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Here's another gem from our friends at the Chicago Film Archives: The City to See in '63, a 12-minute, 16mm color film touting the places, spaces and other virtues of Chicago.

There is some good stuff here. You can see Marina City's residential towers under construction and neon signs blazing at night--nothing said "big city" like neon back then. There are glimpses of long gone places such as the Chicago Sun-Times Building, demolished in 2004; White Sox Park, which was bulldozed in 1991; Riverview amusement park which was wrecked in '67 and the first McCormick Place, which burned down the same year.

I like that neighborhoods were included. Logan Square, Garfield Park and old Maxwell Street made the cut. So did the modernist, backswept North Avenue Beach chess pavilion, which was only about five years old at the time.

The purposely deadpan narration--written like Carl Sandburgesque poem to the city--is also amusing. "You pride yourself in gangster lore and brutal frontier politics," narrator says at one point. "Yet...how do you explain [the] Art Institute and your...how many...universities and colleges?"

The City to See is the work of the late Chicago filmmaker Margaret Conneely and was done when the amateur film movement was big here.

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The automaker Lincoln once made some of America's best-looking cars, particularly the spectacular, minimalist Elwood Engle-designed 1960s Continental with the front-opening rear "suicide doors" and no B-pillar.

You know the car:

:

Late last year, the Ford division began remembering from whence it came, with the company adopting the "Lincoln Motor Company" moniker and emphasizing design in its commercials and branding. And although the above goofball ad for the 2013 Lincoln MKZ from Sunday's Super Bowl XVLII does those efforts no favors, the spot--and one more that aired during the big game--at least shows a Lincoln design that looks drastically different and more nimble than the squared-off land barges of recent memory.

"This car tells the story of being very modern, of being transformational," Lincoln director of design Max Wolff told Businessweek last August. "It tells the story of grace, of elegance.

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As a demolition crew clears the site of last week's spectacular five-alarm McKinley Park warehouse fire, the South Side loses yet another building--and the city loses another top-flight example of its renowned architecture and urban planning. 

 

The five-story warehouse at 3757 S. Ashland Ave.--images of it ablaze, then sheathed in ice last week were seen around the world--was built in 1919 as the Pullman Couch Company. It was once one of the key buildings in the nation's first industrial park: The Central Manufacturing District, a sprawling, privately planned, owned and developed campus of factories, warehouses and other buildings that stretched from Morgan St. to Western Ave. and from 35th St. to Pershing Rd.

The CMD sold off the buildings in the 1960s and many of its old structures have for years sat empty or underutilized.

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An historic North Kenwood home where legendary bluesman Muddy Waters once lived--and jammed--is the subject of demolition order now being sought by the city's buildings department.

The 120-year-old weathered and boarded-up two-flat, 4339 S. Lake Park Ave, has been vacant for years and its owner has been cited about the structure's condition, Department of Buildings spokesperson Susan Massel said.

Inspectors found the building open last November and the dwelling has been the subject of complaints to the city's 311 non-emergency number as far back as 2002, she said.

According to a records search, the unoccupied building is owned by a great granddaughter of Waters'.

Earlier this week, the city affixed a red "X" to the building's facade--a signal to first-responders that the home is structurally unsound. Although the building department is seeking a court order to get a permit to demolish the building, Massel said the agency would rather have the owner take better care of the property. A court date has not yet been set.

"We want compliance," she said.

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The city of Chicago in 1968 had to know what people--particularly black people--were calling urban renewal, then: Negro removal.

At the time, portions of the near South, West and North Sides, especially those closer to downtown, were being demolished and replaced with lower density housing and higher density middle-class white or racially-integrated dwellings. The new places had idyllic names like Lake Meadows. Prairie Shores. An early Puerto Rican neighborhood was uprooted to construct Sandburg Village. Still more poor and working-class black and Italian neighborhoods were cleared to build the University of Illinois-Chicago, expand the Illinois Medical District and more.

The tenor of the times gives some context to the above 1968 film A Place to Live. The 16mm documentary was commissioned by the city's Department of Urban Renewal Commissioner Lew Hill to explain and humanize the controversial policy. The always fascinating Chicago Film Archives uploaded the entire film to YouTube a few days ago.

The well-done color film shows the Department of Urban Renewal's efforts to relocate families whose apartments and substandard homes were being demolished by the city.

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When it opened in 1972, the Ebony/Jet Building was a buttoned-down and conservative addition to south Michigan Avenue; an elegant, modernist rectangle overlooking Grant Park with the same dignity found in the magazines published in the building.

 

But that was the exterior. Behind pioneering black architect John Moutoussamy's four walls were offices designed with an exuberant, high-style and fearless mix of a color, texture, art, contemporary furnishings and pattern. Created by interior designers William Raiser/Arthur Elrod, the offices embodied an afrocentric modernism that was well-turned, avant garde and quite hip--a perfect match for publisher John H. Johnson's groundbreaking magazines.

 

Johnson died in 2005 at age 87. Raiser and Elrod were killed by a drunk driver in 1974. Johnson Publishing sold its building to Columbia College Chicago and last year moved to new digs six blocks north.

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If you are of a certain age--and, boy, I am--the early 1970s video of a Dan Ryan Line el train making a 95th Street-to-downtown run is a real trip...back in time.

Completed in 1969, the line was only a few years old when this video was made; the sleeker new trains glided down the median of the still new Dan Ryan Expressway, stopping at modernist stations designed by Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Back then, the old Lake/Dan Ryan Line went north, passed through downtown, connected to older Lake Street el and traveled west to Oak Park. Today, the Ryan trains compose the south end of the Red Line, while the firner west leg is now part of the Green Line.

As the train travels north in the video, some long-gone landmarks and structures can be seen, such as the lip-shaped Magikist carpet cleaners sign kissing the sky near 85th. As the train pulls into the 47th Street station at 6:45, the now-demolished massive Robert Taylor Homes are visible on the right. At 35th, the camera pans to the left and gets a good view of old Comiskey Park.

Placing a high capacity rail line in an expressway median was revolutionary in the 1950s and 1960s. It lessened the cost of land clearance for mass transit and created a train system that didn't darken roadways, as do the city's overhead lines.

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