace Centenary Committees agreed to mark the century long love-in by exchanging statues. Saint-Gaudens’ Standing Lincoln, the work of Augustus Saint Gaudens, was chosen for America’s gift, and the British government agreed to provide a site in Parliament Square between Westminster Abbey and the House of Parliament. For its placement. [pmsa.kcl.ac.uk]

But World War I interrupted the plans, and Standing Lincoln didn’t make it across the pond. And this is where the last and most amazing part of They Got Lincoln, Again and Again begins.

For the first time in our lives, Jill and I have spent January and most of February in the tropics, bunking down beneath the palm trees on Florida’s Treasure Coast. The weather was unseasonably cold, and Floridians were on high alert, guarding against the almost certain hypothermia brought on by nighttime temperatures in the high 40’s.

Weather forecasters, especially, were in freak-out mode. Each newscast brought an updated set of reminders. Keep your pets indoors. Watch how you use those space heaters. Outfit the car with survival gear in case of breakdown.

Still, almost every day the sky was a deep blue and the sun was shining. As I tried to explain to almost anyone who would listen, warm weather is unimportant if you’ve got a shot at wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt and standing in the sunshine. They’ve got that going for them down there in the Land of the Hanging Chad . . . it’s a rare day when you can leave the sunglasses on the wicker whatnot as you head out the door.

Anyway, we were showing houseguests around the area just south of the Gulfstream Gulf Club, coming into Delray Beach, when the onboard navigator told me that I needed to turn right on George Bush Boulevard, a street on which, as it turned out, a turn to the right was the only option.

Which I did.

Turned to the right, that is. Onto George Bush Boulevard. In broad daylight.

Me. One of only 17 people in the entire United States of America who voted for both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

At that point I knew it was time to start thinking about coming back to the frozen northland.

Which we did.

But not until we watched the televised implosion of the 30-story hurricane-wrecked condo building up on Flagler Drive. As the dust settled and the wealthiest five percent walked their jewelry back into the adjoining properties, we loaded up the car and headed out of town.

It took the better part of three days to cover the 1300-plus miles between the land of the foolish grin and Chicago. Three days on the interstate system through Gainesville and Atlanta, on through Chattanooga and Nashville and Bowling Green and Indianapolis.

Georgia, among other things, is the Imperial Valley of billboards. Jill spotted the best one, an advertisement for dental implants . . . two words, 50 feet tall . . .

GOT TEETH?

Tennessee is mercifully free of outdoor advertising, but the waterfalls of ice frozen all along the mountain passes above Chattanooga were enough for Jill to start snapping cell phone photos. The session continued until I suggested that we were traveling at 75-miles-an-hour through heavy shade, and odds were not in favor of an Ansel Adams day.

The rolling hills and pastures of Kentucky, so lovely in the summer, are largely forgettable in the winter.

And Indiana, well, Indiana, in summer or winter, is . . . Indiana. There is a moment of excitement when you pass Seymour, but even with Little Pink Houses, it’s still Indiana.

Then, finally, as the sun dropped closer and closer to the horizon we were through what historian William Cronon called “the sweet pungent odor that was Gary.”

Cronon opened his book, Nature’s Metropolis, with a description of a similar entry into Chicago. A long car ride – his was as a child traveling in the backseat on a trip from southern New England to Wisconsin – and then after all those miles . . . the Big City.

His child’s impression was of how brutish it all was. “Chicago,” he writes, “represented all that was most unnatural about human life. Crowded and artificial, it was a cancer on an otherwise beautiful landscape.”

I thought of those words as we surged out of the toll booth on the Skyway, after giving a few ducats to help out our Australian and Spanish brothers with their 99-year lease. We crossed the Calumet River and, with the skies around us darkening, off in the distant northeast was the bright and shining giant, the City of Big Shoulders.

The blue-tinted crispness of its glass and steel buildings stood in high contrast to the blurred smudge of soot and grime that we were driving over. It was like reaching down for another fistful of popcorn while watching the beginning of The Wizard of Oz and looking up to find that the film was filled with fantastic colors.

A dozen miles later, the sun set as we rolled down Lake Shore Drive and across the Chicago River.

We were home.

Back in a big, beautiful, ass-busting city, a place with a guarantee that you will never have to turn right onto George Bush Boulevard.

So me and the missus are standing across from Parliament Square, trying to figure out how 40 Greenpeace folks ended up on the roof ruining the pictures of Big Ben with banners protesting the abuse of the environment, when she nudges me and points to a statue over on Parliament Street.

“Looks like Abraham Lincoln,” she says.

“Yep, sure does,” I say.

And I take a picture, one of the dozens of pictures I took of the statues and memorials that occupy every bit of free space in London.

We’re proud of our sculpture in Chicago. Heck, we’ve got Calders, a Miro, a Picasso, a few Henry Moores, even an entire auto junkyard that Frank Stella piled up inside the Metcalfe Federal Building on Jackson. But here in the Windy City our sculptures are like super-heated molecules moving quickly away from one another.

Sculpture-wise London is the equivalent of a substance cooled to near absolute-zero. Works aren’t just plopped into parks and plazas . . . in many places they step over the curb and stand in the middle of the street.

Anyway, it turns out that she who is wiser than I was right and that the Parliament Street statue really WAS Abraham Lincoln.

That London Lincoln – the throne-like chair, the standing President, his head bowed, a farm-boy’s oversized hand grasping the iron lapel of his frock coat – is familiar to every Chicagoan. It’s a replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture that stands at the north end of Dearborn in Lincoln Park, the work we call The Standing Lincoln.

Saint-Gaudens had at the age of 17 seen Lincoln’s train as it moved toward the President’s inauguration. After schooling, including studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a time in Rome, he received his first major commission in 1876 for a sculpture of Admiral David Farragut that still stands in New York City’s Madison Square Park.

Five years later Chicago lumber baron Eli Bates died and in his will left the city enough money to cover two projects, a fountain and a statue of Abraham Lincoln, each to be located in Lincoln Park. Saint-Gaudens was chosen for both projects. The fountain, Storks at Play, is located to the south of the Lincoln Park Conservatory.

It took several years for the sculptor to form his vision of the fallen president into its final form. Using his boyhood impression of Lincoln as he viewed him on that inaugural train, standing “tall in the carriage, his dark uncovered head bent in contemplative acknowledgement of the waiting people,” (www.sgnhs.org) along with the life mask of Lincoln and the casts of his hands made by Leonard Volk before the President was elected, Saint-Gaudens began work.

He used a six-foot, four-inch Vermont farmer, Langdon Morse, as his model, beginning at Cornish, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1885. (www.waymarking.com)

The pedestal on which the Lincoln Park sculpture is mounted was the design of Stanford White, who began his career as the principal assistant to the foremost architect of the day, Henry Hobson Richardson, and who was a partner in the most prestigious architectural firm in New York City, McKim, Mead and White.

Sharing the fate of Lincoln, in June of 1906 White was shot three times in the head at point blank range by multi-millionaire Henry Kendall Thaw on the Madison Square Roof Garden. From that roof it is certain that he could have seen the Admiral Farragut statue, another Saint-Gaudens work for which White designed the pedestal.

The Standing Lincoln was unveiled on October 22, 1887. Chicago Mayor E. A. Roche headed the dignitaries on the dais, and Abraham Lincoln II, the 15-year-old grandson of the late president, released the flag covering the statue. (www.lib.niu.edu) And in that place at the head of Dearborn Parkway Saint-Gaudens work has stood ever since.

As hundreds of thousands of young men were dying on the western front during World War I, negotiations were being carried out for a statue of Lincoln to be erected near Parliament Square in London. The struggle between lawmakers and artists that ensued makes for a fascinating story. Read about it in the next installment of They Got Lincoln – Again and Again.