Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [96]
For a sampling of the work of Sullivan’s one-time Chicago student, Frank Lloyd Wright, visit the Robie House at 5132 South Woodlawn, and the Unitarian Universalist Church in Oak Park. Among the more recent works of Chicago architects, there are the Illinois Institute of Technology and the twin “Glass House” apartments on Lake Shore Drive which represent some of the finest work of Ludwig Mies van dcr Rohe. Alfred Shaw’s work can be seen in the Merchandise Mart, the New Post Office, and McCormick Place. And the new Marina City, designed by trend-setting Bertrand Goldberg, has received world-wide attention. Its twin cylindrical towers are the world’s tallest reinforced concrete structures. They not only house apartments for 2,500 persons, but also include a marina, a bowling alley with fifty-four lanes, a swimming pool, a health club and gymnasium, an ice-skating rink, and a 1,200-seat theater.
All along the Loop portion of the Chicago River, in fact, modern buildings and plazas are being erected. The Sun-Times Daily News Building was among the earliest and most striking of these. Soon to be built along the river west of the Loop is a one-hundred-million-dollar Gateway Center. It will include an airlines terminal, a heliport, a new building over Union Station, and a plaza similar to that of Rockefeller Center. When completed it will give Chicago one of the most beautiful intra-city waterways in the world.
This is only part of a skyscraper building boom now going on in Chicago. A $76,000,000 Civic Center Building, which at 631 feet in height will be among the city’s tallest, is being built east of the present City Hall-County Building. A thirty-story Federal Building is going up east of the Old Post Office-Federal Building. Developers John Mack and Raymond Sher (owners of the Sherman House) have announced plans for sixty-five-story and thirty-eight-story apartment buildings along Michigan Avenue between the Chicago River and Chicago Avenue. And a billion-dollar “city-within-a-city” is being built by three developers on air rights over railroad tracks east of the Prudential Building. As part of this Mayor Daley’s City Planning Department has suggested a hundred-story skyscraper bordering Lake Michigan, a building which would be second in height only to New York’s Empire State Building.
Sculpture depicting Abraham Lincoln is, of course, prevalent in Chicago. You will want to see Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Standing Lincoln near the Chicago Historical Society in Lincoln Park, his Seated Lincoln in Grant Park, and Charles Mulligan’s The Railsplitter in Garfield Park. Chicagoan Lorado Taft is represented by the huge Fountain of Time on the University of Chicago Midway, Spirit of the Great Lakes in the south garden of the Art Institute, and Idyll and Pastoral outside the Garfield Park Observatory.
After leisurely contemplation of Cultural Chicago, next consider Commercial Chicago, which contains the sinews of the city. Commerce is one of Chicago’s dominant reasons for being, and constitutes an attraction in itself.
Visitors to Chicago are understandably impressed by State Street, the most concentrated retail-shopping area in the nation. Women in particular find it easy to spend a day in the Midwest’s most renowned store, Marshall Field & Company. When they tire of shopping, there are fashion shows on view and five tearoom-restaurants within the store.
And even lacking the necessary bankroll, the fine shops of North Michigan Avenue, the “Fifth Avenue of Chicago,” offer inviting opportunities for window-shopping. It is here that Bonwit Teller, Saks Fifth Avenue, and other prestige specialty firms are concentrated, amid the spaciousness and greenery of the “Magnificent Mile.”
This section, where each year the Easter Parade is held in the vicinity of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, is a monument to still another Chicagoan of vision, realtor Arthur Rubloff. A former galley boy