Rogers Park's Metra Murals

Every time the UP North Metra line embankment crosses a street, there are two ready-made mural canvases in the form of the retaining walls under the bridges. And one of the more delightful outcomes of Rogers Park's recent participatory budgeting has been the addition of some amazing and wonderful murals to the underpasses (though honestly, I might have given higher priority to a weekly power washing of the sidewalks, which are covered in pigeon droppings.)

I made a quick survey this evening of the murals in my neighborhood, most of which are less than two years old.

At Pratt, this work has just appeared within the last month, and is still in progress. The first photo shows it a week ago:


Now its color palette has grown:






Is it going to be 3D? I don't know, but as a child of the 80s, I am pre-programmed to like this particular color palette.

The Pratt bridge itself bears some note. It is the only Metra bridge I know of that retains turn-of-the-century ornamentation:




At Farwell, the northern underpass wall has a two-part mural by two different artists. West of the tracks, a surreal motor encounter, by Dan Bellini:



On the east side, a similarly surreal scene by Jennifer Cronin:


The two scenes are united as the road curves off onto a cliff overlooking the forest.



Next up is my absolute favorite, at Morse, a colorful composition by Molly Zakrajsek and Ann Van Devender:


Each of the large, simple figures is colored not by solid fields but by a delightful profusion of tiny colored figures:





At Lunt, the Rogers Park Metra Station underpass is adorned with a themed pair of murals titled "Diverse Earth".







As underpass murals go, the Lunt Avenue one is getting on in age, and parts have been lost to recent concrete spalling.


At the other end of the Rogers Park station, a series of colored panels with cartoon Cubist faces, by Christopher Royal, decorates the Greenleaf underpass:





On the other side of the same bridge, a stylized street scene by Zsofia Otvos:





Last stop: the Rogers Avenue underpass. On the south side, an older and more traditional painting, without the strong-concept artistic styles of the more recent murals, seemingly done by school kids:







On the north side,another strong-concept work - a series of colored panels, each with a slight pointer allowing the panel to be seen as a speech balloon spoken by a figure in the adjacent panel.



At present, there are only three characters, so I improvised a couple more of my own.



Is it incomplete? Are more figures coming? Or is it simply meant to evoke precisely this sort of interaction with the work?

All these works are somewhat ephemeral and transient. With luck, they may last five or ten years; however, they are doomed to a finite lifespan by both their medium and their setting. Paint fades and peels - but more than that, the concrete on which it sits spalls and crumbles.





The bridges themselves won't last forever, either - they're a hundred years old, and their condition reflects that. These bridges are not part of Metra's current bridge replacement plans (that project stops at Balmoral in Andersonville), but it's a fair bet that once the current project is done (in 2018, according to plans), this batch will be on the table for replacement.

Songs about the death and life of the American city

A loose list, a set of vague connections, but all powerful in their condemnation of what's happening to our cities. Songs about urban decay, suburban development, architecture, demolition, buildings and food:

* The Pretenders: "My City Was Gone" - the death of Akron, Ohio chronicled in a bitterly angry rock song
* Marvin Gaye: "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"
* Bruce Springsteen: "My City of Ruins" (about his home town of Asbury Park. Later repurposed as a post-9/11 reflection.)
* Stevie Wonder: "Village Ghetto Land"
* Jay Farrar: "Outside the Door", a lament for the lost places and times of St. Louis
* Son Volt: "Way Down Watson" - Farrar & company mourn the death of St. Louis's old Coral Court Motel
* Marah: "This Town" - (semi)closing track from their amazing Kids in Philly disk. Every track evokes the life and times of Philadelphia, none more poignantly than this short reflection. See also "History of Where Someone Has Been Killed", "The Catfisherman", "Christian Street".
* Neko Case: "Thrice All American" - an almost apologetic song about Tacoma, WA
* B.J. Thomas: "Everybody's Out of Town" - recently suggested by a friend. A sardonic take on the abandonment of the inner city.
* Talking Heads: "The Big Country" - David Byrne looks down on the suburbs from an airplane and dryly declares that "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." I hear ya, bro.
* Rush: "Subdivisions" - those long, drawn-out synth notes capture the essential emptiness of growing up in the 'burbs

People might also suggest "Big Yellow Taxi", but it's a bit too chipper for the moods I'm circling around with this set.

Lane Technical High School

Lane Technical College Prep High School (architect John C. Christensen) is a Gothic icon on Western Avenue, a break from the relentlessly dense and unplanned commercial onslaught that lines Chicago's longest street. Lane Tech occupies a full city block (or more); the building is beautifully and artfully planned, with enormous spacious grounds surrounding an equally enormous building complex. Founded as Albert G. Lane Technical School in 1908, it is the city's largest high school, housing over 4,000 students.



You would never guess at a glance that this building was finished in 1934. The red brick Gothic style was highly out of favor by that point, both from an artistic and economic standpoint, but apparently it was decided to press onwards rather than redo drawings that had been completed several years prior. The result was a building that was out of style before it was even built - but still remains highly impressive today.







You could be forgiven for thinking that the prominent clock tower on the Western Avenue side marks the front of the school, but it doesn't - a look at the building's floor plan shows that the school is actually oriented to the north. Inside the tower is one of the school's many stairwells. The clock itself no longer functions.



On the north side, facing Addison Street, twin towers demarcate the school's primary facade. Between them is nestled the library, a beautiful double-height space with vast north-facing windows that bathe the space in indirect light.



The school's corridors are overwhelmingly long and monotonous, begging the question of how students manage to get from one class to another in the paltry 4 minutes they are alloted.




Though monotonous and monochrome, the hallways are enlivened in a most unusual way. A series of 40 murals, created for the 1933 Century of Progress world's fair, commemorating the contributions of every state in the union to modern technology.



The attitude toward industry and manufacturing in these paintings is startlingly divorced from that of today. Whereas we see factories and refineries as eyesores to be minimized and avoided, these paintings celebrate them as welcome additions to even the most bucolic of landscapes. A steel mill alongside a lake is a thing to be celebrated, not mourned. It's a fitting attitude for a building whose scale is that of a factory, an industrial-sized seat of learning.





Lane's early history is literally written on its walls. In the cafeteria, a small metal plaque notes that the sound system was the gift of the class of '59. Art projects dating back to the 1930s are scattered around the building, including murals in the cafeteria and library, and bas reliefs carved in wood in the library.







The wood reliefs were carefully restored just a few years ago. One, entitled Evolution of the Book, is in a WPA-influenced style similar to the Century of Progress murals. The other, Control of the Elements by Peterpaul Ott, is pure Art Deco - stylized, geometric, streamlined, and utterly amazing. Both were designed by teachers and executed with the help of students.





One of the nearby murals was done by members of the 1942 Mural Club.



Even the utilitarian courtyards are artfully decorated, and used to engender school spirit.



Both the librarian and a security worker I spoke to had glowing praise for the student body - hard workers, disciplined, well behaved, smart. Many are the children of immigrants. A handful were in the library studying on a beautiful Saturday morning.

History of Lane Tech at the school's website

The Murals at the school website

Lane Tech at Wikipedia

Midcentury preservation

Talk about your perfect storm for losing a piece of architecture! This building on S. State Street has it all: it's in a busy area, it's a retail facade, and it's Midcentury in origin.



It's slated to be remodeled into something forgettable. Blair Kamin wrote a an excellent summation of the who, what, why, and why-it-shouldn't.

Preservation in a global economy

My interest in historic preservation comes from some fairly simple origins: namely, I have seen far too many beautiful buildings torn down. I see it and I am outraged, because I know we cannot and will not ever build such things again. They cannot be replaced.



"Historic preservation" is a double misnomer, for me personally. I'm rarely interested in buildings as an embodiment of a specific history. If history gives further ammunition for the conservation of a beautiful building, then so be it; but what I'm really and truly interested in is creating and maintaining beautiful urban places. And I don't want to see buildings preserved - locked in amber - but put to new and productive uses. Too often I feel that preservationists looking to save a building float pie-in-the-sky notions of museums, community centers, and other non-enterprises that cost money instead of generating it. I want old buildings to be living parts of the current and future economy.



Lately, over the last year or so, I've often felt a growing sense of helplessness and hopelessness over the fates of countless minor buildings and forgotten neighborhoods, places left behind by the vagaries of progress. I try to envision a future that would return life to these buildings. Amid a struggling economy, a global economic downturn, rising competition from overseas, and an American culture that is both increasingly insular and wracked with paranoid fears over its physical safety, I cannot do it.



If you use Bing.com to take a virtual flight over older city neighborhoods, you'll see a pattern of scale. Everything we build today is gigantic. Gigantic schools go into old neighborhoods, and they're surrounded by tiny little houses on tiny lots. Goliath size vs. fine grain. The notion of acceptable size in America has inflated to the point of ludicrousness. I try to envision a modern chain store adapting to the fine-grained construction of the historic city - a Wal-Mart inserting itself into a dozen side-by-side storefronts. It's a nice fantasy, but try to sell it to corporate reps who are beholden to a particular development model.



It is a sad fact, little recognized but indisputable, that construction is the province of the wealthy. It takes serious money to build or renovate something, even with a heavy investment of sweat equity. And so the poor, or those of simply less-than-average means, wind up with the leftovers and the off-castings of the above-average. Today this means that the jobless are stranded in neighborhoods like this. Tomorrow it might mean that they are living in deteriorating suburban ranch houses. But neither bodes well for the future of surviving buildings in collapsing neighborhoods.

These problems are all interrelated. Overmassive scale, awful places, nemployment, sluggish economy, beauty allowed to rot, people left behind. If all the effort we've expended in the last 60 years in flinging ourselves further and further apart from one another were instead redirected into building up our cities as the dense, beautiful, walkable, humane places they once were on track to becoming, we'd all be better off.

Damen Avenue Churches

Sometimes I snap a totally random photo, and it winds up haunting and fascinating me for ages afterwards. So it was with a shot of a near west side church I took in 2007, the New Holy Bethel Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God.



I returned a few weeks ago to photograph it more intently. Only when I put the old and new photos side by side did I realize that the building has lost the roof and upper section of its turret. There's been some reroofing work, but the roof - the whole exterior, in fact - is in pretty rough shape. The windows were bricked in long ago, and nearly all the stained glass is gone.



This modest Romanesque church stands at 1960 W. Adams at Damen, right by the United Center, though prior to Chicago's 1909 street renumbering, its address was 739-741 Adams. The founding congregation was the Seventh Evangelical Church, later the Adams Street Society. They erected a building which would commonly be referred to as the Adams Street Church, with a cornerstone date of 1888. (Other articles refer to it as the "Evangelical Church at Adams Street and Robey", Robey being the previous name of Damen until 1927, and the "Adams Street Church". Most of these articles are the planned topics of Sunday sermons at various churches around town, while one describes the departure of one of its first ministers.) From its purchase in 1885, the church property was embroiled in a massive court fight between two factions of the Evangelical Church of North America. The congregation was also involved with the early Temperance movement.



In 1928 it was sold to a Greek Evangelical congregation, the sales posting in the Tribune noting that "many prominent men" went to the church in the past. A 1953 newspaper ad notes that it was then a branch of the Church of God.

New Bethel is one of a string of churches along Damen Avenue:

* West Side Community Church - 1937 W. Adams at Winchster, east of Damen


The cornerstone of St. Paul's Reformed Episcopal Church was laid on February 22, 1886, and services were taking place in the new limestone building by May. Built at a cost of $38,000, it suffered a severe basement fire in December 1886, but quickly rebuilt. In 1950, police were twice called to the premises to break up scuffles that arose over the pastor's attempt to sell the church to the West Community Church, a black congregation, and the previous congregants' refusal to allow the new owners to take possession or enter the building.


* Greater Union Baptist Church - 1956 W. Warren at Damen
William LeBaron Jenney, 1885


This fantastic church building wears some of its history proudly on its facade - a 1950s cornerstone relates that the GUBC was organized 1908, and purchased the building in 1928. Its original builders were the Church of the Redeemer. More on the church building's history can be found on GUBC's website. The exterior features superb terra cotta ornament and stained glass.








* Gospel Temple M.B. Church - 1958 W. Washington Blvd. at Damen


This modest red brick church has a bizarre mansard roof that plunges down between the towers over the entrance. My guess is that there was a much more formal entrance originally, and that this was a way to shoehorn in some office space a long time ago.

It was originally the Church of St. Andrew, dating back to at least 1886.




The thing about these churches is, churches don't just build themselves. For four churches to have gone up on this one little stretch of road, there must have been a sizable population in the area a hundred years ago. Today, there's almost nothing - just vast fields of parking for the United Center.



When planning for the stadium, originally meant to be a new home for the Chicago Bears, began in 1987, much of the area was already vacant land - 73%, according to the stadium architects, a figure that sounds about right based on some skimming of Historic Aerials.com. The area was devastated by the 1968 riots and never recovered.


1972


1988


1998


Stadium plans called for the demolition of over a hundred buildings. Banding together as the Interfaith Organizing Project, several churches in the area led the fight against the monolithic stadium, decrying it as a playground for the suburban rich, and protesting the thousands of elderly and empoverished neighbors that would be displaced.

Plans for a new Bears stadium seem to have quietly died off... only to be revived as an enclosed arena for the Bulls and Blackhawks a few years later. The churches were only able to save themselves; their neighborhood was destroyed. The early newspaper announcement of the stadium plan makes mention of "pedestrian malls", "urban" planning, physical connections to the neighborhood, trees and grassy knolls that would screen the parking lots, economic benefits to the residents of the area - all a hilarious fiction. Destroying the neighborhood was sold as somehow saving it. It's an Orwellian twist of language that continues to be used today by powerful developers who want to get poor people out of their way.

The result - major building survive, while the fine-grained context that gave rise to them, supported and nurtured them, are washed away. 125 years after the West Side was developed, the surreal sight of an urban church in a parking lot is all that remains.

Industrial art

A friend's blog post from a while back extols the architectural merits of a St. Louis industrial park... then leadingly wonders if there might be any comparably architectural industrial park elsewhere. I haven't managed to find a Chicago counterpart just yet, but I did turn up this place a while back.



This is the building of Continental Electrical Construction Co. at 5900 W. Howard. Though it is otherwise an unremarkable 1960s brown brick office building, its western face bears a mosaic tile mural designed in 1967 by Leo W. Witz, son of the company's founder and its CEO until his retirement in 1973. The mural, titled Shakespeare's The Seven Ages of Man, is accompanied by a small plaque quoting the piece in question.



Common to the era, it's a highly stylized and abstracted work, combining forms, curves and colors with identifiable subject matter. The result works as both an aesthetically pleasing composition and an illustration.





In a nice touch, the false window panels around the corner are filled in with a continuation of the same design.