Swept Away: Musings on Wicker’s Fallen Statue
Jeff Huebner
Sometime during the night of August 20 or the morning of August 21, the bronze statue of Charles Gustavus Wicker (1820-1889) that had stood in his namesake park in Chicago since its dedication in September 2006 toppled over. The life-size sculpture, more than a decade in the works, was created by Wicker’s great-granddaughter, Nancy Wicker of Harvard, Illinois, and depicted the neighborhood founder—and businessman, politician, and developer—donning a Lincoln-like stovepipe hat and grasping a straw broom, a reference to how he often took it upon himself to sweep the streets.
Wicker (the statue) was found knocked off his base and lying on the grass. Park supervisor John Davidson wouldn’t comment, referring me to the Park District’s marketing department. But it was almost certainly an act of vandalism that had to have been done by a group of people due to the piece’s one-ton-plus weight, according to park stakeholders. (It is a self-sponsored artwork, paid for by the artist with grants and donations, not a city or park commission.)
The question remains, however: was it youthful hooliganism or politically motivated—because of Wicker’s identification with capitalist and political interests? If it was the latter, the act recalls the contentious early 1990s when Wicker Park was often a battleground between yuppies and anarchists, between Latino residents and landlords, between artists and developers, and it was rife with anti-gentrification vandalism, graffiti, and other actions. As one 1993 leaflet produced by Lumpen Media Group and Chicago Anarchists Project titled “Help Pound the Coyote” put it: “Stop real estate developers from invading our hood with so-called ‘improvements.’”
Well, we all know how that turned out, with the Wicker statue itself representing a “so-called improvement.” (“If something needs to be done—do it!” he reportedly said.) The resistance to real estate development and displacement seems like ancient history now—but not really. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Old Man—pictured wearing a bulky overcoat and a grim visage—was a political target; he and brother Joel, wholesale grocers, are seen as the neighborhood’s first speculators and developers, purchasing 80 acres of land around the park in 1870, a year before the Great Fire. (Charles was also an alderman, a county supervisor, and a state legislator.)
Although some local residents see the heroic bronze as a personification of can-do, civic-minded community spirit—and a complement to the Wicker Park Garden Club’s beautifying efforts–others view it as privileging Official Neighborhood History at the expense of Wicker Park’s storied labor, working-class, radical, and artists’ histories and cultures going back to the 1880s Haymarket era, when the largely German enclave was the center of the workers’ rights and eight-hour day movements. (The four Haymarket martyrs, executed for their anarchist beliefs in 1887, lived in the West Town area.) The Wicker statue embodies only one narrative, and says little about Wicker Park.
Writing about the sculpture’s meaning over a year ago I ventured how Wicker’s broom seemed to be sweeping away the park’s—and the neighborhood’s—many-layered and often contentious histories, as well as the homeless, the poor, and other undesirables (all of whom hang out on tables near the statue), making it safe and sanitized for newcomers, newer money, and newest fashion. The broom seemed to represent the cleansing of historical memory and a place with many pasts.
I have long advocated for public art in and/or around the park that told the alternative histories and stories that continue to shape and define the area—permanent, place-specific sculptures or other works that would commemorate and/or contextualize its scrappy, century-long continuum of labor and conflict, ethnicity and heritage, gentrification and struggle, art and activism, and making these themes relevant for today’s residents and visitors, many of whom only know it as a bohemian-themed entertainment district of aestheticized grit and commodified dissent.
(“The strange and frightening thing about Wicker,” wrote Mike Newirth in The Baffler magazine in 1997, “is that the district’s lamination took only five years or so—five years for the bohemian simulacrum to reproduce itself on the rubble of what was real.”)
You would think a “hip, arty” Wicker Park, often identified as an artists’ neighborhood, might have had such monuments by now. But you’d be wrong. (Well, there is Arbol de Vida–Life-Tree, the concrete-relief and painted-wood mural by Catherine Cajandig and John Weber outside the Center for Neighborhood Technology, illustrating its progressive programs.) In truth, it has not been an artists’ community for at least a decade. Around the Coyote Arts Festival’s recent secession from the hood, and deserved collapse, is symptomatic. (Incidentally, it’s time to whitewash those visually offensive, defaced ATC kids’ murals along the Bloomingdale viaduct facing Churchill Field Playlot Park and replace them with something else.)
Last year, the Wicker Park Bucktown Special Services Area #33 adopted the Wicker Park Master Plan (collaboratively crafted with Philadelphia’s Interface Studio). The plan was partly undertaken to identify ways in which the neighborhoods’ commercial corridors could regain “their beloved ‘grittiness’ and their ‘edge,’” according January 11 WPB press release. (This would be akin to buying distressed designer jeans at an Akira store.) Days later, in a Chicago Tribune article about the plan, several residents were quoted yearning for the neighborhood’s “gritty” and “edgy” roots—to recapture, as it were, the fashionable frontier danger of ghetto culture.
Sorry: It is way too late, too theme-parked for ”authenticity.” It is also a classic example of what Vanderbilt University sociologist Richard Lloyd in his book on Wicker Park’s creative economy Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City refers to as “imperialist nostalgia” —“where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed.” (Come to think of it: Would Charles Wicker, with his ready broom, approve of having to sweep up after all this newly added grit?)
The plan recommends “new works of public art…at critical locations,” such as el stations, Ashland plant medians, Kennedy underpasses, construction barricades (always a lot of those). It calls for “kinetic sculptures,” “reflective murals,” and “playful signage.” It calls for ”green” art, stuff with water and wind. It calls for artist-designed streetscape furniture. All nice, I suppose. What it doesn’t seem to call for is artwork that tells you anything meaningful about the place where you are—history, community, environment—and where it has come from and where it is going.
According to Wicker Park Garden Club coordinator Doug Wood, the park’s lights were out for three weeks prior to the statue incident, a period in which there had been “beer parties and endless graffiti” as well as a field house break-in. In December, WPB awarded a grant to the Wicker Park Advisory Council to help repair the sculpture, now in the studio of conservator Andrzej Dajnowski. Plans are to reinstall it by the summer, along with a plaque explaining the broom. In lieu of its absence, it’s time for local artists to sweep away false pedestals and forge new true ideas in the streets, against the existing order. If that’s even possible here anymore.
