STARTING UP ALL OVER AGAIN
“Nouve@u riche” (June 4, 2000)
When his dot-com startup and the rest of the New Economy were on the way up, John Rodkin was busy hiring and promoting, giving out slices of the company as bonuses like so much candy. During prime-time episodes of “Friends,” he had watched the first commercials for Quick Click, the “smart-link” Web browser tool he’d dreamed up as a University of Chicago law student in 1997 and sold for more than $100 million to NBCi three years later. He’d posed with other San Francisco tech guys in a fashion spread for GQ.
On the way down, he had to learn how to lay people off, combine departments and explain severance packages. And the only times he saw his techie buddies in the media, they were getting roasted for their fast riches, their hubris and anything else somebody wanted to gripe about.
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“Lots of people are getting off on the fact that so many people like me went bankrupt,” John told me recently. “It’s this huge backlash, where people are glad to hear that people like me ended up failing.”
However, John himself didn’t go bankrupt, and he views his experience, which I wrote about last year, as anything but a failure. He got a lucrative departure package when NBC decided to shut down its Internet wing this year. More important to this engineer I used to baby-sit (he’s my brother) was the soundness of his concept: He’d looked at the Internet, found a tiny little sliver of it he thought he could improve, and gotten his project up and running. For an engineer, that’s the good stuff. Flyswat, the original name of the company before NBCi renamed it Quick Click, didn’t fail because of any flaw in his bright idea; far larger economic forces brought it, and all the rest, down.
“I did fine,” he says. Still only 28, he bought a high-end condo and a better car than I’ll ever drive, vacationed in Egypt, Rome, Spain and Hawaii (twice), and paid off a heap of student loans. “When you wrote the first story, I said the money was ‘life-changing,’ and even the way things have worked out, it still is,” John said. “Those are all things I couldn’t have done otherwise.”
There is one downside to his early success: It is hindering his search for a new job of comparable executive status. In the wake of the dot-com crash, nobody wants a chief technology officer who’s not even 30. “I’m too young to get the kind of job I was doing,” he says. “If I were seven years older and had the identical resume, I’d be getting offers.”
So he has toyed with other startup ideas, despite the deep skepticism among investors, and even considered going over to the Dark Side: After battling Silicon Valley venture capitalists for a couple of years, he’s now considering an offer to become one.
— Dennis Rodkin
GETTING SOME `HELP’
“A neighborhood goes condo” (Oct. 22, 2000)
The sign on Deborah Bayly’s building keeps changing. When the Magazine wrote about her late last year, the sign that dangled from her North Side two-flat said: “Condo Buyers Beware! Noisy White Trash Lives Here.” This year, for the holiday season, Bayly posted this message instead: “Be thankful. Especially if you can afford to live in this neighborhood.”
Sometimes Bayly isn’t sure she can.
She was told last year that her property taxes were almost doubling, the downside of a building boom that sent real estate prices skyward. Her neighborhood had transformed before her eyes: Developers bought frame two-flats and tiny bungalows, tore them down and replaced them with upscale condominiums. Bayly watched helplessly as a close-knit block was torn apart. Her old neighbors left in droves, seduced by high profits or pushed out by rising taxes.
Bayly has managed to hold the developers at bay, as has her next-door neighbor and longtime friend, Leonor Romero, despite the whirlwind of construction on their stretch of Damen Avenue. At least 27 properties have sold along the two-block strip between Diversey and Wellington since September of last year, almost all of them condos, according to Chicago Association of Realtors records.
Romero and Bayly are now completely sandwiched between new three-story buildings that tower over their leafy back yards. Most of the condo owners are faceless strangers, so transient that some have already bought, sold and moved on.
“It can never be the same,” says Romero. But neither woman wants to uproot herself from the neighborhood, despite the huge profits they would reap from selling their buildings to developers.
They are not alone. The disruption caused by rising real-estate taxes has spread to so many communities that “some of our best residents actually argue against improving their neighborhoods,” says Cook County Assessor James Houlihan.
The problem finally pushed Houlihan’s office and the Cook County Board into action. In June, the board passed the Homeowner Exemption for Long-Term Properties (HELP), which gives tax relief to Chicagoans who have lived in their homes for at least 10 years and who meet certain requirements for income and increased assessment.
Bayly is a prime example of the 6,500 homeowners now benefiting from HELP, said Houlihan. Exemptions cut her current taxes from about $5,300 to under $3,600. Though that’s still a big jump from her prior $2,800 bill, “of course it helped,” says Bayly, who has had her home for 21 years. “It was a significant reduction.”
At 71, Romero already qualified for the senior tax freeze, which means she can afford to stay, despite her limited fixed income.
Houlihan calls the tax-relief programs mere ‘band-aids.” The real culprit, he says, is an unfair system that relies too heavily on property taxes to fund schools and local governments. Nevertheless, Houlihan is glad the two women have managed to stay. “That’s great,” he said, “though their neighborhood is gone.”
Along Damen, construction is finally starting to slow. But Bayly’s protests continue, wind-blown signs swaying from her second-floor balcony.
— Linnet Myers
ENDURING ART
“Planning the dream” (Sept. 23, 2001)
SCULPTOR CORKY TUTTLE was thrilled to see one of her pieces from 30 years ago, a couple in repose, prominently displayed in a North Shore home that was featured on our pages.
It was a stroke of luck that the Evanston artist saw the story: A friend sent her a clipping in Muskegon, where she has a second home. These days, she’s retired from sculpting and a second career as an art dealer in Muskegon.
But Tuttle remembers making the piece three decades ago and selling it to a couple at a North Shore arts festival. The couple had passed it on to their son and daughter-in-law as a gift when they bought their first house. Tuttle found this fitting. “To me, the piece is symbolic of a happy marriage,” she says. “I hope it has brought them romance.”
— Lisa Skolnik
BIGTIME FOR BROOKS
“Converting a classic” (Jan. 14, 2001)
Before “The Producers” made its world premiere as a musical at the Cadillac Palace Theater on Feb. 1, I wrote that, “success or failure . . . this will likely provide one of the final sentences of [Mel Brooks’] career.”
Many people thought it was risky to refashion the successful 1967 film, written and directed by Brooks and starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. The movie had a loyal and passionate cult following, and was named the 11th greatest comedy ever made by the American Film Institute in June 2000. The film told the story of a down-and-almost-out producer named Max Bialystock who coerces a timid accountant into a scheme to bilk investors of their dough by producing a sure-fire flop, which they believe they have found in a musical called “Springtime for Hitler,” which celebrates everything Nazi.
The stage version, filled with music written by Brooks and dance numbers staged by director Susan Stroman, starred Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Could the musical live up to the movie?
The answer? A resounding, cash-register-ringing “Yes!”
During the play’s Chicago run, which lasted until Feb. 25, tickets were harder to come by than an invitation to dinner with Oprah. It remained that way in New York. When the play opened at the St. James Theatre on April 19, it had already sold $17 million in advance tickets. It was a frenzy not seen since the mid-1970s and “A Chorus Line.” And the critical reception placed the show on a level with such landmark productions as “Oklahoma!” and “My Fair Lady.”
In June, “The Producers” was awarded a record 12 Tonys. At the award ceremony at Radio City Music Hall, Brooks said, “I want to thank Hitler for being such a funny guy on stage.” Three of the awards went to Brooks–as one of the producers; as co-writer of the book, with Tom Meehan; and for best original score.
Scalpers were reportedly getting more than seven times the $100 top ticket price, which was itself the highest in Broadway history. And even when New York theaters suffered a serious box-office slump in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedies, “The Producers” remained the hottest ticket in town. The show set off a theater community controversy this month when a decision was made to cut into the lucrative ticket-scalping market by setting aside 50 seats for every performance and charging $480.
So if this is one of the final sentences of Mel Brooks’ career–and there’s no assurance of that, since there are rumbles that he is thinking about turning “Young Frankenstein” (13th on the film institute’s list) into a musical–it is a very simple yet potent one: “Wow.”
— Rick Kogan
TIMES IS NOT A-CHANGING
“Trying times” (May 27, 2001)
When retired Silicon Valley executive Bob Burnett took over as publisher of Chicago’s cantankerous, left-wing political magazine In These Times last year, it seemed an improbable match. But the new publisher’s resume–he was a co-founder of computer networking giant Cisco Systems–and his bank account inspired confidence in his ability to turn around the struggling bimonthly.
Burnett said he was going to turn In These Times into the media vehicle that would change left-wing politics forever. But in September, a year into his tenure, Burnett abruptly resigned as publisher. “Circumstances in the technology/business side of my life have necessitated my becoming the president of Xamplify, a software startup here in Berkeley,” he wrote in a brief goodbye column in the Oct. 1 issue. Those circumstances included a free-fall in stock valuations–close to 60 points for Cisco–and Xamplify’s need for him to go beyond his advisory relationship with the company.
“Xamplify, where I am a major investor, got into real trouble, and the other investors asked me to step in,” Burnett says. “I miss In These Times, of course,” but he says he couldn’t continue working for “free, basically,” at the magazine and shore up Xamplify at the same time. “I’m not a young guy anymore. I didn’t have time to do both.”
Burnett continues to sit on In These Times’ board of directors and to support the publication financially, but the magazine will miss having access to his purse strings day-to-day. But magazine founder Jim Weinstein emphasizes that Burnett was not keeping In These Times afloat. “This is a magazine saved by its subscribers,” he says. Now In These Times will have to hit donors harder than usual in the coming year, as contributions flagged while Burnett was in charge and he didn’t recruit any new, deep-pockets donors before leaving.
Burnett also never launched his campaign to boost the magazine’s circulation into the hundreds of thousands, dubbed “Secret Plan X” by staff members. Secret Plan X–whatever it was, Burnett wouldn’t say–remains on hold, and circulation is about the same, around 20,000, as when Burnett first came on.
The magazine’s staff was surprised by Burnett’s resignation but seems to have recovered from the loss. “I’m sorry Bob had to resign, naturally, but his reason was valid,” says Joel Bleifuss, the editor and now publisher. “We’re still friends and e-mail each other. If I had money I would probably invest in Xamplify.”
Several staff members had questioned Burnett’s long-term interest from the start. “There were a few things that always sounded too good to be true,” says managing editor Craig Aaron, including Burnett’s promises of expensive investigative stories and a glossy cover. “But I think everyone here is still positive and getting on with the day-to-day.”
— Danielle Svetcov
ANOTHER BEND IN THE ROAD
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“Ella Leya’s Long and Winding Road” (May 6, 2001)
The ups and downs in Ella Leya’s life are the stuff of a novel that’s still being written, the latest chapters coming over the summer in Los Angeles.
That is a long way from Azerbaijan, where Leya fell in love with American popular music when she was 12, and from which she later made her way, via Moscow and Norfolk, Va., to Chicago.
It was here that she has suffered almost unimaginable heartbreak, when her son was diagnosed with leukemia and spent a valiant two years battling the disease. When he died, two days short of his 9th birthday, Leya went into an emotional tailspin.
It was music that pulled her out. “Music was my sacred place where I get in touch not just with myself, but could connect with [Sergei’s] spirit.”
The result was a wonderful CD titled “Queen of Night,” which brought her to the attention of many in the music business. That is one of the reasons she spent much of the summer in Los Angeles, where she quickly learned, “In this business there is so much talk and not so very much action.”
She met with producers and lawyers, people full of promises and plans. “There were dozens of meetings with all of these flaky people. But I did make five good and dear friends from the bunch.”
She also appeared on a popular Spanish-language television program and made a deal to have her music played on Air Korea, American Airlines and Northwest Airlines flights.
Back in Wilmette, where she lives with her husband, Stuart Altshuler, rabbi of Beth Hillel, Leya has been working on her next CD.
Titled “Russian Romance,” it is a gathering of traditional Russian love songs. The recording sessions with local musicians are going well and she expects to finish by the end of January.
Though she’s busy in the studio and much of her husband’s time is devoted to his congregation, they dote on their son, Micha. He was adopted by the couple from an orphanage in Russia, a fulfillment of a promise they had made to Sergei when he was sick.
“Micha is the most active kid on the block,” says Leya. “He is not the most musical yet, but he is taking Russian ballet lessons and he likes it very much.”
— Rick Kogan
POINT TAKEN
“Point counterpoint” (June 3, 2001)
They claim THAT it’s ugly and stark and that it “brutalizes” the lakefront. They’ve dubbed it “the Alcatraz look.” And all year, angry park users have been rallying to stop the new concrete-and-steel seawall being built to reinforce the city’s shoreline. Now, they appear to have won: Officials said they’re dropping plans to build the structure around Promontory Point, a peninsula that juts into Lake Michigan off 55th Street in Hyde Park. The project had been scheduled to begin next year.
“There’s no way we can do this next summer unless we build what was proposed. And the people don’t want the project we proposed,” said William Abolt, commissioner of the city’s Department of Environment. Officials will regroup, he said, and come up with “something people like to look at, and we can be proud of.”
The outcry began after sections of the wall went up along the shore at 51st Street and north of Belmont Avenue. Lake Michigan’s powerful waves had eroded the limestone seawalls, built between 1910 and the 1930s, and officials said the $300 million, eight-mile lakefront project was urgently needed to protect the shoreline and Lake Shore Drive.
But in Hyde Park, residents were appalled by the concrete promenade and seawall they saw going up north of Promontory Point. They said the design made it more difficult for swimmers to get into and out of the water and destroyed the naturalistic beauty of the limestone blocks at the Point, designed in the 1930s by renowned landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Others feared the project would harm marine life.
Some protesters argued that the Point should be declared a historic landmark, and two University of Chicago professors, Peter Rossi and Gidon Eshel, challenged an Army Corps study that justified the massive structure, arguing that the Corps had greatly overestimated the lake’s force.
Officials eventually compromised, agreeing to reduce the project’s size and include swimming access areas. “The things we committed to do [in the compromise] we will do no matter what,” Abolt said in a recent interview. But now, he said, “We’re not ruling anything out. . . . People have even sent us unsolicited proposals that seem interesting.” He said the city has no desire “to spend money on projects people don’t want.”
The Hyde Park protest has been echoed by North Siders in Lake View who were similarly dismayed by the looks of the new seawall north of Belmont. They hope to modify the design of another stretch being built nearby as well as a section north of Diversey Avenue, which hasn’t yet been started.
“We’ve got to have some naturalistic stone, and a way to get in and out of the water,” said Charlotte Newfeld of the Lakeview Citizens Council. “It’s pure and simple.”
Robert Clarke, president of the Southeast Lakeview Neighbors, said he’s inviting Hyde Parkers to a public meeting in January on the Diversey project. “They have experts at the University [of Chicago] who know more than the Corps of Engineers,” said Clarke. “We want them to share what they know.”
At Ald. Bernie Hansen’s office, legislative aide John Borovicka said the lakefront project has raised “very legitimate concerns.” As a result, at Diversey “we might wind up with a better project from the start,” he said.
“The lakefront is worth millions of tourist dollars,” said Newfeld. “After all, this is going to last 100 years, and they’d better do it right.”
— Linnet Myers
A DREAM DEFERRED
“Playing against the odds” (Aug. 27, 2000)
For a musician, the body is an extension of the instrument. If the fingers are not nimble, the joints not loose, the muscles too tight, then the melody does not flow. The phrasing is stiff. The sound is strained. A career is jeopardized.
This fall, Hye-Seon Sin, 19, left Mannes College of Music in Manhattan after her freshman year and flew back home to Korea and the family she left five years ago to come to America to study to become a concert pianist.
“I don’t feel good in my body,” said Hye-Seon before she embarked for home. “My neck hurts all the time. My shoulders are really sore. While I was practicing, it was hurting. I play the piano all the time.”
Dr. Alice Brandfonbrener has seen dozens of cases like Hye-Seon’s. Director of the Medical Program for Performing Artists at Northwestern University’s Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, Brandfonbrener pioneered the field of performing-arts medicine in the early 1980s.
“The very good ones who start very early are tracked into that career without ever looking back, and that has the potential for some complications,” said Brandfonbrener. Hye-Seon began taking lessons at age 4 and gave her first orchestra concert at 11. She is one of countless gifted musicians from Korea and other countries who come to the U.S. in hopes of launching a solo career.
She attended the Manhattan School of Music for nearly two years, living alone in New York as a 14-year-old. Then, aided by the vast but closely knit Korean-American community, she landed in Kalamazoo, Mich., where she studied with a private teacher while she finished high school.
Accepted into prestigious Mannes, she spent the last year immersed in such challenging music as the Chopin etudes, Brahms and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2.
“It is very strenuous what we do,” says Pavlina Dokovska, chair of the piano department at Mannes. “We are using tremendous power, and not only when we play loud. The whole body is involved, all the muscles.”
Pianists and string players suffer the most performance-related injuries of any type of musician, and 65 to 75 percent of serious musicians have a performance-affecting injury at some point, according to studies.
Brandfonbrener says a variety of treatments are available for injuries like Hye-Seon’s, including reducing the sources of stress, both musical and non-musical. “Get out of too much competition. Get good exercise [and] good nutrition and R and R. Learn to pace practicing so you don’t sit for three hours and don’t move.”
He also notes that are physical characteristics that can contribute to injuries. For instance, he says, many Asian women have small hands, so that when playing chords or big, romantic pieces, they tend to come down with extra force on the keys.
Brandfonbrener also suggests psychological help for musicians with Hye-Seon’s history. “You take a kid of 14 away from home and parents when she is in adolescence? Even doing that in your own country is tough, but sending them away to another country and culture is particularly so.” As for Hye-Seon’s physical problem, “It shouldn’t be a career-ending injury,” Brandfonbrener says. “Unless it turns out that she decides that’s what is best for her.”
Hye-Seon plans to continue studying piano but will cut back on her hours of practice. “I will keep playing,” she said, “but not really hard.”
— Sue Ellen Christian
HOW LOW CAN IT GO?
“Taking stock of e-trading” (May 7, 2000)
Steve Petty is back up now. Back in the black after a year or so of stock market carnage. “The Money Shop,” his self-named den of online trading, is still in business, trading less than it did before but still trading. “There’s a little blood on the floor,” Petty said, “but the game goes on.”
E-traders like Petty were hip-deep in the stock market swoon of 2001, watching stocks flop as fast as they had soared through most of the ’90s. Petty had parlayed a $24,000 stake into a $55,000 paper profit in his tech-heavy trading account, and he got hurt like most of the other investors who put $500 billion or more into tech stocks. “I’d go down each morning and just stare at the screen. Last December it was grim. Brutal. I kept saying it can’t go any lower. Of course, most everybody else was saying that too.
“I was down as much as 40 percent, and it would have been worse had I not gotten out of a lot of positions a little earlier,” he said. Trading online, he added, made it as easy to pull the trigger as it had been to buy in the first place. But he also did not panic, hard as that was as the tech-packed NASDAQ average tanked for months on end. “A lot of times I just looked at the whole thing and said, ‘I’m not doing anything today,’ ” he said.
He also refused to dump his good holdings, stocks such as Intel, Cisco and General Electric. “When they got hammered, I bought more. C’mon, these are great companies. General Electric at 29 is butter. You can’t get enough of it.” Part of his reasoning, Petty said, was based on his age. “I’m still in my 40s. I have a long time horizon, at least a 30-year time horizon. Sure, I sold some of my trading positions and got out of stocks that were long shots, but I hung in with the good stuff.”
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In the meantime he married his girlfriend, Laurie, bought a house and two dogs, and installed an Internet service that keeps him online at all times. “You can’t be much more bullish than that,” he said.
While Petty admits to trading less now–10 or 12 trades a month compared with as many as 30 in the heady days–his mouse was most active in the week after the terrorist attacks. “I knew the market would be down, so I bought. I’m in the black now because of it,” he says. “It wasn’t so much patriotism–though I’m as patriotic as the next guy–as much as it was pure value. The value in the market was undeniable.”
— Bill Brashler