“The whole summer is a circus,” goes the promotional saying for that warehouse of fun known as North Pier. With a minor amendment, this slogan might serve as a motto for Chicago: The whole city is a circus. Or at least it’s trying to be.
Since its reopening this summer Navy Pier has been thronged with visitors promenading up and down its 3,300-foot length. But as the jolly maritime signal flags displayed in frames in one of the complex’s restaurants admit, it’s an imitation of life, a simulacrum of a waterfront. Strangely upscale, too, with none of the seedy elements that characterize the Hobokens of the world. Anything you come across here is going to be expensive, and it’s going to be a fully processed corporate product of one kind or another: Pepsi, Rollerblades, a premixed mixed drink called “Mai Tai,” and a swarm of pushcarts and shops dealing in a wide variety of ersatz ethnic and faux-urban fare.
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On a couple of recent weekends Navy Pier was invaded by about a hundred labor activists, who occupied the roof, unfurled anti-Pepsi banners, and handed out flyers urging a boycott of Pepsi products. (Pepsi buys corn sweeteners from the union-busting firm A.E. Staley.) The demonstrations must have seemed strange to the day’s strollers and assorted pleasure-seekers, because Navy Pier is not the appropriate place for such behavior. It is, rather, an object lesson in what writer Stephen Duncombe has called the “colonization” of public space by corporate America. Most of it, of course, is not public at all–it’s a meeting hall and an elaborate ballroom designed for use by businesspeople. What’s left to us is positively plastered with corporate logos: the admittedly pleasant Navy Pier beer garden is awash in advertisements for Lite beer; every gondola on the Ferris wheel is a plug for McDonald’s. I suppose we should be thankful that the wheel doesn’t carry a gigantic rendition of the golden arches; that was one of the options under consideration.
But for Chicago’s impoverished and desperate the urban theme park is something quite different–just about the only sector of the economy where jobs are available. The world according to Disney is turning out to be exactly the place once predicted by labor secretary Robert Reich: a two-class system in which well-compensated “symbolic analysts” skip joyously through their sunshiny days while the rest of the population scrambles for the privilege of servicing their every need. At minimum wage, of course.
The owners of the Falstaff plant fell right in step with this trend. Just a couple weeks after the Journal story appeared, a Daily Southtown article by Joe Robertson quoted the realtor charged with dumping the place saying he was “really pushing the motion picture angle,” touting the building’s silos and catwalks, its interior railroad lines, even “the lake as a background when you’re up there on top of the silos…”Behold a new form of intercity competition–one at which Chicago can excel! We can barely manage to hang onto our sports teams, at the cost of millions of public dollars, but surely we can beat the likes of Wichita in the race to demolish our infrastructure for Hollywood. Bring on the dynamite–destruction means jobs!
