Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Page 4
I always liked to stand at the crossroads outside Fanny Mae’s for a wee while, imagining flaming arrows flying overhead. On one occasion a young woman came up to me, a kind of hippy girl, and asked what I was doing. I told her I was thinking of Indians ambushing the pioneers.
‘Oh, you like all that kind of stuff about Chicago?’ she said.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Love it.’
‘Do you like architecture?’
‘Oh yeah. You bet.’
And it’s true – I do. The Michigan–Wacker Historic District in the centre of Chicago, where Fort Dearborn used to stand, is an amazing place for gazing at buildings. There’s a remarkable line-up of world-class architecture on both banks of the Chicago River, such as the gleaming white art deco Wrigley Building, chosen by William Wrigley, the chewing gum magnate, to house his company. There are several other stunning granite skyscrapers built in the 1920s and 1930s. But smack in the middle of all that fabulous beauty is a glass monstrosity, erected where another lovely white stone building used to stand. The modern eyesore was built by Donald Trump and, in my opinion, it’s a piece of shit, so I always just pretend it’s not there. It looks totally out of place, and it makes me quite angry that Trump was allowed to build it. He wants to be President, but I can’t help thinking that the whole country would end up looking like a public toilet if he was ever elected.
Gazing at all of the surrounding buildings with the hippy lass, I pointed at what looked like a big, skinny cathedral. ‘That’s my favourite,’ I said.
‘Oh, mine too,’ she said.
So we started to walk towards the Chicago Tribune Building, and on the way over she asked, ‘Do you have old buildings in Scotland?’
I’m still laughing about that question now, but at the time I just said, ‘Yeah.’
‘We’ve got buildings here a hundred years old,’ she said.
‘Ooh.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘in Scotland, there’s a place called New Bridge. It’s called New Bridge because they built a new bridge there … in the seventeenth century. Mind you, they’re still driving over the old bridge.’
The girl looked kind of bewildered, then wandered off. I’m sure she didn’t believe a word of it.
It was a short walk from the site of Fort Dearborn to the Chicago Tribune Building and I crossed the river on one of the many bridges that could be raised to allow tall shipping to pass into Lake Michigan. On St Patrick’s Day, they dye the river green in recognition of Chicago’s large Irish community. But the dye wasn’t really necessary, as the river had a weird green tint to it all year round. Walking over the bridge, I again had reason to doubt the origins of Chicago’s nickname. The city might have more than its fair share of gasbag politicians and boastful locals, but that morning it didn’t seem that way. My hair was the clue: a horizontal haircut. Try telling me that Chicago wasn’t windswept.
Approaching the Chicago Tribune Building, the first thing you notice is the vertical stripes, which makes it seem much taller than its 462 feet. But move closer and it looks more like a Gothic King Arthur’s Castle. This combination might sound incongruous, but it works brilliantly. It’s a most attractive building, built as a result of a competition held in 1922 to design the most beautiful office building in the world. The architects won a $100,000 prize and the commission to build the tower. If they held the same competition today, I think the same architects would win again. They would certainly get my vote. I love it. I know some breathtaking buildings are being constructed, especially in Spain, but I don’t think any of them compare with the Chicago Tribune Building. To me, it’s a thing of absolute beauty. But there’s more to the building than just the original design, as brilliant as that is.
The original owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Robert ‘Colonel’ McCormick, had been a war correspondent and he went to Europe early in the First World War to interview Tsar Nicholas II, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. While travelling around Europe, he collected chunks of historic buildings, including a lump of stone that had been blown off Ypres Cathedral by the German artillery. Initially, he just kept these as souvenirs, but then he instructed the Tribune’s correspondents, wherever they were in the world, to start collecting pieces of other famous buildings ‘by well-mannered means’. When the correspondents arrived back in Chicago with their booty, the pieces of masonry were implanted in the outer walls of the lower storeys of the Chicago Tribune Building.
Now, walking around the tower, I kept spotting them, and it was difficult not to exclaim whenever I saw a chunk: ‘Ooh, look, a wee bit of Edinburgh Castle!’ or ‘Wow, a chunk of the Parthenon!’ Quite how the correspondents managed to collect all of this stuff ‘by well-mannered means’ was a mystery to me. Did they sneak up Edinburgh’s High Street in the middle of the night with a sledgehammer and smash a chunk off the castle walls? I didn’t know, so I suppose it was better not to question their methods and just enjoy the result.
There were lumps of masonry from Tibet, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Palace of Westminster, the Great Pyramid, the Alamo, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb, the Berlin Wall, Angkor Wat – the list went on and on. In all, there are 136 fragments of other buildings implanted into the walls of the Chicago Tribune Building. As I walked around the perimeter, I took a wee look at each piece of Colonel McCormick’s grand haul: the Royal Castle, Stockholm; the Ancient Temple, Hunan Province; Fort Santiago; St David’s Tower, Jerusalem; a piece from the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican; a wee bit of Pompeii; the Badlands, South Dakota – that was a nice one; the Monastery of St Michael of Ukraine; the Old Post Office in O’Connell Street, Dublin, where the Irish rebellion started; the Temple of the Forbidden City, Beijing; a roof tile from some Roman ruins; a tiny shard of stone from the Cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem; a rock from Flodden Field in Northumberland, where the English gave the Scots one hell of a doing; then, next to it, a piece from the Tower of Tears in Amsterdam.
But my favourite is a fragment of Injun Joe’s Cave, a show cave in Missouri on which Mark Twain based the cave he described in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I’m a Twain fanatic, so I was really disappointed when it wasn’t where I thought it would be. But then, at the very last second, I came around a corner and there it was, my old pal sticking straight out of the wall. Just seeing it made my day. The smallest things can make me happy. I gave it a little rub, just to check I hadn’t imagined it. Phew. I wasn’t senile like I thought I might be.
From my favourite building I walked a few blocks south down Michigan Avenue, one of my favourite streets, past more magnificent architecture to Millennium Park, which adjoins Grant Park, where Barack Obama held his victory speech after winning the 2008 presidential election. Still marvelling at the fabulous buildings, I reflected that Chicago was a very beautiful place – a stunningly good-looking city – and Chicagoans generally seemed intent on keeping it that way, making it more gorgeous as they went along. It wasn’t like Edinburgh, where the city authorities were in the process of plonking a big bloody tram system down the middle of Princes Street, the jewel in the city’s crown.
It seemed to me that most of the world’s beautiful cities – Venice, Rome, Paris, even Glasgow, which was a gorgeous Victorian city – were constantly under pressure from cretins who wanted to build awful eyesores, or demolish the beauty and replace it with car parks. I could only assume that the people who found themselves in positions of authority, which they achieved because they were desperate for power, seldom had any aesthetic taste. Meanwhile, the people who did have taste didn’t seek power. So cities were constantly under threat because the tasteless people were always in charge. It saddened me. But walking down the streets of Chicago really cheered me up, because it was a living example of how a city could improve and get better looking all the time.
Then I arrived at Millennium Park, which was the cherry on Chicago’s icing. Clos
e to the shore of Lake Michigan, right in the middle of the city, this was a stunning park, but there was a huge row about it when it was built. Although it covered only twenty-four acres, it cost $475 million, more than three times its original budget, which the people of Chicago funded through a combination of taxes and donations. To make matters worse, it opened four years late, in 2004, long after the New Year’s Eve it was meant to celebrate.
However, in spite of its shaky beginnings and huge cost, I thought it was a triumph, and incredible value for money. It will last a long time and Chicagoans will keep reaping its rewards. I only wished we had something similar in Glasgow.
It reminded me of a story I once heard about a city that bought some Jackson Pollock paintings. The authorities were harangued and mercilessly ridiculed by everyone who thought the paintings were worthless junk. Then, ten or twenty years later, the ridicule stopped as those people who’d complained and grouched discovered what a wonderful investment the city had made on their behalf. I hoped the same thing happened with Millennium Park. It was already Chicago’s second most popular tourist attraction, and the area around it had the fastest-appreciating real estate in America. But what really mattered was that it was such a life-affirming place, thanks in part to its designer, Frank Gehry – probably the most important architect of our age.
Built over rail yards and parking lots, the centrepiece of the park was an ultra-modern, vast open-air concert venue that accommodated 4,000 in seats and another 7,000 on a huge lawn. A field of thick grass sloped down towards the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a stage surrounded by 120-foot-high slices of brushed stainless steel that looked like ribbons fluttering in the wind. Above it all, a spider’s web of criss-crossing pipes housed hundreds of loudspeakers, suspended above the audience to distribute the sound as effectively as inside a concert hall. It was unbelievable.
Nearby, there was a great sculpture by the Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor. Although called ‘Cloud Gate’, everybody knew it as ‘The Bean’. If you saw it, you’d know why: it looked just like a 66-foot-long, 33-foot-high, shiny, metallic jelly bean. Created using a huge number of stainless-steel plates weighing more than 110 tons, ‘The Bean’ had been polished to such a fine degree that I couldn’t see a single seam. Jesus only knows how Anish Kapoor managed to do it. But what everyone loved about The Bean was the way it stretched and distorted views of the Chicago skyline behind you when you stood in front of it. And when I walked underneath it, I saw myself multiplied, repeated and stretched.It was like looking into a psychedelic kaleidoscope.
The area around ‘The Bean’ is extremely beautiful, and when we filmed there it was full of people, even though it was a very cold day. A mass of really happy visitors were taking photographs, wandering around, and smiling and laughing when they saw their reflections in the sculpture – surely that was proof of its value. Young and old alike were tickled by it. People even did little dances to see how their reflections would move. It struck me that ‘The Bean’ had a quality like the International Camera Dance Movie that for years I’ve been threatening to make. My plan would be to take a movie camera out of its case, put it on a tripod in an urban area, and just leave it running. Children would jump up and down in front of it. Adults would stop and stare. And whatever country they came from, people’s reactions would be the same. ‘Ooh,’ they’d say in their native tongue, ‘look – a camera.’ Then they’d shimmy around in front of it, moving in for a closer look. You might think I’m indulging in my habit of digressing, but there’s a point here. Just like ‘The Bean’, and in the nicest possible way, my movie would have no point whatsoever. They’re both just fun and interesting and they make us smile. And a lot of good things have no point at all.
So, if you ever get the chance, have a look at the views of Chicago that are reflected in ‘The Bean’. There’s no point to it, but just go and see if it has the same effect on you as it has on everyone else. I bet it does.
A short walk from ‘The Bean’ is something else that would blow anyone away. Called the ‘Crown Fountain’ and designed by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, it’s a pair of 50-foot-tall glass towers that display video images of a thousand Chicago residents in what looks like a big picture frame. I won’t even pretend to know how they superimposed the images on to the 50-foot-high glass towers, but it’s fascinating to watch as the giant faces smile for a few minutes, then pucker their lips all kissy-kissy while pipes send out large streams of water, giving the illusion that the water is spouting from their mouths. Kids absolutely love it, me included.
Of course, there’s always uproar when a government or a council spends public money on something like this, as if art wasn’t worth the effort of spending money. But then a government will go and spend billions on nuclear missiles and hardly anybody lets out a squeak. What’s wrong with the world? You get an atomic submarine that’s good for nothing but maiming and killing, and people almost applaud the thing when it comes into harbour. But spend a few dollars on a beautiful work of art and people are outraged. ‘The Bean’, the ‘Crown Fountain’ and the other parts of Millennium Park are a joy, yet people always moan about how much it all costs. The park is a lovely place to be, dynamic and relaxing at the same time. It’s great. And you know what? I think it’s a snip at $475 million.
From the park, it’s a very short hop, skip and jump across Michigan Avenue to the original start of Route 66 at the corner of Jackson Boulevard. It’s traditional for Route 66 travellers to have their final meal in Chicago and their first on Route 66 at Lou Mitchell’s, which has been at 555 West Jackson Boulevard since 1923. It’s a nice enough place that does an all-day breakfast and very good Danish pastries, but I had an appointment to keep around the corner.
Although the junction of Jackson and Michigan was the original starting point in 1926, it’s no longer the place where most people begin their journey. There are two reasons for this. First, in 1933, after the World Fair freed up some land to create Grant Park, the start was moved a few blocks to the east – to Lakeside Drive on the edge of Lake Michigan. Then, in 1955, the City of Chicago turned Jackson Boulevard into an eastbound one-way street, making it impossible to head west on the original Route 66. As a result, the start was moved a block north to Adams Street, another one-way street, but going in the opposite direction.
If all of that sounds complicated, it’s nothing in comparison to what happened to the rest of Route 66. Throughout its history, the Mother Road was more akin to a meandering river than a fixed road: its source and destination remained constant, but its route frequently changed to suit local circumstances. So shifting the start from Jackson to Adams is a very apt harbinger of what will follow in the miles ahead.
I arrived on Adams Street without my trike, as I still wasn’t quite ready to begin. First, we had to shoot some publicity stills beneath a sign that marked the start of Route 66. I’ve never been a big fan of having my picture taken. To me, it’s as bad as going to the dentist, a kind of root-canal vibe. The photographers are usually really nice guys, but I can’t help feeling – when I’m doing something with my face, my eyes, or the angle of my head – that the snapper is thinking, Is this how this prick sees himself? I know it’s probably just paranoia, but I can never get shot of it, so I always find the whole process kind of awkward, and I’m usually very glad when it’s over.
That evening, I was especially glad when we finished because it was bloody freezing, so much so that I went out and bought some thermals afterwards. Something weird was happening to the weather in the Midwest of America in late April 2011. To the east, west and north of us there were typhoons, hurricanes and probably fucking tsunamis by the dozen. I had no idea what was going on, but it did occur to me that it might be the end of the world.
The next day I was back at the corner of Adams and Michigan, now dressed in my leather jacket and leather chaps, with a nice big crutch cut out of them – just what I needed to let in the freezing-cold air. I pulled on my helmet and threw a double-six to start.
Leaving early in the morning, I didn’t need to be told it was a Sunday – it’s a strange day all over the world. I’ve got a theory that if you were unconscious in a coma for twenty years and you suddenly woke up, you might not know where you were, but you would know if it was a Sunday. It’s got a particular vibe to it, just like Friday night – my personal favourite. I think that Friday night feeling comes from the days when I had my welder’s wages in my back pocket, all aftershave and shoeshine, going dancing at the end of the week at the Barrowland or the Dennistoun Palais in Palermo shoes with inch-vents on the jacket and sixteen-inch drainpipe trousers. Happy days.
Riding off on the magic trike to the sound of a busker playing a saxophone – of all things, it sounded like ‘Careless Whisper’ by George Michael – we soon left Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago behind us. I’d wanted to pop into the Institute to see a specific painting, Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’ – the one with the guy in his overalls holding a pitchfork, standing next to his daughter. But we never made it, mainly because of all that weird weather. And it was still weird now – we were heading straight towards tornadoes. I dearly hoped we wouldn’t run into one. I’d seen a tornado once before, and it was more than enough to last me the rest of my life.