Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [16]
Then I arrived at Millennium Park, which was the cherry on Chicago’s icing. Close to the shore of Lake Michigan, right in the middle of the city, this was a stunning park, but there was a huge row about it when it was built. Although it covered only twenty-four acres, it cost $475 million, more than three times its original budget, which the people of Chicago funded through a combination of taxes and donations. To make matters worse, it opened four years late, in 2004, long after the New Year’s Eve it was meant to celebrate.
However, in spite of its shaky beginnings and huge cost, I thought it was a triumph, and incredible value for money. It will last a long time and Chicagoans will keep reaping its rewards. I only wished we had something similar in Glasgow.
It reminded me of a story I once heard about a city that bought some Jackson Pollock paintings. The authorities were harangued and mercilessly ridiculed by everyone who thought the paintings were worthless junk. Then, ten or twenty years later, the ridicule stopped as those people who’d complained and grouched discovered what a wonderful investment the city had made on their behalf. I hoped the same thing happened with Millennium Park. It was already Chicago’s second most popular tourist attraction, and the area around it had the fastest-appreciating real estate in America. But what really mattered was that it was such a life-affirming place, thanks in part to its designer, Frank Gehry – probably the most important architect of our age.
Built over rail yards and parking lots, the centrepiece of the park was an ultra-modern, vast open-air concert venue that accommodated 4,000 in seats and another 7,000 on a huge lawn. A field of thick grass sloped down towards the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a stage surrounded by 120-foot-high slices of brushed stainless steel that looked like ribbons fluttering in the wind. Above it all, a spider’s web of criss-crossing pipes housed hundreds of loudspeakers, suspended above the audience to distribute the sound as effectively as inside a concert hall. It was unbelievable.
Nearby, there was a great sculpture by the Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor. Although called ‘Cloud Gate’, everybody knew it as ‘The Bean’. If you saw it, you’d know why: it looked just like a 66-foot-long, 33-foot-high, shiny, metallic jelly bean. Created using a huge number of stainless-steel plates weighing more than 110 tons, ‘The Bean’ had been polished to such a fine degree that I couldn’t see a single seam. Jesus only knows how Anish Kapoor managed to do it. But what everyone loved about The Bean was the way it stretched and distorted views of the Chicago skyline behind you when you stood in front of it. And when I walked underneath it, I saw myself multiplied, repeated and stretched.It was like looking into a psychedelic kaleidoscope.
The area around ‘The Bean’ is extremely beautiful, and when we filmed there it was full of people, even though it was a very cold day. A mass of really happy visitors were taking photographs, wandering around, and smiling and laughing when they saw their reflections in the sculpture – surely that was proof of its value. Young and old alike were tickled by it. People even did little dances to see how their reflections would move. It struck me that ‘The Bean’ had a quality like the International Camera Dance Movie that for years I’ve been threatening to make. My plan would be to take a movie camera out of its case, put it on a tripod in an urban area, and just leave it running. Children would jump up and down in front of it. Adults would stop and stare. And whatever country they came from, people’s reactions would