“If in summer, you feel a need for a new, exciting experience,” writes Yvonne Henze in Natural Area Notes (June 1988), “let me suggest what I have enjoyed for years. Spend an early morning in a marsh–a crane marsh if you can find one–watching the sun come up and spread over the marsh. It is essential to be there before the first light of dawn. Marvelous! Inspiring! Breathtaking! If you are lucky enough to hear the early morning unison call of a pair of sandhill cranes, add another 100 points to the quality of your experience.”
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“We may even have to go to Canada to raise corn,” speculates University of Illinois at Chicago ecologist Thomas Poulson. “One of the consequences of a continuing drought will be that the kinds of crops that can be raised successfully in the midwest will be limited. . . . Illinois and other midwestern states may have to switch [from corn and soybeans] to crops that require less water, such as wheat and other grains.”
“This familiar scenario–art ventures forth and yuppies cone tumbling after–has been occuring throughout the River North area,” writes Laurie Palmer in the New Art Examiner (Summer 1988). “It is ironic that the art community ends up victimized by the role it has unwittingly played in this gentrification process–acting first as pioneers, then as bait, and finally as a potential liability to developers.” She says that galleries remaining in one recently sold building are suffering tripled rents, construction disruptions, and a certain indifference from the developer. “Apparently the elevators are going to be made smaller, to adapt from industrial to residential or ‘mixed’ use. When told the proposed dimensions of the new elevators, one dealer exclaimed that they would then be too small to transport art. The reply: “Make your art smaller.”
