Cudgeled by the Sunday Trib

Every once in a while, the Sunday Chicago Tribune will land with a particular authority on the front porch, and The Indignant Citizen knows it’s going to be one of those rare papers that delivers a treat of some kind in almost every section. This past Sunday, the 10th, was one of those.

Two sections in particular stood out: Metro (the South-Southwest edition) and Arts & Entertainment. We’ll start with A&E. Headlining the page was a Blair Kamin architecture review of the new Hyatt Center at Wacker Drive & Monroe Street downtown, “Throwing Tradition a Curve.” Kamin likes it, as he likes the Hyatt Center’s neighbor to the south across Monroe, 111 S. Wacker Drive. He argues they make an attractive western gateway to the Loop that offers visual rewards for pedestrians, much as the Tribune Tower and Wrigley Building do on southbound Michigan Avenue, and the University Club and Monroe Building do at Michigan and Monroe. The Indignant Citizen agrees.

However the design of the Hyatt Center, and more specifically the design of the plaza separating it from Monroe Street, is to The Indignant Citizen more significant than the architectural statement the fish-shaped building makes within Chicago’s right angle-dominated skyline.

Some history. According to Kamin’s story, Hyatt’s new headquarters was supposed to be a showcase building. First, it was to be in a prominent location in Chicago. Second, the Hyatt hotel chain is owned by the Pritzker family, which gives out an annual award for architectural excellence that is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for literature or the Pulitzers in journalism. Finally, the building was slated to be the first skyscraper completed in Chicago in the new Post-9/11 era, also known as the Time of the Fear.

After that wretched day, the Pritzkers knew hotels wouldn’t be making big money, at least in the short term, and they downscaled their dream. They told the original architect, Pritzker Prize winner Lord Norman Foster, that the “special shout” building project he had been commissioned to draw was dead. Instead the Pritzkers hired Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in New York. Cobb, whom Kamin described as a “distinguished elder statesman” was certainly more than capable of designing a quality office tower, having put his name on Boston’s John Hancock Tower. But one gets the impression that Cobb is to architecture what Shel Gordon was to sex in When Harry Met Sally. Sure, Cobb can do your taxes or give you a root canal, but humpin’ and pumpin’ out a hot building that leaves your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat ain’t Cobb’s job.

Nonetheless, his building has a certain grace, and it does one thing exponentially better than the much higher-profile, David Childs-designed “Freedom Tower” in New York City that will sit at Ground Zero: It relates to the street. Cobb’s Hyatt Center meets the sidewalk with a curving glass façade that gives pedestrians a chance to interact with the building. The “Freedom Tower,” on the other hand, meets pedestrians with a massive setback and a 200-foot-tall concrete pedestal that says, loudly and clearly “Get the fuck away!”

Argue all you want about how the “Freedom Tower” is a bigger magnet for Islamo-terrorists, but then face this fact: A truck bomb is a truck bomb, whether it explodes at the “Freedom Tower” or the Hyatt Center. The key is keeping the explosives away from the building’s structural supports. Childs did this by placing his building on a concrete turd. Cobb managed to effect the same protection using whimsically curved planters made of stone placed strategically in a pedestrian friendly plaza along Monroe Street. The planters are low, have ledges for sitting, contain grass and are curved to reflect the tower’s exterior. They allow pedestrians to walk in between them and easily access the building. And they are close enough together to keep any vehicle well away from the building’s lobby, where an explosion would cause the most damage.

Here’s Kamin: “Following the unveiling of the fortresslike Freedom Tower, [Hyatt Center] offers an alternative vision, one in which our fears—and, thus, our buildings—remain in proper proportion.”

Right on.

Now for Metro. There were four stories on the Metro front, each one worth reading. At the top of the page was the obligatory “public agency wastes taxpayer dollars” story about financial problems in the tiny but tax-rich Salt Creek School District 48 in DuPage County. It is the fourth-richest district in the state, thanks to a relatively low student population in proportion to tax revenue.

The discretionary income-drawing Oakbrook Shopping Center rests within its borders, and homeowners in the Salt Creek district enjoy the second-lowest school tax rate in the state. Yet the district still managed to spend $12,653 per student on 550 students in 2004. The Trib doesn’t include a current statewide per-pupil spending average in its story, instead saying Salt Creek’s spending is “far higher” than the state average. That is a lazy journalistic cop-out. Why not put real numbers in? Following a relatively simple Internet search, the Indignant Citizen found that Illinois’ total per-pupil spending in 2003, the most recent year statewide numbers are readily available, was slightly more than $8,400 per pupil. Half again as much could be “far higher” than the state average, but surely the state average increased from 2003 to 2004, right?

Anyway, the key to this story is the fact that despite this tax windfall, the district is going broke. It has prostrated itself before voters five times seeking tax increases, each time unsuccessfully. Meanwhile a teacher in the district has alerted the state attorney general’s office to some shady financing involving the use of Medicaid funds to pay for district administrators and board members to travel to winter conferences in places like Orlando, San Diego and Phoenix. At the same time the district is cutting teachers and programs. Parents are fed up, and berated the district at a recent meeting. District mouthpieces can’t get their stories straight about tapping the Medicaid accounts, but maintain the complaints about staffing and trips are coming from disgruntled teachers angry that their salaries have been frozen for four years and negotiations on a new contract aren’t going well.

The Trib reporter then helpfully points out that the “average” Salt Creek teacher salary is $63,065, “higher than all but a handful of elementary districts in the state.” What’s with the generalities again? Just give us the numbers so we can see for ourselves. And no shit the teachers are pissed. A four-year salary freeze is the same as a pay cut when you consider inflation, a point the Trib story fails to make, instead leaving the rhetorical impression that Salt Creek teachers are well-paid and should shut up and take it like good little whores.

To the Indignant Citizen, this relates back to America’s failure to properly compensate teachers for the work they do, which today includes babysitting as much as instruction. The problem isn’t teacher pay. The good ones aren’t paid nearly enough. (The bad ones should be fired, period. Unions defending lazy and stupid teachers are one reason the public regards teacher unions as it would a disemboweled squirrel falling from a tree onto the Sunday afternoon barbecue.)

For most districts, their problems revolve around bloated administrations and narrow mandates to teach children only what they must learn to do well on tests and earn the ho cash doled out by Pimp Daddy Bush and the Johns running No Child Left Behind. Add to that the fear of frivolous and/or zealous lawsuits against districts with teachers whose ideas challenge students to think critically and you have an education system that is surpassed in mediocrity only by our national public transportation system.

This Salt Creek story isn’t over. That money went somewhere, and not all of it went for $20,000 trips to warm locales. Someone’s got a nice house somewhere or a Mercedes in the garage that was paid for by the district. Just wait.

Then below that there’s a story about a freak murder near the University of Illinois at Chicago. The best anyone can figure, two punk bitches from the ‘burbs got their asses kicked or fell off a city curb late Friday night. When a UIC poly-sci student and his buddy noticed the two bleeding burbanites, they offered to help, an act for which one, Tombol Malik, 23, was beaten to death with his own bike lock and his friend tasered. The Indignant Citizen wonders what kind of fucking world we’re living in when a dude offering a hand gets beaten to death.

Finally the Trib has a story about new lights being installed that will cast a tighter beam on the Wrigley Building. That’s nice as far as it goes. The new light towers on Michigan Avenue are ugly, though, and the Indignant Citizen wonders whether it’s even worth the energy to light up the Wrigley any more, but the real news is buried in the ninth graf:

“The modification comes at a time when the company [Wrigley] is studying its long-term real estate needs and a possible move from its historic headquarters, a development that has prompted some real estate speculators to suggest that the building could someday be turned into luxury condominiums.”

The Indignant Citizen is all for more people moving downtown. But he is also for jobs downtown. Is Wrigley preparing some cut-and-run maneuver in which it downsizes and moves its operations to Beijing? Try it, bitches. I got $50 and a Kryptonite bike lock that says you’re stayin’ right the fuck where you are. Additionally, who’s going to live in these luxury condominiums when the last pump in the Gahwar oil field in Saudi Arabia starts spitting seawater instead of oil, dousing the oil-fired “global economy?”