Last year at this time, a downtown office worker on lunch break could typically wander into the Chicago Cultural Center and spend an hour listening to live music. These days the center’s halls are usually silent at lunchtime — small wonder since music programmers’ jobs have sat unfilled for three months. The Cultural Center cafe and the gift shop have shut down as well, and the library collection once housed on the center’s main floor has been donated to a private group.
“When I went in there the last couple of times, it just seemed kind of dead,” said Marta Nicholas, a former member of Friends of the Chicago Cultural Center, a now-defunct citizen group that two decades ago helped push to keep the city-owned building open to the public and free of admission.. “There weren’t as many people. There wasn’t as much going on.”
The slowdown in programs and services has taken Nicholas and other Chicagoans by surprise, given the high priority Mayor Rahm Emanuel has placed on arts and culture. Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Commissioner Michelle Boone said the interruptions are temporary. She said she plans to fill the music programming jobs and that the absent programs and services will eventually be replaced with equally robust offerings.
“This notion that there’s this mass conspiracy to destroy the Cultural Center is bogus,” Boone said.
“It is certainly a goal of the mayor to continue to provide highly accessible high quality programming for all of our residents.”
Boone said the gift shop will become “a visual arts exhibition space” and the cafe has been transformed into “more space for us to receive visitors and to distribute information.” She said removing the library, which showcased works by local publishers, will allow room for renovation and upgrades.
“If there’s an opportunity to bring on new ideas, fresh programming,” she asked, “why wouldn’t we do that?”
She said several weekly lunchtime concerts — “Classical Mondays,” “Jazz Blues & Beyond” on Tuesdays and “Music Without Borders” on Fridays — and the “Sunday Salon” concert series have not gone forward in 2012 “with the same level of consistency that has happened in the past, only because we didn’t have the staff in place to do that.”
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That’s because a one-year city contract with the nonprofit Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture that provided music programming at the Cultural Center ended in December. Boone said her department chose not to renew the contract because she and other officials wanted to bring the jobs in-house. Three months after that contract ended, however, the city still has not filled the positions, and they may not fill them for another three months.
City spokeswoman Mary May said that the city hiring process is lengthy and the department is not allowed to comment on it in detail.
“We hope to have the best possible candidates for the positions in place by June 1,” she said. (The department said other longtime programmers are planning summer festivals.)
Boone said she does not expect programming at the Cultural Center to be affected by this year’s budget cuts, which reduced her department’s budget by about 10 percent.
Sometimes referred to as the “People’s Palace,” the Cultural Center building was originally the city’s central library, built after the Great Chicago Fire.
When the Harold Washington Library opened in 1991, the building became the Chicago Cultural Center under then-Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois Weisberg.
The elaborate classical granite and limestone building is a popular stop for tourists, Chicagoans and suburbanites alike. It had 897,000 visitors in 2010, according to Crain’s Chicago Business list of the area’s top tourist attractions, an 11 percent increase from 2009.
The only Cultural Center concert still running on a weekly basis, the privately programmed Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts on Wednesdays in the center’s Preston Bradley Hall, draws audiences of several hundred. One recent audience included several people in bicycle helmets, a young woman doing science homework, a father-and-son pair of lawyers on lunch break, and a professor who arrived early to people-watch as the crowd trickled in.
“It’s so beautiful,” said Ralph Lustgarten, an “almost retired” lawyer who sat with his wife, Gudrun. “This hall is especially beautiful with all the mosaics, and they have excellent music here. We come all the way from Glenview just for this.”
He said he hoped other weekly concerts would return soon.
To some Cultural Center regulars, the cuts seem an odd contrast to the enthusiasm and effort the Emanuel administration has poured into its proposed 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan. Boone’s department is in the midst of holding about 30 citizen meetings to enlist Chicagoans in drafting a blueprint for the city.
Other frequent visitors to the center said the changes simply seemed abrupt and mysterious. Overhead signs still point visitors to the nonexistent cafe. Boone said she has tried to spread information about her department’s plans though media interviews and pointed out that notices in the building explain the whereabouts of the library collection, known as the Chicago Publishers Gallery. (It moved to the Read/Write Library in Humboldt Park, open 1-5 p.m Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.)
Nicholas, the longtime advocate for the building, said she is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the changes. But Tanya Klasser, a retired teacher who visits the center for concerts, art exhibitions and other events, is disappointed with Boone’s new plans for the building. She said she has a hard time understanding why the programming jobs remain unfilled, and why a center that already has gallery and performance space is swapping out services for more space.
“This isn’t good,” Klasser said. “Making changes without discussion, and the prospect of not replacing things with equally good stuff. You know, not having a cafe there anymore. Not having a gift shop, and dragging your feet on the new music programs. Just not good.”
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