Chicago being slowly 'chipped away'

CHICAGO -- To former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, the elevated train tracks crisscrossing the city are more than a mode of transport. They are a reminder of a great city that has for generations looked and felt like no other place in the world.\nBut they are an increasingly lonely reminder.\n"Chicago has been chipped away," said Byrne, mayor from 1979 until 1983. "I look at my grandson ... and what you want to tell him about different things (in the city), things that won't be there for the next generation of Chicagoans."\nWith its distinctive skyline, lakefront and icons such as the Field Museum and Wrigley Field, Chicago will never be mistaken for another city. But it has changed dramatically -- and its icons are continuing to disappear.\nIn September came what was viewed by Chicagoans as the ultimate indignity: Marshall Field's, the city's most famous department store, will be renamed Macy's, the ultimate New Yorker.\n"I like the Macy's in New York, but I'm not in New York," said Michael Braun, a Chicago attorney. "I'm in Chicago."\nThe changes extend to how and where people live.\n"I don't recognize my own neighborhood," said writer Studs Terkel, who has been one of Chicago's most distinctive voices for decades.\nChicago is certainly not the only city seeing change. But in Chicago it can be serious business.\n"I have rarely experienced a city that is so enamored with its history," said Lonnie Bunch, who left as president of the Chicago Historical Society this year to help launch a new museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "Chicagoans revel in their history."\nThat helps explain the tug-of-war when the city's past butts up against the present and the future. \n"There is incredible tension in Chicago between tradition and innovation," said Blair Kamin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural writer for the Chicago Tribune. "On the one hand it is a city that invented the skyscraper, and on the other it tries to preserve landmarks (built) 100 years ago."\nThat tension reared its head with the renovation of Soldier Field -- a project that drew widespread scorn because the finished product appears not to combine the modern with the traditional but plops the modern atop the traditional.\n"It's a slap in the face," Byrne said.\nJonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, said Soldier Field was just one example of Mayor Richard M. Daley's willingness to disregard the traditional in the name of helping and attracting business.\n"His agenda is not about Chicago or the people of Chicago or the legacy of Chicago," he said. "It's about business and making Chicago safe for business and if that means flushing a historic name down the toilet that is what will be done.\n"All you need to know is Chicago is tearing down real Victorian buildings at the same time it is putting up fake Victorian streetlights."\nDaley's administration dismisses such talk. It points out that the city has designated or is in the process of designating 750 buildings -- including the Marshall Field's store on State Street -- as historic city landmarks this year alone.\nThere was also the Historic Chicago Bungalow Initiative, a city program that has spent millions of dollars to preserve Chicago-style bungalows in the city's older neighborhoods.\n"We do want to encourage preservation of our most significant buildings," said Brian Goeken, a deputy planning commissioner. But, he said, "we're not a museum."\nThat was Daley's point when he talked about the decision to change the name on Marshall Field's to Macy's.\n"Things change," Daley told reporters in September. "If you aren't willing to accept change, then you stay in the past and we're never going to stay in the past in this city."\nBut even Perry Duis, a University of Illinois at Chicago history professor who applauds the mayor for the transformation of the lakefront and construction of Millennium Park, said the city looks a lot more like other cities than it used to.\n"It's more homogenized, kind of Disney-like, in the sense that it is a city but there is something artificial about it," he said. "The (elevated trains), you take that away and you won't know where you are"