The Spirit of Hyde Park was designed and executed by Astrid Fuller in 1973 and has suffered from lack of restoration over the past three decades. Layers of graffiti and whitewash have exaggerated the ghostliness of the mural's figures, and spalling concrete and leakage have rendered parts of the mural nearly invisible beneath the damage. The mural is massive, about 2,100 square feet, and spans the entire underpass at 57th Street and Lake Park.

As with many murals in Chicago, this was a neighborhood effort, and 15 neighborhood children volunteered to help Fuller. She was so taken with their eagerness and dedication that she divided them up into a morning and afternoon crew so that she could give each child sufficient attention, and the kids applied all of the flat colors themselves. Chicago muralist Bill Walker (whom we've talked about before) acted as Fuller's mentor in this enormous endeavor, and three years later, painted a powerful and controversial mural opposite Spirit of Hyde Park. Walker's Justice for Delbert Tibbs spoke to the perceived injustice of a black Chicagoan convicted of murder in Florida, and, sadly, the mural was later destroyed during Metra station renovation.

Though Fuller's original design for Spirit had been approved by nearby residents and businesses, it was also not without controversy, with at least one local newspaper lambasting it as "violent." In response, NBC-Chicago reporter Len O'Connor described the mural as a "wall of hope that has tried to record the heartbeat of mankind in community."

We think it's a bit difficult to interpret Fuller's mural as violent, as it openly calls for mutual respect, civil rights, and equality - values as meaningful today as they were more than 30 years ago. We know that outdoor art is often transient, especially with weather as extreme as Chicago's, but we think that this art is as worthwhile as any on a museum wall, and we hope that restoration funding becomes available for this mural before it's too late.

Fuller was responsible for a number of similarly themed murals in Hyde Park, which you can read more about at the Chicago Public Art Group's website. Take your cameras and be sure to tag your photos with "chicagoist."

Leon found inspiration and joy in his work as the public programs manager at the Eiteljorg Museum, where he worked for the past eight years, and at The Children’s Museum, where he worked the decade prior. His affinity for working with people came naturally, and those who found themselves on the edges of society—children, minorities, even new staff members—received immediate warmth and friendship from Leon. He treated people with admirable equality, staying true to his own open nature, no matter who they were or how they treated him. He was more than a coworker or a manager of public programs: his genuine affection for the artists he invited to the museum bore rich fruit in the lasting friendships he formed and in his own creative endeavors. He became an artist in his own right, taking up basketry with exquisite results. He was a determined activist for African-Americans and other Americans of color, using his work at the Eiteljorg Museum and Indiana Black Expo to help people see themselves in the American West, from the earliest times to the present. He cared about bringing the museum’s mission to life, and took pride in events like Winter Market, which he nurtured from a simple idea into a great success.

Unlike many of us who hesitate to reach out and touch others, Leon did so literally and figuratively, time and time again. He provided support and encouragement for several families who had relocated to Indianapolis after Hurricane Katrina. He was an active and faithful board member of Gleaner’s Food Bank for seven years, tirelessly leading their strategic planning efforts and pouring his heart and passion into their mission. Leon wrestled with the challenges of feeding the hungry, and he encouraged others to do the same. When the Eiteljorg offered free admission in lieu of a food donation to Gleaner’s last December, Leon kept staff apprised of not only how much food had been collected, but also how many bowls it would fill. He was so happy to be able to spread the passion from his volunteer work to his day job, and proud that Eiteljorg visitors contributed so heartily.

Leon saw no boundaries, only opportunities, and he found a singular place in our lives that straddled the personal and professional. He incorporated Gleaner’s mission into the Eiteljorg; he brought compassion and understanding to Gleaner’s; he infused his own hopes for African-Americans into everything he did. His wonderful dry humor permeated our lives, keeping us humble and humane, and he unstintingly expressed sincere affection for those around him, always there to squeeze a colleague’s shoulder or offer a hug. His love for his partner, Kevin, was quiet, strong, palpable. He spoke fondly and proudly of his brother, Jerry, and his sister, April. He was always happy for an excuse to brag about his niece and nephew, Tessa and Tristan, whose pictures he kept in his office. The mothers of young boys collapsed with laughter at the recountings of his own favorite childhood stories, as he told how he and Jerry escaped punishment after setting the vacuum cleaner on fire—who would have thought that sweeping up hot embers from the fireplace could have such negative consequences?

Leon didn’t hesitate to bring swift perspective to a situation, often saying, “Aah, get over it!” But we won’t get over him: it is simply not possible to find somebody who hugs so well, smiles so broadly, or cares so deeply. Leon wrote in an email many years ago, “I’m not sure what the future holds for Leon Jett. I do know that I carry with me lessons about families, children, life, learning, and many personal discoveries into my next chapter. I am richer for it.” And we are richer for him.

Living in Florence years later, Robert Clark noticed a plaque in the foyer of his apartment that he had glanced over for two months without reading. Placed on the wall above his head, it indicated the level to which the Arno had swollen nearly forty years before. He remembered seeing the pictures in Life magazine as a young teenager—mud lapping the hems of marble robes, half a dozen people carrying an enormous canvas across a wet piazza, and Cimabue’s massive Crocifisso, which became the symbol of the ruinous flood and the decades of conservation that followed.

Clark is really a novelist, and so Dark Water is a procession of vignettes. It is a personal introduction to the artists, museum staff, and librarians whose drawings and papers were sucked into this violent eddy and whose lives were newly defined in the flood’s soggy aftermath. But Clark is savvy enough to realize that the story of the flood began many centuries before 1966, and so the interlacing vignettes start sometime in the thirteenth century with the felling of a poplar tree for the Crocifisso. The evolution of the poor Santa Croce quarter, the centuries of irreplaceable art, the expatriate poets who settled Florence in the mid-1800s, Hitler’s exemption of the Ponte Vecchio when the Germans bombed nearly every other Florentine bridge: these are the myths and realities that made Florence legendary. Perhaps some of those legends once drew you to Florence, whether by plane or train or by book or painting. If not, Clark’s oft-meticulous vignettes will be less stirring and more of a trudge through history.

To the right audience, though, Clark has performed what must have been some kind of genealogical miracle, tracking down an impressive network of characters from decades past. Clark not only finds relatives of photographers and museum staff whose lives were changed by the flood, but also tracks down many of the angeli del fango, or mud angels, who descended upon Florence in her hour of need. The mud angels, mostly art history students from Europe and the United States who showed up in Florence after the news of the flood’s devastation reached them, are perhaps the greatest testament to the primacy of art in Florence. Thirty-three people died in the flood—Florentines were always skeptical of such a low official casualty count—and the city had to dig itself out of mud, debris, and disease. And yet it was the thousands of pieces of damaged artwork that drew, without prior organization, the angeli. Many angeli del fango showed up eager to spend tireless days in dank, ersatz museum vaults simply to be in the presence of the art they had studied, to scrape mud from thousands of pages of books or spray anti-fungals on the back of crucifixes.

The angeli del fango phenomenon—a proto-Woodstock of high visual culture—gave the appearance of being a miraculous and spontaneous expression of youthful benevolence, epitomized that same night in Botticelli’s Magdalene being transported from the Baptistry in a red Volkswagen Beetle (the archetypal student vehicle of the time), its harrowed face emerging from the sunroof. But for all the impromptu charm of the image—Procacci and Baldini would have been apoplectic (with good reason) had they known—the Magdalene arrived safely at the Palazzo Davanzati, where expert restorers of wood sculpture from Norway would join it in a few days.

As Clark slowly lays character upon character, vignette upon vignette, he expands this dreadful day in Florentine history, taking us deep into museum vaults both ancient and modern, tracing the footsteps of the angeli and into the lives of a dozen or more Florentines.

McIntyre was working on his doctorate at the time, studying the productivity of lakes and rivers in the tropics. What he saw in Michigan was a massive fish migration that easily surpassed the migratory spectacle he had witnessed in South America.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that sucker breeding migrations, known as runs, may not be as enormous as they once were. Yet McIntyre estimates that there are still tens of millions of suckers in the Great Lakes basin that make the annual upstream pilgrimage. Unlike other migratory fish, suckers swim up streams both large and small. McIntyre has measured tributaries only 20 feet wide that swell with 3,000 to 8,000 suckers during migration. According to local lore, migrating suckers become “so thick you can walk across the stream on their backs.”  

Despite their humble name, suckers are anything but ordinary. They are the third-most diverse family of freshwater fish in North America, growing anywhere from 14 inches to two feet long and living as long as 25 to 30 years. Carnivores—not mudsuckers, as their name might suggest—suckers are bottom-dwelling fish whose diet ranges from shellfish to snails.

As they pour out of the Great Lakes into streams and small tributaries to breed by the million, McIntyre says the massive migration is a phenomenon rivaled only by more famous migratory wonders like the wildebeest of the Serengeti or the salmon of the Northwest Coast. And unlike the declining species whose scarcity inspires protection, the suckers’ conservation value is born of their sheer volume.

Today, McIntyre studies these enormous migrations in a more official capacity than when he first saw them with his grandfather. As a Smith Fellow of the Society for Conservation Biology, McIntyre has teamed up with Dr. Patrick Doran, Michigan’s director of science for the Conservancy, Dr. David Allan from the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and Robin Abell at the World Wildlife Fund. Their work on suckers takes place on the Stonington Peninsula in the northwest corner of Lake Michigan. Local residents help the researchers establish study sites and monitor the sucker runs.

One of McIntyre’s overarching goals is to measure the degree to which sucker runs fertilize Great Lakes tributaries. This data is especially important when considering the manmade barriers that can block sucker runs, such as dams, road culverts and fishing nets—barriers which may have a far-reaching impact on overall stream health, not just the immediate surroundings.

McIntyre’s early data shows a clear increase in stream nutrients during the migration. That’s no surprise to anybody who has witnessed the enormity of this event and has seen firsthand the tangible natural link between small streams and the Great Lakes. In a watershed, where everything drains from upstream to downstream, the millions of fish that swim against the current are an important exception to the downward flow of nutrients.

The life cycle of suckers supports the streams they migrate through. Adult fish are an important food source for both birds and mammals, and emerging evidence shows that sucker eggs are a critical seasonal resource for salmonids and other game fish. Walleye and northern pike, which breed in the same rivers as suckers, may benefit because predators are less likely to consume their larvae than those of the more-plentiful suckers.

The waste products and carcasses generated during sucker migration inject new nutrients into the streams. That enhances algae growth, which provides food for insects, which then become food for birds and game fish. Suckers typically survive the breeding season and return year after year to spawn in streams, and although they usually out-populate other fish species, their non-game status has discouraged research and management efforts. But as Conservancy scientist Patrick Doran explains, “what’s good for suckers is almost always good for the entire fish community, including game species.”

McIntyre’s study isn’t just about suckers. His results will provide critical input for the Conservancy’s efforts to protect the health of Michigan’s streams—understanding how suckers impact stream health can help inform basin-wide conservation decisions.

McIntyre and Doran both stress that this study can yield a win-win scenario. Massive sucker runs enhance the health of both stream ecosystems and game fish. The more we understand about suckers, the better The Nature Conservancy can protect and preserve the integrity of the mighty Great Lakes and their tributaries.

To assess the potential importance of sucker runs for the productivity of tea-stained streams in the UP, McIntyre teamed up with David Allan (University of Michigan), Patrick Doran (Director of Science for The Nature Conservancy in Michigan), and Robin Abell (World Wildlife Fund). The Smith Fellows program, which provides post-doctoral funding for young environmental scientists to partner with academic and NGO mentors to address pressing conservation issues, offered an ideal mechanism for initiating the project.

The first time I saw these murals, I was walking under the 53rd Street viaduct on my way to work. I was rushing and only glanced at them. I noticed that big white-and-brown rectangles had been painted over the original murals in big blocks, covering the graffiti tags that inevitably appear on concrete walls. In other places, the paint had flaked off in sheets, revealing dull concrete beneath.

Maybe it was this decrepitude that bothered the woman; maybe it was a sign to her that people let things crumble and decay; we let nature, or art, run its course. Maybe it was the figures themselves, the thought that an apparition could float from the wall at any moment during a late-night walk home. I understood: the ebony shell-faced figure looked back at me whenever I rushed by on my way to work, its mouth a gaping black "o." I thought that something powerful might arise from standing and staring at the murals, from walking up and down the sidewalk and running my hands along the crumbling paint.

But I resisted. Would my sense of wonder crumble, too, if I got to know these murals? I worried that wonder would deteriorate into disappointment, that my walk to work would become monotonous. The woman's fear intrigued me—what power these murals must possess to drive her from her apartment!—and I wanted to hold on to my awe of that power. I wanted to hold on to my ability to rush by them with the shell-faced figure staring at me. I wanted to hold on to not knowing.

I finally visited the 53rd Street murals on one of those cold mornings when the stinging wind reminds you that Chicago is on a lake, the kind of morning when the precipitation is neither snow nor rain nor sleet, but some vicious, frozen mixture that bites mercilessly at your face. The question of whether these concrete walls might indulge me an immersive experience would have to resolve itself quickly.

Time slowed while I ran my eyes over the sometimes vibrant, sometimes shredded, concrete. The mural's colored ribbons blew across the viaduct wall and gusted into the blue-black body of the shell-faced figure that had driven the woman from her apartment. Maybe it was an apparition to her, a mean spirit whose swirling, tangled arms might spin right off the concrete wall and run its fingers through her hair. Empty-eyed and open-mouthed, its gaping orifices were formed by small shells arranged in circles. The shells were tipped with bloody red; the openings created by their circular arrangement were abysmal and black.

The spirit arose from nothing; the swirls and streaks of color that formed its body had their own mind. Its right arm crossed its body, one brightly-colored streak after another, dancing, overlapping, flying up toward the next section of the mural. As the arm lifted upwards, it splintered, not into fingers, but into something more like bare tree branches beribboned with pinks and oranges and reds, exuberantly streaking down into a brindled landscape. The tawny streaks looped up into the dreadlocked hair of a coppery black woman who tossed cowry shells into the sea with long, boneless hands. A sheer, light blue cloth draped her shoulders, covering her breasts but revealing her stomach. She was more proud than provocative, her dreadlocks streaming behind her and her eyes gazing steadily forward. Red, yellow and white rays emanated from her face and melted into the sea in front of her.

I crept closer to the mural, mindful of the occasional pedestrian who stumbled by. Staring at a viaduct wall at that hour probably marked me as crazy as the early morning drunks. As I got closer to the murals, I noticed something strange. Small hieroglyphics dotted the concrete canvas, drawn in only a slightly darker blue than the impressionistic sea. Scarab beetles, stern vultures, and kohl-lined eyes were inked in amongst the cowry shells, at once cryptic and legible. Maybe some budding Egyptologist had indulged in late-night graffiti, delighting in the symbolism and eroticism of the cowry shells, which are often used in Africa as symbols of fertility and wealth. It was strange that cowry shells and hieroglyphics, these artifacts of ancient Africa, would be exposed on a crumbling wall on a crumbling Chicago street.

Aside from the occasional passerby, my only company under the viaduct that cold gray morning was these painted spirits. They were deathless things, howling and scowling at me. A bird rose from the cowry shells, its feathers overlapping in diamonds of oranges, purples, and reds. Astride the huge bird was another genderless ebony-blue figure, clad only in a necklace, who commandeered the bird into a flaming sun. Painted-over graffiti left big rectangles over its center, marring its blaze. The sun burned weakly in the amber glow of the light affixed near the top of the mural, lighting the way for pedestrians, keeping them safe from crumbling spirits. Instead of crumbling away, my wonder was gathering momentum. I was hooked.

Lucky you’ve got some natural magnetism to light your way. Here’s a bright idea: shake the Shaker Flashlight for a few seconds to “charge” the magnetic coils inside. You can toggle between one or three LED lights, which stay on for 12 to 30 minutes.

Light Me Up (+)

• As promised, the Shaker Flashlight lights up your world and keeps it lit. I went a couple days between using it, and even without additional shaking, it kept all three LED bulbs going for more than 30 minutes.
• Since the flashlight uses magnetic coils, it’s environmentally friendly and will keep going and going without batteries.
• Its slim design and single button make it easy to use, even for kids or seniors.

Dim Bulb (-)

• Not the brightest bulb. Even though the Shaker uses LED bulbs, they are tiny. Good for emergencies, bad for lighting the way off the beaten path.
• A little heavier than most flashlights the same size, campers, hikers, or cyclists may find it adds too much weight. Some seniors might even find it too heavy.
• It came packaged in a cardboard box and bubble wrap—it’s a durable little light, and the extra wrap is unnecessary.

The Bottom Line
Not the best choice for people who need an extra-bright light or who are concerned about extra heft. But if you want a durable flashlight for emergencies without the fuss or environmental impact of batteries, you’ll find that the compromise is worth making.