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Nov 27, 2005 2:28 pm US/Central
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Some Fear Chicago Becoming Less Distinctive
Remove the "L" Trains And Would Most People Know What City This Is?
CHICAGO (AP) ―
To former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, the elevated train tracks crisscrossing the city are more than a mode of transport. They are a reminder of a great city that has for generations looked and felt like no other place in the world.
But they are an increasingly lonely reminder.
"Chicago has been chipped away," said Byrne, mayor from 1979 until 1983. "I look at my grandson ... and what you want to tell him about different things (in the city), things that won't be there for the next generation of Chicagoans."
With its distinctive skyline, lakefront and icons such as the Field Museum and Wrigley Field, Chicago will never be mistaken for another city. But it has changed dramatically -- and its icons are continuing to disappear.
Gone are the steel mills and stockyards that gave the city its reputation for broad shoulders. Gone, too, are Chicago Stadium and Comiskey Park, replaced by gleaming new stadiums. The proud columns of Soldier Field remain, but since a massive renovation project completed in 2003, it looks like a spaceship landed on them.
In September came what was viewed by Chicagoans as the ultimate indignity: Marshall Field's, the city's most famous department store, would be renamed Macy's, the ultimate New Yorker.
"I like the Macy's in New York, but I'm not in New York," said Michael Braun, a Chicago attorney who was shopping at Field's original State Street store the day the name change was announced in September. "I'm in Chicago."
The changes extend to how and where people live.
In neighborhoods throughout the city, scores of taverns and other small businesses have been erased from the landscape in favor of pricey bistros and shiny condominiums.
"I don't recognize my own neighborhood," said writer Studs Terkel, who has been one of Chicago's most distinctive voices for decades.
Terkel is a reminder of something else the city may be losing: its distinctive voice. Of such famed Chicago writers and journalists as Mike Royko, Nelson Algren, Ben Hecht and Ann Landers, only Terkel is still alive. And he's past 90.
"Nobody has filled the void," said Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute. "There is still really terrific journalism going on in the city (but) the national influence has diminished."
Tourists these days take an elevator in the Sears Tower to get to the top of the city, but it takes a car to get to the company's headquarters since a move to the suburbs in 1992. Company after company once synonymous with the city -- from Montgomery Ward to Amoco -- have either died or moved out of town.
Chicago is certainly not the only city seeing change. But in Chicago it can be serious business.
"I have rarely experienced a city that is so enamored with its history," said Lonnie Bunch, who left as president of the Chicago Historical Society this year to help launch a new museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "Chicagoans revel in their history."
That helps explain the tug-of-war when the city's past butts up against the present and the future. It showed itself in the late 1980s when the Chicago Cubs decided to install lights at Wrigley Field, years after every other major league team had them. It surfaced when Field's announced it would stop making its famous Frango Mints in Chicago after seven decades and move production to Pennsylvania. And it's there whenever old buildings get torn down to make way for new ones.
"There is incredible tension in Chicago between tradition and innovation," said Blair Kamin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural writer for the Chicago Tribune. "On the one hand it is a city that invented the skyscraper and on the other it tries to preserve landmarks (built) 100 years ago."
That tension reared its head with the renovation of Soldier Field -- a project that drew widespread scorn because the finished product appears not so much to combine the modern with the traditional as to plop the modern atop the traditional.
"The Eyesore on Lake Shore," "Acropolis meets Apocalypse," and the "Mistake by the Lake" were just a few of the names given the stadium.
"It's a slap in the face," said Byrne.
Jonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, said Soldier Field was just one example of Mayor Richard M. Daley's willingness to disregard the traditional in the name of helping and attracting business.
"His agenda is not about Chicago or the people of Chicago or the legacy of Chicago," he said. "It's about business and making Chicago safe for business and if that means flushing a historic name down the toilet that is what will be done.
"All you need to know is Chicago is tearing down real Victorian buildings at the same time it is putting up fake Victorian streetlights."
Daley's administration dismisses such talk. They point out that the city has designated or in the process of designating 750 buildings -- including the Marshall Field's store on State Street -- as historic city landmarks this year alone.
And they point to efforts to save structures that hearken to the city's past. A current effort is preserving water towers, which were a common sight atop buildings in the early 1900s but of which only about 130 remain.
"They are part of the historic urban fabric of Chicago," said Nathan Mason, curator of special projects for the city's public art programs.
There was also the Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative, a city program that has spent millions of dollars to preserve Chicago-style bungalows in the city's older neighborhoods.
"We do want to encourage preservation of our most significant buildings," said Brian Goeken, a deputy planning commissioner. But, he said, "we're not a museum."
That was Daley's point when he talked about the decision to change the name on Marshall Field's to Macy's.
"Things change," Daley told reporters in September. "If you aren't willing to accept change, then you stay in the past and we're never going to stay in the past in this city."
But even Perry Duis, a University of Illinois at Chicago historian who applauds the mayor for the transformation of the lakefront and construction of Millennium Park, said the city looks a lot more like other cities than it used to.
"It's more homogenized, kind of Disneylike, in the sense that it is a city but there is something artificial about it," he said. "The L (elevated trains), you take that away and you won't know where you are."
(© 2005 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)