Truly connect Millennium Park with its sculpture and art to the Art Institute.
This would also be the easiest way to make it easy for great numbers of people to enter the art museum. Here's the scene as the Modern Wing opened this week:
Just imagine the above scene with this space landscaped and with sculpture! It'd be a fine new public space for the citizens and the many tourists.
The automobile drivers survived Monroe street being close on the day above, didn't they? They easily found alternate routes.
Chicago, especially at its hugely successful Millennium Park, needs to prioritize the people, the walkers, those strolling, enjoying city life. A great thing about Millennium Park is that because it is built over a parking garage it is raised up above the street. It is one of the few public places in the city where you don't see and hear and smell cars whizzing by, as you do in, for example, Daley Plaza. Extend this peaceful, urban, exalting feeling right to the door of the fabulous new Modern Wing of the Art Institute.
Note to Mayor Daley: for a long time your name came up first when people talked of great American mayors, "green" mayors, visionary mayors. Now I hear more talk of Mayor Bloomberg in New York, as, for example, he closes parts of Broadway to car traffic - starting this Sunday - to make it more friendly to pedestrians. We'll see Manhattan derive great benefits and better quality of life from this progressive move.
And if better quality-of-life ain't enough, as New York's commissioner of transportation told the Wall Street Journal, "It's a down payment on a better economic environment." (Do read this about her.)
More and more people want a livable, walkable, quieter city. If New York can close parts of Broadway, why can't Chicago close a part of Monroe?
More Hello Beautiful! on the Modern Wing here. (Then scroll)
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4 comments:
I took the day off today and trained in to see the Wing. Very nice. We entered using the bridge, but left to go back to the Millenium by crossing Monroe. Kind of a crap shoot to get across without getting hit, but nobody wants to walk to the corners to cross.
The lure of Lurie in plain view is too much to resist!
"What a scathingly brilliant idea!"
I've stolen the line from the movie, "The Trouble with Angels," but the idea of closing Monroe IS scathingly brilliant.
Great idea to close Monroe street! Perhaps they will allow all manner of entertainment by street musicians, a first class puppet theater, jugglers and magic acts. Sort of like "happenings" or those living circus posters that inspired some of the "Chicago School" in the '60's. Also, the AI should be required to have one hour during the day when the north window shades are raised so all can stand simply dumb founded viewing that fabulous view of Millennium Park as well as the city "curtain wall." I also would suggest they should bring back the MagicKist lips and mount them on top of the Prudential building. Now that WAS art! (Just ask Klaus Oldenberg who had his petite wife fabricate one larger than she for a happening in the 60's.) Ah, but I digress ;-)
Steve Wohl in Edgewater currently
Taking out the street and extending the park to the museum seems so obviously right that I have to assume that it will eventually be done. Let's hope it's sooner rather than later.
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