FORGET WHATEVER ROADSHOW succeeds ”Phantom of the Opera” as the latest
”must-see” import from Broadway. Forget whatever follows ”Dick Tracy”
as the latest ”don`t-miss blockbuster” from Hollywood. The hottest ticket in Chicago for the next couple of years will very likely be a $7 number that, early next year, will get you into the Shedd Aquarium and its new Oceanarium. Three of the seven bucks that will get you regular admission to the 60-year-old Shedd and a chance to see what is still the largest collection of fresh-water and salt-water aquatic life in the world-8,000 individuals in all. The other $4 will get you into the new Oceanarium and a spot in its 1,000-seat amphitheater for one of five daily live shows starring the Shedd`s newest acquisitions.
This isn`t the first time the Shedd has been a hot ticket. When it opened 60 years ago, it was the instant sensation of the city. Throughout the 1930s no other museum or zoo in Chicago, a city richly endowed with such cultural institutions, attracted the crowds that swarmed daily through the Shedd. Curious Midwesterners daily jammed the octagonal Beaux Arts building rising majestically by the lake. Lining the aquarium`s cool, darkened galleries, the ranks of lighted fish tanks awash with the exotic colors of fishes from the world`s oceans, lakes and streams, were as rare masterpieces on display in a great art museum.
How else would a landlocked, 9-to-5 tool-and-die maker or the child of a tenement or an office clerk have the chance to see an octopus or an angel fish or a shark in living, breathing color? Even a rich man in those days would have had trouble finding the time and inspiration to travel to the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the South Seas to see what the Shedd displayed every day under one roof.
Now the Shedd is ready to create that excitement again, as it puts Chicagoans nose-to-nose and eyeball-to-eyeball with some of the Earth`s most majestic creatures-whales.
The whales are going on permanent display in the spectacular new, $43 million Oceanarium. It is a mammoth 170,000-square-foot marine-mammal pavilion sitting on two acres of reclaimed lake bottom along the original building`s eastern exposure. Originally scheduled to open this fall, the Oceanarium experienced technical problems that have pushed the opening to early 1991.
In 1982 the Shedd engaged the Chicago architectural firm of Lohan Associates to begin working with the aquarium`s marine-mammal handlers and its design department to come up with a plan. For five years Lohan architects and Shedd personnel criss-crossed the country and traveled the world looking at existing whale exhibits. They also spent a lot of time in southwest Alaska photographing its temperate rain forests and rocky coasts in search of an interior motif for the Oceanarium.
What the architects came up with was a long, low structure curving around the original aquarium`s eastern, or lakeside, face (see graphic, pages 30-31). Started in September 1987, it has taken three years to construct. Rather than trying to duplicate the original Shedd, the Oceanarium`s minimalist design, clad in the same white Georgia marble that covers the old building, is unobtrusive and preserves the architectural integrity of the old building.
Inside, the Oceanarium bears no resemblance to the original Shedd building. Where the aquarium boasts a cast of thousands of fish displayed in tight galleries, the vast, open Oceanarium has a much smaller ensemble. At the opening, the whale pools will be occupied by two beluga whales and four Pacific white-sided dolphins. Another beluga and three false killer whales are scheduled to join them at a later date.
THE WHALES WILL ROAM through a series of four pools. The main pool-180 feet long, 80 feet wide and 30 feet deep and holding two million gallons of water, is the largest indoor whale pool in the world. The other three pools hold 400,000, 200,000 and 30,000 gallons each, the last set away from the public so that whenever they want, the whales can get away from being on view. At times the whales will be joined by a small herd of harbor seals living in a cove adjoining the 400,000-gallon pool. Within the pavilion, there is also a 60,000-gallon habitat for colonies of Gentoo and Rockhopper penguins, a 50,000-gallon pool and habitat for a group of orphaned Alaskan sea otters rescued from the Exxon Valdez oil spill a year ago and a tidal-basin pool featuring a collection of crabs, clams, starfish and anemones.
While the animals certainly will be the stars of the new attraction, the building interior itself is a breathtaking show. It is an elaborate re-creation of a segment of the Pacific Northwest coast, the last temperate rain forest in North America, which, like the tropical rain forests of the Amazon, is threatened by extinction because of logging and development.
Visitors will walk through the pavilion along 400 feet of nature trails alongside the animal habitats and among the craggy, foliaged-forest landscape, interrupted only by the amphitheater at the center of the building.
Taking advantage of the miracles of artificial zoo habitat construction that has been developed in the last several years, the rock work with its plant life is the creation of the masters of the trade, the Larson Co. of Tucson, Ariz. The rock work is a faithful rendering of 16 rock communities that comprise the geologic formation of the coastal area. The forest is made up of 62 artificial Sitka spruce trees, complete with such details as woodpecker tracks and bear scratchings. They rise from 24 to 30 feet in height, with a few western hemlocks and Alaskan yellow cedars interspersed between them along with native flowers and undergrowth.
”It involves so many notions of illusion and theater staging,” says Paul Bluestone, the Shedd`s curator of exhibits, who did much of the enviromental design planning. ”This is a walk-through diorama, and for me, it has been a great challenge. We were really impressed by the drama of the temperate rain forest, and we wanted to tell the geological and botanical story of this area and man`s impact on it. It`s a whole environment rather than a `come and see the animals in a barn` attraction.”
The design of the building and its function is the result of 10 years of brainstorming by the Shedd staff. ”In the very beginning there was negotiation within the staff over what the Oceanarium would be,” Bluestone says. ”There was a strong opinion that we should play down the show and the amphitheater and let the landscape of the building dominate, like a natural park setting.
”We wanted to get away from the spectacle of having the animals jumping through hoops and anthropomorphizing them. So we designed shows that will give them workouts, which they need to do anyway to remain healthy, by having them demonstrate behaviors they normally display in the wild, like jumping and breaching. It will be respectful of the animals, not flashy.”
The setting in which this will occur is 50,000 square feet of rugged rock work constructed from casts of natural geologic formations. The rock work slopes into distinct coastal zones, featuring the rain forest, streams, shoreline, coastal thickets and beaches, and comes alive with the aural undercurrent of insects, croaking frogs and rustling mice. The design is so meticulous that trained geologists and botanists will immediately understand what it depicts.
While the reconstruction of nature, right down to maintaining a 68-degree temperature in the pavilion, is mostly to immerse humans in an environment, it is integrated into the lives of the resident animals too.
The whale pools, for example, have irregular shapes to discourage the animals from swimming constantly in circles. The rock work extends into the water, providing them with underwater portals to swim through and rough surfaces against which they can scratch their bellies. Ten underwater acrylic viewing windows, each 20 feet wide and 7 feet high, are there as much for the whales to look out at the public as for people to look in on them. Whales love to press their snouts to the watery side of the windows to eye the passing parade of humanity on the other side. The pools are designed with no flat planes on the bottom to minimize the racket of ambient sounds from the pavilion echoing back to the animals.
UNDERGIRDING THE WHOLE exhibit are nine miles of piping that run between the pools and the salinization and pumping machinery in the bowels of the new building. It purifies and completely recirculates 3 million gallons of salt water used in the habitats every 1 1/2 hours.
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To William P. Braker, the feisty, 63-year-old director of the Shedd who first went to work at the aquarium as a 23-year-old in 1950, the Oceanarium is a dream realized. Not long after he became director in 1964, he began pushing the Shedd`s board of directors to consider a major new building that would allow the aquarium to display large marine mammals.
Lately Braker has been fighting animal-rights groups over the propriety of keeping marine mammals in captivity, even though those he has selected for the Oceanarium are smaller species and are not from endangered populations. The Shedd is now a defendant in a lawsuit seeking to bar it from buying-and thus saving, it says-three false killer whales from Japanese fisheries that normally slaughter them.
Animal-rights activists argue that it is cruel to keep marine mammals in captivity. The Shedd holds that with the new technology in use at the Oceanarium, the mammals in it should live normal, happy, reproductive lifespans. Braker argues, too, that introducing Midwesterners to living whales in the intimacy of the Shedd`s facility will profoundly lift public awareness of and opposition to the slaughter of whales in the open seas.
Before he got into these legal battles, Braker had to struggle for several years to convince the Shedd`s board of directors of the need of a marine-mammal pavilion in Chicago.
To push a non-profit entity such as the Shedd into a $43 million undertaking must be a daunting task, and it has been that for Braker. The aquarium was the legacy of John G. Shedd, a protege of retail prince Marshall Field. Shedd came to Chicago as a young man to clerk in Field`s department store and eventually rose to become chairman of the company. Before he died in 1926, he left $3 million to build the lakefront aquarium bearing his name. Completed in 1929, it sits across the street from the monument honoring his mentor, the Field Museum of Natural History.
The Shedd`s board had always been wary of making any major changes in the original building, which itself is an irreplaceable architectural museum piece. Other than installing the outstanding coral-reef exhibit in the center of the building 20 years ago, the board had been satisfied with keeping the building much as it was when it was built.
Board members worked to keep the building in first-rate condition, making sure that mechanically the facility was at the forefront of aquarium technology. And it oversaw the creation of the aquarium`s excellent education department, which works closely with Chicago-area schools in conducting marine-biology classes and lectures for 400,000 children a year.
”The original building is still one of the best aquarium designs around, easy to work with,” Braker says, ”but after 60 years it does present some problems you can`t get past. Certainly we did not want to alter the building very radically, but it just didn`t lend itself to more-modern exhibit design, especially for large marine mammals. I felt that Chicago needed that sort of exhibit, but the only way we were going to install one was to build a whole new building.”
One ally Braker found on the Shedd`s board was retired Santa Fe Railway Co. executive John Shedd Reed, grandson of the aquarium`s founder. Reed became president of the board 22 years ago, and soon after that he and Braker began talking seriously of building a marine-mammal pavilion.
”My mother always told me Grandpa was always the first in town to try something new,” Reed says of the aquarium`s original benefactor. ”He had the second or third auto in Chicago and the first crystal radio set. When I took over the presidency of the Shedd board, it had been years since anything particularly innovative had been done here. Bill Braker and I felt the time had come that we should inject some public interest in the aquarium and keep it up to date.
”We never had a major fundraising since it was built, so taking on something like this wasn`t easy. I believe in paying cash on the barrelhead. I had never borrowed money like this. I`m a little puritanical in that regard, I suppose.”
ONCE BRAKER CONVINCED the board to build the Oceanarium, the board had to convince city, state and Chicago Park District officials that it was a worthy idea. It had to seek 37 environmental permits before construction could start. And it had to find $43 million to build it. Starting with $8 million of the Shedd`s own funds, it got $5 million each from the state and the park district, on whose land the aquarium sits. The remaining $27 million had to come from foundations, corporations and individual donors. Of this amount, the board as of this summer has raised $25 million.
Income from admission fees will be used to cover operating expenses of the new facility, making it completely self-sufficient, Braker says. The $7 adult ticket allows for a $2 discount for senior citizens and children ages 6 to 17. Continuing its long-standing policy, Illinois school groups making prior arrangements with the Shedd will get into both the aquarium and Oceanarium for free. The Shedd is expecting 1.5 million people to visit the whales each year.
That is a lot of people, most of whom will meet and see whales for the first time in their lives, and that would probably make old John G. Shedd happy. The institution he started will continue to spectacularly fulfill the mission he gave it: to inform the people of metropolitan Chicago about the latest advances in marine biology. Shedd would probably also be more than a little pleased to know that the museum that bears his name is not only the first of its kind in Chicago but the best of its kind in the world.