[Photo of UIC campus post 1970]When Richard J. Daley took office, he sought the kind of power that could really transform a city. Among the numerous "urban" problems the mayor faced when taking office in Chicago including race relations, the list also included a serious lack of investment in the downtown area. With the general deindustrialization of cities post-WWII, Chicago was constantly being looked at as the "city on the make". The city needed revitalization and structure, out with the old and in with the new. To note the beginnings of the Chicago Housing Authority [CHA] which was developed during 1937 under President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works Administration, is an important subject to look towards as public housing and its subsequent problems would run parallel to race tensions, politics, urban development and population numbers. The first three housing projects were the Jane Addams, Julia C. Lathrop and Trumbull Park Homes. These structures fell within Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to provide affordable housing for low-income families.
As the middle of the century was passing, ideas of how the structures of public housing should actually look and function swung literally much higher, to high rise operations. Clustering hundreds of apartments among single structures, then closely placing the separate structures together accounted for thousands of living quarters atop of one another. Close to each other, but not close to city amenities and simultaneously not utilizing the entire amount of land assigned for such huge projects.
As Daley looked to ways of improving Chicago, he focused his attention on the University of Illinois at Chicago having a downtown location. The university was getting by at its location on Navy Pier, but the mayor was ready to expand. After a plan fraught with political, financial and neighborhood problems, sites on the near West side of the city just West of Halsted street was decided on. The new campus of UIC was designed by Walter Netsch, an architect most closely aligned with Field Theory. The architectural group under which he worked was Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the same organization which developed the Hancock Building in Streeterville. The photographs at the beginning of this post are what the UIC campus looked liked post 1970, the drawing directly below the photograph is the design for areas of the campus which were never built West of the expressway. Note that that drawing was rendered in 1961 and features the Hancock Building, whose construction did not begin until 1965. With how much controversy the buildings of the UIC campus came with, it is startling to think what the further development of the campus could have done to those plotted neighborhoods.
While Chicago became a city to incorporate more highways and expressways within and around its environs, Daley pushed more and more for what the National Interstate Highway and Defense Act, signed by President Eisenhower in 1956 enacted. Chicago was to become a city more accessible by automobiles, keeping in mind that the car culture and transportation infrastructure of this period was leaning much more heavily on automobiles as the focus. With the super roads to be developed in the city, something had to move. Buildings, neighborhoods, people and their cultures became uprooted, displaced and pushed to the side. Even Daley at times thought reflectively at what the influx of roads was doing to the image of the city in which he was raised. So the buildings came down and the roads went up, some with more commotion than others. The photographer Richard Nickel was one who looked to point out of such acts of demolishment. To see the buildings razed, the images were created as an act of preservation, because it was the last option. Nickel's photographs of a city that was becoming modern at the end of post-war America could not replace the buildings, but serve only as a way to provide an option for looking. Nickel had the impossible task of realizing he would never be able to convince Mayor Daley to the importance of architectural gems the city could afford, much less the entire nation. The photographs act as a visual diagram to instruct those to look who do not have a camera. Nickel looked to present the works of "masters" such as Adler and Sullivan in Chicago, to have the photographs serve as a document. The images were to became a statement, Nickel thought the structures for the people along the lines of "this is all you have", so look at them, really look and think about why their destruction is allowed.
The city at this time is becoming a sign of many unhappy words: filth, poverty, crime and generally was equated with fear. Ignoring, defacing and thus destroying the architecture, whether big or small within the city seemed to be a sign of the times in Chicago. Real estate agencies and various politicians saw the "dinosaurs" of the Loop tired and worn. The downtown was seemingly poised for a push towards the new and modern. The city would build more roadways that made more places accessible by car, city distances to be measured less in pedestrian scale. Even public transit began to fade faster as multiple rail lines were cut throughout this time period and continue their decline today.
[Transit maps in 1898, 1942, 1944, 1975 and 2011 respectively.]
It is a wonder to look at the city mayors of past and what their nods and approvals went to for buildings. Even buildings that appear to be natural alliances to the architectural grounding of Chicago [Burnham and Root] were demolished. What kind of architectural efforts went supported, only to be torn down by the next mayor or developer. Bigger egos and seemingly better ideas as to how a city it supposed to look and function prevailed. Recontextualization of buildings and their purported beauty was not for post-war America and definitely not for Chicago. The sleek, shiny and eventually unusable was manufactured for replacement. The city is seeded within a rebuilding attitude, as it happened tragically and out of necessity due to the fire of 1871, why couldn't it happen over and over again voluntarily if it is to the benefit of the overall city, its environs and populous?
What maybe most likely saddened Nickel even more was the fact that the subtle aspects of the architecture did not yield the passerby, only when the wrecking ball was present people stopped to look. Nickel appears in the end even more adamant about looking at and to the structures even though he is moving away. There is a constant pulling, Nickel wants to look and document the buildings to urge the public, the masses, to keep looking at their greatness
but when asked to lecture to college students on the subject of the demise of architectural art, he refuses. Besides being a private person, his ideals wrapped up in what he thought the newer generations would do to the past made his thoughts migrate towards thinking of this newer generation being incapable of appreciating the power of the word. Within argument to the buildings' lives and adequate living means he must have surmised to be best projected using a powerful impact of visual attempts as a presentation tactic. For the lecture request he suggested a film be made instead to show other people about building demise and to throw the spotlight on money grubbers and gangsters, the "business as usual" course within the city. The film could act as a way to really look at the happenings of destruction if you were so blind to not see them on the everyday street.
[Photo credits: Richard Nickel and photograph of Richard Nickel with salvaged ornamenture.]The role of witness proved difficult for Nickel, although it appears he used the act of making his photographs as a way of looking, which made those moments both depressing and therapeutic in nature. Nickel, a reclusive character found solace and unrest within the entire process: scouting, stalking, looking, gazing, creating, imaging, development and then rest. Where did the pictures go, hopefully in his mind to a place where more of the common would see them like City Hall versus a more restrictive environment like the Art Institute. The photographs served to show areas all over the city. The "master gems" were not just destroyed in Daley's front and center Loop, but also in middle-class and lower-income neighborhoods, noting once again road development and public housing as CHA moved in with the mentalities of Le Corbusier for development practices.
The creative efforts in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool race towards the visualization, both documentary and staged, in an ever changing city as Chicago was being imaged and imagined in many ways during this period. The political, social and racial tensions that rose directly after WWII came to a full boil during the summer of 1968. Some of the musical choices and staging of the two main characters in the film, John and Gus, camera and sound man respectively, very much resemble the 1966 film The Endless Summer. This classic beach movie follows two surfers in search of the perfect wave during one long summer, like John Cassellis is to follow the one big story. Even the use of actor Peter Boyle as the shooting range manager somehow felt predictive to aspects of his role as Wizard in Taxi Driver, another film which follows stories of tension closely but also so pinpoints the atmosphere in a city [New York City per Taxi Driver]. The character states that the role of the journalist is to record, much like Nickel felt his job to entail. They both look at the problems, while Nickel focuses on a two-dimensional presentation of three-dimensional objects, while Wexler uses a motion picture full of actual footage, staged drama and sound to fully captivate your attention to mounting city problems, rising in the film's conclusion during the 1968 democratic convention in Chicago, where the whole world was watching.
[Photo credit: Art Shay]As Chicago was changing and photographs were made in response, each person works with their own strategy of looking while at the same time appears to work in tandem by including small details or an overall sense of the changing climate.
[Photo credits: Vivian Maier]
[Photo credit Art Shay, Nelson Algren Amuses a New Friend]
[Photo credit: Art Sinsabaugh]No building was too insignificant to photograph, thus to look at. Nickel provided a private tour to the city, the neighborhoods, the peoples. His matter of fact way of looking provided a clear view, his attempts always trying to pull between the subjective and objective as Nickel repeatedly photographed the same thing over and over in different seasons, with different angles, different everything, a constant pursuit of the "right" way to see a building. Before his sad demise, Nickel was able to show a new city of shrouded masterpieces to a city that thought it knew its own place and secrets. He was able to point out just where to look, as there was always another building or rather ethos to focus on, so many more photographs to make.
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