Entries associated with the tag "Grant Park":

Let's move the International Museum of Surgical Science to Grant Park. (Alternately: the Hamilton Woodtype Museum.)

What?

"This comprehensive exhibit begins with the birth of orthopedics with Nicolas Andry in the 17th century and include discoveries and milestones in orthopedic surgery, as well as the evolution of amputation methods and prosthesis design from ancient times to the present. Featured in the exhibit are historical artifacts from the Museum’s extensive collection, including ancient bone-cutting tools, Civil War amputation kits, and 19th-century splints and artificial limbs. These objects are accompanied by archival manuscripts and artworks in several media that highlight orthopedic and prosthetic pioneers and their great discoveries and inventions."

Oh, like you'd prefer the BIG Backyard. 

It doesn't to me.

--Eric Zorn

But if not quite a dead horse, the argument against defiling a sacred vista is too lame to make it around the track against the opposition of not only the mayor and the Children’s Museum’s other powerful allies but even Lois Wille, Grant Park’s biographer and the Tribune’s former editorial boss. What ultimately undoes the museum’s claim on Grant Park is its failure to look anywhere else, and Bruce Dold, who now holds Wille’s old job, decided early on that the Tribune would have to propose alternatives.

--Michael Miner

Sometimes I think the Children's Museum fracas has less to do with kids or Grant Park or architecture or free and clear etc. and has a lot to do with the powers that almost are but aren't having lost a lot of pissing matches to the powers that be. And I'm okay with that. There are obviously bigger problems, but you might as well throw down against a weak hand for a small victory.

--me

I think the key here is what Zorn mentions offhandedly--"here, somehow" (emphasis mine). Now, it doesn't seem to make any sense that a "lame horse" defense of a not-beloved part of Grant Park vs. the heretofore unremarkable Chicago Children's Museum (I'd never heard anyone say anything about it until this mess) would hold any promise as a wrench in the gears of the Daley Quality of Life Tyranny. Even the specious concert-promoter bill is a bigger and more important fight. This is, on the surface, kind of dumb on both sides.

And that's why it's so important. That's the "somehow." Unlike foie gras, unlike concert promotion, and don't even get me started on TIFs, all the supposed merits on each side of the argument are so transparent that the only tangible goal, for the Machine and its discontents, is the dark beating heart of the city: Clout.

And we, the discontents, we have charts.

PS:

The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they're convinced the alternative is worse. Meanwhile the winners, who might earlier have accepted a compromise peace, become so maddened by the refusal of their enemies to stop fighting that they see no reason to settle for anything less than absolute victory.

--Lee Sandlin, "Losing the War"  

I vote for the Trib's Doctors Hospital suggestion. It's pretty, it's next to a park and the MSI, it's near underserved neighborhoods and an institution of higher education, and the damn thing has been boarded up since I moved here.

Just, wow.

Chicago Children's Museum officials were in the Woodlawn neighborhood Thursday night pitching their $100 million plan to relocate the facility to Grant Park to a lively group of about 200 children from after-school programs.

As the children munched on pretzels and drank from juice boxes at the Harris Park Field House, Jim Law, the museum's vice president of planning and external affairs, said the project was good for families.

[snip]

At the end of the meeting, the children were told to fill out a card urging aldermen to "support this museum for children from our neighborhood."

Steve Rhodes asks: "Did anyone ask why the museum didn't consider locating in Woodlawn then?" Actually, Woodlawn could use it. Woodlawn could use something besides townhouses, apartment buildings, and vacant lots. But it's cool, because the Olympics will definitely be in Washington Park in 2016.

Chicago: The City That Wouldn't Grow Up.

Lois Wille seems to be an unlikely person to misunderstand what parkland is, but here you go:

"The museum, where youngsters learn while they play, fills that gap. They enjoy racing along architect Frank Gehry's serpentine bridge above Millennium, but so far it's a bridge to nowhere. In this new site, the Children's Museum will be waiting for them."

If this move goes through, perhaps they can expand the BIG Backyard room, which provides children with fun, a valuable sense of irony, and a glimpse into the manufactured outdoors we'll all live in as the world evolves into an apocalyptic post-industrial hellscape.

"Art meets technology in BIG Backyard, a wondrous urban garden, filled with enormous insects, giggling flowers, giant toadstools and other fantasy creations that stir the senses and make imaginations bloom. Through innovative technology, you can immerse yourself in the action and discover what it's like to be part of the city's landscape."

Come to think of it, that's pretty damn educational. I didn't learn about hyperreality until I got to college. 

Millennium Park's Lurie Garden--as an artistic work--is especially poignant during the controversy over Grant Park's "open, free, and clear" status. Chicago's motto, "Urbs in Horto," is meant to highlight the city's commitment to parkland, but it's basically PR. When the city was given the motto, our metropolis was more of a slaughterhouse in a mud puddle; now it's a TIF in a grid. 

And Millennium Park, for all its attraction and wonder, is an aesthetic expression of the triumph of urbanity. It's no less a simulacrum than Washington Park, Garfield Park, and the city's other sylvan, continental green spaces, but it is hugely different, notably in its lack of green space. It's crazy futuristic (the Bean, the Gehry bandshell) and its most significant humanizing touch, the Crown Fountain, is the glitziest light sculpture between Times Square and Vegas.

In the midst of all this is Lurie Garden. According to the official site, the fenced-in hedge is meant to symbolize Sandburg's "city of big shoulders," but to me it looks like an internment camp for brushy little trees, a symbol of victory over the prairie. It questions the city's motto and the aspirationally Euro aspect of Olmstead's parks, but also suggests the delicacy of the open land we have left in the city and its environs. It's worth thinking about while the Children's Museum comes in for a crash landing.

Overlooked in the debate about the Children's Museum, until now: Is it any good?

"In comparison, the Chicago Children's Museum, which at $8 has the highest non-member admission of the three [Chicagoland children's museums], plus hefty parking fees on Navy Pier, books one unimaginative commercial traveling exhibit after another, often with licensed characters children are expected to recognize from television."

Sun-Times family entertainment writer Delia O'Hara says no, emphatically.

Via the Beachwood Reporter; Steve Rhodes's Friday Papers on the Museum is a must-read, including some inside-baseball gossip on how this relates to the decimation of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. 

It's a shame people are harshing on Mayor Daley for his passionate support of the Children's Museum. His love for the children, and the poor, and the poor children, is boundless. And all he wants to do is express his love in the form of a museum, and the Javerts who live next to Grant Park want to put it far away from the poor children, like all the way on the south side. Or something. It makes me so sad that I want to break into song.