Reminiscing for the days of a better Chicago? Or merely living in the past?

The Chicago of my youth took a few more steps Tuesday toward being a wispy dream that exists only in my head.

First, there was the fact that city officials were all a-giddy at the thought of attracting a new Target store – one that will be filling in the space on That Great Street that once was occupied by the flagship store of Carson, Pirie, Scott.

NOW I CAN understand that it is a good thing that a vacant retail space, particularly one as big as Carson’s, ought not to sit vacant. It was becoming almost as big an embarrassment for Chicago that nothing was sitting at Madison and State streets as the fact that Block 37 sat vacant for so many decades.

Yet a part of me wonders if the idea of a Target at the heart of the city grid system is almost as tacky as those ice-skating rinks that used to be set up at Block 37, with city officials spewing some rhetoric making it seem like the vacant block was a deliberate plan so that city-goers could skate during the winter months.

For the one-time flagship of a major retailer isn’t big enough to be anything substantial for Target. We get talk of an urban-style Target store, compared to their usual formula of those big boxes built on former farmland in suburbia.

Which means scaled-down. While I realize that many more people live downtown than did in past decades (which is a good thing), the idea that they will be the primary market for this new Target almost makes it seem like the one-time Carson’s is being turned into a convenience store for Loop dwellers.

AS FOR THOSE who want the full-fledged Target shopping experience, they probably will continue to go to the store at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street. The Near South Side location, with a subway stop just a block away.

Even the thought of the jobs (which is what had Mayor Richard M. Daley drooling publicly on Tuesday) to be created isn’t all that big a deal. Some 200 employees for those part-time slots that hardly pay enough to raise a family on. So you’ll have people paying a significant part of their earnings just to commute to work.

It’s a good thing that Illinois officials are giving thought to boosting the minimum wage in this state, hoping to get it to a level just over $10 per hour by the time they’re through. Otherwise, these workers would be toast.

But the Chicago of my youth had a State Street anchored by the major flagships of Carson’s and Marshall Fields – neither of which no longer exists. The Chicago of today now has Macy’s (which doesn’t even feel like a New York import to our city as much as just a generic shopping experience that could take place anywhere) and Target.

STATE STREET JUST doesn’t feel like a Great Street so much anymore.

Then again, the city’s population isn’t what it used to be either. The Chicago of my youth was a city of 3 million people – one of the few cities proper that could achieve that level.

Yet the population counts for Illinois were made public on Tuesday, and while parts of the Chicago metropolitan area are gaining significantly (two out of every three Illinoisans lives in the Chicago-area, and three of the other four municipalities that comprise the Illinois Top 5 are suburbs themselves), the city itself has just slightly under 2.7 million people living here.

We can’t even make the claim that we did a decade ago – that we were a city of just under 3 million people. We’re starting to look more and more like Houston in terms of the number of people who live in the city itself.

OF COURSE, NO matter how few our numbers become, the individuals who are here will continue to have more class than those who live anyplace else. But it does make me wonder about those people who engaged in their politically partisan raging back in November when they claimed almighty Chicago was forcing its wicked ways upon the rest of the state.

What it really means is that it is the suburbs that are on the rise, and those individuals chose to throw in their lot with the urban residents of the state rather than the rural portions that think Cairo is a city on the Rivers Ohio and Mississippi – rather than the Nile.

So a part of me is doing a bit of reminiscing for obscure concepts of a Chicago of old. Then again, there is a part of me that always approaches 35^th Street and expects to see the whitewashed brick building where the White Sox play on the north side of the street – and feels a bit of a let-down when I instead see the rosey-tinted concrete slabs of the stadium that now rests to the south.



I was only 1 year old when the federal building that Al Capone and countless generations of Chicagoans would have known disappeared. Yet now I'm starting to appreciate the sentiments of people who reminisce for it.



Which means I’m starting to appreciate the sentiment of the real old-timers of Chicagoland – the ones who rant about the beautiful federal building/post office the city used to have at Jackson and Dearborn, instead of the black glass towers that now sit just across the street and come across as being so generic by comparison.

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EXTRA: Where’s my M Squad?

I guess if I have a Christmas holiday wish, it is for someone to get me a DVD set of all the episodes of “M Squad.”

That’s the late-1950s television drama starring the late Lee Marvin as a Chicago police detective with an elite unit whose members were capable of handling just about any kind of crime.

THAT SHOW HAD become a staple in recent months of the evening lineup on the MeTV channels in Chicago. But in recent days, I have noticed that the show has been removed. As I write this, I should be seeing yet another episode where Det. Frank Ballinger takes on some of the scummiest people of Chicago’s seedy underside (one of my personal favorites was one where Ballinger investigated a ring of people who were counterfeiting pop music records).

Instead, I’m seeing Jimmie Walker and the rest of the gang from “Good Times” (although not my favorite, John Amos’ portrayal of father "James Evans, Sr."). Which as far as I’m concerned is a let-down.

Now I understand these stations that rely on re-runs have to juggle their programming schedules about periodically to avoid becoming stale. I only wish that the “M Squad” broadcast (which some people claim was the original inspiration of Leslie Nielsen’s “Frank Drebin” in Police Squad! and the “The Naked Gun” films) could have somehow been retained – even in a crummier time slot.

The show had become one of my guilty pleasures, in part because I used to get a kick out of recognizing the parts of Chicago that were used in the television show. The Wrigley Building still retains its glamour.

BUT IT USED to amaze me when I’d see some locale as it existed some five decades ago, and compare it in my mind to how it exists today. Some places in Chicago have experienced radical change, while others might as well be the same.

There also were the “stars” who made their appearances on the television show that made a celebrity out of Marvin, building up the credits before they had their own hit roles.

Leonard Nimoy as a conniving arsonist whose truly heartless reaction to learning a security guard had burned to death in one of his incidents? Quite illogical. And I would expect the future Mr. Spock would treat him to that Vulcan grip, unlike the harsh beating that Marvin’s “Ballinger” ultimately gave him.

Angie Dickinson, Burt Reynolds and Don Rickles were just a few of the other guest stars to appear on the show throughout the years.

NOW I UNDERSTAND this particular show was a large part of the reason why the elder Mayor Daley (as in Richard J.) hated the entertainment industry. Marvin’s “Ballinger” in many ways was a thug with a badge.

One was never sure if the episode would end with Ballinger arresting the suspect, or killing him. 1880s-era Dodge City might as well have existed in 1950s Chicago, if “M Squad” was to be believed. Although sometimes I wonder if those “Untouchables” episodes from that same era (which theoretically have a basis in 1920s Chicago history) are even more ridiculous. Nobody ever claimed there was a real-life Frank Ballinger the way there really was once an Eliot Ness working in Chicago.

So now I’m going to have to go through withdrawal. I can’t count on seeing an episode every night. I won’t even be able to hear the theme music, written by Count Basie and played by his orchestra.

I’ll have to settle for 1970s-era echoes of “easy credit rip-offs,” at least until the next round of MeTV re-scheduling.

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Chicago's newest athletes are "Red Stars"

A part of me is inclined to think that Chicago’s newest professional sports franchise is guilty of either altering the city’s flag, or of grossly overestimating its significance in the city’s history.

How else to view the nickname, “Red Stars?” That’s the new Chicago franchise that will play in the Women’s Professional Soccer league beginning in 2009.

TEAM MANAGEMENT ANNOUNCED the nickname last week following a two-month-long contest by which potential fans were asked to choose a team moniker. “Red Stars” beat out nicknames such as the “Massacre,” the “Riot,” the “1871” and my personal favorite, the “Stinking Onions.”

The nickname alludes to the Chicago city flag, that non-descript banner of blue and white stripes with four red stars. Each of those stars is meant to signify a significant event in the city’s history – the original settlement at Fort Dearborn, the fire of 1871 and the World’s Fairs held in Chicago in 1893 and 1933.

In the logo designed for the team, the flag has five stars, and team officials explain that the fifth star is meant to signify the creation of the Red Stars as a women’s professional sports team.

In a sense, they are saying this team is as significant as the Great Chicago Fire (the inspiration for the nickname of the men’s professional sports team) or the first European settlement at the site where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

THAT MIGHT BE pompous and arrogant. I have to wonder if any pennant or banner designed for the team could be construed as desecration of the city’s flag (is that a crime?) It might come back to haunt the team if they or their league flounders financially.

But I will give it credit for at least reflecting something about the city’s history, instead of some generic, cutesy nickname that sounds more like it was meant to inspire a fuzzy purple mascot to roam the stands and amuse the kiddies.

Team officials even went so far as to designate special meanings for each of the six points on the flag logo’s fifth star – entertainment (top point), service, success, community, teamwork and leadership.

Those meanings are kind of self-serving and cheesy, but it goes in accordance with the real Chicago flag, where each of the points on the four stars has attached to it a special meaning that city founders would like to think reflect the unique character of Chicago – such as justice, civic pride and religion.

I’M NOT GOING to run through the list of all 24 meanings, but needless to say, they are the image that Chicagoans would like to say they are about, and that ought to be the goal of all Chicago residents in their lives. (For those who really care to know, read the Chicago Public Library’s explanation of the city flag at http://www.chipublib.org/cplbooksmovies/cplarchive/symbols/flag.php, or click on the Chicago flag image to the side of this weblog for a lengthy analysis written by the weblog Chicago History.)

To me, that implies that someone involved with the team took the trouble to understand the history of the city and to know that the stars on the flag are not just stars, but an attempt to tell Chicago’s story.

It is a more logical nickname than the trend of late among athletic teams of naming themselves after weather-related characteristics.

The Miami Heat. The Dallas Tornado. The San Jose Earthquakes. Heck, one of the nicknames considered by this Chicago team followed that trend.

WE COULD VERY easily have been stuck with a team nicknamed the Chicago Wind.

So now, let’s look forward. It would be interesting if this new team could somehow beat the trend of other women’s athletic teams that have tried to do business in Chicago.

They failed. Usually, their whole leagues failed. The Chicago Red Stars could easily become the latest version of the Chicago Hustle. How many people besides me remember the team that used DePaul University’s old Alumni Hall in the late 1970s for its games in the Women’s Basketball League?

The Chicago Sky of the Women’s National Basketball Association has struggled to gain much of any attention (although the fact that their teams have been terrible has not helped). When it comes to the city’s athletic culture, the Matadors (those blubbery, overweight guys used as a parody of cheerleaders by the Chicago Bulls) gain more respect than any women’s team in Chicago sports history.

ONE FACTOR GOING in their favor is that this is soccer. This is a sport where the women’s game is taken seriously, due in large part to the image set in the 1990s by athletes like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Brandi Chastain (when she wasn’t stripped down to a sports bra).

Unlike the U.S. national teams for men that are not the world leaders in the sport, women’s national teams from the United States are regarded as being the world power. A U.S.-based women’s professional league would be able to feed off the teams that have won women’s World Cup tournaments and would be a goal for top female athletes from around the world.

There is a certain fan base in this country that will take this version of the sport seriously.

Of course, there also is the fact that this is soccer, and some nitwits are going to want to disparage the game no matter what happens. The last attempt at a women’s pro league, the Women’s United Soccer Association, didn’t last long enough to put a team in Chicago, let alone build up anything resembling history or tradition.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago Red Stars hope to begin play next spring. They likely will (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/newsitem_ektid2984.aspx?team=chicago) share a stadium with the Chicago Fire men’s team out in suburban Bridgeview.

Potential fans of the new women’s soccer team picked the nickname “Red Stars.” Whether many of those people spend their hard-earned dollars to buy tickets to games (http://blogs.chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/soccer_redcard/2008/06/womens-team-to.html) will determine whether the team catches on in Chicago’s sports culture.

The Boston Breakers and the Washington Freedom, along with yet-to-be-named teams in (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/) Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, will comprise the Women’s Professional Soccer league in its inaugural season.

Do the names Rita Easterling and Janie Fincher ring a bell in your mental backlog of Chicago-related trivia? They do (http://www.wblmemories.com/index.htm) in mine.

Will Todd Stroger get I-57 some day?

For those who are curious about every form of trivia, the namesakes of Chicago’s expressways are as follows:

Jane Addams – First U.S. woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and founder (left) of Chicago’s Hull House, the site of which takes up land that the University of Illinois at Chicago wishes it could change into something more commercial, but doesn’t dare.

William G. Edens – A banker who sponsored Illinois’ first highway bond issue in 1918. Without him, we might still be driving around on dirt or gravel roads.

Dwight Eisenhower – The former general who “won” the Second World War and the president who signed into law the measure creating all interstate highways, which means he had to get something named after him.

Bishop L.F. Ford – Former presiding bishop (left) of the Church of God in Christ on the South Side. With more than 8.5 million members, he qualifies for membership in the Road Namesake Club.

John F. Kennedy – The former U.S. president who conservatives are still convinced only won because Mayor Richard J. Daley turned out the vote in Chicago’s “river precincts.”

Ronald Reagan – Former U.S. president who was born in Dixon, Ill., and attended college in Eureka, before ditching Illinois for a life in California.

Dan Ryan – Former president of the Cook County Board. I wonder what current president Todd Stroger will get named for him someday – we still have the Chicago portion of I-57 nameless.

Adlai E. Stevenson II – The attorney from Bloomington (right) who served as Illinois’ governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but is mostly remembered for getting his butt kicked twice by Ike.

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Chicago should embrace its Lincoln heritage

What does it say for the parochialism of Chicagoans that the official ceremonies commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Illinois’ most significant resident ever are largely an afterthought in the Second City?

While communities all across the nation are planning events throughout the next 366 days leading up to the Bicentennial of the Sunday in 1809 that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in rural Kentucky near the current town of Hodgenville, there is nothing set for Chicago.

FOR THAT MATTER, there’s nothing scheduled to take place anywhere in Cook County.

Thus far, the closest that any official Lincoln celebrations will come to Chicago will be in Batavia – and both events are rather minor celebrations.

Those events are both scheduled for this weekend, and consist of little more than allowing people to meet, and talk with, a Lincoln impersonator on Saturday at the museum which displays a recreation of the sanitarium cell where Mary Todd Lincoln was committed for four months in 1875. There also will be a re-creation Sunday of the famed debates between Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas at a nearby restaurant.

Actors portraying Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln walk the downtown streets of Springfield, Ill., near the Old State Capitol. Lincoln actually walked these streets, as his law office was located across the street from the capitol and his home was two blocks south. Photograph provided by Illinois Bureau of Tourism.

The debate recreation is taking place there even though none of the seven real debates held during the 1858 race for a U.S. Senate seat were anywhere near the Kane County town located just under 40 miles from downtown Chicago. Freeport, located on just the other side of Rockford, is as close as Lincoln and Douglas ever came to the city that grew in Lincoln’s lifetime from a rural trading post to an Illinois city rivaling Springfield or Peoria (it’s rise to a world-renowned metropolis came following its resurrection from the Great Fire of 1871) in influence.

ADMITTEDLY, A MUSICAL show inspired by the life of Lincoln is under production. Tentatively entitled, “A Good Man,” it will be shown at the Ravinia Festival near Highland Park some time during 2009.

But that just isn’t enough, considering that Lincoln is the one president of the United States to date whose political style was developed in the nitty-gritty political world of Illinois. Barack Obama would be the second if he actually gets elected – I don’t count Ronald Reagan because he left Illinois after graduating college for a life in California.

There are no plans for anything in Chicago like the period ball held Saturday in Springfield, Ill., or the open houses scheduled for Tuesday at the recreated log cabins at Lincoln’s Kentucky birthplace and at New Salem (near Petersburg, Ill.) where Lincoln first lived as an adult in Illinois.

Similar events are scheduled throughout the year and into early next year in cities across the state, and in other Mid-western states. Some people are determined to pay tribute to the memory of Lincoln, whose efforts kept a nation together at a time when it was in danger of collapsing.

FOR THOSE PEOPLE who think the chasm between North and South is just a natural part of the United States’ composition, keep in mind that the regions may have their differences on many cultural and economic issues, but at no other time in this country’s history have Southern “rebels” seriously talked secession, not even during the 1990s.

Lincoln’s determination to keep the nation whole made possible the gains in the late 19th and 20th centuries that allowed the United States of America to become one of the top nations of the world.

For those “Southern sympathizers” of today who try to recast the Lincoln legacy into one of a hypocritical racist (he didn’t really believe in integration of the races, would have liked to have seen slaves repatriated to Africa and only turned the U.S. military effort during the Civil War into a fight for freedom to prevent other world nations from siding with the Confederacy), one needs to keep in mind that Lincoln’s view was the “liberal” viewpoint of that era.

He regarded African slaves as human beings, unlike his opposition who saw them as little more than livestock that could be trained to speak. And it was those same opposition forces who were willing to scrap the thought of being part of the United States of America when Lincoln was elected president in 1860, out of the mistaken belief that Lincoln’s first act would be to start freeing slaves (taking away their property, as they saw it).

THIS IS A legacy that all people ought to be proud of. It is sad that many people who grew up here probably think Lincoln’s only tie to Chicago is that the bed upon which he died at the Petersen House in Washington is now on display at the Chicago History Museum (generations of school children, including myself, have walked by the bed as part of elementary school field trips).

Lincoln in his own lifetime saw the rise of Chicago to a city of influence, and he used its developing power to boost himself from obscurity as a central Illinois politico to a serious presidential candidate.

For starters, it was the Chicago Tribune that used its muscle to boost Lincoln into the ranks of the powerful. When one considers that he was little more than a former state legislator who had served one term in Congress (and lost his one bid for the U.S. Senate to Douglas), the newspaper’s use of its influence is a significant achievement.

It was at a nominating convention in Chicago that the then-fledgling Republican Party chose Lincoln to be its candidate in the 1860 elections that resulted in the first victory ever by a GOP nominee.

THERE ALSO IS the fact that after Lincoln’s death, his family relocated from their downtown Springfield home (located about a two-block walk from his law office and the Statehouse building that was then in use) to Chicago. Who’s to say that Lincoln (had he lived) would not have retired to the Second City, and could have been one of the city’s elders in his final years of life?

It was as a Chicagoan that Mary Todd Lincoln fully developed the flaky reputation by which most people remember her today. And it was in the Cook County court system that her son, Robert, ultimately had to trust to have his mother committed to the Bellevue Place sanitarium in Batavia, which has since been converted to rental unit apartments.

I’m not saying we need to erect a plaque at the site of the old courthouse, reading something like, “On this site in May, 1875, Judge Marion R.M. Wallace declared former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln to be insane.”

But one could easily envision a plaque at the southeast corner of Lake and Market streets. That was the site of “The Wigwam,” the nickname given to the giant tent that was erected for the then-princely sum of $5,000 to house the 1860 convention that tabbed Lincoln to be the GOP nominee.

THE LINCOLN LEGACY is just as much a part of Chicago history as it is downstate Illinois, even though we don’t have Lincoln’s home and law office like Springfield or the actual courthouses where Lincoln actually practiced law like many central Illinois counties.

I can’t help but notice looking at the schedule of events for the upcoming year that many are historical forums taking place on university campuses. A perfect example is the March 13-15 Illinois History Symposium to be held at Millikin College in Decatur, where several speakers will give their impressions of Lincoln’s continuing legacy.

Why can’t events like that be held in Chicago, which has several universities of quality? Events could be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago or Loyola University or Northwestern University in Evanston. I’d also suggest the University of Chicago, except my dealings with the university throughout the years reveals a mindset that thinks local issues are beneath their mission in life. Would the good people who root for the Maroons think that Abraham Lincoln is too parochial?

There’s no reason we in Chicago should surrender our share of the fun in celebrating the life of Lincoln. Here’s hoping that officials can get their act together and stage some events to celebrate the life of Honest Abe so that I don’t have to make the 200-mile drive south to Springfield to get my fill this year of Abe-mania.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: To date, very little of the actual celebrating of the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln (http://www.lincoln200.net/index.asp) is scheduled to be celebrated anywhere near Chicago.

This is how the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/al16.html) officially remembers the Lincoln legacy.

Lincoln buffs prefer to remember their Lincolniana (http://www.alplm.org/home.html) in this way. For what it is worth, everybody on Earth at some point in their lives should take a trip to Springfield (the one in Illinois) to learn about Lincoln.

Unlike Gen. (and president) U.S. Grant, there’s no mystery about where Lincoln is buried. He remains (http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/art/tombtour.htm) at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield (his body wasn’t revived for a few seconds after being dug up from a grave at Arlington National Cemetery, as the Weekly World News reported a few years ago), which means there are generations of central Illinois residents whose claim to fame is that their earthly remains lie within shouting distance of a former president.