Lucas’ museum: Too little, too late?

Reading the news accounts Friday of how we may very well wind up with filmmaker George Lucas’ vision for a pop culture museum after all make me a tad skeptical.

 

Is it possible for this George Lucas vision to ever come close to reality in Chicago?

For while I don’t doubt that Lucas, a San Francisco-area resident, gave some thought to locating his pet project in our beloved Chicago, I wonder if there has just been too much negativity for him to want to bother with us any longer.

WE MAY HAVE had a shot at gaining this museum for our city’s collection of public attractions. But I wonder if Lucas is too turned off on Chicago to bother to put his Museum of Narrative Art here.

I also wonder if perhaps we’re now better off if this project winds up going somewhere else. Perhaps Los Angeles? Who’s to say!

Much has been made of the political fight that has arisen in Chicago, as it seems Lucas was determined to get a location in the Second City along the Lake Michigan lakefront. One near downtown so that you’d get clear views of the city’s iconic skyline.

It can’t be a real Chicago museum unless the soon-to-be-former Willis Tower looms over it!

OF COURSE, THE fight was coming from Friends of the Parks, the environmentalist group that would love to see the whole lakefront be one long sandy beach and thinks there already has been enough development in Chicago.

They’re the ones who filed the lawsuit that has tangled up the project in court so thoroughly that Lucas has become frustrated and started seeking out other cities as a potential location – namely the aforementioned City of the Angels.

But now, the news reports inspired largely by a Sneedscoop in the Chicago Sun-Times say Friends of the Parks may well drop their lawsuit. Although later reports by the Chicago Tribune followed in the journalistic tradition of knocking down someone else's exclusive -- they claimed Friends of the Parks had no intention of backing off its lawsuit. Which would, or would not, eliminate the primary obstacle and allow the City Council to behave in their usual manner and merely give rubber-stamp approval to anything that Rahm Emanuel tells them to.

It would allow for the museum to be built on part of the property now used by the McCormick Place convention center (a place most Chicagoans visit solely to see the Chicago Auto Show every February – where they dream of being able to buy the latest cars and date the models who present them, before they get back into their “beaters” and return to reality).

SUPPOSEDLY, THE CITY would find ways to create more public parkland along the lakefront, in exchange for this use of lakefront for the museum. Although the real reason may well be the reports saying the Friends of the Parks were advised by attorneys that their lawsuit in the long-run would be a loser.

A judge could very well find that their concerns about lakefront land use for private development were invalid, and that the museum should have been permitted to be built.

But by then, the facility could be up and running elsewhere. Friends of the Parks could wind up looking incredibly stupid. Thereby causing the desire to settle this whole affair out of court while there’s still a chance Lucas could be appeased into wanting to come to Chicago after all.

Who knows what the chances are of that happening.

FOR THE FACT is that a project like this is about egos being stroked. Having someone go to court to challenge this dream is just the kind of thing that would kill it off in Chicago.

Personally, if I were a part of the group trying to locate the museum, I’d be inclined to think the hassle isn’t worth it – particularly if locating in Chicago would mean having to cope with Midwestern winter weather.

They may find a more mild climate to be a place to put a museum meant to appeal to our pop culture fantasies. It certainly wouldn’t be something along the line of our Field Museum that tries to educate us about our natural history.

Which means that getting this project back after Lucas has started to let himself be seduced by Hollywood and L.A. glamour could wind up with such a high price for our fair city that it may turn out to not be worth it.

  -30- 

Are we destined to be “blessed” by being picked for site of Obama library?

In the ongoing dispute over where President Barack Obama would choose to have the legacy museum and library meant to enhance his historical reputation, I can’t help but wonder how long until we get the big announcement.

Because to listen to the various reports that have emanated from assorted places, Chicago has done everything that has been asked.

WE CAME UP with a site with proximity to the University of Chicago and put on the political pressure to make those individuals who hate the idea of a presidential library being built on Chicago Park District land feel uncomfortable.

Heck, some 332,171 of us even went so far as to vote for Rahm Emanuel to be our mayor for the next four years – out of the ridiculous belief that having Jesus Garcia as nuestra alcalde (that’s “our mayor” for those of you who are linguistically challenged) was somehow a deal-killer for the Obamas.

That supposedly was the reason why the Obama Foundation that technically is deciding this issue (in reality, it’s the president himself, deferring to the best judgment of first lady Michelle) held off on making an announcement about a museum and library location back in February.

We needed to see if Chicago voters cast their ballots properly in order to deserve such a facility.

YES, I’M BEING very facetious in writing this, because I honestly believe if the Obama interests were being shallow enough to decide their library location based on a municipal election outcome that ought to be the deal-killer for anybody with sense.

In which case, let the facility go to Honolulu – which you have to admit would provide for a most-unique location for a facility that usually winds up in places like Abilene, Kan., or Grand Rapids, Mich.

Then again, Ike and Jerry Ford aren’t Obama by any means.

I got my amusement from the Chicago Sun-Times Wednesday, which gave us a “Sneed Exlusive” that says it’s just about a done deal – the presidential library will be located in Chicago.

THE CLINCHING ACTION was the resignation of Cassandra Francis of the Friends of the Parks organization. That is the group that always complains about over-commercialization of the public parks, and was threatening to tie the Obama library/museum proposal into legal knots if they tried to put it there.

They may still be opposed, technically. But having a hole in leadership hurts their effort to put up much of a court fight.

Although considering how political people have their ways of influencing the courts, I’d have to wonder what judge out there would want to be remembered as the guy who ruled against Obama.

This isn’t South Texas where a federal judge was only too eager to put a hold on Obama’s attempt to impose some common sense to the nation’s immigration policies – rather than the ideological nonsense that comes from the kind of people who are likely to want to demonize the library/museum project for years to come.

IN CHICAGO, THIS project is going to be a big deal.

The part of columnist Michael Sneed’s report Wednesday that caught my eye was her claim that the Business Leadership Council and other African-American community leaders were preparing to take on Friends of the Parks by claiming that their no-parkland stance was denying the black community of Chicago a chance to have a significant facility.

Even Emanuel seems to realize this. In Washington this week, he told reporter-types who asked if Chicago would consider bidding for a future Olympic Games that he was more interested in attracting the library/museum for the man whom he once served as chief of staff.

He called a presidential library, “an Olympics with an annuity that gives every year,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

EVEN THOUGH THERE’S a good chance that such a facility would be visited once by locals, then become the site where future generations of schoolchildren from the city (if not the more Republican-oriented of suburban communities) would go on field trips.

Which is what we have to look forward to when the announcement is made.

As I look up from my keyboard, I see a plastic mold figure of the U-505, the Nazi Germany submarine that was captured intact and has been on display for decades at the Museum of Science and Industry. The mold is a souvenir from a long-ago trip to the museum.

Will future generations go to the Obama museum and wind up coming home with a plastic mold bust of the president’s head – big ears and all?!?

  -30-

Could Lucas museum be Chicago lakefront’s ultimate defilement?

There is a certain generation of Chicagoans who believe the McCormick Place convention center is a monstrosity that permanently defiled the beauty of the city’s portion of the Lake Michigan shoreline.

It’s big. It’s bulky. It got built in so many pieces throughout the years that there isn’t an architectural consistency to the entire complex.

IT CERTAINLY CLASHES with the Burnham plan of the early 20^th Century that was supposed to encourage urban development in Chicago that would not interfere with the natural beauty of being a city right on the Great Lakes.

But it got done, and we have to live with it. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m of a generation that thinks in terms of McCormick Place having always just “been there.” It doesn’t make me ill because it just seems hard to envision the site open to anything else.

Which apparently is what those who prepared the preliminary design for that George Lucas museum that may someday be built in Chicago are thinking about.

When I saw the sketches of what that structure will supposedly look like (with the downtown skyline in the distance and the futuristic-like Soldier Field within sight), I couldn’t help but think the structure looks ridiculous.

TOTALLY OUT OF place. As in no way that thing should ever be built on that site, or any site along the lakefront. As in perhaps I’m sympathetic to the lawsuit filed Thursday by the Friends of the Parks organization in U.S. District Court to stop development of the project.

But perhaps future generations will just sort of accept that it’s there, and not give it any thought before they check out the assorted artifacts that will wind up on display in such a museum.

My own thoughts about the sketches I saw was that the structure looked like a giant pile of sand along the lakeshore, with some sort of ring casually placed on top. Giant, as in seven stories high – with that ring being an observation deck where people can check out Chicago from up high, like they already do by traveling up to the 103^rd floor of the Sears Tower (forget that Willis nonsense, I’d sooner call it the “Arnold” building).

Almost as though a giant baby was using our public beach as his personal sandbox and built sand “castles” that were nothing more than the content of a bucket turned upside down.

YOU HUMOR THE youngster for making a nice pile, but it’s not anything permanently lasting. So why should we think this design that would defile the lakefront’s appearance is worth any praise?

Now I know that Lucas has knocked down the public impression that this is a museum devoted to his “Star Wars” films – saying it will be much more about pop culture throughout our society.

Yet it almost looks like somebody’s reject of a Star Wars set – and I’m not alone in thinking that. Both 42^nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly and 2^nd Ward Alderman Robert Fioretti made similar comments.

With the would-be mayoral dreamer Fioretti saying it looked to him like the Jabba the Hut character’s palace. Does this mean we’ll have a Carrie Fisher lookalike walking around in that skimpy gold-bikini-like outfit worn in “Return of the Jedi?”

I’M NOT BOTHERED by the idea of some sort of Lucas-inspired museum being in Chicago. I just would like to see a bit more inspiration put into its design. Or else this would literally be nothing more than the gap-filler in a stretch of tackiness started by the current incarnation of Soldier Field stretching down to McCormick Place.

Although perhaps we should feel lucky that one of the most absurd ideas for a lakefront development never got done – that dream of then-Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1960s for a multi-purpose sports stadium to be built on a man-made island IN Lake Michigan proper.

It may have looked inspired on a drawing board.

But just think of how much frustration Chicago White Sox and Cubs fans, along with Bears fanatics, would have felt trying to navigate to such a structure on game days. Then getting caught in a ridiculous traffic jam after watching our city’s typically pathetic ball clubs lose yet again!

  -30-