By Steve Rhodes
Michael J. Lewis, the author of American Art and Architecture, among other works, reviewed Timothy Gilfoyle’s Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark in The New York Times Sunday Book Review last weekend, and when I saw the pull quote, I thought, uh-oh, here we go again.
“Starting from scratch,” the Times stated in boldface, “Chicago has turned a wasteland into America’s most dazzling urban park.”
Lewis’s enthusiasm early in his review also set my teeth gnashing – he’s impressed by the $475 million cost of the park, seemingly oblivious to the contract cronyism and mismanagement that drove the price tag so high, instead oddly comparing the park’s cost favorably to estimates for a World Trade Center memorial. Lewis also describes the park’s construction as swift, when the joke around here was that the park was named for how long it would take to get it built.
Then again, maybe Lewis only has Gilfoyle to go by. Fortunately, Lewis recognizes that something is amiss. By the end of his review, he is questioning Gilfoyle’s account of the way the park was built – and its artistic value – in a way that I haven’t seen done here amidst Chicago’s parochial, prideful press.
If only the Chicago media could put their pompoms away long enough to give the ideas at the conclusion of Lewis’s review an airing here.
Instead, we have to rely on Lewis and The New York Times to write a passage like this:
“Gilfoyle has written a thorough account of the creation of these works. But he is not particularly critical; he tends to rely on what the artists and their promoters say, making no aesthetic judgments. Nor does he judge the park as a whole – or even consider whether it is a whole – which will disappoint the reader looking for some suggestion as to how good it actually is.”
Well, thank you Michael Lewis!
As I have written, Millennium Park does not function as a whole. The disparate parts have no relationship to each other. Lewis, in his review, explains why: Various donors such as Cindy Pritzker and Crown family ponied up their dough on the condition that they could choose the artists and the works that their money would purchase. This got the park built, but it is a park whose central planning became unmoored because the mayor couldn’t manage it, and Sara Lee chief executive John Bryan had to rescue it for him.
“Not until Page 343,” Lewis writes, “do we discover how much sober and intelligent criticism has been leveled at the park, and from the very outset. What Gilfoyle does not say (and perhaps doesn’t see) is that a park financed by donors given the power to select objects and artists will look very different from one in which aesthetic or social concerns predominate from the first. It will tend to be less a unified landscape than a series of detached vignettes – in effect, naming opportunities.”
Gilfoyle is a history professor at Loyola University, but by Lewis’s lights, his account is hardly befitting a rigorous academic. “[E]verything is put in the most positive light possible, a quality that, together with the platoons of tuxedoed donors whose photographs we encounter along the way, imbues the book with the kind of earnest boosterism we expect in an annual (or perhaps millennial) report,” Lewis writes.
Gilfoyle has said that he had editorial independence, but also that the book was not his idea. “The original concept and much of the funding for the project was not Gilfoyle’s but that of Josephine and Newton Minow, Chicago history enthusiasts who were convinced that the park’s creation was a watershed event in the city that needed to be documented,” Kevin Nance wrote in the Sun-Times in June.
It’s unlikely, of course, that Minow would have sought out an author whom he felt might be critical of the park.
And that’s just fine with the Tribune, which, as is typical, waited a month after its release to review Gilfoyle’s book, and then assigned it to Lois Wille, a former editorial page editor for the paper who once published her own boostergram about a downtown development.
In her review, Wille called Gilfoyle’s book “a biography that suits [the park] to a T.”
Wille declines to state whether she agrees with this assessment by Gilfoyle, though she relays it to readers: “There are plenty of other heroes in this book, including the unsung kind. No villains, though, although Gilfoyle does bemoan a pesky press that confused dramatic upgrades in concept and acreage with ‘cost overruns.'”
The press just didn’t understand when the Daley administration made things up as it went along and the cost of the park skyrocketed.
But maybe, in a perverse way, Gilfoyle’s book does suit the park to a T.
“It may well be that such a park reflects our values and how we live today, but the Chicago planners seem to have considered no alternatives,” Lewis writes. “Millennium Park is indeed a handsome souvenir of the park, but somewhere between the lines is a cautionary tale of what happens when the fund-raising arm assumes aesthetic control by default.”
Posted on August 7, 2006