May 2023 Issue: King (Print Edition)
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At the Threshold of Forgotten Dreams
"Jaume Plensa created the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park eighteen years ago. As the weather warms up, tourists and Chicago families with delighted, drenched children will again form ad hoc communities around the two large towers. In 2014, Plensa returned to the park to celebrate the work’s tenth anniversary with a temporary installation of several monumental heads nearby; he told me then he had not anticipated how the fountain would double as a place for play or for large gatherings. The site’s towers with their thousand giant illuminated faces, and the waters that roll over and gush out of them, make the pond-like plaza unexpectedly fulfill one of Plensa’s long-held dreams: to create a piece that lets viewer-participants walk on water. " (Ted C. Fishman)
Finishing the Hat
"It took lots of bold steps for Graham Thompson to reach the top of his game and become one of the best fine hatmakers in America. The Optimo Hat Company factory, 1700 West 95th Street, was built from the feisty spirit of a decommissioned 1914 Chicago firehouse. Visitors walk up a long flight of stairs underneath an eight-foot-tall Paul Natkin photograph of blues great John Lee Hooker wearing an Optimo hat before a 1998 concert at the Arlington Park racecourse. The building’s interior is finished in relaxed materials including blackened steel, walnut and cork. A cool lounge features Thompson’s collection of a thousand jazz LPs. And there are historic items that date back to when Thompson started Optimo twenty-seven years ago." (Dave Hoekstra)
American Jesus
"The New York Times best-selling author and “master storyteller,” as Emmy and Grammy award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns refers to him, eases into a chair before he is seated in a booth to discuss his latest project, a 688-page epic on the life of America’s Jesus, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For six years Eig transformed himself into something more than a biographer. Combing through previously unreleased documents of King’s life to present the martyr as someone who is far greater—and more complex—than the dream he once told the world he had." (Scoop Jackson)
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