Shades of Gotham, shafts of light

Chicago is overwhelming.

Part frightening and part exhilarating. At time it feels like the inspiration for Gotham. You cross the river over a number of bascule bridges acting as the drawbridges leading to a dark citadel. Once in downtown, a building of 8 stories is a midget. They rise to 20, 30,40 stories as each rapid innovation in building techniques was pressed into service in the building frenzy of the late 19th and early 20th century. The street facades may be glitzy but between the blocks are cavernous dank service alleys, the landing pads for spindley unkempt fire escapes that hang off the dull back faces, and the spaces for rubbish bins and unknown activities. Even on a hot day the main roads are chill and in shadow, the sun blocked out by the towers. Encircling the original downtown is the elevated train line the EL, known in this area as The Loop. Its rusty hulk sits squat in the centre of the streets laying another layer of shadow on pedestrians and cars below and how those cars honk at each other. These are bad tempered streets. They are also tricksy streets which disorient the newly arrived tourist. Signs hung from gantries slap bang in the middle of the carriageway do not in fact identify the street you are about to enter but the street that crosses perpendicular. I spent half an hour wandering up and down a street not understanding where I was. They are wide streets up to 6 lanes governed in places by the objectionable pedestrian countdown timers found in Toronto but set to 25 seconds because the streets are so wide. At the corners shuffle the destitute shaking their starbucks cup hoping for a $1 from the trickle down economy. From the confused, over-world gloom you can go down the steps to the river bank some 20 metres below current street level as the city has been jacked out of the swamp and mud of the Chicago River and there find another mid layer of dimly lit roads. The grey sky of my unrelentingly rainy first day added to the menace and my heart lurched as I unexpectedly entered this subterranean scene replicating the city dystopias of the films. Venture out to the suburbs and you don't find well tended lawns and 3 cars in every garage. You find huge vacant factory lots with the housing that formerly depended on this for employment peeling and decaying around. A suburb is more the scale of a declining industrial town and there are 27 of them (29 less the park and downtown districts). It's like Stoke on Trent but multiplied by 20. And over it all presides the dominant figure of Mayor Richard J Daley. His name appears everywhere, on project signs and on advertisements for commercially run events. This is the puppet master.

But oh but oh. It is impossible not to be amazed by the verve, arrogance and wealth that is displayed in the most glorious array of skyscrapers I have ever seen. Chicago pioneered tall buildings, innovating first with massive ground stories to hold the upper floors and then racing upwards once steel frames and lift technologies were introduced around the early 1890s. Within the buildings are glorious lobbies faced with marble, mosaics, stained glass, bronze, metal work and statues. Go to the palaces of commerce or of culture and see how the world class artists were encouraged to produce their best for the city - a luminescent atrium ceiling mosaic in the enormous Marshall Fields department store and a delicately detailed cupola of at least 10 m diametre in the former City Library now the Cultural Centre were both commissioned from Tiffany. Money no object in the city that dominated intra-continental transportation, lumber shipping, meat packing and mail order. The conjunction of buildings compared with what Toronto could manage at a similar time shows just the amount of capital and determination is needed to create buildings of enduring quality in less than a generation. And whilst industry might be contracting, there is still plenty of money sloshing around to endow new parks, to ensure that the historic buildings remain glittering and to bequeath a new generation of fabulous architecture to the city. The Millennium Park is a wonderful mix of sculpture, planting and structures (no beggars though, the city has decreed that such pleasures should not be sullied by the evidence that human life is not always this good). Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor but called the Bean by locals, is a highly polished silver bean shape which reflects and refracts the city skyline in its flanks and gives you a kaleidoscope of light ands you within its doomed interior. The Lunas garden sets perennial flowering plants mostly native within a restful composition of streams. A Gehry designed open air concert venue sits the orchestra in an explosion of silver petals manifesting the music that will flood outwards and then a sinuous chrome bridge, plated with tiles that look like dinosaur scales overmounts the road below to link to the blue expansive Lake Michigan where hundred of boats bob and clink their pulleys against the mast, a flotilla of ants next to a giant city which offers glorious skylines which ever way you look.

So do I like it? Yes but I need more time to understand it and survive it. It's going to have to be next time. I'm finishing this in San Francisco sat in April and Jerry's gorgeous home (check out their stimulating blogs) looking out over the city as the Bay fog is gradually being burnt off by the California sun that will come out later. A new city to discover.