Quickie: Chicago Spire update

The Irish newspaper The Independent has published an article updating us on what's going on with the Chicago Spire.  In a word -- nothing.  The paper lifted a couple of quotes from a New York Times article and tried to present it as something new, but it told us nothing we didn't already know -- 1, that the Spire needs money to be built; and 2, that the banks aren't willing to part with any money right now.

Spire Screwed Again

It just seems like everyone and everything is conspiring against the Chicago Spire .  What could be a treasure of modern architecture on the coast of Lake Michigan can't seem to get a break.

The latest hurdle is a big one -- the meltdown of Anglo-Irish Bank.  According to the Sun-Times , the bank is about to be nationalized by the Irish government.   That will make it tougher for Garrett Kelleher, the visionary who took over the Spire project, to get the money he needs to continue construction.

According to the Times, Kelleher has already withdrawn almost $70 million from the bank to get this far.  But the bank attached few strings to his spending.  With the bank in the hands of the Irish government, it's unlikely the new people holding the purse strings will be as generous as their predecessors.

At this point, when it comes to the Spire, everything is speculation. It's been like that pretty much since the beginning when Fordham made big plans, but couldn't follow through on them.

For now, all we can do is gaze into the foundation hole and dream of what may... or may not... come.

Sure, we're City of the Year -- but for what?

The magazine formerly known as Gentlemen's Quarterly has named Chicago its 2008 "City of the Year."  Sure, anyone from the hot dog vendors at Sox Park to the ballcap-and-sweatshirt crowd in Lakeview could have told you that.  But GQ's reasons are intriguing because they're both insider, and wildly superficial.

(Read the full article here )

The article focuses immediately on politics, and of course the city's mostly benevolent dictator, Richard M. Daley.  It then moves on to perpetual insider, and now Obama-maker David Axelrod, the Rove of the moment.  But then it derails by picking Jesse Jackson Junior as a reason Chicago is good.  Umm...  Excuse us?  The article notes that he's come out of his father's shadow, and while that's true the only way he made that happen is to adopt many policies that run in direct opposition to his father's legacy.  The elder Jackson wasn't afraid to stand up to the elder Daily.  These days when Hizzonor says, "jump" Junior says, "how high?"  Jesse Jackson can call up WGN-TV and demand to be on the News at Nine whenever he wants (and he does).  If Junior tried to pull that stunt, he'd get laughed at.

Fortunately, the GQ article goes way beyond politics and gives literature as the number three reason the city is so great.  Good for GQ.  A lot of people don't realize that Chicago's literary heyday is not in its past, but in its future.  With the recent death of Studs Terkel a lot of people saw it as the figurative, and literal, nail the coffin of great Chicago writing.  But GQ notes that there are many talented writers still slogging through the gritty streets of the city with rumpled suits and a wad of notebook paper.  Though, these days they've traded their mac coats for Mac computers.  Still, in this age when even Tony Bennett has sold out to the MTV crowd, the pleasures of crisp book have the power to seduce.

And then there's the architecture.  While Chicago was the home of the world's first skyscraper (much to the chagrin of New Yorkers) , and has been a trend-setter from art moderne to Meisian International to 90's McScrapers, and now into the wild blue postmodern, all GQ could find to talk about is the Spire.

Ah, yes, The Chicago Spire -- the hopes of a new generation of architecture fans wrapped up in a shining baguette of technology.  Don't get me wrong -- we're huge fans of the Spire around here.  But GQ's choice of it as a symbol of the city's greatness does Chicago a disservice since anyone who's been following the project knows that it's on hold.  Now thousands of people who see it featured in the glossy pages between impossibly-breasted supermodels and impossibly-sculpted shaving ads will do a quick Google and learn that Chicago isn't everything the article promised.  That the ancestral land of wild onions has its flaws, too.  And that if the article is wrong about the Spire, then what else is it wrong about?  Suddenly all that hard work and goodwill is tarnished, and an opportunity to raise the city's domestic profile is wasted.

Chicago losing a title?

If you've never seen it before, drink it in.  That's the pool for the residents who live in the John Hancock Center.  It's a full-sized pool on the 44th floor of the building, which puts it about 500 feet in the air.  To date, it is the world's highest pool.  But for how much longer?



With new megatowers coming online around the world almost every day it seems like a title that could be lost soon.  In Hong Kong, for example, many of the residential and hotel buildings like the MetroPark Hotel have pools of their roofs.  And while the Burj Dubai's hotel only goes up to the 39th floor, there are residences above it -- so the possibility exists that there's a pool up there somewhere.  We won't know until the joint opens next year.



Maybe the builders of the Chicago Spire can make a last-minute design change and put a little blue and wet on the roof of that building so that we can at least keep one record-setting title in the Windy City.