It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
In fact, going to hear a genuine, old-fashioned civic speech might rank with quilting bees and church socials among things people don’t do anymore. Nowadays, if it’s a speech you want, you can punch up a politician’s web site for a canned dose of “I’m right and my opponent is wrong,” or you can tune to C-Span for some graph-and-chart wonkery on the federal budget.
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But the old-time civic speech–the inspirational, in-person let’s-build-a-park kind of speech, the kind that architect Daniel Burnham used to give at the Commercial Club–that’s just not done much anymore.
So don’t expect a Wrigley Field-sized crowd when The Bright New City lecture series opens its 30th season April 1 at Preston Bradley Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center.
But do expect Mary Ward Wolkonsky.
You can’t miss her. She’s the diminutive dynamo straightening the potted flowers, making sure the VIPs and donors sit up front, and, of course, introducing the featured speaker in language so impeccable you’d have thought it went down with the Titanic. Katharine Hepburn, eat your heart out.
It was Mary Ward Wolkonsky who launched this wonderful anachronism back in 1966. And it is Mary Ward Wolkonsky who has kept the world-class speakers coming back to Chicago every spring, like the crocuses in Grant Park and the smelt to Montrose Harbor.
Back at the start she was known to Chicagoans as Mrs. J. Harris Ward, the hard-charging wife of the chairman of Commonwealth Edison Co. He passed away in 1974. Always more a doer than a see-and-be-seen society dame, Mary Ward Wolkonsky helped found womens’ boards at the University of Chicago and at the Lyric Opera. And when women began cracking the governing boards of Chicago’s major civic institutions, she was among the first to take a seat on more than a dozen of them, ranging from the Art Institute to the Salk Institute for Biological Research.
But it’s the Monday speeches that have made Mary Ward Wolkonsky a local legend.
Who would have thought, in this cynical, too-busy-to-care world we have spun for ourselves, that you could fill a small auditorium every Monday in April with people who want to hear about better parks, better schools, better streets, better plazas and better residential neighborhoods?
Mrs. Ward Wolkonsky did, and somehow convinced the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts that there was an audience in Chicago for good urban design. And so The Bright New City was born with a $5,000 Graham Foundation grant, the first of many to follow. Later, the University of Chicago would sign on as a co-sponsor, followed by corporate donors such as CNA Insurance and Sara Lee Corp. and not-for-profits such as the Pritzker Foundation and DePaul University.
Always a hard person to turn down, Mary Ward Wolkonsky proceeded to bring in such luminaries as Edward Logue, the visionary who orchestrated the revival of downtown Boston, and Edmund Bacon, the planner credited with a similar turnaround in Philadelphia. Then there was James Rouse, the developer who invented “festival marketplaces” as instant anchors for downtowns that are adrift; William Whyte, who opened America’s eyes to the way people use public spaces; and James Q. Wilson, who warned that crime and the fear of crime is every city’s worst enemy.
But the speakers have not all been intellectuals.
Neighborhood organizers like Joe Cicero and public housing tenant leader Artensia Randolph have spoken from the Bright New City podium. And for the last 10 years the series has sponsored a “City Brightener” award that recognizes everyday citizens for small acts of heroism such as turning a vacant lot into community garden. This year a “Super Brighteners” category will honor, among others, Daniel Barenboim for keeping the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the top of the music world.
That Bright New Cities has had an effect on real-life Chicago can hardly be doubted. Daley administration department heads can usually be found in the audience, along with many of the city’s top architects, planners and developers. High-level schmoozing also gets done at the invitation-only receptions the night before each speech hosted by Dr. and Mrs. Peter Wolkonsky (her second husband) in their Lake Shore Drive condo overlooking Oak Street Beech.
From the rebirth of Navy Pier to the rehab of the Garfield Park Conservatory, it’s hard to think of an inspired civic improvement that was not discussed first at a Bright New City gathering.
Such is the tradition that renews April 1 at 5:30 p.m. at the Cultural Center, 77 E. Washington St. James W. Lyons, Jr., an undersecretary of with the U.S. Agriculture Department, will give a free talk on “the important ecological, social and economic dimensions of parks, trails, wetlands and other green spaces within an urban setting.”
Like I said, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
But don’t be surprised if ideas from the speech, or the conversations that follow, end up influencing city hall’s plans to turn Meigs Field into a nature preserve or to rebuild all of the park district’s lagoons.
Mary Ward Wolkonsky has a knack for bringing in the right speaker at the right moment. She is one of Chicago’s true City Brighteners.