Skyscrapers

Trump International Hotel & Tower is coming along nicely, you’ll be happy to hear. This groundbreaking structure will combine both a hotel AND a tower into one structure. I love towers, and don’t even get me started on hotels—they’re great! Did I ever think they would be combined? No. But these is modern times we’re living in. Anything is possible. Especially if you’re Mr. Trump.

I work on Wacker Drive, near Michigan Avenue, so I’ve witnessed the construction of this controversial 92-story building from its humble beginnings. And I mean humble. Mr Trump bought the crotchety old Chicago Sun-Times building and dismantled it floor by floor to make way for a behemoth glass structure that will slightly obscure Mr. Van Der Rohe’s famous IBM building. Sure the Sun-Times building was an rusty, crumbling eyesore to the glittery skyline of Chicago, but it was OUR eyesore, Chicago’s eyesore. And even though the use of typewriters went out with the 90’s and most people now get their news online or on tv, you could look at the building and easily imagine the old newspaper newsrooms of the past. No mas.

Seeing a new structure slowly climb to the sky is nothing new to us Chicagoans. All over Chicago (and other major American cities) there is a major influx of new construction, thanks to the interest rate situation. Old buildings are being knocked down to make way for snazzy new condos and skyscrapers.

Sure, I love architecture—good architecture. And I’m not one of those people who throws around the word “new-fangled” a lot. But seeing this phenomenon brings to mind the future: Besides the fact that filling these enormous buildings with people is going to bring a huge glut of people into the city, thus an overcrowding beyond which we already know--that is, if they can fill them at all--what is going to happen to all of these skyscrapers when they are out of date? What’s going to transpire when/if they fail and we have to spend millions of dollars to repair leaky piping or an inefficient air system? Or we grow bored of them? Or we want to replace it with another, more dazzling building?

It is one thing to raze a 100 year old “skyscraper”, as we might do these days. After all, turn-of –the-century skyscrapers were only 15 floors max. But, one can’t just put a wrecking ball to a 100 floor skyscraper. I needn’t bring up 9/11 to prove how dangerous a falling building can be. I can only imagine that any building within a population must be dismantled floor by floor, as in the case of The Sun-Times Building. Otherwise, you’re exposing the city to a host of environmental pollutants, not to mention the danger of something as harmless as a carpenter’s pencil falling from 1353 feet in the sky. How long would it take to dismantle a building as large as The Sears Tower? Surely, years. And millions of dollars.

Perhaps this problem will challenge how we currently live. Perhaps our love of money and instant gratification will force us to make-do with what we have and we will stop knocking down old buildings to erect new ones. Or, perhaps we’ll slow down and realize the consequences of our actions. Or perhaps we’ll just move farther and farther outside of current city limits and keep building new skyscrapers while our old ones lie in wasteland.

I don’t know and, ultimately, does it matter? We are all so blinded by Mr. Trump’s new 1,131 foot penis to give two poops about what happens to us in the future.

Goo-goo, gaa-gaa. Building so pretty and big!