Architectural TV: Chicago Temple (First United Methodist Church) on WTTW Tonight

One of the treats of living in Chicago during the 1990s was that I got to be surrounded by some stunning architecture. From the bridges to the parks to the monumental museums, there was inspiring work all around.

I was a member of the First United Methodist Church during my time in that city, and I've told people since then that that church ruined me for other churches. If I don't explain, they might get the wrong idea, thinking that the church was a bad influence or terrible experience. In fact, between the friendly, diverse congregation and the wonderful pastors (led by the incomparable and now-retired Dr. Eugene H. Winkler – still the best preacher I've ever had the pleasure of hearing), First Church simply set the bar too high for any other church to meet, as far as I'm concerned.

Today, I certainly wouldn't pass a litmus test for believers, but if I lived in Chicago, I'd still be a member of this wonderful church. It is located in a historic skyscraper in the heart of the Loop (if you've seen Blues Brothers, the church is briefly visible at the very end in a scene of various police cars converging on City Hall) and is an architectural marvel. The building itself is called the Chicago Temple (which leads some people to assume the congregation is Jewish, then they get confused with the Methodist Church bit) and it is the oldest congregation of any faith in Chicago. It's even in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest church in the world.

Sorry. I could go on and on, because I have too many great memories of my time at the Chicago Temple. The memories were spurred by a Facebook post by the Temple that the building will be featured tonight (November 29) at 7:30 pm Central time on Chicago station WTTW. Below is a short video excerpt that will give you a taste of the WTTW program and of the building.

(If the video below doesn't work, you can see it on WTTW's website.)

Green Bay So Excited about Playing Bears, They've Forgotten How to Spell

I'll be rooting for my hometown Packers this weekend when they take on the Bears (in another of my former cities), but I'm amused/embarrassed by the headline misspelling that's been ricochetting around the internet. The Green Bay Press-Gazette misspelled the name of the city they're taking on in the NFC championship. Way to go, Gazette. If you're going to make a big mistake, do it in the biggest typeface you've got.

As you can imagine, the Chicaco – I mean Chicago – press has been having a field day with this.

Richard Daley to Pass up on Re-Election

After 21 years as mayor of the country's third-largest city, Richard M. Daley announced today that he would not seek another re-election. Saying that he loved his time leading the city, he said "I've always believed that every person, especially public officials, must understand when it's time to move on."

What people outside of Chicago rarely appreciate is that, unlike the mayors of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, for example, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley never wanted to hold any other higher political office. He didn't want to sit in the U.S. Senate. He had no interest in being governor of Illinois. Not even president.

To Daley, being mayor of Chicago is being king of the world. The City of Big Shoulders is the center of his universe (as it is for most Chicagoans), so why would he want to leave it?

As Daley himself noted, in the coming days, lots of people will be dissecting his time in office. There's a lot of bad to talk about. Stubbornly high crime rates. Persistent corruption in public works. I can't defend that; though I lived in Chicago for most of the 1990s (and am now in San Francisco), I'm a Wisconsinite at heart and by political bearing. Clean government is very important to me.

But I think people should also note the good. When Daley took office back in 1989, he was derided for saying he was going to put up more wrought-iron fences and plant more trees. People questioned whether he had a big-enough vision for the city. Past mayors built giant public housing complexes, paved over vast swathes of classic neighborhoods to make way for expressways, created an urban university. Against that, what did fences and trees do?

He was also derided for not being the most eloquent speaker around. That's putting it nicely; in reality, he made the Bush presidents sound like Shakespeare. One of the meanest – and, frankly, best – things the Chicago Tribune did to Daley in the 1990s was to publish an interview with Richard Daley without cleaning up the quotes, as journalists usually do (taking out the "ums," "ers," and paraphrasing sentences that start and stop uncompleted). It was brutal, but the Tribune had a testy relationship with Daley, and it is to the paper's credit that it continued pursuing its criticism even when he made life hard for it.

Well, the fences helped block off abandoned lots that could therefore no longer be used as drug markets. Trees were only the cornerstone of his commitment to environmentalism. I don't remember the exact number, but I remember reading years ago that Chicago was recognized for the hundreds of thousands of trees that had been planted under Daley's leadership. Daley was also a big proponent of "green roofs" -- using the tops of buildings as gardens, which help reduce heating/cooling costs, provide pleasant respite in the urban jungle, and fight air pollution. City Hall in Chicago even has a green roof.

But bigger transformations did come, and he has left a legacy worthy of a big city behemoth. He took on the city's terrible schools – called the worst in the nation by Secretary of Education William Bennett – and wrested control of them from the state. I don't think anyone would call Chicago's schools today the best in the nation, but they're a lot better than they were, and that's because of Daley.

Another area of transformation is the city's public housing. As part of a national trend away from public housing and toward subsidized, distributed, less-dense low-income housing, Chicago redeveloped its massive inventory of public housing. In the early part of the 21st century, I was a senior editor at Affordable Housing Finance magazine (come on, you used to have a subscription when you were in college, right?) and one of the more interesting articles I did was a visit to Chicago to tour some of the redeveloped sites, talk to the head of Daley's housing department (and other city folks), and meet with developers and residents. Anyone who ever went to a Chicago White Sox home game in the 1990s knows what an ugly site it was to look over the stands, across the highway, and see block after block of one of the nation's largest and tallest (and most dangerous) public housing projects. Those were taken down and replaced with distributed, low-rise, mixed-income housing that revived a long-dormant and depressed neighborhood.

That was only part of a multi-multi-billion dollar affordable housing plan. It was part of a national trend, as I noted above, but Daley does get credit for the execution, because it was his people, his vision, his determination to revive neighborhoods and change the character of huge parts of the city. The cover photo above is from the October 2005 issue of Affordable Housing Finance, for which hizzoner was nice enough to pose for a photo along Chicago's revitalized lakefront. (He later autographed a copy of the cover, which I have sitting in my office.)

While I was at the housing magazine, we had a conference in Chicago and one of our lunch speakers was none other than the mayor. I don't know what the other editors were expecting, but I didn't have high hopes. Having read that Tribune interview with him years earlier, and knowing that politicians usually give a welcome-to-our-city-we're-doing-great-things-spend-your-money-goodbye type of speech, I had no higher hopes. But Daley spoke for about 30 minutes about the reasons for Chicago's re-engineering of its affordable housing stock, and he spoke well and knowledgably. It was clear this was not just another agenda item for his administration; it was clear it was a passion of his.

His speech was at noon, and right after the speech, he flew to Houston to watch his (and my) beloved White Sox win the World Series. I suspect that, if you could really ask him what were the highlights of his time in office, he would mention things like the schools and housing and the revived lakefront park and the election of a native Chicagoan as president. But I think he'd also mention getting to see a Sox World Series.

That's the man who just announced his pending retirement.

Fun with Blagojevich

When former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was charged with a zillion corruption charges, I told some colleagues that I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't convicted. The reason was that, in the absence of a powerful new political force in Illinois, there would be few people willing to testify or convict a governor for shaking down the state's businesses and citizens. Those shake-downs have been occurring for too long, and they simply are seen as the way business is done in that state.

I don't like corrupt politicians – in fact, it annoys me deeply in my Wisconsin-bred heart and soul – but I simply don't think Illinois is going to go through a great awakening of political and social reform that will make the state government operate in a transparent and clean manner. (BTW, if you want a fascinating and at times jaw-dropping story of Chicago corruption and amusing reform movements, check out the book Sin  in the Second City.) Don't forget that Blago himself got into the governor's chair by campaigning as an anti-corruption reformer.

It's how Illinois operates. It's how Chicago operates. And the fact is that I think most Chicagoans and most Illinoisans figure the system runs pretty well. You know, you never want to see legislation or sausage being made. Chicago's got its problems (crime is stubbornly bad, for example), but it's a great city with so much going for it. Take away the current Great Recession-related financial problems, and Illinois doesn't have too much to complain about.

So for all of us good-government types, this should be horribly depressing. And yet, I'm not depressed.

I can't quite explain why. Perhaps living in Chicago in the 1990s corrupted my reformist's heart. But whatever's the case, I make this prediction: Little will change in Chicago locally or Illinois statewide in terms of how business is done with the government. Some new rules and laws will be put into place. They'll be adhered to in word if not in deed. And the state will continue sending a high percentage of governors to jail.

Fun fact: The lawyer for a 1920s Illinois governor charged with corruption – who was himself a former governor – argued that Illinois governors enjoyed the divine right of kings. Laughable as that is, was Blagojevich's in-your-face legal counter-offensive any less brash?

Media Roundup: Rolling Stone, Forbes, Red Eye, Starlog, & More

Oh, what a tangled world wide web we weave:

• Not all newspapers are collapsing and shrinking. Red Eye, the Chicago Tribune's free commuter tabloid, is expanding its circulation and distribution, reports the Trib's Phil Rosenthal.
• In an apparent attempt to replicate the success of tell-all books by former disgruntled employees, an unknown (but Jeff Bercovici names names) former employee of Forbes magazine is reportedly writing an insider book that allegedly lays bare things such as a feud between the Forbes brothers. Think of the book as sort of a Devil Wears Prada but boring. Will Kip Forbes get us his restaurant review before deadline? Will Steve return Bono's text message? Who gets to sleep with the Fabergé eggs under their pillow tonight? Turn the page to find out! Or don't.
  
• Speaking of laying bare secrets: It was published in The Globe, so you know it's got to be gospel. The gossip rag published an are-they-or-aren't-they-gay list of celebrities, which Matthew Rettenmund kindly shares. I think you can give little credence to much of it (the suspicions and the denials), but it is interesting to read some of the rumors. Rush Limbaugh? Oh, dear.
• As readers of this site know, I love behind-the-scenes stories of magazine companies, especially entrepreneurial ones. (No, this isn't hypocritical; I don't care about the personal relationships at Forbes. If that book were on the decision-making and history of the magazine -- now that I'd find interesting.) Starlog editor David McDonnell provides another look at his company's experience publishing -- and not publishing -- licensed movie magazines. (It's a follow-up to an earlier article by McDonnell on the same topic.)
  
• This is the oldest bit of magazine news I can report; everyone's already published the news. National Geographic Adventure is being canceled, after a very short attempt to sell it (which went nowhere, because who's going to buy a magazine that either retains someone else's brand or has to be rebranded at cost?). The brand will continue, reports Folio:, in a "multi-platform model." So, they couldn't sell it.
• Speaking of stretching brands across platforms, Rolling Stone magazine is opening a restaurant in Los Angeles.
  

My previous media roundup.

Battle of the Burger Pics: Chicago vs The Commonwealth

The new edition of Chicago magazine arrived in my mailbox yesterday, sporting a closeup cover photo of a giant juicy hamburger. It immediately reminded me of the December 2008 cover we put together for The Commonwealth magazine.

For our cover, we went to the nearest bistro here in San Francisco's financial district, and we bought two sandwiches. One was a turkey club, and the other was some vegetarian concoction. We combined them to form the sandwich with the height we needed for the cover. You can see the result in the photo. (No food was injured in the making of this cover shoot; all sandwich material was eagerly swallowed up by young staffers following the photo session.)

Chicago, of course, is owned by Tribune Company, so God only knows what sort of budget they had to make their burger. They probably had it prepared in orbit -- because a low-gravity environment makes the cheese melt more uniformly, as I'm sure you know -- and beamed it directly to their expensive Michigan Avenue studios, where a team of fashion experts and eunuchs spent days making it look just right.

Both covers are shown here. Which burger would you rather eat? Do we need Bobby Flay to do a throwdown?

29

Okay, I'll depart from my new-found devotion to writing about magazines to note that the Chicago White Sox's magic number (the combination of wins by the Sox and losses by its main opponent) is 29.

Even better, if you were looking for a reason to vote for Barack Obama, then here's this: According to the Chicago Sun-Times (and other outlets), in an ESPN interview to air later this week, Obama was asked about Chicago's baseball teams.

ESPN: "If the Cubs and the White Sox both make it to the World Series?"

Obama: "I would be going."

ESPN: "Who would you root for?"

Obama: "Oh, that's easy. White Sox. I'm not one of these fair-weather fans. You go to Wrigley Field, you have a beer, beautiful people up there. People aren't watching the game. It's not serious. White Sox – that's baseball. Southside."

That's great. He's a real Sox fan -- you can tell, because he not only praised the Sox but he slammed Cub fans (and accurately, too). Now THAT's the kind of insight we need in the White House!

White Sox, Part II

Here's the post-game self-congrats by the White Sox.
It was nice to see former Sox Frank Thomas (not to be confused with Chicagoan Thomas Frank) (seriously, though I do) playing, even if it was for the bad guys.

Chicago White Sox 2:1 Oakland Athletics

I took advantage on Saturday of an opportunity to catch a rare appearance of the Chicago White Sox here in the Bay Area. After losing to the Oakland A's the previous night, the Sox rebounded on Saturday afternoon to a 2-1 victory. The game was not exciting, but it was a great baseball Saturday: Good seats, good weather, a good friend, good game result.
I took the photos in this posting from the 24th row behind home plate.