Every now and then a change in the cityscape, like a good dream, packs an unexpected psychic punch.
But now the harsh sentence has been lifted. State Street has been “restored,” not to any precise moment in its past, and certainly not to 1978, but at least to a street, with normal sidewalks and traffic.
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But they are, after all, more like clothes than they want us to believe. They go up; they come down. They leak; they rot; they blow away. They are replaced. They are slaves to fashion, creatures of their time. They can represent high-class, artful intelligence, or the shoddiest, crassest whim. You know how it is in the dressing room. A person can make a mistake.
Maybe 17 years from now Being Born will find another resting place. For now, we’re stuck with it, though at least it was an addition and not a taking away, which, when you’re talking about buildings and streets, is a very big difference. The purging of architectural treasures from Chicago may have slowed a bit, compared to recent decades, but it’s always in the air as a possibility, as if Chicago were a teeny, tiny place with no empty spaces left and the only way to build new stores is to tear down some nice old building or dismantle a floating staircase. Only on a continent whose cities are less than 200 years old would this seem logical, would an 80-year-old building be considered ancient, impossible to deal with. Everywhere else in the world, people buy their Nikes and toothpaste in centuries-old buildings adapted to modern use. But here we shoot first and ask questions later. Block 37, anybody?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Rebecca Jane Gleason.
