Did you make it to the State Street celebration?
It was nice. Not grand. Taste of Chicago has grown grand and lost a lot of its charm along the way. The State Street festival was more bite-size and digestible.
The mayor came down to launch balloons, and there was rock music. At one tent, they were selling some unidentifiable meat on a stick, and the people cooking it were having a good time, shouting at the crowds and laughing at each other.
People seemed friendly and happy as they milled around, looking at the store windows or at the homemade art displayed under tents.
State Street still calls itself That Great Street, but it hasn`t been so hot for a long time, and everyone knows it.
You might have forgotten it, though, on the two days of the second annual State Street celebration. The people were back, and it was almost like the old days, if you ignored the fact that Wieboldt`s was closed and so was Goldblatt`s and so was Sears and Montgomery Ward`s was torn down.
What made it so special?
It took a while to figure it out, but then it began to dawn on the people in the crowds. They were so busy going from tent to tent and shop to shop that they forgot what a wonderful thing was happening:
The State Street Mall was turned into a mall for the two days of the celebration.
What a clever idea.
For two whole days the buses and the taxis and the police cars and the city cars and the other cars that use the State Street Mall as a throughway were diverted onto other streets in the Loop.
For two days the multimillion-dollar State Street Mall, generally acknowledged to be a disaster, was turned into a mall.
It was wonderful. People could jaywalk from one side of the street to the other without taking their lives in their hands.
The cops had put up barricades at the cross streets so that no one would accidentally think that it was the regular old State Street Mall bus parking lot and turn in on the live people.
The irony of the situation didn`t seem to occur to anyone connected with the celebration. The news releases did not point out the absurdity of taking a shopping mall that is not a mall and turning it into a mall. This is normal in a city where emperors regularly strut about without any clothes on and without anyone noticing.
Hopefully, some people from Oak Park came downtown to see the State Street Mall in its brief period of being a mall. Maybe they learned something. Oak Park has a mall, too, which is going to be torn down at great expense and turned back into a street, which it used to be. The wise folks who run things there have thrown millions into the mall and now think it was a bad idea from the start. Like the State Street Mall, the Oak Park Mall appalled.
The State Street Mall subverted itself from Day 1 (as Mayor Byrne, who opened it, might have said) by turning the middle of the mall-the part where people wander from one side to the other-into a bus barn for the CTA.
The Oak Park Mall took longer to turn off potential shoppers, but one of its brilliant strokes was to create a series of hilly berns through the middle of the mall so that people could not easily get from one side of the street to the other. It also created a series of little parking lots attended by parking attendants who would rather not be doing what they were doing, and so the FULL sign brought a gratifying level of frustration to suburban shoppers who wanted to use the damned thing.
The State Street Mall will eventually be turned back into a street at great expense because that is the way of these things.
One group or the other will point out that business is in decline on State Street and point to the fact that the collection of cars, trucks and buses that used to clog the street are missing and conclude that people hate malls.
The crowds at the State Street celebration didn`t seem to hate malls, though.
It used to be a grand thing when all the politicians marched down State Street in the St. Pat`s Day parade. The street was closed off, and there was a nice carnival feel to the thing.
The parade is still held, of course, but not on State Street, though a mall would seem to be an appropriate place to hold a parade.
All the parades, in fact, are held elsewhere because it is vital not to impede the CTA bus barn operating between Wacker and Congress.
The State Street Mall, in short, is a phony. Most of the time, it is a sterile imitation of what it once was, a modernist`s idea of a suburban shopping plaza rendered in downtown details.
But for a couple of days this hot summer it was a mall, and there were crowds and a few giggles and some rock music and it was fun to be on State Street again.
Maybe a genius or two in the ranks of the city or among the merchants still on the street might figure out that malling the State Street Mall more than just two days a year might possibly bring back the happy chaos of little shops, booths, food tents and-most importantly-people that generally make a shopping mall work its magic.
Of course, if there were any geniuses around, they wouldn`t have let the State Street Non-Mall Mall happen in the first place.
