So. July melts into August. Summer about half over. Are you having fun? What is fun, anyway? There’s small fun: drinking coffee on your porch fun. Tossing cards into a hat fun.
And big fun. Big Chicago fun. Enjoying the unique activities that only a city like Chicago can provide.
Such as? What are peak Chicago summer experiences? A Cubs game at Wrigley Field. A hot dog and fries at Gene & Jude’s. To me, it isn’t summer unless I stop by MingHin, grab some dim sum and then meet my wife at the Gehry bandshell in Millennium Park to listen to … well, honestly, I don’t really care what we listen to. Music. Blues, jazz, opera. Whatever.
A Chicago River cruise fits perfectly into the mix. Frankly, the Water Taxi works for me. But the ideal, full, peak cruise experience is the Chicago Architecture Center cruise. Because the buildings along the Chicago River, well, they’re Chicago’s glory, aren’t they? I can’t tell how many times I’ve taken that cruise. Filling my pockets with informational coin that I can dole out for years to come.
Although, the last time — I had trouble. The docent, she was very nice, and, ah, informed, in a gentle, volunteer, small town librarian sort of way. And it isn’t as if the information she was telling us was wrong, per se. But I found myself almost biting my hand, struggling not to interject the sharper facts she was overlooking.
How can you point out the Tribune Tower and not use the phrase “Gothic horror show of a building”? (Okay, neo-Gothic horror show …) How can you mention the 1922 architecture contest that selected this mess of flying buttresses — the best the Middle Ages have to offer — and not observe that the truly innovative design, Eliel Saarinen‘s far superior and influential, though never built, tower, came in second?
Or that Tribune publisher Robert McCormick — a world class xenophobe and Hitler bootlicker — sent his correspondents to beg, borrow or steal chunks of the great landmarks of the world, the Parthenon and Taj Mahal and such, to embed in the outside wall at ground level in his monument to American exceptionalism. A staggeringly misguided display of architectural homeopathy that would revolt us if we weren’t so familiar with it.
See how fun this is? Musing on how I could both enjoy the summer and raise some money for my financially struggling newspaper, I cooked up what we’re calling the Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline. A gloves-off, no-holds-barred, sharp, adult architectural river cruise. Not for the faint of mind.
Although. Since I do like to have an adult in the room — someone who really knows the topic, and can backstop me if I go blank, plus share the inevitable blame — I invited Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey to join me. And in a very uncharacteristic bit of recklessness, he agreed.
Lee, who worked for both Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the city, brings a granular knowledge of the buildings we’ll be drifting past, and will keep things from getting too negative. I’m with him there. I mean, I got married at the Intercontinental Hotel. It isn’t that I don’t like it. But the former Medinah Athletic Club, well, it’s also very strange, with those big Assyrian bas reliefs of bulls and kings and whatnot. What were they thinking? We’ll tell you. For 90 minutes.
In a city like Chicago, there’s a lot to keep track of. I was talking Saturday to a young lady of my acquaintance, who conflated the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Building, now 875 N. Michigan.
When I pointed this out, she said, “Aren’t they the same building?”
Don’t let that happen to you (Trying to be kind, I replied, gently, “No, and you might be confusing them because they were both designed, in part, by Fazlur Khan, the great Bangladeshi-American structural engineer.” I actually said that).
You need to know how the marble skin peeled off the Aon Building. And how the sign on Trump Tower was originally going to be much bigger. And multi-colored.
This is the part of the column where I planned on making the hard sell: taking your hand, looking deeply into your eyes, and urging you to buy tickets for the Aug. 21 event. Support the scrappy Sun-Times and its soulmate, WBEZ.
But tickets were offered first to Chicago Public Media supporters on Thursday, who snapped them up in a couple hours. The cruise is sold out.
A reminder: membership has its privileges.
Didn’t see that coming —though I have coined a phrase to explain the wild popularity of the cruise: The Lee Bey Effect. Better luck next time.