Reading Blog: February 2022

My main book for the month is on Chicago’s history. I was going to add Station Eleven, but after watching the TV series I realized it’s still too soon. I will get fiction on here eventually.
I continue looking for an up-to-date book about Polynesia and Micronesia. I just picked up Voyagers (2021) but it looks light.

Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill, 2021)

A history of Chicago hyper-focused on the land grants and legal battles which filled the lakefront with green space, museums, and a few exceptions. The authors do an excellent job illustrating the build-up of Chicago’s modern shoreline with maps, photos, anecdotes, and explanations.

The Grant Park area was mostly underwater except for a small strip known as ‘Lake Park’. The Illinois Central Railroad was allowed to build a trestle bridge / track just off the lake shore up to access the city and docks.
After battles and bribes in the state house, the railroad was eager to fill in the land and establish ownership, but was held back by a reluctant city. After the Great Chicago Fire, the opposition relented for decades. Debris helped fill in land up to the track, and several small buildings and a convention center were permitted to accelerate Chicago’s recovery. In the run-up to the World’s Fair these buildings were removed. Everyone acknowledged that Lake Park was a central location, but renewed complications of space and ownership resulted with almost all World’s Fair buildings in Jackson Park, except for today’s Art Institute of Chicago.
Tensions over ownership between the US, state house, Chicago, and the railroad over riparian lands (non-tidal underwater land) was appealed to the Supreme Court around this time in Illinois Central Railroad Co. v. Illinois (1892), which grandfathered in the existing rights, and established the state government as the owner of the lake bed, with certain rights reserved for navigation and ‘public trust’.

The next phase of Chicago’s lakefront came with Marshall Field’s death — his grant would be returned to his estate if the city didn’t start building a museum by 1912. Mail-order magnate Montgomery Ward used the plain language of Chicago’s plan to oppose any new structures in the park after the Art Institute, and the city’s strategies to call these ‘park buildings’ or public-domain away Ward’s rights failed in court. Eventually the museum’s location was carved out from a rail yard, and the surrounding peninsula was built up with fewer challenges.

These legal machinations affected significantly less-planned areas north of the river mouth. Land holders were understood to own up to the naturally changing shoreline, but after adding artificially fill, questions arose over the state’s ownership to the lake bed:

• George Streeter (as in Streeterville) made several claims and frequently sparred with the land holders in the courts and newspapers. The authentic owners still were uncertain of development until the 1920s, when they made two moves to establish ownership: first through continuing Lake Shore Drive, then through a carefully negotiated and insured deal with Northwestern University, which still has its law and medical schools there.
• Lincoln Park was built through negotiations with landowners; in many cases the state gave property owners 100 feet of new land into the late, in exchange for any further land-fill and lakebed claims.
  Some landowners had built piers onto the lake, but the state was able to show that these had no navigation purpose, were aimed at artificially moving the shoreline, and could be demolished. Then one navigation pier was successfully challenged by the state. The authors acknowledge when legal reasoning is rather muddled or wrapped up in public opinion or momentum, and this is one of those times.

Compared to the battles over Grant Park and the personalities of Streeterville, the authors seem almost disinterested in their sections about the South Side, reversing the Chicago River, and modern developments. The river story is familiar to anyone with Chicago history knowledge, but it was neat to learn how scientists applied the new germ theory model to infectiousness and explained that evidence in court.
In their discussion about Millennium Park (which replaced a parking lot and rail yard) the authors warn that it’s broken the Ward precedent by having substantial structures, and moving forward with consent from immediate neighbors only. They believe “undoubtedly… city planners will be tempted” to continue building in Grant Park.

Overall I can recommend this book — if you live in Chicago and have an interest in historical Illinois politics! Otherwise it’s a lot to take in.

Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments (Erin L. Thompson, 2022)

The newest book which I’ve covered in my reading posts — it just got published and shipped! Thompson is on Twitter as ArtCrimeProf.

The thesis is that statues represent who has power, and when figures are disgraced and torn down, it is portrayed as vandalism to deny that real power is shifting.
Thompson opens with the powerful stories around the US Capitol’s Statue of Freedom and then back further to the American Revolution. There is a lengthy section on the unique American psychology which has built Civil War monuments with evolving stories (in the North, Lincoln / emancipation statues and a Vermont memorial are examples of how Black soldiers’ contributions were erased).

There’s a good piece of journalism in the stories of George Floyd protests, when AIM activist Mike Forcia toppled the Columbus statue in Minneapolis, and Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin ordered the removal of a Confederate monument. Forcia held a public event to remove Columbus after years of protesting the statue, so it’s possible for Thompson to interview him and discuss the restorative justice process which ended with a sentencing to community service. In Birmingham, Woodfin knew that the state would fine the city for acting, but preferred that to damaging the statue or ignoring the protests.

The Birmingham story makes it clear just how difficult it is to legally or democratically remove statues, when even a majority-Black city has to fight the state’s Attorney General over who is honored there. Unfortunately states across the South are debating expanding laws against officials altering, ‘disparaging or reinterpreting’ monuments, with a Texas-abortion-style strategy for citizens to sue to enforce the law.
Before now I’ve seen 2020 statue protests only on Twitter, so it felt consequential and real to have these stories and the backstory in print.