Fixing up the governor’s mansion; that’s Rauner’s one kept promise

If we’re going to be fair, we have to acknowledge the one accomplishment of Bruce Rauner’s time as Illinois governor – the state completed a necessary rehabilitation project of the Governor’s Mansion, work that was desperately overdue.

The governor's mansion -- old enough Abe Lincoln would remember it

The repairs needed to the structure that dates back to 1855 were so extensive that Rauner and first lady Diana actually had to move out of the official state residence provided for our governor.

FOR THE PAST two years, the Rauners have used the state-owned house that is part of the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield as their official residence. While more spacious (4,000 square feet) than what is essentially an apartment on the top floor of the mansion, it doesn’t quite have the aura of the structure in downtown Springfield located a block from the Statehouse.

Close enough that I remember the sight of then-Gov. Jim Edgar routinely walking to work every morning that he needed to be in the Capitol Building.

Definitely a step up from the livestock barns of the fairgrounds, whose aroma could carry over to the director’s house (built around 1945) if the winds were blowing the right way.

But the governor and first lady got to return to the mansion that had some $15 million spent on upgrades including a new heating and air conditioning system, a new roof (the old one leaked badly) and a new entrance.

RAUNER: Will he get credit for rehab?

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, many of the problems with the aging structure became apparent during the years of Pat Quinn as governor.

Not that I’m saying Quinn & Co. trashed the place.

But like any structure, constant upkeep is necessary to ensure the building doesn’t rot away. During those Quinn years, there often were higher financial priorities that had to be placed ahead of the official mansion.

Particularly since during the Quinn years, state government undertook a very pricey rehabilitation of the Statehouse itself. The structure dating back to 1877 had its own share of problems that needed to be fixed.

QUINN: Will he get blame for condition?

BECAUSE OF THE structure’s age and historic significance, there are certain standards that have to be met. Certain details that must be fulfilled.

Meaning the expense became so high that many people complained. Just think how much more they would have ranted and raged if Quinn had tried to proceed with a mansion upgrade?

Which is why I think Rauner deserves some praise for getting the mansion project done. Particularly since he managed to put together a group of private donors who took an interest in the building’s historic significance and came up with the cash to get the needed work done.

Which became obvious on Monday, as Rauner himself could be seen carrying boxes of personal possessions into the rehabbed mansion.

A PART OF which will include a display of some of the historically significant people who worked there on behalf of the people of Illinois.

No word on how prominent such as display will be about The Rauner Years – which thus far are much more significant for all the things that didn’t happen and the degree to which partisan politics have dominated the way government worked.

The degree to which people will place the blame on Rauner for the inability of things to get done will depend largely on one’s own ideological leanings and whether one wants to “Blame Bruce!” or “Blame Madigan!” for everything that is wrong in Illinois these days.

The official Rauner residence the past two years

Although one has to admit that if fixing up the mansion is Rauner’s one significant achievement as governor, then something is significantly wrong with the way our state operates and the fact that we seem willing to tolerate such lack of activity from the officials doing “the People’s business.”

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EXTRA: United States of America presence and ideals for which it stands?

GARY, Ind. -- It’s kind of depressing, if you think about it.

What it once was

But I spent a chunk of my day Saturday in downtown Gary, Ind., participating in a city tour of the area and the many structures remaining that have significant local history behind them -- but in many cases have become decayed and remain in ruins.

What it is today

WHILE IN ROME the millenniums-old Coliseum sports arena’s ruins are regarded as culturally significant, we can’t quite say the same for the structures that remain at the far southeastern corner of the metropolitan Chicago area. Although maybe we should?

I got to see the City Methodist Church whose ceiling long-ago collapsed and now has trees growing inside. There was the one-time Union Station that long-ago quit servicing passenger trains to New York City.

But the ruins that most caught my attention were the ones at 6^th Avenue and Massachusetts Street just off the main strip along Broadway. Those were the ones of the building that for nearly five decades served as the U.S. Post Office for Gary and the surrounding northwest Indiana area.

Inside the Post Office

For like many post offices in smaller cities, the building also doubled as the offices of the U.S. government. Any federal agencies that felt the need to have a physical presence would have their office space on the upper floors, while the first floor was devoted to the delivery of the U.S. mail.

WHICH IS HOW it really breaks down for units of government, which may talk about high-minded ideals but usually have a specific function that most completes their use to the taxpaying public.

Watch your step!

For the state government, that’s the motor vehicles bureau within the Illinois secretary of state’s office. They issue us our driver’s licenses, identification cards and the license plates that we put on our automobiles.

For the feds, it’s the Post Office.

Suggestions for structure's future?

It really is a Federal Offense to tamper with the delivery of the mail, because we’re supposed to be able to count on reliable mail delivery – even though in today’s day and age there are those people who don’t have a problem with paying a larger fee to have their packages delivered by UPS or Federal Express.

YET THE CLASSIC old building in Gary is in ruins. The roof leaks, the upper floor is a wreck, the floor that separates it from the lower floor barely exists and the first floor where generations of people dropped off and picked up their mail is filthy and graffiti-ridden.

It almost looks like some post-apocalyptic vision of the collapse of our society, and these being the remains of the ideal once known as the United States of America.

Kept head safe and sound

The Gary Redevelopment Commission, as part of its preservation tour and with advice from the Chicago Architectural Foundation, actually allowed people to enter the Post Office that has been closed since 1970 – which is how I managed to get these images of the rubble.

Yes, I had to wear a “hard hat” to protect my head from the potential of falling debris (then also sign a waiver promising not to sue Gary, Ind., in the event I got injured).

NOTHING WOUND UP falling, but I did slip on the steps that are so chipped away as to barely be existent. Although if I had been hit in the head, I wonder if the results would have been similar to those of the famed baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean, who upon being hit in the head by a ball during a game supposedly produced headlines along the line of X-rays of Dean’s head reveal nothing.

It also amuses me to see how the Post Office managed to replace its classic structure with something so incredibly blah, and so much like the generic Post Office structures that exist in so many communities across the United States.

An architectural snoozer compared to its predecessor

Is this truly the image we want to give of our nation? Is this what we truly think of ourselves?

How “blah” can we get?!?

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Reagan plaque the equivalent of Lincoln’s blown nose? Or just ideology at work?

I still recall a cartoon once published by the State Journal-Register newspaper of Springfield, Ill. – one meant to mock the historic preservation aspects of certain groups in the capital city who get worked up at the thought of Abraham Lincoln doing just about anything.

Too bad Thompson never brought talent to Chicago

In that cartoon, a plaque was erected on a downtown Springfield street corner informing passersby that on a distant date in the past, Lincoln had pulled out a handkerchief and blown his nose on that very spot.

THAT’S AN EDITORIAL cartoon (by Mike Thompson, who later took his talents to the Detroit Free Press). It is not meant to be taken literally.

Yet the thought of it is what popped into my mind on Wednesday when I read a DNAinfo.com report about the demolition of an apartment building in the Hyde Park neighborhood where Ronald Reagan lived briefly as a young child.

For the news-oriented website says that the apartment at 832 E. 57^th St. is being demolished, but University of Chicago officials plan to compensate for the potential loss of history by erecting a plaque at the site.

REAGAN: Not really a Chicagoan

Ronald Reagan once rode a tricycle along this very sidewalk. Perhaps that is what the plaque could read? Or we could always revert to the standard Ronald Reagan slept here.

FOR THE PERIOD in which Reagan’s father lived with his family in Chicago was literally around the time that the future U.S. president was about 2 years old. The actual structure isn’t likely to give us any real insight into Reagan’s life.

The idea of a plaque here strikes me as silly. If there were legitimate history to preserve, then the structure itself should have been maintained. If not, then why bother?

Reagan, of course, is an Illinois native – although the bulk of his life was tied to central Illinois. The home where he lived in Dixon and Eureka College where he was educated are legitimate sites of interest to anyone intrigued by the former president.

But he’s not exactly anyone with Chicago ties – which is all good and fine. I just think it cheapens real history to try to claim that this aging structure is somehow all that significant.

PERHAPS THE UNIVERSITY’S desire to turn the land into a strip of green space next to a parking lot that will be needed as the University of Chicago hospitals continue to expand is a practical use of the land.

It’s just that the idea of a plaque strikes me as an attempt to reach a cheap compromise with ideologically-inclined people who would like to have Reagan-named or Reagan-tied things in every single community in the nation.

They would like him to become an all-encompassing presence in our society as he never was in life! Which strikes me as being more about trying to re-write history, than preserving it.

Personally, I chuckle at the thought of that apartment building being “historic” largely because historians were never able to determine which of the six units of the three-story structure the Reagan family lived in. Which means the plaque would have to read Reagan slept somewhere near here.

AND AS FAR as Reagan himself is concerned, he did reminisce once about seeing horse-drawn fire engines going by the building, or going out for a walk once and getting lost – winding up on the Midway Plaisance just a couple of blocks to the south.

For a 2-year-old, I’m sure that was an adventure. To the rest of us, it would be much-needed exercise. We all should walk around a bit more than we do now.

Does this mean we should now put our historians to work to try to figure out which exact spot along the Midway that a youthful Reagan wound up at? We could erect the plaque saying Ronald Reagan once got lost here.

Ronald Reagan once got lost near here. Image provided by Chuckman Collection.

 

To try to equate Hyde Park with Dixon as a significant site in comprehending Reagan is a distortion that we shouldn’t support. One-time first lady Nancy Reagan had stronger ties to Chicago than husband Ronald, and she largely went out of her way to downplay that part of her life.

BESIDES, SOMEHOW I suspect that the real motivation for having a Reagan-related site in Hyde Park is for the ideologues to somehow try to undermine the speculation that a future Barack Obama presidential museum and library will be built in conjunction with the university where Obama was once an instructor at the law school.

Maybe the ideologues will try to pass it off as an alternate site for people to visit. Ditch the Obama presidency, they’ll say. Knowing them, they probably will get all worked up to travel to the site where they’ll get to see a batch of parked cars nearby.

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