(with apologies to those who like Chicago and her traditions less than I do, which is probably all of you)
I leave town for a week, and they go and change Marshall Field’s name on me. To fucking Macy’s.
It’s really hard to express how evil this is to a native-born Chicagolandian. I know many of the people who read this weblog live or have lived in Chicago, and I assume at least some of you share my disgust, but it’s nothing like having grown up here. Terry Lundgren could rape my mother and hardly generate more blind hatred than I feel for him right now.
The best part is that he “might” keep the brass name plate. No story I’ve found mentions the clock, but if that comes down look for herds of angry shoppers marching to New York with pitchforks and torches. (Which brings me to a rant I won’t have right now – replacing a specifically Chicago landmark with a specifically New York one. That is depraved).
Everyone from Chicago is going to have a Field’s story in the days and weeks and months to come, so here’s one of mine: December 1995, I was on the waning edge of 13, and going Christmas-shopping on State Street for the first time ever. Between me and the city proper were something like 20 malls – it didn’t make any sense for my family to drive that far for clothes, so we never made the effort. But it just so happened that we had theater tickets one wintry night at the Auditorium (for Miss Saigon, I believe), and my mother hadn’t seen the Field’s windows in about a decade, so we decided to arrive early and walk a few blocks to do a little bit of shopping.
The windows that year were based on the book Pinocchio, and if my memory serves they were pretty dull (they kind of always are, I hate to say). But then we went inside, and I was floored: I hate to admit it now and dislodge the veneer of cool urbanity that I have wrapped around myself in the last five years, but I had never been in a huge city department store before, and I never realized that you could go shopping on eight fucking floors! And as we browsed, we eventually made it to the observation area over the Walnut Room on the top floor, and I looked down on that two-story Christmas tree in the middle of the restaurant, and it impressed me because even though I was a week away from 14, I wasn’t jaded yet. You could turn around and see the skating rink across the street, 9 or 10 stories below. It might have been snowing, or that might be the haze of nostalgia.
And sometime in 2006, just like that, it’s going to go from the State Street Marshall Field’s to yet another fucking Macy’s, because in the words of Da Mare, we’re not a city that clings to the past. You know what, Daley? We actually are. We are a stolid, pragmatically ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it Midwestern city, for good and bad. And while I’m no conservative and the word “tradition” sends chills down my spine, I still know an Institution when I see it, and Field’s is just as much a part of Chicago as the El or Wacker Drive or Lincoln Park or the Natural History Museum which, I am advised, may also have been named for Marshall Field, and may it hold this name for many years to come.
In the meantime, I need to go stock up on socks before the End Times.