Space limitations kept me from discussing all of Springfield’s International Style buildings in my recent column on jet-age architecture. You’d think that the basic building model for the state fair and similar expositions is the barn, and so it is at the state fairgrounds, but one of the barns at the Illinois State Fairgrounds is […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
If you don’t market it, will they come?
Photo by Alan Solomon/Tribune News Service You wouldn’t think that a town that boasts the burial place and the only adult home of a man famed around the world as not only America’s greatest president but America’s greatest citizen, a town furthermore that is just down the road from the reconstructed village where that man […]
Posted inOpinion
Jet-set architecture? In Springfield?
The State House Inn, designed by Henry L. Newhouse II, was the most stylish hotel in Springfield when it was built. After a 2003 reincarnation, it retains the title today. PHOTO COurTESY SANGAMON VALLEY COLlECTION AT LINCOLN LIBRARY Much in the way that human corpses become food for the worms, dead eras become food for […]
Posted inOpinion
Men in uniform
In “Off the rack” I chided the governor for his too-casual choices of attire while on the job. I concede that my standards in such matters were shaped by my first tow governors, William Stratton and Otto Kerner. Stratton was a bit of a dandy, Kerner went dignified. Kerner was named Best Dressed in his […]
Posted inOpinion
Vainglory
ILLUSTRATION BY RICK NEASE/TNS Some 30 years ago I was moved by the mindless boasting of the Republican blowhard in the White House to write this column, which appeared in the Prejudices series on Aug. 8, 1985. The presidential field at the moment offers us several others of the type, so I thought my […]
Posted inOpinion
Eggheads, again
This week I take up the governor’s choices in clothes, but I can find no fault with his grooming. I haven’t always been able to say that about Illinois’s senior politicians. In a 1990 column titled Eggheads, I examined – not a bit more closely than I had to – the topic of the comb-over […]
Posted inOpinion
Unfit
Usually when the subject is Illinois governors and someone brings up cuffs, you know what they mean. But this week I’m talking about attire, not arrests. We’ve had chief executives who preferred casual clothes – Jim Edgar comes to mind – but Bruce Rauner prefers what I call casualty clothes, because he looks likes a […]
Posted inOpinion
Off the rack
PHOTO BY PATRICK YEAGLE I took in two things during lunch the other day. One was bean soup. The other was Goethe’s observation that the nobleman “tells us everything through the person he presents, but . . . the burgher simply is, and when he tries to put on an appearance, the effect is ludicrous […]
Posted inOpinion
Faster., faster!
In “Unplugged” I wondered why Illinois’ internet service is so backward. I probably should have specified Downstate Illinois. These days Comcast customers in suburbs can get service with downloads speeds reliably in 125-135 Mbps range for under seventy bucks. Last month Comcast announced its plans to offer 1-gigabit-per-second Internet service to Chicago residential and business customers […]
Posted inOpinion
Seeing is believing – isn’t it?
Dearborn and Randolph, Chicago, May 25, 1909, from Souvenirs of Chicago, V.O. Hammon Co., 1915. History sleuths assert that the photographer asked traffic cops to knock off for five minutes, with the dramatic result you see here. Everyone likes picture books, and for mostly good reasons. Picture books about history are especially intriguing, in the […]
Posted inOpinion
Belew
A faithful reader was kind enough to share her own recollections of Adrian Belew in Springfield. She writes: Back in 1982 or so, I was at my parent’s house visiting. I grew up on South State. My mom was a precinct committee woman (wrong party, but I kept my mouth shut MOST of the time). She said that […]
Posted inOpinion
Tell me, Adrian . . .
This week in the print edition of IT we reran an old Prejudices column of mine about the brief sojourn of rock guitarist Adrian Belew in mid-Illinois. That version of the column had to be edited for length; here’s the original, uncut, as it appeared on June 17, 1982. OCTOBER 15, 1979: I encounter the […]
