Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [49]
Not long ago, in a survey conducted by the American Institute of Architects, its members declared Chicago home to the finest architecture in the country, and Comer and his wife, Francie, would agree; every Sunday they used to take a drive around the city, mostly to admire its older buildings. On one of these drives, in 1999, Comer was approaching the Loop from the south and he suddenly understood that he was watching a city shedding its skin: “I saw this magnificent façade of buildings, and I realized that what I was looking at was temporary. There isn’t much over one hundred twenty years old in the city. Most buildings last eighty to a hundred years. I realized the city was really in transition. New buildings going up. Old ones coming down.” And in that instant, Comer had a notion. “The city was being rebuilt from the center out. I thought, ‘Gee, let’s lock it into place at the end of the millennium.’ ” He decided to hire some photographers to capture the city as it was right at this moment in its history; then he might create a kind of time capsule, perhaps bury it in a canister beneath a new park under construction downtown.
Comer approached Richard Cahan to head up the project. Cahan was a likely candidate for the job because he’d written a book about a local architectural photographer, Richard Nickel, who was among the first preservationists to fight for buildings because of their architectural rather than their historical significance. (In 1972, Nickel died doing what he loved: While he was combing through Chicago’s old Stock Exchange, bulldozers bore through the building and buried him.) Cahan, who was also the picture editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, told Comer, “If you’re going to capture the city you ought to capture its people, its life, not the architecture. That’s what people will care about a thousand years from now.” Besides, he added, “Human lives are more interesting than buildings.” Comer gradually came to agree, and so Cahan left his job at the Sun-Times to direct the project, which they christened CITY 2000.
Two hundred local photographers were hired, most of them on a part-time basis, to take pictures around the city over the next year. Comer didn’t set a budget; he just told Cahan and the photographers he assembled to make it as good as possible. “I don’t want to hear any excuses,” he told them. Initially, Cahan skimped. When they needed aerial shots, for instance, he rented an old Piper airplane that cost seventy-five dollars an hour, but the resulting photographs were distant and out of focus. Comer heard of the problem and suggested they hire a turbo helicopter at five hundred twenty-five dollars an hour. In the end, Comer spent roughly two million dollars on the project.
Photographers were given free rein and told to do whatever they’d long dreamed of doing. Leah Missbach asked women throughout the city to empty the contents of their purses, and then shot the contents along with the owners. Lloyd DeGrane took photos of people in uniform, from players for the Chicago Cubs to maids at the Hilton Hotel. Scott Strazzante documented the last days of a tire store where his father worked. Kevin Horan set up a makeshift studio at ten locations around the city, including outside the Criminal Courts building, by the lakefront, and on the streets of Albany Park, and asked passersby if he might photograph