WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

(photo by Lee Bey)

One of the more overlooked preservation stories this year has been the alarm sounded by Landmarks Illinois a few months back.

The statewide preservation group named the entire 10400 and 10500 blocks of Corliss and Maryland avenues to its "most endangered list." The citation is significant and alarming because the blocks compose the northeast portion of the local and nationally-landmarked Pullman Historic District--an almost completely intact former company town‚  that was built in the 1880s to house workers of the long-shuttered Pullman Palace Car factory.

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(photo by Lee Bey) 

I took the above photo during a cool snap a few weeks ago. The lithe H&M girls reminding us that warm weather is approaching and that bikini tops are $4.95 runs up against the cold reality that Chicago---on that day, at least--wasn't quite finished with cold weather yet. The street advertising is everywhere in Chicago. Kiosks, billboards, bus shelters, cabs.‚  It's darn near inescapable. But as the fake "them" and the real "us" occupy the same streetscapes, the juxtapositions can be entertaining.

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(photo by Lee Bey)

Western Avenue, the muscular 25-mile north/south commercial thoroughfare has a funky midsection between 31st and 32nd.

The street bulks up there. And its accompanying overpasses, barrier walls and streetlight bases are still dressed in snazzy Art Deco, courtesy of a $1.8 million re-do in 1940. The street's garb is faded a little after seven decades, but its beauty is still there. Indeed, it makes one wish streets and overpasses could be designed this beautifully today.

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(photo by Lee Bey) 

The late Andy Warhol's famed Silver Clouds is billowing around the interior of IIT's Crown Hall. It's worth checking out.

One thousand helium-filled mylar balloons--seemingly with minds of their own--rise and float around the interior of the Mies van der Rohe-designed glass pavilion/masterpiece/home to the IIT's College of Architecture. Warhol and engineer Billy Klƒ¼ver created Silver Clouds, which debuted at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1966, and it became an instant icon of modern art. The folks at the Mies van der Rohe Society at IIT say the Crown Hall showing of Clouds is the biggest installation of the work yet, with scores of balloons joyously animating the modernist building's huge interior.

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Lee Bey is away until Monday, June 7th. We are running some faves from his archives. This post originally ran on January 22, 2010.

(photo by Lee Bey) 

Suggested tongue-in-cheek movie bill for the shuttered ICE Lawndale 10 Theaters:‚  The Invisible Man. Ghost Story. The Man Who Wasn't There. And The Vanishing.

Jokes aside, what do we do with the empty multiplex?‚  Not just this one, but the others that'll likely come on line as the movie-going audience fractures and distracts itself with DVDs, Mp3 players and the very device you're reading this blog on.‚  And we can't depend on movies with blue characters to solve the problem, no matter how profitable they seem. "Avatar" 's $520 million gross is exceptional--only if you don't adjust for inflation. If you do, 1939's "Gone With the Wind"‚  grossed the equivalent of $1.4 billion in today's cash. In that matrix, "Avatar" barely out-grosses "Butch Cassidy‚  and The Sundance Kid."

Some of the closed multiplexes will become churches, no doubt, as did the old Hillside Theater in the late 1990s, and that's okay.‚  But the rest of them: could they be reused for live community theater? Or if possible, multiplexes of musical acts. Imagine a choice of 10 acts on 10 different stages in a single building.

The theaters could also become independent movie houses where the next budding‚  Cassavetes,‚  Micheaux or Lemmons can get their works‚  screened before a live audience?

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Lee Bey is away for the remainder of this week. He will return on Monday. Instead of staying dormant, we bring you some of his work from the archives. This post originally ran on January 15, 2010.

(photo by Lee Bey)

You can almost hear the wah-wah pedals as your eye washes over the bell-bottomy "Real Estate" lettering and the company's name squinting through those low-profile, late 1960s/early 1970s orange and black graphics.

But Newmann & Associates has been out of business for years. Which means this fantastic piece of street advertising--visible from the southbound lanes of Cottage Grove south of 75th Street--will ultimately fade away like the business that sponsored it. The sign has joined the ranks of ghost signs ever-so-slowly vanishing on brick walls all across the city.

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Today's offering from the unbuilt architecture files: a 1949 plan to construct a massive--and exceedingly modern--complex of government buildings in southwest corner of the Loop.

The complex boarded by Madison, Van Buren, Congress and Canal was proposed by the Chicago Plan Commission, back when the commission did actual planning, rather than grant approval to projects brought before it.

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