Razing Old Ghosts
Had they taken them down by ball and crane, it would have meant a month's work and the effect would have been far less interesting. The four buildings, sixteen story high rises that were part of Chicago's urban renewal during the sixties, would be razed in thirty seconds by carefully placed dynamite or TNT or C4 or whatever the new age explosives they use now.
The attraction to implosions, fires, or other displays of annihilation is mostly a guy thing, you know. This event was no different. I was reminded when we were boys and constructed plastic model airplanes and set lighter fluid burning on their wings -- choreographing a most spectacular crash and burn sequence in the front yard, complete with the roars and crashes and other horrific sound effects we could mimic from our ten-year-old voices.
I remember spending a day at the lake, painstakingly building a city in the sand with my brother, working for hours, and then destroying it with kicks and stones and other missiles of doom. There were the attractions to "Combat" and Sgt. Rock comics, and all the other images of war and destruction that loomed out there in the media of the fifties, reminders of what men do to move seemingly immovable things from their path. Taking them out with rockets and mortars, artillery and air strikes, or electronically-timed, well-planted, explosives.
These buildings were definitely not in Daniel Burnham's 1910 lakefront plan. But then, his vision did not include the depression, two world wars, and an industrial boom that would fill his grand city with packers and porters, drivers and steelworkers, and hand laborers from all over the south. The prime real estate where they stood, faces Burnham Park and its view of Lake Michigan's southern shoreline, wedged between the commuter rail tracks and busy Drexel Boulevard, five or six blocks north of the once elite, Hyde Park neighborhood. It was called the South Shore in its time, and still is, I imagine, by the residents. But back in the fifties, resort hotels dotted the shoreline on every square inch of available property from the loop to 83rd Street. I remember a billboard not far from our house in the south suburbs, advertising the "50th On The Lake Motel" with images of boaters and water skiers and beautiful people in swimsuits.
The city granted the land to the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) in the early sixties, replacing a stand of squalid tenements and making room for hundreds of families who couldn't land that big job or suffered unfortunate luck and found the low cost housing the only home they could enjoy. These families may have lacked in the many luxuries they would never have afforded, but the vistas they could take in each morning must have been spectacular.
The sunrise was brilliant this Saturday morning and the five short blocks I walked from the DuSable museum parking lot were invigorating. The twenty-nine degree temperature was predicted to give way to another unprecedented warm December day and the air was crisp and inviting.
Who comes to these things? There were the guys, of course, of all ages, many with their sons on their shoulders. There were bicyclers and joggers, college students, families with strollers, and amateur cameramen with everything from tiny instamatics to the well-equipped newsmen, laden with the state-of-the-art cameras, wired to their high-tech equipment trucks. And there were the choppers and the skycams hovering over the park like dragonflies. Of course, a cherry picker was on hand for the Associated Press crew to afford them a bird's eye view from the eighty-foot-high perch. Yellow hard hats emblazoned with the wrecking crew's logo on them were supplied to the camera crew, as well as the OSHA mandatory safety harnesses.
A small trailer in the park opened on one side into a platform and there were perhaps a hundred chairs facing it, looking absurdly away from the implosion site. A sparse audience of all ages was scattered in the chairs, listening to the few political speakers, who applauded the city for the improvements that were to come, the re-development of the property into more than 350 mixed-income homes. There were videocams from the TV stations perched on their reserved platform, a small riser about four feet from the Burnham Park turf.
Ground zero was just across Lake Shore Drive and the South Shore tracks in between. Three of the buildings were situated as three sides of a square courtyard with the west building facing the spectators directly. The fourth building was perhaps two blocks north, on a spit of land where the tracks curved northwest into the Loop. Vacant for nearly ten years, the glass windows had been removed from each of them and they looked cold and bare, standing like victims before the firing squad, without blindfolds, awaiting the inevitable doom. They served their purpose. It was time to go.
Like many onlookers, I pondered the sequence of the implosions. I imagined the blasts going off simultaneously or maybe there was a deliberate reason to take them down one at a time. It's all physics-- mass and gravity and support. My logical choice would have been a domino effect from south to north, one fell swoop, like an air strike. I positioned myself so I could snap the buildings from that point of view. As the crowd gathered, I overheard many different arguments for as many different implosion sequences, so I went up to an important looking guy wearing a yellow hard hat to find out for myself. He told me the lone building on the north would go first, followed by the south building in the complex, its facing neighbor across the courtyard, and the western building, which was draped with a yellow banner, last. I was as close as anyone could be and, the Associated Press cherry picker point of view notwithstanding, I had as clear a shot at the spectacle as anyone. I heard a mounted policeman move the crowd back to the boundary line -- the bike path -- and I secured my share of turf. I had a good view just over the heads of shorter onlookers and through the leafless branches of the few saplings that stood between us and the boulevard. I stood my ground, checked my camera settings, and waited.
I talked with Charlotte, a fifty-something cyclist who agreed it was a one-of-its-kind event along the park. She had watched the preparations for weeks, making the daily round trip to work along the drive from her apartment on 50th Street. There was also Bob, a young bearded man from the suburbs, with his video camera ready and his wife and young child standing by. And there were students and amateur photographers and the curious of all ages who just wanted to see the sight. They milled around in front of me and by the trailer and along the bike path, bouncing and moving to keep warm. The atmosphere was electrified with anticipation.
At 8:15 the Chicago police closed Lake Shore Drive between Oakwood and 47th. The blue-and-whites raced up and down the lifeless boulevard, their strobe lights flashing. At the last minute, one of the cars stopped and a uniformed officer got out and set up a video camera and tripod in the median and sped off, out of range. The perks of the power, I would guess.
The crowd talked and laughed and waited. The photographers on the press platform drank coffee and corrected their camera settings, and waited. Across the tracks, the buildings, dark and hollow, leaned into the last winter wind they would ever brace, and waited. From the trailer behind us, the speaker and the crowd counted down. Ten. . . nine. . . eight. . . the photographers hoisted cameras up to wide eyes, their fingers trembling with excitement. Five. . . four . . . three. . . red and white and blue balloons were let loose skyward from the crowd.
BOOM! Then BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!, like an artillery barrage, the first building, the south one, took the charges as a thousand shutters clicked. The crowd held its breath as nothing appeared to be happening, and in a second, it began to cave into itself, just as the west building, complete with banner, sounded its death throes and collapsed. The north building echoed the chorus as its steel girders were blasted from the concrete and it, too, tumbled to the cheers of the crowd. The last building sat on its little spit of land, alone now, perhaps a reprieve from the wrecking ball. One could almost hear it shudder before the explosions ripped apart its foundation and it followed its comrades to rubble in three gargantuan sighs.
The silent dust cloud rose slowly from the site like a ghost and the westerly wind wafted the grit across the tracks, across Lake Shore Drive, and into the crowd, who bumped and darted spastically, in near panic, to escape the bitter, concrete fog that blotted the sun.
Like a soldier in a siege, I hunkered down and closed my eyes and covered my mouth and nose with my handkerchief until the fog passed over me, over the bike path and the park, and moved out over the lake. Once again, the bike trail was there, and the trees and the sun, and the park reappeared, covered with a thin veil of pulverized concrete that blanketed everything like a fine, gray snow.
Before I went on my way, I took a final look across the boulevard, testifying that nothing remained but the tracks and mounds of rubble, and beyond that, a view of a city that would, no doubt, turn away and go back to work, packing and carrying, and moving along on another Saturday morning.
