THE SPACESHIP HAS LANDED
By Lois Wille
– I saw several computer-generated views of the new Bears stadium on television recently, and it looked nice. One simulated an aerial photo. If you are a bird or a passenger in a blimp hanging high in the sky above the playing field, you will see a graceful, pale blue oval lipped in white. In another, virtually-real people bundled up for a game walk along a sunlit ramp lined with food stands and shops and restrooms on one side, and the noble pillars of what once was Soldier Field on the other. Then the virtual tour shifts to a summery, non-game day, with sightseers strolling on a new red-tiled walkway through one of the old colonnades.
Everything was bright and fresh and inviting, a fine setting for a football game. And pleasant just to visit, too. One of its architects, narrating the TV tour, suggested that the colonnades might become a popular spot for outdoor weddings.
Something was missing, though, from the pretty little travelogue. With the exception of the bird’s-eye view from on high, there was nothing to indicate what this new stadium will look like from more than a few yards away. Yet that’s how most people will see it, including the residents of Chicago, who are the owners of the lakefront park on which it sits and the folks who will make up the difference if the city’s hotel tax should ever fall short of the $33.3 million a year, on average, it must generate for the next 30 years to retire the bonds that are paying for the stadium.
The new Home of the Bears–it’s difficult now to think of it as Soldier Field–is only half-built, but it’s already clear what its impact will be on its surroundings.
Chicago’s famous lakefront museums were designed to respect, at least in spirit, a pledge made 166 years ago by city founders and state officials: the land along Lake Michigan would be a public park, forever, clear and free. The museums and even Soldier Field in its early days fit that concept. They were low and beautifully proportioned, compatible with each other and careful not to clash with the serene shoreline. When they had to expand, they did it in ways that honored their settings.
Now, walk south in Grant Park toward the Museum Campus, and . . . what are those things rising above the Field Museum? Gigantic steel ribs jut into the sky and then curve inward like monstrous pitchforks. Hurry south to Cullerton Avenue, a mile away, and there they are again, hovering above the pricey new townhouses under construction in the Prairie Avenue Historic District. Flee north along Indiana Avenue to the Central Station neighborhood, where Mayor Richard M. Daley lives. Here is a gracious little parkway between two sets of townhouses labeled “Harbor Square” and “Park Row,” bordered by wrought iron lampposts of the sort beloved by the mayor. Not long ago, it perfectly framed a view of the Soldier Field colonnades. Now an enormous steel superstructure soars over the columns, looking as if it will crush them at any moment. The mayor’s neighbors must love their new view.
This is only temporary, of course. The giant prongs and beams will become the west grandstand of the new stadium. Its outer wall will be curtained in glass, but that won’t hide the fact that it mocks the old Soldier Field columns with its height and arrogance, it destroys the compatibility, the serenity and the dignity of the Museum Campus, and it violates the historic pledge made to the people of Chicago to preserve the lakefront as a public trust.
This is most obvious from the east side of the stadium. It does not rise as high as the seven-story west grandstand and it’s already sheathed in glass, so it doesn’t look quite as menacing. But the view from here seems even more depressing. The contrast between the gleaming blue-tinted glass and the classical colonnades is not dynamic and interesting, as its designers had hoped. It’s bizarre and comic. The nearby Field Museum, with its decorative friezes that match those of the Soldier Field remnants, seems diminished by the incongruity.
Across the waters of Burnham Harbor is a small island. It was created with landfill in the 1920s, along with the park that became the Soldier Field site. Both landfills were financed by city taxpayers and inspired by Daniel Burnham’s great Plan of Chicago. One was to be a water-oriented family playground, the other a “great meadow” for staging city festivals and amateur sports of all kinds.
Instead of the promised playground, the people got Meigs Field, an airport used primarily by state officials traveling back and forth to Springfield and out-of-town executives in Chicago for one-day business trips. Instead of the arena for civic events and prep sports that was the original Soldier Field, there will be a stadium built primarily with tax dollars to the specifications of the National Football League and the owners of the Chicago Bears, who will profit handsomely from the deal. And possibly double their franchise’s potential selling price.
No doubt about it, this is Bears Stadium rising along the public’s lakefront, not a “new” Soldier Field. Dirk Lohan, partner in the architectural team that designed it, has said he could not be as site-sensitive as he was in his superb additions to the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium because National Football League standards demanded the steeply pitched grandstands. That’s not all. In its agreement with the Bears, the Chicago Park District guaranteed that the stadium would be upgraded to meet future NFL standards.
The walkway between the new stadium and the lakefront has a decorative marble inset inscribed with these words:
MEMORIES ARE LIKE STARLIGHT
THEY GO ON FOREVER
Perhaps Mayor Daley could add:
PUBLIC TRUSTS ARE LIKE PORCELAIN
THEY ARE EASILY BROKEN
LITTLE HOPE FOR FOES OF NEW STADIUM
“THE LAST STAND” (FEB. 17, 2002)
– Though it has long been the adopted home of the Chicago Bears, Soldier Field in 2002 began a transformation into a home designed with the team in mind–instead of a stadium built to host track and field events and public rallies. The stadium is more than halfway completed since photographer Chris Walker began documenting the old stadium’s transformation after the last Bears game there on Jan. 19.
Opponents worked hard to derail the $632 million plan to plop a modern arena inside the confines of the 1924 stadium’s historic colonnades. After a judge threw out the second of two lawsuits against the project in April, however, most observers counted out any chance of stopping what some called the Bears’ “spaceship.”
But still clinging to hope are the plaintiffs in the lawsuits, the Friends of the Parks and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, who still have appeals pending. In late November, the Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the suit thrown out in April, in an appeal that the court allowed to bypass the usual appellate process and go directly before the justices. A decision in the case could come within a few weeks, or as late as next May.
One of the attorneys on the case, University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, said legal precedent would allow the court to order the Bears “to rip the whole thing out and start somewhere else.” That would mean pulling off the unlikely feat of convincing a Democratic-majority Supreme Court that it should order a Democratic mayor’s administration to undo hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work.
Some experts say a likelier possibility would be that the court might order a new financing scheme for the $432 million in tax-backed bonds for the project. The plaintiffs’ suits did succeed in revealing details of the benefits the Bears’ owners, the McCaskey family, will reap from work in which they’re investing less than $40 million of their own money–including profits from game-day concessions. The team estimates its profits will triple and the value of the franchise will double, according to figures made public during the second lawsuit.
Whatever the ultimate fate of the lawsuits, crews have completed about 60 percent of the work at Soldier Field, a spokesman for the project says. Though critics scoffed at the possibility a new stadium could be built between January 2000 and Sept. 28, 2003, project manager Alice Hoffman and the Bears-picked team of construction contractors seem well on their way to proving them wrong.
“The big emphasis over the winter is the enclosing of the east side in glass,” and finishing off the interiors of the skyboxes and banquet rooms that will dominate the Lake Michigan side of the stadium, said Barnaby Dinges, a spokesman for the project.
Workers are almost finished with the steel skeleton of the new arena, and should have the support frames for two 20-by-80-foot scoreboards done by the end of the year. An underground parking garage north of the field also is nearly completed, and that has allowed crews to begin installing the north grandstands, the last section of stands to start going up. Outside the stadium, a sledding hill has been constructed from earth excavated from the stadium’s two garage sites. Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, while withholding final judgment on the new stadium, has urged the National Park Service to take it off the list of the country’s National Historic Landmarks even before it opens because the architectural integrity of the original structure clearly has been lost.
— Liam Ford
SOMETHING TO SMILE ABOUT
“LIFE AFTER WELFARE” (JUNE 23, 2002)
– Pamela Burrell, an Aurora single mother who got off the cash welfare rolls and struggled with unemployment and a mountain of debt, finally got a new set of teeth this year. That, she had thought, would be just the thing she needed to set her life back on track. Her gap-filled mouth, she felt sure, was what had held her back during job interviews and meetings. She had grown so self-conscious, she rarely smiled.
So, right around her 40th birthday in August, with financial help from DuPage County’s Family Self-Sufficiency program and a Tribune subscriber who had read about her plight, Burrell got 13 false teeth in a set of dentures–precious, gleaming jewels in Burrell’s eyes.
“I love them,” she said recently. “I don’t want to take them out. You’re not supposed to sleep in them, you know, but I do.”
But the teeth alone, it turned out, were not a quick fix. Burrell, who got a college degree while receiving cash aid, is still searching for a job. Since we told her story in June, she has sent out more than 50 resumes and had four interviews. She said she has had no offers.
She still receives government food stamps and Supplemental Security Income for two of her daughters, but she has not reapplied for cash assistance, which has been the chief target of the 1996 overhaul of the nation’s welfare system. The lifetime limit of cash assistance sent thousands off the rolls and to work.
Burrell, who had been determined to live in the suburbs for the better safety and education they offered her three young children, now says she will go anywhere–Chicago, out of state–wherever there’s a job. “I’m questioning a lot of things now,” Burrell said. “I’m questioning myself. I’m questioning God now.”
Someday, she says, she aspires to create a non-profit group to assist other single mothers in tackling issues like child support, education and children with disabilities.
Reapplying for cash assistance, Burrell says, is not an option. It’s not worth the hassle, the red tape, the sense of begging and pleading. Still, she says, she wishes President Bush and other welfare-reform proponents could better understand the challenges that she and women like her face.
— Monica Davey
1.5 MILLION ARE SHOWN A NEW WORLD VIEW
“GETTING OFF THE GROUND” (MAY 26, 2002)
– Before the June 21 opening of the “Earth From Above” photo exhibit in Millennium Park, French aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand said: “Flying above the Earth, there are no nationalities. We all come from the Earth and, rich or poor, city or country, we must depend on each other.” That message was conveyed to more than 1.5 million people of all nationalities who viewed the exhibition this summer. It was so popular with tourists and locals that it was extended two weeks beyond its original Sept. 15 closing date.
“It was a success on every level,” says Valentine Judge, the director of marketing for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which presented the show. “I’d say that maybe half the visitors were tourists. A lot of Chicagoans visited the show three, four times. They kept coming back and bringing friends and relatives.”
The exhibition featured 120 photos blown up to supersize–4 by 6 feet–in vivid colors. They were taken by Arthus-Bertrand from planes and helicopters that flew over dozens of countries around the world. Some were beautiful and some disturbing, and each was embellished by lengthy captions that addressed ecological issues.
One poignant moment came last Sept. 11, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. At one end of the exhibition, a large color map on the ground helped people locate the places depicted in the photos, and on Sept. 11 people spontaneously began leaving flowers on the map where New York was located. “That was very touching,” says Judge.
Solar panels were placed at the edge of the site to convert sunlight to electricity, which was stored in batteries that powered lighting for the exhibit at night.
The photographer, Arthus-Bertrand, says the Chicago exhibition was the best of the dozen or so he has had in cities around the world, including Paris, Madrid and Tokyo.
— Rick Kogan
VOTE-BUYING? IN WISCONSIN?
“COTTAGE INDUSTRY” (JUNE 30, 2002)
– The mansion at Black Point just outside Lake Geneva is shut down for the winter, its vintage furnishings covered in sheets to keep out the dust, the American flag lowered from its prominent tower overlooking the shoreline. Sometime soon, the State of Wisconsin is supposed to begin transforming this Queen Anne beauty into the area’s newest tourist attraction, despite heated opposition from a group of privacy-minded local residents.
But even as the mansion waits, the politics continue with a vengeance.
Black Point is Exhibit A of a public-corruption scandal that has engulfed Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala, traumatizing a state known for clean government. A sweeping criminal indictment filed in October accuses Chvala of demanding cash for favors, working both sides of the Black Point controversy to obtain illicit campaign contributions.
Chvala, who stepped down from his leadership post after the indictment, has denied all wrongdoing and says the charge is politically motivated. But Black Point owner Bill Petersen and his Wisconsin lobbyist, William O’Connor, both confirm the outlines of the alleged scam.
It started five years ago, after a state finance committee approved the funding for a conversion of the historic home into a museum, by a 15-1 vote. When O’Connor gloated to Chvala about the lopsided tally, the Senate boss told him that if he wanted the bill to continue progressing, “his people” had better contribute $500 apiece to two of Chvala’s favored candidates, according to the indictment. O’Connor contacted Petersen, who told him that “he was from Chicago, and he was familiar with such requests,” joking that “only the dollar amounts were smaller in Wisconsin.”
In an interview, Petersen says he has never been personally involved in a similar scheme in Chicago or elsewhere, but he took Chvala seriously. “The threat was there,” says Petersen, a lawyer whose wealthy great-grandfather built the Lake Geneva mansion as a summer cottage. “They’ll dump it if you don’t come through.”
Having championed the plan to donate Black Point to the state for preservation, Petersen sent the checks, and the legislation passed.
At the same time, neighbors fearing that crowds of tourists would descend on their tony neighborhood were determined to keep fighting Petersen’s proposal. In 1999 and 2000, at least three of the neighbors contributed to one of Chvala’s favored candidates, the indictment alleges, and a repeal of the Black Point legislation made its way into the 2001 state budget. Ultimately, then-Gov. Scott McCallum vetoed it and, so far, funding for the project remains intact.
But Wisconsin has yet to sign off on a final agreement that would take the property off Petersen’s hands and begin converting it into a tourist site. The state Department of Administration first must update the agreement with Petersen, finish the architectural plans and specifications for the restoration, and seek bids.
Nothing’s certain, especially with a newly elected Democratic governor, intense budget pressures and the distraction of Chvala’s indictment. “We’re in limbo,” says Petersen. A childless septuagenarian who wants the family home opened to the public and safeguarded from developers, he may yet change his mind about the project. “If it doesn’t happen, we’ll start selling it,” he warns, “and I’ll be richer.”
— Greg Burns
WAIT ‘TIL NEXT TEAM
“BAYLOR’S WAY” (FEB. 24, 2002)
– “Loyal Forever,” the fight song of ex-Cub manager Don Baylor’s high school in Austin, Texas, was also his credo in a 35-year love affair with professional baseball. But for a major league skipper, loyalty from above and below usually lasts only as long as the team’s winning percentage floats well over .500, buoyed by the elixir known as clubhouse chemistry.
The 2002 Cubs struck out in both categories.
On July 5, after weeks of speculation and mounting criticism from fans and pundits, Baylor was fired during a road trip to Atlanta on the eve of the All-Star break. The team was 33-49 at the time, 12 1/2 games out of first place in the National League Central Division. Baylor, who had 1 1/2 years remaining in a four-year, $5.2 million contract, found himself idled in mid-season for the first time in his career. He and his wife, Becky, retreated to their home in Palm Springs, Calif., and passed the unanticipated down time by playing golf, a mutual passion, and simply relaxing. “It’s different,”‘ he told reporters in October at the World Series, which he attended at the invitation of major league officials. But, he said, “I still wake up at the same time–early.” He declined to talk about the events that led to his dismissal.
Last month, he was named bench coach for the New York Mets by Manager Art Howe. It was a reversal of roles, since Baylor had hired Howe as a coach eight years ago when Baylor was Colorado Rockies manager. At the time, Howe had been fired by the Houston Astros.
The Cubs’ year looked promising at the start of the season. The players on the team’s $76 million payroll looked good on paper but delivered mostly anemic hitting and spotty pitching. Baylor’s handling of his hurlers, in particular, was savaged from the stands and the press box.
Any esprit de corps fizzled early, as the team went 8-16 in April. On May 13, pitching ace Kerry Wood decried the moribund atmosphere: “I haven’t seen any signs of anything, of any life,” he said. “Somebody’s got to step up and do something.” Baylor held closed-door team meetings and lobbied unsuccessfully to bring back fitness and motivational coach Mack Newton. The Cubs remained comatose. By early July, Baylor seemed resigned to losing his job. “I’ve been fired once before and recovered,” Baylor, whose first managerial post was with the Rockies, said just three days before he was cut loose. “I’ll recover again if that happens.”
Triple-A Iowa Cubs manager Bruce Kimm, promoted to replace Baylor, fared no better and was discharged the day after the season concluded with a 67-95 finish, a 21-game backslide from the year before. The man named to succeed Kimm, former San Francisco Giants manager Dusty Baker, is an old friend of Baylor’s who talked with him before taking the job.
Baylor has been characteristically blunt about his desire to run another team. Last fall, he turned down an offer to become the San Diego Padres’ hitting coach, holding out for a top job. The most fitting postscript to Baylor’s final half-season with the Cubs may have been uttered by team President Andy MacPhail. “We all failed,” MacPhail said the day the firing was announced. “The front office, the coaching staff and certainly the players. We all share in the responsibility.”
But only one head rolled.
— Bonnie DeSimone
‘JUSTICE WAS DONE’
“A MODEL CITIZEN” (JAN. 20, 2002)
– After their son was killed in 1995, Ralph and Helen Harrington had to endure the stares and whispers of people who viewed him as a crazed murderer shot down by a husband defending his family. They never believed Mark Winger’s story that he shot Roger Harrington after he had invaded the Winger home and was beating Donnah Winger to death with a hammer after stalking her for a week. Roger’s parents described him as a gentle soul who liked to help people.
So when a Sangamon County jury convicted Mark Winger in June of murdering his wife and Harrington, it was a vindication for the Harringtons and others who had doubted Winger’s story from the beginning.
“My parents had to bury their son branded a psychotic killer,” said Roger’s sister, Barbara Howell. “Now my brother can rest in peace.”
Sgt. Doug Williamson, the lone detective who tried to keep the case open back in 1995, had a similar reaction. “Donnah’s family finally knows what happened, and the Harrington family has been vindicated,” he said. His superiors closed the investigation in one day, but Williamson and his partner worked for years to have it reopened.
Winger, now 39, told police he was exercising on a basement treadmill on Aug. 29, 1995, when he heard a thump from above. He said he raced upstairs, grabbed a gun from his bedside, and ran down the hall to the dining room where he found Harrington standing over 31-year-old Donnah, striking her in the head with the family’s claw hammer. He shot Harrington twice in the head.
Harrington, 27, had a history of mental problems, and police were quick to conclude that he became obsessed with Donnah after driving her home from the St. Louis airport six days earlier, then stalked and killed her. Donnah had complained to her husband about Harrington’s speeding on their ride together and his bizarre talk of violent fantasies.
At his 2 1/2-week trial last spring, prosecutors argued that Winger, a nuclear engineer, plotted to kill Donnah in the weeks before her death, then staged her murder by inviting Harrington to his home under the guise of an appointment to discuss a complaint he had made to Harrington’s employer.
Harrington was “taken like a lamb to the slaughter,” said Carol Evans, jury foreperson, She called the jury’s decision “a not guilty verdict for Roger” as well as a guilty vote for Winger.
Cash Brown, Donnah Winger’s father, doubted his son-in-law’s innocence almost from the beginning and rejoiced after the verdict was announced, saying “justice has been done.” But most of Donnah’s family members struggled through the trial to reconcile their former vision of Mark Winger as the ideal son-in-law and grieving widower with the cold-blooded killer portrayed by prosecutors. “It’s still hard for us to believe that the Mark we knew could do this,” said Ira Drescher, Donnah’s stepfather.
Tom Breen of Chicago, Winger’s attorney, argued that authorities were correct in 1995 when they quickly concluded that Harrington killed Donnah and Mark acted in self-defense when he shot Roger. He described Winger, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, as a devoted family man and loyal state worker who served his country in Korea. Defense experts testified that forensic evidence supported Winger’s account and Harrington’s psychiatric records indicated he could be dangerous.
Breen attempted to exclude the testimony of DeAnn Schultz, Donnah’s close friend, who was having an affair with Mark Winger at the time of the murders. He called Schultz, who received immunity from prosecution shortly before the trial, a mentally disturbed woman seeking vengeance because Mark ended their affair.
Schultz told police about the affair in 1999, after undergoing psychiatric counseling, leading police to reopen the case. She told the jury Winger made incriminating statements to her about wanting his wife dead and plotting to get Harrington into his house.
Winger’s parents sat in stunned silence as the verdict was read. His current wife, Rebecca–the nanny hired to care for the child he and Donnah were adopting at the time of her death–pronounced the verdict “ridiculous.” Winger showed little emotion but said quietly, “It’s wrong,” then turned to his wife and said “I love you no matter what.”
Winger did not testify at the trial, but at his sentencing Aug. 1, he proclaimed his innocence. “Roger Harrington killed my wife,” he said. “I was there, and he did it.” In a rambling half-hour statement, he blamed a host of others for his plight, including his former in-laws, the rabbi who stood by him after the murders, and detectives who resurrected the case 3 1/2 years later.
He and Rebecca have four children, ranging in age from 2 to 7.
Judge Leo Zappa sentenced Winger to life in prison without parole. His case is on appeal, and after a month at Stateville Correctional Center, he requested protective custody and was transferred to Pontiac Correctional Center.
— Linda Rockey
MORE SICK DEER FOUND
“LAYING WASTE” (OCT. 6, 2002)
– In the months since Wisconsin officials began killing deer in an ambitious program to halt the spread of a deadly brain disease, more cases have been found outside the zone where the first sick deer were shot, including one in Illinois.
Deer infected with chronic wasting disease, which is related to mad cow disease, were reported at a deer farm in Minnesota and two game farms in Wisconsin outside the eradication zone in the south-central part of the state. The Illinois case was a free-ranging deer found near the Wisconsin border.
“Finding a positive deer in Illinois is unsettling, to say the least,” says John Cary, a biometrician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who had earlier predicted that if nothing were done to eliminate the disease from Wisconsin’s herd, the deer population there would plummet within 20 years.
Chronic wasting disease is a fatal disease of the brain and nervous system that is endemic in deer and elk populations in several Western states and Canada. When it was discovered in the deer population of south-central Wisconsin early last year, state officials were determined to stamp it out before it spread. All 25,000 to 30,000 deer living in the area where the infected deer were found would have to be killed, they said, though probably 97 percent of them were healthy.
The fact that CWD is turning up in several spots in the Midwest suggests that there may be more than one local source or cause of the disease. To find out, the state has launched the biggest deer-sampling effort ever attempted. When the regular deer season opened on Nov. 23, the Department of Natural Resources deployed 1,200 volunteers around the state to collect deer heads for testing.
In a related development, health officials announced in late November that they had ruled out Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human brain disease related to CWD, in the deaths of two Wisconsin hunters, both venison eaters who had died of neurological diseases. Creutzfeldt-Jakob was confirmed in a third hunter, but it was the sporadic type of CJD that is unrelated to the consumption of mad-cow-infected beef.
“The fact that this cluster of cases dissolved upon closer scrutiny is no proof that CWD has no potential to cause human disease,” cautions James Kazmierczak, an epidemiologist with the state Department of Health and Family Services.
Before the Wisconsin deer season opened, many hunters said the fear of eating venison might keep them out of the woods this fall, and that fear was reflected in a 20 percent lag in license sales throughout much of the summer and early fall. But in the week before the season opened, sales picked up strongly, with 11 percent of total sales recorded on the day before the season began. Still, sales for the regular season were 10 percent below last year’s.
— Brenda Fowler
‘SWEET’ GOES SOUR
“THE TALK OF THE TOWN” (Dec. 23, 2001)
– When “The Sweet Smell of Success” staged its world premiere as a theatrical musical at the Shubert Theatre last January, anticipation and expectations were high.
Based on the dark but artful 1957 Burt Lancaster/Tony Curtis film of the same name, it was the story of a powerful and vindictive 1950s gossip columnist, J.J. Hunsecker (played by John Lithgow), and his sycophantic protege Sydney Falco (Brian d’Arcy James), set against the seductive but sleazy night club scene of post WW II Manhattan. The musical was created by people with impeccable stage credentials and a closetful of Tony awards: composer Marvin Hamlisch (“A Chorus Line”), playwright John Guare (“Six Degrees of Separation”) and director Nicholas Hytner (“Miss Saigon”).
Many theater folks believed the show might dance its way to New York in the footsteps of “The Producers,” another movie-to-musical creation that had its world premiere here a year earlier before moving to Broadway, playing to capacity crowds and winning a record 12 Tony Awards.
The Chicago reviews for “Sweet Smell” were lukewarm. Critic Richard Christiansen called it “a most ambitious musical trying to find its balance.” Even so, the show generated some $4 million in advance sales for its mid-March opening at the Martin Beck Theater in New York.
When it did open, the New York critics tore it to shreds.
“Zzzzzz,” wrote Ben Brantley of The New York Times. The Washington Post’s Nelson Pressley said, “Maybe a loss of toughness and cool was inevitable, but savvy and plain sense are casualties here, too.” The New York Daily News asked the question, “Why did we need to lift this rock and see these creatures scurry–in song?”
Though the show would be nominated for seven Tony Awards and win one for Lithgow for best leading actor in a musical, “Sweet Smell” proved a dud at the box office. It closed on June 15 after only 108 performances. It lost something in the nasty neighborhood of $10 million, and not one of the high-profile talents involved was heard to echo one of Hunsecker’s most famous lines about New York: “I love this dirty town.”
— Rick Kogan
