Where is the “Planet of the Arthropods”? Free-lance photographer Jim Rowan has found a planet where there are four times as many species of spiders, grasshoppers, butterflies, cicadas, and other arthropods than there are species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish combined. Rowan’s pictures of the earth’s most successful animal phylum may be seen starting September 26 at the Chicago Academy of Sciences.
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Hey, man, it’s a question of priorities. Writing in the Chicago-based Christian Century (February 5-12), Jon D. Levenson recalls chatting with a professor from a “prominent liberal seminary”: “‘Are there, then, any beliefs or practices required of the faculty or students now?’ asked one of the company. ‘No,’ replied the seminary professor firmly. But then, as an afterthought and in an undertone, he added, ‘except the requirement to use inclusive language.’ ” In other words, muses Levenson, at this seminary “one can deny with utter impunity that Jesus was born of a virgin or raised from the dead. But if one says that he was the son of God the father, one runs afoul of the institution’s deepest commitments.”
“When I started investing in buildings a friend and I would travel to the North Side of Chicago, put on hard hats, and walk into buildings that were being renovated to see how they did things,” says veteran South Shore rehabber and property owner Keith Banks in Targeted Investment (July/August). “That’s how I learned. I wanted buildings to look beautiful by sanding and staining wood floors, stripping old wallpaper and putting wrought iron fences around them. In the neighborhoods where I was investing, the rehabbers were painting floors with brown paint, papering over old wallpaper and installing Cyclone fences. It looked really ugly.”
“The Rookery was first and foremost a privately owned vehicle for making money, but, like other big office buildings of its day, because it was so big and so prominent, it also had a major civic function,” according to Robert Bruegmann in Inland Architect (July/August). “With all of its variety of tenants and services and the vast number of visitors coming and going to offices and shops, it had to operate like a small city within a city. The light court served as a kind of public square at the confluence of the corridors leading in from LaSalle and Adams streets.”
