As Chicago’s political past and present were in mutual-admiration overdrive on Thursday, the city’s future was 100 feet away, paying no attention to all the conviviality and diligently using crayons on illustrations of jazz musicians.
“I get to read, color and get on the computer,” said Nishon Luke, 7, merrily toiling in the children’s section of the new Richard M. Daley branch library on a desultory stretch of West Humboldt Park along Kedzie Avenue.
The building’s namesake and his successor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, were dedicating the shiny, 16,000-square-foot, light-drenched building, the 58th library set in motion during the former mayor’s 22-year tenure. It had opened three weeks earlier and had already been host to 10,000 visitors.
“It gives the younger kids an alternative to being on the corner,” said Kelvin Thomas, 18, a high school graduate with hopes of going to a city college, who was standing a few feet away. “They don’t have to worry about the gangbangers.”
This concise observation struck me more than the library’s litany of features: tons of natural light, a green roof, permeable paver parking lot, 38 computers, a creative digital space partly financed by the MacArthur Foundation, a big room for neighborhood meetings, and $500,000 in books and magazines, as well as a certified teacher and a “cybernavigator” to help visitors with computers, both sponsored by Wal-Mart.
And there’s more to this one-story, customer-friendly, energy-efficient, well-landscaped steel-framed building with a brick-and-cast-stone-veneer exterior.
“One of the challenges in the inner city includes security concerns while making it open, attractive and visible,” said Dirk Lohan, the building’s co-architect and the grandson of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Lohan and a partner, Michael Barnes, have thus made sure that sight lines of central-desk staff members take in key areas and that they also control access to the restrooms. But there’s an inviting covered plaza outside, with lots of windows and soft colors everywhere.
The libraries of my childhood and college days were dark and cramped. This one is as inviting as the long-shuttered firehouse across the street is forbidding. It signals to those on the street, “This is your space.”
The library will draw blacks and Latinos in West Humboldt Park and Ukrainian Village, and it will serve five elementary and five high schools. Perhaps like the Near North branch, which long ago proved a bridge between the God-forsaken Cabrini-Green and the Gold Coast, it could unite two divergent communities.
Three Daley grandchildren attended the packed gathering, where a deferential Emanuel struck just the right note by linking two Daley legacies, Millennium Park and libraries.
Daley’s many corruption-obsessed news-media chroniclers will be dyspeptic as their tales of petty graft and patronage abuses are likely to be lost in history’s fog, while the downtown park and the libraries Daley approved wind up central to his legacy.
To that extent, it’s both paradoxical and fitting that his branch is far from downtown’s madding fray. A man so associated with the Loop’s revival – disproportionately obsessed with it, critics said — also revitalized down-and-out stretches with an institution once left for dead but now proving a catalyst not just to literacy but also to social and civic engagement.
“They’ve become community centers for adults and children, and, in a society with dwindling community resources, they’ve become even more valuable,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, the activist Catholic priest, who attended the opening.
Daley was in fine fettle, with no public signs of PMWS (post-mayoral withdrawal syndrome) and with several reminders of those trademark rhetorical idiosyncrasies. The 27th Ward alderman, Walter Burnett Jr., became “Alderman Barnett,” and libraries were “lie-berries.”
There was a passionate riff, too, on the roots of society’s problems that was both a bit jumbled and totally understandable. In sum, don’t blame just the schools.
He walked the grounds, which include a lovely garden, and posed for photos with staff members in front of his portrait. He nabbed me and emoted about all the light and space and opportunities for youth.
As Emanuel, a.k.a. the Missile, left, presumably to prepare for the jarring, even damning, account he delivered on Friday of financial challenges he has inherited, a wide-eyed young lady sat in the children’s section and underscored a more alluring Daley bequest.
Takeya Thompson, 12, said, “Now kids can have a quiet and safe place to do homework.”
by JAMES WARREN | Jul 31, 2011
As Chicago’s political past and present were in mutual-admiration overdrive on Thursday, the city’s future was 100 feet away, paying no attention to all the conviviality and diligently using crayons on illustrations of jazz musicians.
“I get to read, color and get on the computer,” said Nishon Luke, 7, merrily toiling in the children’s section of the new Richard M. Daley branch library on a desultory stretch of West Humboldt Park along Kedzie Avenue.
The building’s namesake and his successor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, were dedicating the shiny, 16,000-square-foot, light-drenched building, the 58th library set in motion during the former mayor’s 22-year tenure. It had opened three weeks earlier and had already been host to 10,000 visitors.
“It gives the younger kids an alternative to being on the corner,” said Kelvin Thomas, 18, a high school graduate with hopes of going to a city college, who was standing a few feet away. “They don’t have to worry about the gangbangers.”
This concise observation struck me more than the library’s litany of features: tons of natural light, a green roof, permeable paver parking lot, 38 computers, a creative digital space partly financed by the MacArthur Foundation, a big room for neighborhood meetings, and $500,000 in books and magazines, as well as a certified teacher and a “cybernavigator” to help visitors with computers, both sponsored by Wal-Mart.
And there’s more to this one-story, customer-friendly, energy-efficient, well-landscaped steel-framed building with a brick-and-cast-stone-veneer exterior.
“One of the challenges in the inner city includes security concerns while making it open, attractive and visible,” said Dirk Lohan, the building’s co-architect and the grandson of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Lohan and a partner, Michael Barnes, have thus made sure that sight lines of central-desk staff members take in key areas and that they also control access to the restrooms. But there’s an inviting covered plaza outside, with lots of windows and soft colors everywhere.
The libraries of my childhood and college days were dark and cramped. This one is as inviting as the long-shuttered firehouse across the street is forbidding. It signals to those on the street, “This is your space.”
The library will draw blacks and Latinos in West Humboldt Park and Ukrainian Village, and it will serve five elementary and five high schools. Perhaps like the Near North branch, which long ago proved a bridge between the God-forsaken Cabrini-Green and the Gold Coast, it could unite two divergent communities.
Three Daley grandchildren attended the packed gathering, where a deferential Emanuel struck just the right note by linking two Daley legacies, Millennium Park and libraries.
Daley’s many corruption-obsessed news-media chroniclers will be dyspeptic as their tales of petty graft and patronage abuses are likely to be lost in history’s fog, while the downtown park and the libraries Daley approved wind up central to his legacy.
To that extent, it’s both paradoxical and fitting that his branch is far from downtown’s madding fray. A man so associated with the Loop’s revival – disproportionately obsessed with it, critics said — also revitalized down-and-out stretches with an institution once left for dead but now proving a catalyst not just to literacy but also to social and civic engagement.
“They’ve become community centers for adults and children, and, in a society with dwindling community resources, they’ve become even more valuable,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, the activist Catholic priest, who attended the opening.
Daley was in fine fettle, with no public signs of PMWS (post-mayoral withdrawal syndrome) and with several reminders of those trademark rhetorical idiosyncrasies. The 27th Ward alderman, Walter Burnett Jr., became “Alderman Barnett,” and libraries were “lie-berries.”
There was a passionate riff, too, on the roots of society’s problems that was both a bit jumbled and totally understandable. In sum, don’t blame just the schools.
He walked the grounds, which include a lovely garden, and posed for photos with staff members in front of his portrait. He nabbed me and emoted about all the light and space and opportunities for youth.
As Emanuel, a.k.a. the Missile, left, presumably to prepare for the jarring, even damning, account he delivered on Friday of financial challenges he has inherited, a wide-eyed young lady sat in the children’s section and underscored a more alluring Daley bequest.
Takeya Thompson, 12, said, “Now kids can have a quiet and safe place to do homework.”