Building Ideology in Chicago
Chair(s): Mark Clague (University of Michigan)
If walls could talk, Chicago’s would sing. Throughout Chicago’s history, music and architecture have served as tools of communication through which power relations manifest and ideologies become embodied. We take up a question posed by two of the city’s preeminent architecture critics, Blair Kamin and Lee Bey, on the field of historical preservation: “Whose history gets remembered, and whose history is erased, either by bulldozers or by willful ignorance? In short, who is the city for?” Chicago remains a musical and architectural destination, and we observe how political ideas have influenced its built infrastructure, and, in turn, the sounds created in those environments. These physical structures are shaped by the aesthetic preferences, cultural perspectives, economic resources, and political forces of the moment in which they were built, yet countless contemporary concerns are built upon Chicago’s musical infrastructure, including equitable access to artistic programming, a new labor movement for arts workers, and efforts to preserve the city’s musical history. This panel examines the critical nexus at which architecture and ideology formation converge in Chicago’s storied musical past. In our intervention, we ask how architecture of spaces intended for musical functions—conventionally the domain of the city’s elite—might instead serve its listening publics. We examine how preservation efforts have amplified some musical histories while relegating others to silence. The first paper highlights the ways that Progressive Era infrastructure constructed in Chicago parks, such as bandshells, fieldhouses, and pavilions, shaped an ideology of who should constitute audience in public spaces. The second paper traces the ways in which the 1993 Symphony Center renovation-as-neoliberal-project invariably shaped the material working conditions of classical music laborers under the guise of restoring reverb time. Finally, the third paper will unpack the many challenges the author faced in the preservation of historically queer music spaces in the city during their work toward securing landmark status for the Warehouse, now considered the birthplace of House music.
Presentations of the Symposium
From Fieldhouse to Opera House: Ideology, Infrastructure, and Music in Chicago’s Parks During the Early 20th Century
Katherine Brucher
DePaul University
This paper explores the ways that Chicago’s public parks became a focal point for building a civic identity through music during the first half of the 20th century. Chicago parks gave rise to a distinctive urban music scene that nurtured amateur musicianship, endeavored to entertain the masses, and provided opportunities to those who pursued music as a profession. Park district buildings, instructional programs, and public performances, documented in local newspapers, scrapbooks and clipping files, and Chicago Park District records held at Chicago Public Library Special Collections, attest to the ways that parks served competing interests and different constituencies shaped by factors such as age, economic class, ethnic and racial background, and neighborhood. As Chicago’s population grew and the city acquired more land, municipal agencies, such as the South Park Commission (1889–1934), the West Park Commission (1889–1934), and the Chicago Park District (1934–present) developed parks, constructed public buildings, and introduced recreational programming to address a wide range of perceived social issues. The city invested in physical infrastructure for music making, such as the Grant Park Bandshell, built in 1931 and home to Grant Park Music Festival from 1935-1975, and neighborhood fieldhouses, such as the one in Union Park on the Near West Side, that supported amateur music performances, instructional programs, and neighborhood festivals. The structures that weren’t built, such as a 6,000 seat opera houses planned for River Park on the Northwest Side but abandoned at the onset of the Great Depression, also offer insight into the city government and different communities understood music to play a role in civic culture. Park programs and infrastructure that began during the Progressive Era laid the groundwork for municipal music making that intensified during the Great Depression with the creation of the Chicago Park District in 1934 and the support of federal Works Progress Administration funds. The legacy of these programs reverberates into 21st century with park district sponsored programs and public concert series that continue to shape Chicago’s civic identity.
In Search of Lost Reverb Time: Orchestra Hall Renovations and the Acoustic Work Environment
Natalie Farrell
University of Chicago
Throughout the 1990s, what David Harvey calls the emergent business class bourgeoisie rebuilt bastions of robber baron musical high culture in their own image: LA’s Walt Disney Hall, for example, solidified the neo-shoebox/vineyard approach as classical music’s new ideal. However, when Mayor Richard M. Daley tasked the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association with updating Chicago’s cultural amenities in his efforts to replace the city’s once-dominant industrial sector with private equity, the CSOA opted to transform the (in)famously dry Orchestra Hall into the more reverberant, multipurpose Symphony Center. The CSOA took out $150 million in TIF bonds, thereby creating an immense deficit that led to multiple strikes and lockouts in the following decades. In this paper, I take a historical materialist approach as I contextualize the 1993 Symphony Center project as more than a quest to amend Orchestra Hall’s reverb time: it was an act of creative destruction that encapsulated the aesthetic and financial consequences of Chicago’s transformation from an industrial city to a financial hub (in turn shaking up the CSO’s Board of Trustees, nearly bankrupting the Chicago Federation of Musicians, and irrevocably changing the orchestra’s sonic identity).
Orchestra Hall’s renovations straddled the need for acoustic adjustments while visually preserving a sense of institutional history carved into Daniel Burnham’s architectural flourishes. The dynamic and timbral potentials afforded by Orchestra Hall’s idiosyncratic acoustics cemented the material conditions from which the CSO developed its Solti-era, brass-heavy legacy. Solti’s departure, coupled with Daley’s discomfort after a few financially unstable seasons, prompted a major reimagining of whose music should sound good in Orchestra Hall—and at what cost. The Symphony Center project fundamentally altered the orchestra’s working conditions by insulating the hall from the city soundscape, trying (but not succeeding) to increase reverb time, and eliminating quasi-acousmatic playing conditions. By the time the bill was due, not only did musicians lose their relationships with their work environment, but they lost their pensions. The American symphonic institution has always already been in financial free fall, and architecture in which it is housed plays an oft-overlooked, outsized role in shaping the working conditions of its musical laborers.
The Battle to Preserve The Warehouse
Max Chavez
Preservation Chicago
In 2022, Preservation Chicago named The Warehouse, the birthplace of house music helmed by music pioneer and legend Frankie Knuckles, one of the seven most endangered sites in the city of Chicago after a sale of the building. The immediate international demand for landmark protection led to the iconic site of musical and queer history receiving Chicago Landmark status in the summer of 2022, cementing the building’s significance for all time.
The site’s worldwide resonance speaks to the cultural footprint of house music and its deep-rooted connection to the queer community. The site’s potential loss and its eventual landmarking has sparked a renewed interest in the Warehouse as a symbol of this relationship and house music’s status as one of Chicago’s most beloved and popular cultural exports.
For too long in the city of Chicago, the informality and ephemerality of queer music spaces have led to them being erased from the built environment. In fact, the Warehouse’s protected status brings it into rare company: there are only a small handful of landmarked sites of musical history in Chicago and, now including the Warehouse, only three landmarked sites of queer heritage. The Warehouse’s landmarking makes it resoundingly clear that these stories are more than worthy of honoring with permanent protections.
The Warehouse is a great rarity: a singular location where a genre’s—an entire culture’s—genesis can be distinctly pinpointed. Its retention as a storytelling device is potent. It evokes memories and histories from past attendees, with a humble size that belies its incalculable cultural heft, and it inspires people to visit from afar as a sort of Mecca. This new landmark status validates marginalized Black and queer communities, centering their struggles and their successes within the Chicago landscape, and forever declares house music as a core component of Chicago’s DNA.
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