Public Arts in Public Places: Contests and Spectacles in Block 37

Peter Bacon Hales

Few outside Chicago know of the contests over public art in public space surrounding the downtown block denominated by its parcel number: Block 37.

[Here we see the block, first from the monumental Miesian plaza of the Civic Center,

and then looking at it as a pastoral interjection across the street from the Marshall Field's, and,

here, as a true vacancy, looking southward across it to the graciously airy, fully restored, and currently vacant Daniel Burnham masterpiece of 1891-95, the Reliance Building.]

In Chicago, architecture is the dominant form of public art. Indeed, the downtown of Chicago is so laden with recognizably significant buildings that it is not unusual to see tourists asking a cop or a city electrical worker the way to the Monadnock Building and receiving in return a detailed itinerary that will take them from Helmut Jahn's State of Illinois Building past the Miesian Civic Center, down Dearborn past the First National Bank Building, through the plaza of the Federal Center with its Calder stabile, and thence to the Monadnock, with the admonition that they are to go inside, look at the elevators, exit the other end, and then walk over to LaSalle St. because otherwise they might miss the Rookery Building.

In Chicago, everyone's a critic; the Jahn-designed State of Illinois Building has been and remains one of the noisiest topics of conversation among the polyglot denizens of downtown-- is it a boondoggle? An extravagance? An insult to its surroundings? Tell a clerk at Marshall Fields that your personal favorite is the Reliance Building, as I did recently, and you're likely to find yourself in a highly complex discussion of the virtues and limits of government intervention in the restoration of monumental architecture, and some sort of explanation for its persistent vacancy despite restoration.

And yet architecture is an odd form of public art-- odd because it is rarely owned by any recognizable public-interest entity, and unlike the typical equestrian statue, streetscape ethnic-identity mural or fed-%-for-art "plop art" object, its function is in some fundamental way to glorify and profit the patron; odd because it must compete cheek-by-jowl with other monumental buildings; odd because that competition occurs across often remarkable leaps of time and style and economic possibility; odd because there is rarely any significant regulated open public debate about the nature of the object in question. I don't mean to imply that there isn't public debate (or for that matter that public debate about other forms of art is "significant", "regulated," or "open," as Erika Doss has pointed out in her book, Flying Pigs and Spirit Poles and as I've talked about the process of acquiring a Frank Stella for a federal building in Chicago) both during and after the construction of a major building. Yet this debate usually lies outside the sphere of influence; architects and corporate building committees may take into account the culture of the street, choosing owls to signify wisdom, neoclassical columns to propose economic stability, and the like, but the real issues that determine the building are those of FAR [floor area ratio], equivalent lease rates, requirements for corner offices-- issues of economics pure and simple. The tendency, then, is to see architecture as a doubled process, producing masses and facades that are sculptural. Painterly, aesthetic in their inflection and their reception-- are public art, while the building is commerce.

But this belittles the capacity of public viewers to see the complex whole. Chicagoans at least have long been understanding, discerning critics of architecture, able to parse the complex connections between aesthetics and economics. See-through architecture may be an esoteric term to New Yorkers or Los Angelenos, but you shouldn't be surprised if, standing after lunch break from your jury duty on the 9^th floor of the the Civic Center you find your jurymate, a housewife from the Northwest side, comment with some relief that the Chicago Trust and Title Building across the street is finally filling up and to wonder, aloud, whether this means "they" are going to build on Block 37.

And so the passionate public interest in the process by which the eradication of a block of downtown and its replacement by a magnificent shimmering vision of contemporary urbanity became instead the conversion of a polyglot and marginal urban space into a vacant lot irregularly populated. And so also the high stakes bedded within this struggle to control the narratives of progress and decline, the symbols of civic virtue and civic decay, and broader notions about the nature of "the public," and the right of certain institutions-- local government, federal government, private public interest groups, and private financial and real estate consortia-- to declare their action to be aimed at "public good."

Few within the Chicago metropolitan area fail to take a deep interest in this contested public space, located between the majestic civitas of Mies's Civic Center, and the proper-lady retail sophistication of Marshall Fields, once the site for rundown theaters and forgotten architectural monuments.

[ and here we see the block as it was in '67 as the backdrop for the dedication of the Civic Center,

and in the late '70s, from the opposite end-- from Marshall Fields' north end, looking westward, in photographs reproduced in Ross Miller's Here's the Deal]

Block 37 began its spectacular public life in the early Reagan years as a contest over the concepts of architectural and social propriety in the cityscape: developers proposed to raze its contents (including the historically significant landmark McCarthy Building by Van Osdel, and the brutish, brooding Art Deco ComEd substation of Holabird and Root); in its place, they proposed a postmodern vertical urban mall designed by architectural darling Helmut Jahn.

[shown here in one of its early and more monumental incarnations, and then in some of the variations].

In most respects their proposal was archaic-- it resonated with older models of urban renewal-- the concept of "urban blight" and the formulaic belief that to raze and rebuild was to rejuvenate. This set of arguments existed as late as the early '80s, author Ross Miller has pointed out, because the plan to raze Block 37 was really Richard J. Daley, the old man's, idea, and it was contemporaneous with the plan to build the Civic Center next door-- that is to say, it was a plan hatched in the mid '60s. Under this plan, Block 37 was blight for the standard reasons: it was a polyglot mixture of low buildings and low-rise skyscrapers from relatively unmemorable architects and eras; the buildings themselves had lost their economic splendor and were in disrepair and underutilized; the theaters and stores were servicing an undesirable mixture of people -- in this case, mainly black Chicagoans who hadhabituated to shopping in the Loop back when they were barred from outlying shopping areas, or who now lived in areas too economically marginal to have any form of shopping available.

Certainly from Daley pere forward, the notion of the Loop as a place of urban black, youthful, anarchic, passionate incursion was a major part of the mixture. It may seem odd to us that black gangs would be trying to take over a block constantly ringed by double-parked cop cars whose occupants were ducking into the Civic Center to testify at trials; in fact, the video arcades and trashy movie houses had lots of black kids in them, but they were as likely to be bourgeois kids on their way home from St. Ignatius Prep. Nevertheless, in a city dominated by ethnic paranoia, the signs of urban disorder and the presence of black youths were often considered indistinguishable.

In this conception of urban decay and rejuvenation lay an underlying tenet of modernist urban development, not only as practiced by urban, state and federal agencies from the postwar years to the present, but also as posited much earlier, by the principal intellectual and artist-practioners of urban-space modernism: men like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, most prominently. But their conceptions found resonance in older social models embodied, for example, in Central Park, in Hausmann's Paris, even in Jacob Riis's call for a new collection of redemptive public parks for New York City. All of these earlier instances had sought to use government intervention to regulate and reconstruct urban spaces into spaces of propriety: both to render physically impossible the actions of impropriety (from soapbox prosletizing to public urination) and to inculcate uniform codes of proper public behavior through the control of everything from the width of carriage routes (to discourage rowdy racing) through the marketing of acceptable social activities, like rowing or promenading.

Under the modernist incarnation of this social control urbanism, architects and planning professionals sought to remake the urban fabric, removing heterogeneity and heterodoxy and replacing it with aesthetically and ideologically consistent, uniform spaces in which activities continued to be closely regulated to enforce public propriety. Where they moved further was in their proposal to extend this systematic reorganization of urban space beyond the purely "public" spaces-- that is, beyond the spaces where citizens were invited to enter, spaces that law increasingly dictated had to be open to all citizens. Modernists sought to regulate a new quasi-public, quasi-private environment: privately developed urban spaces, in which market activity dominated. This was the impetus behind the plan, hatched as early as 1963, to eradicate the privately polyglot environment of Block 37, make it temporarily public, under the aegis of civic government, and then return it to a highly regulated private-space development, in which the models of propriety could be even more strongly enforced.

The developers of the late '70s and '80s who competed for Block 37 added a second set of assumptions, those of the gogo years of real estate boom, which looked at the block not as a public nuisance but an economic inefficiency: simply insufficiently dense to generate real money.

The city administrations of Bilandic, Harold Washington, and eventually Richie Daley the younger were drawn to the plan not only by tradition, but also by the straightforward cash premise that a high-rise mall-like block-sized structure would have an assessed valuation not of 53 million but of 622 million-- 11 times more tax revenue, in other words. And there was the promise of architecture as prestige in itself-- the attraction of new buildings by major designers aiding the contention for status as world-class city.

At this hopeful stage, the contesting parties saw architecture as spectacle-- arguing over the sense in which conceptions of "proper" and "improper" architecture spilled over into ideas of proper and improper public life. Preservationists linked with the city's historical elites formed one extreme; developers tied first to the older Irish/Eastern European political bloc, and then to the new African-American bloc under Mayor Harold Washington, formed their opposition. But in both cases, the goal was to reinflect urbane bourgeois propriety on the site-- whether by restoring the significant buildings into an architectural museum, or by tearing it all down and building a new world-class building. The result in either case would be to reattract white and moneyed tourists, renters, and shoppers to a new architecture of spectacle, designed to program proper behaviors. But these two extremes were in fact only part of the story. In between them was a complex theater of social and public action, "spectacles of liminality", to paraphrase the French theorist Guy Debord: black and hispanic kids who hung out in the arcades and theaters; Pakistani, Indian, Near Eastern and other merchants eking out their livings selling boom boxes, softcore porn and tube socks; bums and drunks soon to be redignified as "the homeless," ward politicians, journalists and city contractors hanging out at Mayor's Row-- all forms of marginal social groupings uneasily coexisting in a block of Chicago's downtown directly between big commerce (Marshall Field's) and big government (the Daley Center Plaza and the Federal Center).

But this was only the first of two and soon three acts in the drama of Block 37 as spectacular public space. The developers succeeded in bulldozing the McCarthy and flattening all but the ComEd building.

[and here we see an "official" view of the razing of Block 37]

Then the real estate market went soft, and the deals fell through. The result was "the most expensive vacant lot in the world", as the Chicago Tribune called it. An admonition to all the contesting parties, Block 37 remained for a brief time a shabby symbol of private greed, public mismanagement, failed city planning, the death of the downtown, etc. etc. And then it was reincarnated, not as private property/public space, but as a new form of public landscape: a landscape of planned spectacle, presided over by Karl Wirsum's antic "Plug Man" on the ComEd building's front-facing rear end, its about-face redeeming its makers and reinflecting the downtown. During the era of the late '80s and '90s, developers, politicians, and downtown commercial and civic "entitites" conspired to reconstruct the vacant lot as civic space. Through various landscaping schemes, through significant infusions of cash from all parties, Block 37 reemerged as a civic playground in winter-- a skating rink, hockey-practice area and general pleasure zone for suburban visitors attracted back to downtown by the Christmas window displays at Marshall Fields and Carson, Pirie, Scott.

[and here we see a view of the wintertime incarnation]
In summer, it became a symbol of civic earnestness, of a reincarnated "city that works" (Chicago's motto)-- Gallery 37, a special school, studio, production facility and sales gallery for engaged outsider art by ghetto youngsters mentored by art-school students.

[here shown this summer]
Once again, a complex public space emerged, produced and directed by a complex cast of civic figures, all contesting to redefine the ideal civic space in a postmodern American city. Looking at this narrative as a contest over the control of the concepts of "public space", "public arts", and "public spectacle," I would like to propose the case of Block 37 as peculiarly useful to an understanding of the uneasy reorganizations of all three of those terms.

This can best be understood, I believe, not by casting an economic argument but by assembling a visual and an iconographical catalogue, and then unpacking the imbedded fields of meaning within these objects. My goal here is to suggest the direction of an alternative to the two current conceptions of public art and public space in the contemporary city: to propose instead that we see the city as spectacle, as specular, as spectacular, offering visitors and denizens a particular form of inspecting instrumentality, the chance to see the city itself as public art in public spaces.

To do that, we have, first of all, to demolish the most common form of analysis of the changes in urban spaces. Under those terms, Block 37 is, to quote Ross Miller, " "a gold-plated hole in the ground, a dead and bleak vacancy at the heart of a great American city."

[and here we see Miller's own final picture for his book, a calculated image of failure, complete with bum and miserable weather.]
Behind Miller's statement lies a notion of public space and of urbanity reflective of a wider confusion in American architectural and urban history-- the confusion of "success" as an urban public space with commercial feasibility, conformity to urban planning program, and fit within narrow categories of land use that are part of the unspoken vocabulary of federal, state and local planners, urban critics, and most urban historians: tall contemporary building; high-commercial-use private mall; preserved architectural masterpiece; public park.

All of these represent archaic conceptions of "public" and "use." On one side, they confuse profit by landlords, occupancy by clients, recouping of property taxes, and retention of assessed valuation, for successful public use. On the other, they propose a halfhearted humanism which decries the presence of poverty, homelessness, racism, and the like, but still holds up as ideal a public environment of limited use and maximum propriety. Under these terms, for example, a public park is good insofar as it encourages continued density of use by appropriate users-- downtown office workers looking for a spot of greenery in which to eat their lunch or sun themselves..

Behind this vision of successful urban land use is, I would argue, an underlying obsession with control. Recognizing the symbolic significance of vacant land in a supposedly dense downtown of commercial and government building, mayors and consultants and developers all have sought to reinvent the lot in such a way as to disguise or deny its symbolic code of economic failure. Under these terms, Miller's conception of Block 37 as a failed space conforms closely to the ideas of Chicago's civic leaders, and so we will see the adaptive reuses of Block 37 to have been deemed successful insofar as they successfully embody a controlled urban event. But in the case of Block 37, that event has shifted substantially, from the event of construction, rental, use and financial recoupment, to an economy of images-- to the realm of the spectacle and its control.

Now I've introduced one of my two conceptions of public space and public art: as a space of propriety or an artifact that induces an appropriate or proper response in the appropriate audience. Under these terms, a nice equestrian statue is ideal, because it is meant to inspire in its viewers a desire to go forth in battle for the State or for Commerce, depending on the locale, and to remind us of the heroic sacrifices others have made to allow us to eat our McBurger here in Grant Park. Also ideal is the Picasso that's in the Civic Center Plaza, because its modernism is recognizable, its maker legendary and heroic, and its effect to celebrate the capacity of the State to embrace the new and radical. This is the second common conception of public art and public space: as the artifact in which the commonality, the civitas, exhorts its individualities in the virtues of subservience to the common will, and engages in creating a commonality by imposing a shared vocabulary of meanings and symbols. Here the Picasso is particularly interesting because it really isn't anything-- like the Calder just down the street in the Federal Center Plaza, it's a signifier for modernity: for a triumphant market capitalism so efficient that it can throw off large swatches of space in the form of public plazas, and large amounts of cash to support monumental architecture whose goal is to enlarge the aesthetic horizons of everyday office workers. Similarly, though in a more populist way, the near-universal dislike and distrust of the Helmut Jahn- designed State of Illinois Building just a block northwest of Block 37 serves its function by drawing the individual into a shared commonality of distaste.

Under both these definitions, one rhetorical and the other iconographical, Block 37 as a vacancy is a failure. Indeed, the problem with Block 37 as a vacant lot lies in the way it threatens the most commonly accepted narrative of urban progress-- old trashy stuff torn down, shiny new building up, public plaza added, nice sculpture put in middle, city revitalized-- and substitutes an equally resonant dystopian myth: engineers of greed destroy monuments to past glory, seeking to capitalize on aesthetically and historically illiterate public, and in the process destroy what is most precious.

And so to resolve this conflict, city government and the developers of Block 37 have devoted a great deal of time and attention to the creation of what might be called a virtual narrative or virtual myth, a sort of temporary structure that seeks to negate the narrative of decline and reenforce the narrative of progress. In this picture, the munificence of the city and developers in making a temporarily unfinished space available for proper public use indicates the continued rightness of things as they are.

We must note, however, the great difficulties that cluster around the issues of permanence and temporariness. For there is a subtle deliberately unstated danger to the re-presentation of Block 37 as a place for the public: a notion of squatters' rights and, even more dangerous, a notion of de facto easement, in which the eventual development of the block becomes not a mark of success but the source of controversy: civic organizations up in arms, art students and neighborhood organizers lying down in front of the bulldozers, cries of rage and even eggs and fruit tossed at the tong-tied mayor as he seeks to cut the ribbon. This is just what happened the last time "they" appropriated Block 37.

And so everything done to Block 37 must look just permanent enough, and just temporary enough. Too temporary, and the site comes to resemble a Harlem or a West Side vacant lot-- it inflects upon the cheap steak place across the street, and Mattress World next to it,

and the area looks decrepit to the urban aficionado and, perhaps more important, to the suburban visitor whom the State Street Council is trying to lure back from Woodfield Mall or even the Magnificent Mile with its tacky spectacles of NikeTown or its recent paragon of propriety, the Terra Museum of American Art. When black kids bang on plastic trashcans and the one legged, dulcimer-playing Vietnam Vet sets up in front of Marshall Fields, and the biracial husband-and-wife blues band plays loud guitar, it can look picturesque-- or it can look dangerous, to visitors from New Trier High School or Schaumberg, places where there are no visible black people and no wheelchair-bound cardboard-sign-wearing musicians; it can look like just what their parents warned them about.

But let the signifiers get too toney, too proper, and the space looks, frankly, public, in the sense that Central Park as Olmsted conceived of public space-- as a place of propriety designed to reenforce middle-class values. When that happens, the possibilities of a cultural easement become dangerously possible-- the MacArthur foundation, the Community Trust, Maggie Daley (director of Gallery 37 and Mayor Daley's wife), even Marshall Field's executives, all lobbying to keep it as it is or even to devote civic cash to its further improvement as a public environment.

In this regard, the two schemes for Block 37, wintertime skating rink and summertime art school for "gifted" and underprivileged city children, reflect two seemingly traditional but actually subtly altered visions of public space and its use. The rink is clearly the more inelegant of the two spaces: it is cobbled together of plywood and trailers and the sort of cheap amusements-- hockey-shooting tents,

a Santa's train-- that one might expect to see at the Festival of St. Andrew, in the parish parking lot. Its population is predominantly suburban-- the real denizens of the city go to the permanent rink, between Monroe and Randolph, where the trees arch and the view's of the lake and the clientele might include Sugar Rautbord or Jane Harvey or Lou Manilow or Ed Eisendrath and his kids.

Skate on State, instead, is meant as a suburban diversion, designed to reclaim the now-abandoned North Loop Redevelopment plan for conversion of the State Street area into a vertical mock-suburban mall, complete with honky tubes and security police and mallwalking ladies. It's the diversion that gives you respite from the rigors of shopping or the inconvenience of waiting in long lines to see the animated Christmas windows at Marshall Field's and Carson, Pirie, Scott. It's even got a McDonald's,

and in the heated resting area there's a tv turned eternally to the talk shows and soaps of daytime network television.

Gallery 37 comes from, and addresses itself to, a radically different taste culture-- not middlebrow suburban but civic elite. Its rhetorical function is to reassure those who supported the preservation aspects of Block 37, who fought its demolition of the McCarthy and the Unity and the Springer, all examples of significant post-fire commercial building by established local architects-- Van Osdel, Wight, and Adler&Sullivan, whose renovation of the Springer Building in the late 1880s gave it Sullivan-esque detailing under a coat of grime. The Gallery made great rhetorical sense-- an arts-school linking underprivileged kids and downtown Art Institute and School of Art & Design graduate students; a place where these gifted kids could get intensive arts training and then sell their stuff to downtown collectors and patrons. It was built on the theory that Chicago was ripe with Basquiats. Last summer, they made highly individualistic decorated park and public transit benches, too. And here, too, the architecture of the Gallery reflects its taste culture: the swooping open tents, part origami bird and part circus minibus, arranged with a pleasing irregularity of form across the multi-acre space.

[Here is the text written on the poster that adorns the wall directly across the street from the Daley Center Plaza: Every summer, since 1991, this vacant city block is transformed into a working studio for 620 youth employed in the City of Chicago's Gallery 37, the award-winning jobs training program in the visual, literary and performing arts. Youth are selected based solely on their artistic aptitude. These "apprentice artists" create original art ranging from silk scarves to stonecarvings, public murals to poetry, and jewelry to Latin Big Band. Gallery 37 employs a total of 2,000 youth and 300 professional artists in after school and summer programs conducted throughout Chicago. During the summer, programs are held on this downtown block and at neighborhood cultural centers and park districts. Programs are also conducted year-round in Chicago public high schools and middle schools. We invite you to become a part of Gallery 37. Walk by the studio tents. Browse through the retail store. Meet the apprentice artists-- you'll find their stories powerful and inspiring. Just like Gallery 37."]

Let us now turn to the iconography of the site, with the proposal that its elements reveal, still, a curious complexity to the notion of the space as public art, and a hidden possibility that there remains some other set of public uses to which the block is being put to use-- not by institutional forces, but by pedestrians and visitors, residents and casuals.

Before we begin with the architectural elements, we need to look briefly at the most obvious work of public art in Block 37-- Karl Wirsum's Plugman.

Wirsum's mural was painted on the back wall of the Com Ed substation, the only building left standing after full demolition. Wirsum was a particularly happy choice, for he was a bankable name within Chicago's cultivated circles-- he was one of the Hairy Who, the Chicago School of antic representational surrealists who'd begun showing at U. or C. in the '50s and early '60s and come into prominence during the '70s and early '80s. Wirsum was also a representational artist-- his Plugman was skillful, recognizable, imaginative-- all the things most commonly cited by citizens as appropriate to public art. In that way his mural confirmed the double audiences essential to Block 37.

Plugman was at the center of the block, visible from the upper floors of Marshall Fields, from parking lots, from a distance. But he was not visible if you got close to Block 37, at least not at first, because of the fences.

If we are to discuss the iconographical program of Block 37, then, we have to start with fences. The first fences were the typical plywood barriers of the usual downtown construction site.

[shown here in a picture from Ross Miller's book, and compared with a view

I made about three weeks ago during the warm spell, two blocks south, at the edge of the other vacant lot in downtown]

This early fence served as a utilitarian barrier to scavengers and protesters, and it also signified the imminence of construction and development: it even had, on its south side, the appropriate "windows" where one might watch the concrete workers lay the first foundations and the girder men sway their way atop the skeleton.

This fence could only last so long, however, before it became an indicator of failure, of the collapse of hope. The next fence was a variation on the first--

it repainted the promises of North Loop Redevelopment over, in a deep green, and began to add childrens' murals at high-traffic points-- facing the Picasso and the Daley Center Plaza, at the stairways to the C.A., across from the major entrance to Marshall Field's.

[and here we see the murals stacked up as they came down to be replaced by the next incarnation, the fence.]

Adding the Hot Tix booth helped, too-- it reenforced the sense of cultural fluidity-- are you here for the Goodman's Godot or Cats? Then, the city and the developers redesigned the entranceways, so that they conformed to a plywood and 2x4 mockup of architect Jahn's original plan for a mall entrance, and rebuilt the corners, so that they were architectonic, reflective of the rectilinearity of the grid, and able to accommodate a whole new planting scheme of which I'll speak in a moment.

Tied to this, then, was the penultimate stage, the addition last spring of a historicist metal fence.

The fence enabled the removal of most of the plywood and the opening up of the site into a space of display-- a space made visible to visitors and passersby, in which civic good was now public, open, accessible. In the summer, now, one could look into its tents while walking by, or one would walk directly into Gallery 37-- though, as the promotional poster was cheerfully pointed out, visitors were kept under strict surveillance: photography was forbidden, fraternization discouraged, and browsing in the gift shop encouraged. In the winter, on could lean on the fence and watch the skaters, and the skaters could look out at the monuments of architecture and commerce surrounding it-- the newly-restored Reliance, the Christmas-decorated Marshall Field's, the Chicago Theater, playing Disney's musical of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Picasso, with its special Christmas-season giant red ribbon and bow.

Then, to finalize this conversion from closed potentiality to open public play, the design added a series of other elements: in particular, a form of decorative cinderblock dyed old-brick red and rusticated, to reminisce with the old Unity Building once on the site, or connect the Northeast side of the Loop with its diagonal opposite to the Southwest, the Monadnock. It was a wonderful pastiche of postmodern historicism and preservationist regret. This material was used to make a second recessed low wall (and the fact that this was a hint of a wall and not a fence is significant) that formed the foundation and boundary to a series of plantings, which were meant to replace the old plywood walls in obscuring the interior without revealing that obscurantism as a goal. In addition, the plantings served to refer to a domestic model of space: street/sidewalk/fence/yard/residence. This rusticated masonry also appeared in large interior planters

that appeared to be permanent but turned out to be temporary.

Plantings represent the other significant mutating iconographic program. In the earliest years, the plantings were evidently temporary, and they looked forlorn in winter and summer alike.

The second stage involved the introduction of a small number of stunted street trees; this is the usual planting for the outer areas of vacant lots awaiting development. In this case, however, these trees died or grew. Those that grew over the next 7 years, nurtured by city workers and the abundance of sunlight, became rooted parts of the cityscape, rising as much as 20 feet above the street. Building the new rectilinear planters, city workers and landscape architects worked around these trees; the result was a sophisticated variation on the urban picturesque, very different from the more linear and open-space directed habits of the Chicago Park District and its most famous Grant Park.

Whatever one may think of the process at work, the participants, or their larger goals, I think one must see that the carefully integrated schema of fences, pictures, walls, planters, and landscape design have, I think, made Block 37 into an ideal temporary civic space-- amalgamating historicist and modernist/progressive elements to make a proper public place, a place that seems to be occupied by the public but remains firmly in the hands of the institutions of economic development and human restraint, a place in which the public is exhorted to accept its public duty to respect the forces of power and privilege, a place, indeed, in which the very idea of propriety is simultaneously exploited and reinforced.

This is an ideal, however, only from the standpoint of those who are agents in its production: the Daley administration, the State Street Council, the North Loop Redevelopment Commission, the real estate conglomerates. They are, in this regard, using public space in a very limited way: they conceive of it as a stage upon which the dramas they propose to enact are to be seen by a broad` sample of citizens, each of whom is capable of transmitting subtly changed attitudes to others.

Yet there is a sense in which this block may have gotten away from these dramatists-- to be reappropriated by a different sort of public, and in a different sort of definition of public art and public space. In the older Greek model, there was, we remember, the agora, a public marketplace in which public discourse occurred. This ideal of an agoraphilic public art is countered by the public space and public art directly opposite block 37-- the Daley Center Plaza and the Picasso sculpture. For the Daley Plaza is, like most public plazas created by setback laws and zoning regulations dictating "public space" surrounding high building in downtowns, an empty place, not simply because it is inhospitable but more broadly because it is a decreed public plaza dominated by heroic architecture. Winds generated by the building buffet the pedestrian. There are few places to sit. There is nothing, really, to look at-- the scale is so large that one can't see the building or the Picasso, really, from close up. One finds oneself revealed to be insignificant.

And so the city administration uses the Plaza in ways that seem, on the surface, to be scaled-down, humane, neighborly. From spring through fall, the city has ethnic arts performances-- Lithuanian folk dancing or African-American gospel festivals. And on Wednesdays, two blocks down at the Federal Center plaza, there's an equivalent, the Farmer's Market. Yet whereas the farmer's market seems marginally to fulfill its purpose, it does so, I think, because of the surrounding buildings, particularly the Marquette Building to the north, whose complex human-scaled ornament and lowered facade address the street as if it were a place of people. Even the Plaza has some momentary life, in part because Mies could not ignore the impeccable credentials of the Marquette, and so built the Post Office to match its scale.

Not so with the festivals in the Civic Center Plaza. There the scale of the plaza works to make these events not reoccupation zones but reeducation camps, where everyone, participant and spectator alike, has their own smallness brought unambiguously home to them. This is the sense in which I meant my earlier statement that these public spaces reinforce and exploit the concept of public propriety-- by enforcing the spectator's sense of insignificance against the monumental force of the public space and its art, while then directing that diminishment of spectatorial power to the goal of reinforcing the powers that underlie the owners and sponsors of this titular "public" space.

So I want to end by proposing a paradox: a public plaza open to the public which reinforces the powerlessness of the public sphere and of the individuals and groups who comprise the public in public art and public space; set next to a private space, closed to the public, which as a consequence may be appropriated, reoccupied and reinflected as part of a process of public artmaking by the very public consuming that art.

There are, I think, two ways to see this process at work. In one sense, the vacancy of Block 37 becomes a presence. The presence of a giant hole in the fabric of the downtown marks someone's screw-up. Each succeeding sanctimonious public declaration then becomes a more bold and liberating gaffe, for each becomes a more obvious duplicity, a protestation too loud. And each person or agency making the declaration-- the Chicago Tribune (which has immersed itself by dint of a series of editorials), Hillary Rodham Clinton (who stood on Bloc 37 to dedicate Gallery 37 last summer, blessing its benefactors and declaring it a national treasure)-- is implicated in the see-through scheme that went wrong. Thus the very success of each succeeding act, from the tired trees of 1988 to the rusticated stone of 1997, reveals the very thing it is meant to hide-- the vulnerability of the coalition that sponsors and underlies the story of Block 37, a consortium of labor, capital, government, culture. Everyone walking by the block chuckles knowingly, notes sardonically the newest iteration, then passes on, empowered in some subtle way.

But this is the less interesting, the more typical Marxian argument. It gains resonance, I think, when it is combined with the second, the aesthetic argument, within which the citizens and visitors who throng past and look through Block 37 refuse to make it what its owners and managers wish it to be, while they simultaneously turn it into something more than it might be-- turn it into their own private camera obscura, their panopticon for viewing the city and owning the view.

For you see, though Block 37 is closed to the public, the visual tear it has ripped in the organized monumental sphere of downtown architecture makes it a liberating force for the eye of the spectator. When Block 37 was up, organized civic forces deemed it offensive partly because of the complex, uncontrolled, incomplete vistas and views it afforded-- breaks in the wall of buildings, discontinuities in the laws of vertical prosperity that dictated economic health in number of stories above the street. From the tall buildings, one could look across it and see where themodernist high-rise facades ended and the homely brick began. Its very heterodoxy reflected outward onto its surroundings, suggesting that perhaps the urban core was not destined to sublime economic heights.

We might, in fact, see the block in its last stages as an indictment of the modernist urban visions championed by Mies and Le Corbusier, in which uniform heights, uniform setbacks, and a limited stylistic repertoire defined the buildings, while wide greenswards and wide concrete sidewalks and roadways set in rectilinear orderliness, defined the urban fabric. The historical heterogeneity of the block's buildings meant an equivalent heterogeneity of building heights, stylistic references, building materials, additions, and subtractions; the result was a riot of visual textures and an equal riot of contesting symbolic programs.

Yet tearing it down didn't diminish the effect-- it exaggerated it. Tully for Assessor, one reads on a wall that should have been long-hidden by a taller building. When did Tully run? 1956? Anyone can look through the emptiness of block 37 to the complex histories revealed-- one can see the lake from the lower floors of the Civic Center; the el is there; the Picasso has to compete with Plugman and, more dangerously, with the boarded up checkerboard of the Oriental Theatre or the bizarre false-facade modernism of Mattress World (now The Bedding Store). The active absence that is Block 37 opens up a lively heterodox presence, not within itself, but surrounding it, and the resulting picture of the city proposes the triumph not of rationalist modern planning and economic development, but of historical momentum and economic inertia. The city loses its force as an ideological program and becomes available to the senses. Anyone, from legal secretary to Mayor's wife, can construct an engrossing, playful game of masses and spaces, light and dark, movement and stasis, simply by walking along two sides of the block. And to move across the street shifts everything. So also does the change from morning to evening, from fall to spring, from cloudy to bright sun.

In both of these cases, though, we may return to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and find in it the seeds of something both richly comic and deadly serious-- we may propose the possibility of a revolutionary event in public art: an easement by the people. For this, I must return us to the paradox of architecture as public art with which I began this extended essay. The difficulty with the entire program of temporarily holding the space as public space, so that when the time comes it can be successfully developed as private space is, finally, the conundrum of preservation: that everyday people, pedestrians and office workers and executives and bankers, come to love a building or the flow and shape of a block or a view, and so find themselves opposed to progress, to redevelopment. In various, subtle ways, these street denizens come to believe that they own the view. And the appearance of a vacant lot has a profound effect on that view-- it gives a great gift, opens up the space, creating a sky-gate for light and air and the definition of space, redefining monumentality in the other buildings, so that buildings which might have shrunk when placed next to Helmut Jahn's proposed skyscraper mall instead loom regally over the diminutive swooping tents or the tawdry trailers and amusements.

This is not an event that takes place without agency on the part of those individuals who rush or ramble past the block, once or twice, or habitually. Debord and his cohort LeFebvre both suggested that Paris might truly be occupied by the revolutionary forces of 1968 not by cadres of rock-throwing or gun-toting radical Maoists, but by hippies and artists whose acts awakened the participatory relationship between space and spectator. They proposed, that is, a metaphysical occupation by a revolutionary army that, in Chicago's case, wears not combat camouflage but everyday downtown clothing.

It is one of the oddities of this upending that the owners of "the most valuable vacant lot in the world" might lose the ownership of vacancy-- literally and figuratively-- because it is vacancy. It is also an irony that this occurs in some ways because everyday viewers of the block have been steeped in the modernist proposal that proper, prosperous modern building should be spacious, open, generous in light and air. The historian Anthony Vidler has noted this characteristic, and he's proposed that it's not a matter simply of style but of the ideology of modernism, in which, as he quotes Walter Benjamin, "to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence... an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism..."

So while the planners imagined a modified, more playful postModern Corbusian event on Block 37, the modernism that instead occupies it is the modernism of openness, in which ownership dissolves, in which the participant-spectator duality is reversed, and spectators participate while the economic partners lose their stake.

In this regard, then, I quietly hope that Block 37 has become essential to the new Chicago, not as a developed space, but as a vacancy, as a picture window in which the window itself has disappeared and the single picture replaced by a continuously increasing multitude of pictures created by spectators confronting the view in its infinite mutability. And, surprisingly, I may find support from the unlikeliest of places, as the very institutions and social forces most infected by agoraphobia have found themselves converted to agoraphilia. Increasingly, the successes of the North Loop-- the purchase of the Chicago Theater by Disney, the move of the famed Goodman Theater and Steppenwolf Ensemble to the Harris and Selwyn theaters just north of Block 37, the restoration of the Reliance-- all have been inflected and invigorated by the vacancy of Block 37. Even the commercial interests of the North Loop have found this emptiness to be advantageous, not only by bringing people into the downtown, but by showcasing their enterprises, by making their buildings more solid and their presence on the street more substantial. And in fact, the appearance this year of the metal fence and, more significantly, of a permanent sidewalk, may signal a grudging acceptance by the civic consortium of the possibility that Block 37 may remain public art for a long, long time: contested space in which citizens and power elites battle each other for control of the imagination of the city.