Shoulder Towers

I spotted this pair of sculptures on my way home from Target recently. They are on opposite sides of South Des Plaines St. on the north side of the Taylor St. intersection. I can't find any information about these on the City of Chicago or State of Illinois websites, even though they are located directly in front of the Illinois Department of Transportation Dan Ryan Field Office building. The two large metal frame-like structures are about 16 feet tall and painted in red oxide primer. They closely echo the lines of the skyline clearly visible to the northeast, particularly the looming Sears Tower. The Sears Tower, famously designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to have smaller floors on the top of the tower and larger floors lower down, appears to consist of nine smaller columns ending at different heights as the bundle of towers rises, creating structural "shoulders." The two smaller tower armatures flanking south loop traffic here each consist of four rectangles of different heights and widths, set at slightly different angles on the brick concrete base, to reserve, as in rotation, a greater volume than their actual material occupies. In fact, from the street corner in front of the sculpture, the skyline recedes in the background, and the relatively small structure of metal lines feels almost monumental. It seems intended to serve as a monument to the well-known skyline vista of Chicago approached from the south on the Dan Ryan Expressway, as it easily recalls this familiar view to mind. However, the form and site of these sculptures reference the less visible infrastructure of the city, both the physical infrastructure--its buildings, bridges, roads and highways--and its geographical infrastructure--the areas of the city without historically significant architecture, neighborhoods where rents are affordable enough for warehouse spaces NOT to be converted into condominiums, where the surface of things is not always shiny stainless steel and clean, unblemished glass. In this city thousands of miles of streets full of houses and businesses of all kinds are visible from observation windows in buildings like the Sears Tower only as a vast, textured grid sprawling out from the designed origin point, 0,0, the epicenter of the city. Appropriately, then, these "shoulder towers" support the city's structure, being all but invisible from far away, blending easily into the texture of the grid. And, even up close, they still allow a view between or even through them to always see the city's looming beacons of business, the heads of industry in the forms of the Sears Tower, the John Hancock building, the Aeon building, The Trump Tower, etc. Those towers, though, all serve as their own monuments to money, the real infrastructure that builds and supports this, or any other city--head, shoulders, knees and toes.

Tomb Fragments Towers

After learning about the deathly history of south Lincoln Park through the Hidden Truths project, I started looking more closely at the ground, the roads, the trees, and the people in the park. I imagined all sorts of possible resting (and restive) places for bygone Chicagoans. Along one path near N. Clark St. and Wisconsin St. I saw a scattered assortment of very old fragments of stone and concrete. Some still had remnants of decorative carvings, possibly part of a cornice or other adornment to a tomb or monument long since crumbled and forgotten. I wondered if these had just been dug up in a recent lawn improvement or path repaving, or if they had simply been sitting there where I found them for a hundred and fifty years. I wondered how many people like me had passed by them...if any of those people could have been related to the people whose monument these fragments once were. To whom do those rocks belong? I circled back by the rocks on my way home, and on an impulse, stacked them up in two towers, making new memorials to the unknown, unknowable past they lived. The lawn suddenly looked different. It was more peaceful, more settled. I hope more people find meaning now in the short stacks of old rocks as they walk around, breathing in the crisp air of autumn, alive and un-haunted by the ghosts of Lincoln Park. For now.