The Loop Chicago Part 1

This series builds on my earlier essays on Old Town, Gold Coast and River North with an exploration of Chicago's iconic neighborhood known colloquially as the Loop.

The name "Loop" is rooted in two elements of Chicago's urban landscape.

The first, is its grid layout. Like many North American cities, Chicago is arranged in a simple grid of north–south and east–west streets, making navigation easy even for the most directionally challenged. These two sets of streets meet at traffic-light intersections throughout the city.

The second is Chicago’s transit system, which includes stretches of elevated train tracks known as the “L” (short for “elevated”). In the late nineteenth century, the city built a circuit of these tracks around four streets within the central business district—two running east–west and two running north–south—forming a rectangle. You can see these elevated tracks from street level:

If you traced the path of the elevated train around the four streets, you would quite literally draw a rectangle — the Loop. The four streets are depicted in the map below:

Source: adapted from Google Maps

While the bounded area in the map above is the strictest definition of the Loop, two broader ideas shape how people use the term

The first is the community-areas framework devised in the 1920s by University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess. Chicago is divided into seventy-seven community areas, and the Loop is one of them.

The second is the looser notion of neighborhoods, which residents find easier to relate to than community areas. Wrigleyville, Boystown, and Andersonville, for example, are all neighborhoods within the larger Lakeview community area. When Chicagoans say “the Loop,” they usually mean not only the four streets carrying the elevated tracks but also the walkable neighborhood around them. Unlike community areas, however, neighborhoods have no fixed boundaries. One man's River North may well be another man's Loop.

For these essays, I am using boundaries beyond which I would balk at using the term "Loop". Every Chicagoan has a personal threshold—some, for example, place Union Station inside the Loop, while I see it as firmly in the West Loop. My borders, more expansive than the strict definition but narrower than the "community area" demarcation, are depicted below:

Source: adapted from Google Maps

As I walk around the Loop, my observations are structured around the streets within it, beginning with the North-South ones and concluding with the East West streets.

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N-S Street 1: Michigan Avenue

Chicago Cultural Center

I began my Loop excursion on Michigan Avenue at its intersection with Lake Street. Very soon, one encounters the Michigan Avenue façade of a giant building that occupies an entire city block:

While the building now serves as the city-run Chicago Cultural Center, it began life in 1897 as the first permanent structure of the Chicago Public Library system. The carving visible at the top in the picture above references that original purpose.

You may also notice in the picture that the “U” in “Public” is written as “V.” The practice of writing 'U' as 'V' on historic Chicago buildings is a stylistic homage to ancient Roman monumental inscriptions. The alphabet used for the English language is a descendant of the Roman alphabet in which Latin was written. The original Roman alphabet did not have a distinct letter 'U'; the single letter 'V' was used for both the vowel 'U' sound and the consonant 'V' sound. Chicago’s architects adopted this convention to give their grand structures an air of timeless classical authority.

The decoupling of U from V is an interesting story. They were initially just allographs—shape variants of the same letter, like “a” and “ɑ.” When writing in lowercase with quills, scribes found the rounded form u easier to write than the pointed v. After printing arrived in the fifteenth century, printers adopted a convention: the pointed variant appeared at the start of a word (as in vncle, victory), and the rounded variant appeared in the middle (as in public, saue). By the seventeenth century, printers shifted from this positional rule to a phonetic one, using the variants to mark the consonant sound (v) versus the vowel sound (u).

The story of U’s secession from V resembles Canada’s quiet independence from the UK—a gradual shift rather than a rupture like the Indian nationalist movement. It also made me wonder which other colonized Roman letters are still struggling to break free. The letter G seems a likely candidate. In English, G represents both the sound in go and the sound in giant, whereas in Hindi these sounds have distinct letters: “ग” for the former and “ज” for the latter. Fortuitously, two allographs already exist (see below), and one of them is ready to secede.

While the Michigan Avenue side is the most imposing, the entrances of the Chicago Cultural Center sit on Washington Street and Randolph Street. The Washington Street entrance features an ornate, bronze-framed door:

Outside the entrance stands a bronze cow:

The bronze cow, as you would expect, has a backstory. In 1998, Peter Hanig, proprietor of a well-known Chicago footwear store, visited Zurich and saw a public art exhibit of decorated cows. The next year, he persuaded city officials to purchase more than 300 life-size cow sculptures from Swiss artists, have local artists decorate them, and display them across Chicago. Tourists and locals wandered the city looking for their favorites. After the exhibition, many cows were auctioned for charity—one buyer was Oprah Winfrey.

The cow, of course, has a unique place in Chicago’s history. The Great Fire of 1871 began at the barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary, a working-class Irish immigrant couple. On the night of October 8, 1871, their tenants, the McLaughlins, were hosting a party for a newly arrived relative from Ireland when the O’Leary barn caught fire. A local paper, relying on hearsay, claimed the blaze began when a cow kicked over a lantern during milking. Catherine O’Leary testified that she never milked her cows at night, and the official investigation concluded that unknown persons—not she—had caused the fire. Yet the legend of the cow endured. For the unfortunate Mrs. O’Leary, journalism was not the first draft of history but the enduring one.

Historians today trace the virality of the O’Leary cow story to the anti-immigrant, anti-working-class hysteria of the period. The Irish then occupied a social position much like that of poor Latin American immigrants today. The subtext of contemporaneous newspaper reports implied that the O’Learys were ignorant of “civilized” behavior — that milking a cow at night by lantern light was something no proper city dweller would do — much as some now fault immigrants for unfamiliarity with modern norms such as safe driving or responsible garbage disposal. That these immigrants lived in wooden homes — a flammable necessity, not a choice, given the cost of brick and stone — was also held against them.

While the original cows of the 1999 "Cows on Parade" were made of fiberglass, Peter Hanig commissioned a bronze one to commemorate the event and donated it for installation at its current location. Few notice that the cow’s eyes are etched with tiny images of two Chicago landmarks. One eye bears the Water Tower:

On the other eye is etched Untitled, Picasso's public art gift to Chicago :

This entire episode surrounding the cow statues is an example of human life unfolding outside the conception of man as homo economicus—the rational, self-interested actor imagined in economics as motivated solely by profit and utility. One could, in hindsight, justify the public art project by pointing to tourism revenue, but the organizers could not have predicted that whimsical bovine replicas would become a cultural phenomenon.

Finding joy in a colorful fiberglass cow is neither more nor less meaningful than life itself. Much of life is Plato’s “continual becoming but never being”—the effort, then the reward (if we are lucky), and then the search for the next hit of experience as hedonic adaptation settles in. Camus compared the human condition to that of Sisyphus, condemned by the Gods to roll a massive boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble down each time he neared the top. His punishment was eternal repetition—a cycle without purpose or end. Camus radically reimagined Sisyphus as content, even joyful, finding meaning not in the outcome but in the struggle itself.

Walking into the building from the Washington Street entrance, I was awed by the ornate elegance of the interiors:

The staircase is majestic (the building does have elevators):

On the second floor, the staircase opens onto a beautiful landing with arches that serve as the entrance to a hall:

Walking through the arches, one enters Preston Bradley Hall, known for its famous Tiffany dome:

The dome was created by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company of New York. Its lead designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, was the artistically inclined son of Charles Tiffany, who founded the retail chain in 1837. Tiffany stores entered the national spotlight when President Lincoln purchased a necklace and earrings for his wife to wear at his inaugural ball. The company has marketed its engagement ring as a symbol of true love for more than a century, but with marriage rates plummeting, it may soon need to invent something cheaper to celebrate situationships.

There is a fun origin story behind the term carat, which refers to the weight of a diamond as measured on specialized weighing equipment. Carat comes from the Greek word for “carob seed.” These seeds were reputed to have highly consistent weights, though not all contemporary agriculturists agree. One seed weighed roughly 200 milligrams—one carat—so ancient merchants used carob seeds on their scales to measure gemstones. Somewhat confusingly, carat in the context of gold refers to purity, the proportion of other metals in a piece of gold jewelry. Adding to the semantic ambiguity is the spelling: some people, especially in the United States, distinguish the gold carat by spelling it "karat".

If you look carefully up at the dome, you can see the signs of the Zodiac displayed at its center:

The concept of the zodiac nicely illustrates what Buddhists call the delusion of the self. The zodiac is supposed to be the constellation the sun was closest to when you were born. But constellations aren’t “real” structures in space—they are a pattern of stars that humans have grouped together and named, often based on animals or symbols—like Leo the Lion or Scorpio the Scorpion. This is how the Buddhists teach us to think of ourselves —a conceptual overlay to an impersonal collection of physical and mental attributes.

The Preston Bradley Hall, which houses the Tiffany dome, was where library patrons once picked up the books they wanted:

The idea of borrowing and returning books to a library—limited by due dates, lending caps, and physical copies—feels quaint in an age of instant digital access. The Netflix DVD era seemed so revolutionary because there were no due dates for return, simply a ceiling on the number of DVDs you could keep concurrently as defined by your subscription plan.

The world of bytes, unlike that of atoms, has abundance built into it. The same digital copy of a film sitting on a giant computer can be streamed by millions. Yet this very abundance produces stark income inequality. Instead of thousands of workers earning wages in printing presses, a handful of people can run a digital-only publishing company. A rideshare company with a few thousand employees can earn more than the millions of drivers it dispatches.

Technology tends to favor the big. A streaming platform that gains traction can use its trove of viewing data to deliver ever more personalized recommendations. As more riders join a rideshare platform, more drivers follow— and vice versa—making the service faster, cheaper, and more reliable for everyone. The winner takes all.

On the one hand, jobs inextricably tied to the world of atoms—baristas, hairdressers, drivers, nurses—have relatively greater security. On the other hand, those who supply the capital that finances these technologies of abundance—shareholders—capture most of the reward, while workers receive only a small share as wages. This Marxist framing of labor and capital as adversaries fits awkwardly in a world with millions of retail shareholders, yet the tension remains because of the simple mathematics of how the pie is divided, especially in firms and economies where the pie is not expanding fast enough.

I have observed, with some unease, that I feel a flicker of satisfaction when a company in my investment portfolio announces mass layoffs, knowing the stock price will likely rise. As a citizen, I recoil at the image of Tim Cook presenting President Trump with a gold plaque—an unsettling echo of the Cuban dictator receiving a golden telephone in The Godfather Part II. Yet as a shareholder, I found myself quietly pleased by the surge in Apple’s stock that followed this act of gratuitous ingratiation. The root of this inner dissonance lies in the clash between sound economics and our moral intuition. It feels counterintuitive to accept that measures like banning child labor or raising minimum wages are economically and ultimately morally unsound.

Standing outside the hall and looking toward the Washington Street side, I paused to admire the beautiful ceiling and chandeliers:

Walking up to the second floor, one arrives at the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Rotunda, built to honor Union veterans of the Civil War and crowned by a second, somewhat larger dome:

The GAR dome, contrary to popular belief, was not made by Tiffany but by the interior design firm Healy & Millet, a business founded by two friends who had studied together in Paris.

The site where the Chicago Cultural Center now stands was originally intended for a Civil War memorial. The decision to build a public library there drew opposition from veteran groups, including the Grand Army of the Republic. Bonds forged in wartime endured long after the conflict ended, leading many soldiers to form associations for fellowship and mutual support; out of these grew the GAR as a fraternal and political organization for Union veterans. The inclusion of the GAR rotunda and hall in the building’s design was a compromise to placate them.

While I had entered the building from the Washington Street side, those approaching from the Randolph Street side would enter the rotunda from the GAR Hall through these beautiful gates shown below:

Shortly after Lincoln won the presidency on November 6, 1860, eleven Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, largely over disputes about slavery. The Union’s victory in 1865 preserved the United States as one nation, but at an immense cost—more than half a million lives lost and a country deeply scarred by conflict. It is easy to forget this ugliness amid the beauty of the GAR Rotunda. Yet the political polarization that marked the Civil War persists today. Thankfully, a physical war is unlikely, not least because the opposing sides are no longer geographically contiguous. The divide now runs between coastal and inland states, and even within those states, between cities and suburbs.

Is history inevitable? The hypothetical worlds in which the Confederates or the Nazis won feel so implausible that they make for compelling science fiction—The Man in the High Castle comes to mind. It is comforting to believe Martin Luther King’s line that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Figures like King, Gandhi, and Mandela embraced this optimism; without it, they could not have embarked on the journeys they did. In a broad sense, they are right: the life of an ordinary person today, even in deprived regions, is better than that of a medieval nobleman. But when we lower our vantage point from humanity as a whole to the histories of specific peoples and nations, it becomes hard not to see history as the product of outcomes at critical junctures—outcomes that could easily have gone the other way.

Tolstoy, in War and Peace, set against the early nineteenth-century wars between Napoleon’s Grand Armée and Russia, argues that history is driven by imperceptible laws or forces that shape human action much as the laws of the natural world—like physics and evolution—govern the material world. In the novel, he applies this lens of historical determinism on two levels: to individual events and to the broader sweep of history.

At the tactical level, he argues that the Russian commander-in-chief Kutuzov’s key decisions—to fight at Borodino and later retreat from Moscow—were shaped by countless prior events and choices. By the time he faced those moments, his degrees of freedom were tightly constrained, if not eliminated altogether. On a larger scale, Tolstoy sees the Napoleonic Wars as ripple effects of the French Revolution, which itself arose from earlier upheavals—a causal chain stretching back centuries.

Tolstoy does not offer a concrete example of the invisible forces he claims shape historical events. But he likely would have approved of Yuval Harari’s focus on the broad systemic forces that drive historical change. For example, Harari explains how agriculture created food surpluses, enabling humanity’s transition from a nomadic existence to the first cities. As food production no longer required everyone’s labor, social stratification emerged, giving rise to specialized roles such as craftspeople, priests, and administrators. A superficial historian might credit a city’s establishment to its founder, but a fundamental historian like Harari would see the founder as an enabler of deeper forces, not their cause.

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Millennium Park

Just a short walk from, and across the street from, the Cultural Center is Chicago's famous Millennium Park:

Millennium Park is named to commemorate the turn of the new millennium—the year 2000—but, as one would expect from a government-sponsored project, construction delays pushed its opening to 2004. Some people describe it as a rooftop garden because it sits atop a large underground parking garage and commuter rail station. Its lawns, trees, and art installations rest quite literally on the roof of that structure.

The year 2000 felt momentous because multiples of ten carry a certain gravitas. A fiftieth birthday is a milestone in a way the forty-ninth is not; the S&P crossing 7000 seems heady in a way 6999 does not. These numbers feel symbolic because our counting system is base-10, not because the universe favors them. Nature, in fact, seems indifferent to our decimal milestones. Pi, for example, appears in circles and ellipses throughout nature—planetary orbits, ripples in water, irises—a strange, endless number that quietly mocks our finitude.

The Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, )—where each number is the sum of the two preceding it—appears throughout nature. In the ancestral chart of a drone bee, for example, the counts of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on follow this pattern. Likewise, the number of petals in many flowers often matches Fibonacci numbers—three, five, eight, and so on:

Unlike pi, Fibonacci feels more intuitive; every fifth number is divisible by five, revealing a rhythm that resonates with our base-10 number system. Still, it is hard to imagine a city planner numbering street addresses this way. Yet many thoughtful people believe that collective human behavior may follow arcane mathematical patterns like pi or Fibonacci.

One such person was Martin Armstrong, a self-taught markets analyst, who noticed in his research that financial panics occurred every 8.6 years. When he realized that 8.6 years translated to 3141 days, which is pi multiplied by thousand, he felt that he had unlocked some divine pattern and set up a successful research firm advising traders and bankers. While his idea may reek of the occult, not least because he was indicted in 1999 of running a Ponzi scheme, the discipline of technical analysis in stocks is based on the notion that market data, which represents collective human action, must follow mathematical patterns not discernible to the naked eye.

There is a large cohort of traders who, unlike Mr. Armstrong, did not make it to Federal prison but believe in Fibonacci Retracement Levels. These levels represent the percentage of a prior price move that is likely to be temporarily reversed before the trend continues. For instance, say the price of stock on an uptrend increased from $10 to $20. A Fibonacci Retracement level of 23.6% means of the $10 price gain, 23.6% i.e $2.36 will be reverse. Hence, the price will fall to $17.64 before it can continue to the uptrend. A stronger pullback than the 23.6% retracement level is represented by the 61.8% one.

In today’s age of frictionless trading, it can feel as if buyers always appear for every seller. That is because when buyers are scarce, the price simply keeps falling until demand returns. The intuition behind Fibonacci retracements is that in an uptrend, investors who fear that high prices may not hold start selling until the price drops to a level low enough to attract new buyers, who then bid it up again. The mechanism works identically—but in reverse—during a downtrend.

The role of Fibonacci plays into how these levels are calculated. Recall the Fibonacci sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …The 23.6% Fibonacci retracement level comes from dividing a number in the Fibonacci sequence by another that is four places ahead—for example, 21 ÷ 89 ≈ 0.236. Other retracement levels are calculated similarly.

An average person buying stocks through a brokerage account—without any Fibonacci charting tools—is likely to think in simple terms: “The stock is 25% below its high; it seems like a good deal now.” Another investor might be tempted only at a 10% discount. Sellers make similar calculations: one may view a 10% drop as too steep, while another is willing to cut losses at 25%.

Each seller and each buyer makes an individual decision. Yet technical analysts believe that thousands of such decisions, made independently, collectively reverse a stock’s price trend at predictable levels derived from a mathematical order woven into the physical universe.! Just as bees build hives whose cells are hexagons without (presumably) knowing they are doing so, human behavior may be collectively shaped by numbers that lie outside our base-10 intuition.

Whether millennium years deserve the fanfare or not on account of their numerical attribute, Chicago was lucky to get its most iconic landmark—the Bean, as part of the Millennium Park package:

This artwork made of stainless steel and weighing 100 tonnes, which residents call the "Bean" because of its kidney bean like shape, is officially titled "Cloud Gate" and is the brainchild of the British Indian artist Anish Kapoor. The Bean’s curved surface warps the Chicago skyline into a liquid-like reflection. It is the best place to see yourself and the city together in the same frame.

One rather grotesque view appears if you walk beneath it and look up:

Perhaps, the second most beloved attraction of Millennium Park, after the Bean, is the Crown Fountain, which features two glass towers facing each other across a shallow reflecting pool. Each tower displays digital videos of Chicago residents’ faces on LED screens, and at intervals, water spouts from their mouths, creating the playful illusion that the faces are spewing water into the pool.

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The Art Institute

Walking farther down Michigan Avenue toward the Loop’s southern edge is the world-renowned Art Institute:

Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago is both a leading art museum and home to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the nation’s premier art schools. The picture above is the institute's striking Michigan Avenue facade. Walking up close towards it, one can see two iconic bronze lion statues guarding the entrance. The lion on the south flank, in the sculptor’s words, stands in a posture of defiance:

The lion on the north flank of the entrance, as the sculptor put it, is on the prowl:

The lions were installed in 1894, after the Art Institute moved from its original site at Michigan and Van Buren to its current location. This building first opened for the World’s Fair in the summer of 1893 and became the Art Institute that December. The sculptor, Edward Kemeys, was a self-taught artist who specialized in sculpting animals. He began by studying animals in captivity but later traveled across the American West to observe and dissect wild creatures, gaining anatomical insight for his lifelike sculptures of panthers, bears, deer, and jaguars.

What impulse drives an artist to spend a lifetime studying animal anatomy simply to recreate it in sculpture? The podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy defines life’s work as “a lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are.” He explains that this idea has three essential parts.

First, a lifelong quest means that true work is not about accumulating achievements but about dedicating oneself to a continuous pursuit—doing something for its own sake, as “the reward for good work is more work.” O’Shaughnessy's idea of a lifelong quest echoes the concept of the infinite game, introduced by James P. Carse, which describes pursuits where the goal is not to win but to keep the game going. Edward Kemeys spent decades studying animals in the wild and sculpting them with tireless dedication

Second, to build something for others emphasizes that meaningful work serves others and contributes to the world; generosity, he notes, is the authentic mark of such a life. Through his sculptures Kemeys offered people a way to connect with nature’s majesty in the middle of the city.

Third, work that expresses who you are must be rooted in authenticity—aligned with one’s true nature and individuality. Kemeys' art expressed who he was: a man fascinated by nature and the spirit of animals

Edward Kemeys discovered his life’s work by chance: while working as an engineer in Central Park, he happened upon a sculptor shaping a wolf’s head and felt compelled to try sculpting animals himself. For those privileged enough to not have overarching financial considerations, the big question is how to discover one's life's work as Patrick O’Shaughnessy describes it. While I do not know the answer, but the practice of mindfulness has helped me notice which activities truly bring me joy—and ultimately guided me toward a more fulfilling life, allowing me to leave my corporate job once I could afford to do so.

While the Michigan Avenue facade of the Art Institute presents the original classical building, from the Monroe Street side one can see the glass and steel design of the modern wing that opened in 2009:

In the picture above, you can see the Nichols Bridgeway that crosses Monroe Street, connecting the museum to Millennium Park. A good view of the bridge can be seen further west from Monroe Street:

Walking a few steps south from the two lions one lands at the South Garden of the Art Institute:

The sculpture on the east side of the pool, called Fountain of the Great Lakes, consists of five bronze figures, each representing one of the Great Lakes:

Some believe that the sculptor—Lorado Taft—may have been inspired by the Greek myth of the Danaides. The Danaides were the fifty daughters of Danaus, who fled to Argos to avoid marrying the fifty sons of his brother, Aegyptus. Forced into the marriages, all but one obeyed their father’s command to kill their husbands on their wedding night. For this crime, they were condemned to carry water in leaky jars that could never be filled. The myth of the Danaides echoes that of Sisyphus mentioned earlier. Both are condemned to endless, fruitless toil—a haunting image that Camus reimagined to contain the seeds of a meaningful life.

Reading about this sculpture, I learned that the five maidens are arranged so that the flow of water through them mimics the movement of water among the Great Lakes. Without that context, a casual observer would never guess that the top figure represents Lake Superior, from which the water descends to Lake Michigan—just as most people would never notice the tiny etchings in the eyes of the bronze cow outside the Cultural Center. Both examples show that someone doing life’s work does it for its own sake, largely oblivious to how it is received.

A somewhat comical postscript associated with this sculpture is the objections raised at its 1913 dedication relating to the semi-nude condition of some of the figures. The "Fountain of the Great Lakes" unwittingly got ensnared in a puritanical maelstrom brewing in Chicago during that time. When a reproduction of a French painting—depicting a nude young woman standing in water—was displayed in a Wabash Avenue shop window, a police officer ordered its removal on grounds of indecency, arguing that it was inappropriate for public view. Although a jury later acquitted the shop owner, the incident stirred public debate over morality and art, leading city officials to tighten obscenity regulations.

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The Fine Arts Building

My next stop was the Fine Arts Building at 410 South Michigan. On the way I passed by the Santa Fe Building (224 South Michigan), also known as the Railway Exchange :

The building sits at the intersection of two important strands of Chicago’s history.

First, the railroad industry. Chicago’s rise as a major trading city accelerated when a canal was built to link the Mississippi River system of the South with the Great Lakes of the North. Before the canal, goods had to be moved by portaging—carrying cargo over a short but difficult stretch of land between the two river systems. Ironically, in 1848, the very year the canal fulfilled Chicago’s dream of easing North–South trade, the railways arrived and began rendering that water route obsolete. Santa Fe Railways, a railroad company of the time, commissioned this building to house its employees and those of other railroads.

Second, the architecture firm of D. H. Burnham. Daniel Burnham was not only a gifted architect but also co-author of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which shaped the city’s physical development for decades, expanding his influence beyond architecture into transportation, parks, civic centers, and the lakefront.

A short walk from the Exchange Building brought me to the Fine Arts Building:

As you enter the building, the words above the second doorway read, “All passes—art alone endures”:

The motto resonates with me. To me, art is, by definition, a creation of imagination that can be experienced repeatedly with undiminished and deepening absorption. In that sense, it is enduring. One can read Sherlock Holmes' stories or listen to Auld Lang Syne repeatedly in one's lifespan without satiation. A sub-set of art proves to be enduring in its appeal to a reasonably large number of people across decades and centuries. These are the classics. It is hard to imagine a future without people who still laugh at Jane Austen’s wit or are moved by Amazing Grace.

I like that the motto assumes the perspective of the beholder instead of the artist. There is a craft behind any work of art. Edward Kemeys’s lion sculptures outside the Art Institute, for instance, depend on his painstaking fidelity to animal anatomy. Yet outside the community of sculptors, few care about his techniques. A person who enjoys a classic film like Citizen Kane or Tokyo Story may be oblivious to the techniques that shape their experience—long takes, compositional symmetry, intricate lighting etc.— much like savoring a meal without knowing its ingredients. It is the art that is enduring, the craft will keep evolving.

What gives a creative work its enduring quality is subjective. For me, The Godfather film is art because it continues to draw me in, again and again, in a way the Mario Puzo novel does not—though I enjoyed the book. Others may feel differently. For some, manga or Pixar films hold the same artistic power that Da Vinci or Picasso do for others. There is no hierarchy of art. Yet, we have all wasted our time and cognitive energy on what cultural elites deem to be "worthy".

Many spending hours on a trip to the Louvre would walk by The Mona Lisa without noticing it had they not been apprised of its greatness. I spent days laboring through Moby Dick, which I found unreadable, because of its reputation. But each one of us, at some point in our lives, will develop a visceral understanding of how short and hence, precious our time on earth is. Till that happens, we will unconsciously squander the scarce resources of time and attention on pursuits that reflect, what Rene Girad calls, our mimetic desires.

The Fine Arts Building has one of the city’s last manual elevators—a human attendant controls the elevator’s movement with a handle, starting, stopping, and aligning the car with each floor:

Except those who are claustrophobes or unlucky to have gotten stuck inside them, the only time elevators capture our consciousness is when we have to endure a prolonged wait. Yet, in this age, behind even the most mundane objects in our environment is a bewildering body of knowledge. While we may think expertise in elevators centers around its technology elements (the hoisting mechanism, power source, sensors etc.), there exist elevator consultants who decide, for example, how many elevators a building needs, how fast they should move, and how long the doors should stay open. They even have a Bible: The Vertical Transportation Handbook, more than 600 pages long and bold enough to use elevatoring as a verb.

A classic New Yorker essay (July 2014) by Nick Paumgarten, “Up and Then Down,” introduces an elevator consultant, James Fortune, who carries a “probable stop” table to minimize the vexing problem of each passenger choosing a different floor. The table lists the average number of expected stops under various conditions. If ten people share an elevator serving ten floors, it will stop about 6.5 times on average; in a building with thirty floors, the same group triggers roughly 9.5 stops. While all this may seem arcane, it has real economic consequences. Excessive wait times and slow elevators affect occupancy rates, rents, and property prices.

I took the elevator all the way to the tenth floor and then walked down by the stairs, stopping at each level. James Fortune’s “probable stop” table could never have predicted that every passenger would exit on the tenth floor—but that was by design, since my visit was part of Open House Chicago.

The fifth floor displays informational placards describing the history of the building:

The original purpose of the building, when it opened in 1887, was to house the headquarters of the Studebaker Carriage Company, a maker of horse drawn carriages. The upper floors housed carriage assembly operations while the sales showrooms were located in the lower floors. By 1895, Studebaker’s rapid growth prompted plans for a new factory on Wabash Avenue. Before relocating in 1897, the company chose to keep this building and transform it into a hub of artist offices and studios. As part of the renovation, the Studebaker Theater—still operating today—was created, and an open courtyard called Venetian Court (shown below) was added at the building’s center:

The building’s motto—“all passes—art alone endures”—is fitting, because Studebaker’s traditional business soon collapsed with the arrival of the automobile in the early twentieth century. Impressively, the company adapted and became a major automaker before finally closing in the 1960s.

The involvement of a car manufacturer with the Fine Arts Building highlights a relationship between money and art that spans centuries. Art endures, but the sources of wealth that sustain it change. In the medieval era, wealth came from land and trade, so noblemen and merchants patronized artists. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the Industrial Revolution, patrons tended to be owners of railroads, newspapers, department stores, banks, oil, and steel. Much of this new wealth accumulated in America, whose rich collectors bought the art collections of cash-strapped European aristocrats. As a major center of this emerging economy, Chicago developed a vibrant art ecosystem. Today, the major collectors come from the new economy—tech entrepreneurs and Wall Street financiers.

Art forms broadly belong to two categories—those that can be replicated with technology, like music, photography and cinema, and those that cannot be, like painting, theater and sculpture.

The first category, reproducible art can be often be financed by consumers. The challenge is that creative works of enduring quality rarely command large audiences. They therefore need some form of taxpayer support (as with the BBC) or philanthropic funding (as with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi).

Technology has improved the economics of reproducible art. The internet allows creators to find niche audiences on a global scale—people willing to pay for, say, a documentary series on ancient shipbuilding techniques. Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” thesis argues that an artist needs only a thousand people willing to pay enough each year (say, $100) to make a sustainable living. He did not say, however, that finding those thousand fans is easy!

The second category, non-reproducible art by its nature, depends on wealthy patrons. Yet even here, technology is transforming the landscape. Wall Street can now pool funds from hundreds or thousands of retail investors to finance art purchases with an eye toward investment returns. Tools like the Mei Moses Index, which tracks changes in artwork values by analyzing repeat public auction sales at houses like Sotheby’s over two centuries, cater directly to these investor-oriented collectors.

Before the Fine Arts Building opened, Chicago’s artists tended to gather in separate spaces tied to discipline-specific institutions—the Art Institute for visual art, Weber Hall for music, and the Auditorium Building for theater. While some of these organizations still exist in their own homes, the Fine Arts Building introduced the innovation of bringing multiple disciplines together under one roof.

Artists with studios on the tenth floor created murals around the common areas and stairway on that level:

Over the years, the tenants of the offices in this building have included painters, authors, printers, sketch artists, book dealers, composers, exhibition rooms, bookbinders and sheet music publishers. Frank Lloyd Wright was also a tenant. Additionally, in its early years, the Fine Arts Building was a hub for women’s organizations such as the Chicago Women’s Club, the Fortnightly of Chicago, and the Cordon Club—groups dedicated to causes like child protection, compulsory education, labor reform and women's suffrage:

Throughout the Fine Arts Building’s hallways, many studio doors display placards that share the stories and former occupants of their historic suites. One such interesting placard related to Studio 1026:

In the early 1980s, this suite was leased by a firm called Independent Material Systems. In reality, it served as the offices of an undercover FBI investigation called Operation Greylord that exposed widespread corruption in Chicago’s Cook County courts. Named after the traditional grey wigs worn by British judges and lawyers, the operation used wiretaps, hidden cameras, and agents posing as lawyers to uncover judges, lawyers, and police officers taking bribes to fix cases. The cases being fixed ranged from parking tickets to robberies and rapes!

Incidentally, grey wigs have been phased out in the British judicial system for civil and family cases because they frighten children, but they remain widely used in criminal courts. Wigs became symbols of gravitas in seventeenth-century Britain when King Charles II adopted them, and the fashion soon spread across Europe. Although wigs fell out of everyday use by the early nineteenth century—helped along, in part, by the grim sight of them tumbling with their wearer's heads into guillotines—the British legal profession continues the tradition.

The Economist reported that when the Bar Council surveyed the profession in 2007, about two-thirds of the 2,500 barristers who responded wanted to keep the traditional wigs and robes, despite them being uncomfortable to wear. Holding on to tradition that transcends our time on Earth is a way we find meaning in what Schopenhauer refers to the futility of existence. In his words:

To our amazement we suddenly exist, after having for countless millennia not existed; in a short while we will again not exist, also for countless millennia. That cannot be right, says the heart.

The whimsical charm of the Fine Arts Building is perfectly captured by the offices of the Flute Asylum:

As the name suggests, you can take your malfunctioning flute there for repair. The flute may well be the world’s oldest musical instrument. In 1995, archaeologists in Slovenia found, near a 50,000–60,000-year-old Neanderthal fire pit, an instrument made from a young cave bear’s bone, with three drilled holes and a sharpened mouthpiece.

The existence of higher-order needs in a species for whom mere survival was a daily challenge affirms the proverb “man does not live by bread alone.” But the idea of a caveman making music is less surprising on reflection. Walter Benjamin describes the two types of value that human beings assign to art. Cult value refers to the worth an artwork has because it is tied to a ritual–social or religious. The national anthem of a country, the rangoli in an Indian wedding, the pratima in Durga Puja and the birthday song has cult value. Exhibition value, by contrast, is the worth an artwork gains from being viewed by many people.

In the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes that the emphasis on the exhibition value of art is a relatively recent phenomena triggered by technologies (printing press, camera, audio recorders) that introduced reproducible art forms. But art in its ritualistic form is intrinsic to human life.

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Auditorium Building Roosevelt University

My walk along the Loop segment of Michigan Avenue ended at the Auditorium Building, which stands just south of the Fine Arts Building and is physically connected to it:

The origin story of the building lies in the desire of Chicago civil society to build an opera house. Given the cost of construction, the opera would not be financially viable. Hence, a "commercial part" consisting of office space and hotel were added to the "cultural part" of a theater. Even before construction was completed in 1889, the building hosted the 1888 Republican National Convention, where Benjamin Harrison accepted the party’s nomination. He went on to serve a single term as president.

The former hotel—now part of Roosevelt University, which owns the building—is accessible from the Michigan Avenue entrance:

Everyone knows about the famous Union Station staircase scene of The Untouchables in which Eliot Ness engages in a gunfight with gangsters as a baby carriage rolls down the steps. A lesser known staircase scene occurs when Elliot Ness confront Al Capone in the Auditorium Building staircase pictured above. In the film, Federal agent Ness forms an incorruptible team to battle Al Capone, the Chicago-based gangster who built a fortune selling bootlegged alcohol during Prohibition.

It seems strange now that the US would pass a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. The18th amendment was ratified by states in 1919 to prohibit the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors". It is extraordinary that the predecessor to the19th, which gave women the right to vote, would be such a foolish one. Incidentally, the 21st amendment, ratified in 1933, which ended Prohibition, is the only amendment in US history to repeal a previous one.

Chicago’s "gangster haven" reputation is rooted in Prohibition. Before the ban, crime in the U.S. was mostly a small business—localized gambling, prostitution, extortion. The sudden illegal demand for alcohol created “organized” crime, as bootlegging profits allowed gangs to expand geographically and develop professional operations such as bribing officials, laundering money, and evading taxes—the charge that ultimately brought down Al Capone. Hyman Roth’s line in The Godfather Part II—“We ran molasses into Canada”—alludes to this underground economy. While all this racketeering was happening across the country, Chicago and New York became the hubs.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions. Prohibition grew out of America’s temperance movement, which dates to the early 1800s and was led by activists, many of whom were women, alarmed at the toll male drunkenness took on wives and children. But even the most virtuous cause needs fertile ground to become state policy, and three forces provided it. The first was the same anti–working class immigrant sentiment that blamed Catherine O’Leary for burning down Chicago; many proponents were patricians who saw Prohibition as a way to save the recently arrived poor immigrants from their own vices. The second was the creation of the federal income tax in 1913, which lessened the government’s dependence on alcohol excise taxes. The third was World War I, which made conserving grain for food—not fermenting it into liquor—a patriotic duty.

The theater, which gives the building its name, is now accessed through the south side on Ida B. Wells Drive:

The Auditorium Building was one of the first to be lighted using electricity. The evolutionary paths of stationary versus mobile energy usage are antipodal. Transportation moved from electric to fuel, while home lighting moved from fuel to electric. In the late 19th century, the earliest automobiles were often electric, especially in cities, because they were quiet, clean, and easy to operate. However, as internal combustion engines improved and gasoline became cheap and widely available, petrol cars overtook electric ones. Home lighting followed the opposite path: it began with gas lamps in the 1800s, but as electricity infrastructure spread, electric lighting replaced gas.

The downfall of the Auditorium Building began in 1929 when it was hit simultaneously by two calamities.

First was the loss of the anchor tenant and the sine qua non of the building—the Chicago Opera Company, which moved to the newly opened Civic Opera House on Wacker Drive. Without the opera, the building lost the very institution it was designed to support.

Second was the stock market crash. That summer, the banker Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president, reputedly began liquidating his portfolio after a shoeshine boy offered him stock tips. Apocryphal or not, on the chilly Thursday morning of October 24, sell orders flooded the New York Stock Exchange between 11 a.m. and noon, with buyers failing to materialize even for blue-chip stocks. Prices plunged in search of demand. “Black Thursday” marked the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

By the time World War II had ended the Auditorium Building, which had been used during the war as a center for servicemen, had fallen into extreme disrepair. Roosevelt University purchased the Auditorium Building in 1946 for one dollar, assuming the cost of making the building habitable again. The theater which had closed in the 1940s was restored and reopened in 1967.

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Wrapping up

Reflecting on my ramblings above, I notice two threads pulling in opposite directions. One is the idea that human actions are guided by forces outside us. The zodiac, the influence attributed to numbers like Fibonacci, and Tolstoy’s theory of historical determinism all point that way. The image of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to fruitless toil, fits this vision. The other thread is that man shapes his own destiny. The sculptor Edward Kemeys, pursuing his life’s work of creating authentic animal replicas, was clearly exercising agency.

From the outside, when we study people—through science, history, ethics, or religion—we see patterns. Yet from the inside, our lived experience feels free—we believe we are choosing our actions. We are not tallying our social relationships, yet somehow we converge on the Dunbar number. Even those who intellectually accept that free will may be an illusion struggle to feel it viscerally.

In War and Peace, Tolstoy resolves this quandary by declaring that free will and inevitability are not rival explanations but rather two different perspectives on the same action. Free will is how a person experiences their action; inevitability is how nature views it. From nature’s perspective, our behavior is governed by laws, just like other rule-based phenomenon, like gravity or evolution. Thus, Tolstoy suggests that moral judgment still applies. Even if free will is illusory from some objective vantage point, humans experience it viscerally and must be held accountable for their actions.

It had been a long day and my mind was struggling to process more than a century of history packed in less than a mile. I called it a day committing to restart my explorations of the Loop the next day. Click here for Part 2 of these chronicles.