Most of us walk by the scores of statues in city parks and plazas without really noticing them. But Mayor Richard Daley is learning that when they disappear, some people definitely notice.
One who did was former Mayor Jane Byrne. The elegant Children’s Fountain she installed on a Wacker Drive traffic island vanished during Wacker’s long reconstruction and has yet to resurface. The same thing happened to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, also dedicated during Byrne’s four-year reign in the early 1980s.
Removing the statues during the roadwork was necessary, but spiriting them away without a word is nothing short of outrageous, Byrne complained in a letter to the Chicago Sun-Times last year. “I would appreciate it if the mayor would stop treating . . . public structures, particularly those with my name on them, in the same shabby and sneaky manner as he treated Meigs Field,” she fumed.
Another friend of city statues who had a similar experience is Lawrence Pucci, a history buff best known among Chicago’s business elite for his upscale custom-suit business at 333 N. Michigan Ave. He had a special interest in another Wacker Drive statue that disappeared, a bronze trilogy of George Washington, Robert Morris and Haym Salomon that sat on a concrete island at Wacker and Wabash.
Morris, an English-born Protestant, and Salomon, a Polish Jew, were included because of their critical role in financing the Revolutionary War.
Pucci also has taken a particular interest in the statue honoring Gen. John Alexander Logan, the Civil War hero from Murphysboro, Ill., who was later elected to three terms in the U.S. Senate after the war. The dramatic equestrian statue sits in Grant Park across Michigan Avenue from the Hilton Hotel and Towers.
The day the monument was dedicated in 1887, some 20,000 men–mostly soldiers, some carrying tattered flags–walked in a celebratory parade with 50 bands, “music enough to march half a dozen armies,” according to the Chicago Times-Herald.
Pucci “adopted” Logan’s memorial in the late 1990s and arranged to have the 100-year-old bronze likeness buffed up and rededicated, just as he had done with the Washington statue. He also asked the city to hold a Memorial Day parade in Logan’s honor, which was fitting, as Logan had signed the 1868 order creating Decoration Day–later renamed Memorial Day–to remember those who had fallen. The city agreed, and Daley kicked off the first Memorial Day parade in two decades in 1998 by laying a wreath near the Logan statue.
Pucci can’t entirely explain his fascination with Logan and his legacy. “Sometimes there is a mysterious force, and you want to do something,” he says. “I do think the man was overlooked.”
Pucci also was moved by the same mysterious force to adopt the statue of Washington, Morris and Salomon on Wacker Drive. The original concept for the statue came from Barnet Hodes, a one-time alderman who served as the city’s top lawyer under Mayor Edward Kelly in the 1930s and ’40s. Hodes, who was Jewish, felt Salomon’s role in the American Revolution had been slighted. He found investors to finance his dream and commissioned sculptor Lorado Taft to create the statue, which was unveiled in 1941.
But 50 years later, the statue was looking a little down at the heels, and Pucci, a longtime friend of Hodes, made it one of his projects. Chicago attorney Scott Hodes, Barnet’s son, remembers the phone call he got from Pucci.
“He says, ‘Your father’s monument is in disarray. Do you think we can get the city to refurbish it?’ ” Hodes recalls. “He’s quite a guy that way.”
Hodes got on the phone to City Hall, which arranged to have cleanser company Bon Ami clean up the bronze. The newly gleaming monument received its due in 1992. Pucci sent out invitations on heavy cream paper, and a group of Chicago luminaries, including Daley, showed up for the re-dedication ceremony.
When the monument disappeared with no warning in the fall of 2001, Pucci was less than pleased, especially after he inquired about it. “Naturally, they wouldn’t tell me [what was happening]. I’m just a mosquito,” he says.
Then last spring, more than a year later, Washington and his bankers suddenly reappeared on the north side of Wacker at Wabash Avenue, not far from the spot where cars once whizzed by them. Pucci and Hodes say they are pleased with the location and the new lighting.
A spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation said the agency carefully catalogued, removed and restored more than 40 statues and historical markers along Wacker and always had intended to find new homes for them.
“We tried to preserve as much as possible,” said Brian Steele.
Unlike Washington and Logan, Pucci never served in the military, although while attending Northwestern’s law school during World War II, he tried to join the Navy. Rejected because his eyesight wasn’t 20/20, he went home and ate carrots. No miracle occurred.
He never finished law school, choosing instead to join his father’s tailoring business in the late 1940s. Yet the war had its effect. “I lost a lot of friends in the war,” he says. “We lost a lot of people. That always has preyed on me.”
Pucci and Byrne may share a civic interest in Chicago’s public art, but their style and personalities couldn’t be more different.
Byrne is known for her feistiness. Her temporary abode in the Cabrini Green housing complex when she was mayor cemented her reputation as a politician who knew how to grab headlines.
Pucci’s manner is quiet and urbane. Now in his 80s–he doesn’t divulge his exact age–Pucci is always elegantly dressed with a crisp shirt and wide silk tie. He prefers minimalist suits–no vents in the back, no buttonhole for flowers, no breast pocket. His firm’s hand-sewn suits start at nearly $5,000 and the price can double for an ensemble of fine cashmere.
Pucci never married, and he lived with his mother until her death in 1986. He works with his sister, Caryl Pucci Rettaliata, who designs custom apparel for female clients and shares her brother’s interest in art and public monuments.
In recent years, Pucci has downsized his business, not taking on new clients except for “legacies” of his old customers. Instead, he has poured his time into a variety of projects, including the formation of the Central Michigan Avenue Association to spiff up the not-so-magnificent part of the Mag Mile south of the Chicago River. But he always has found time for his beloved statues.
Pucci’s patience with the city paid off. So did Byrne’s more confrontational approach.
The former mayor has been getting weekly progress reports from Sheila O’Grady, Daley’s chief of staff, and Byrne has signed off on the city’s tentative plans to relocate her statues.
The Children’s Fountain is slated to reappear in Seneca Park, a large children’s park near the Museum of Contemporary Art on Chicago Avenue, this spring.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial will be moved to the River Walk area next to Lower Wacker where it will sit at the foot of a falling stream of water.
She still hasn’t pinned the city down on a new location for a clock removed from Water Tower Park–but that’s another story.
“If all these things come to fruition, I’m satisfied,” she says.
