Monday I was downtown walking two visitors from Denmark around some of Chicago’s greatest architectural treasures, the Monadnock, the Rookery, the Fisher, the Auditorium, the Marquette, the kind of buildings that make you want to stand a little taller and say, “Yeah, this is my city.”
And every few minutes they’d ask the same question: “So… when are we going to see the Picasso?”
Not the Monadnock. Not the Rookery. No. They wanted the Picasso, the big, rusty, 50‑foot Rorschach test in Daley Plaza that Chicago has been arguing about since 1967. Now I love the Picasso as much as the next guy, but really?
And honestly, that’s the most Chicago thing ever.
We’ve spent decades insisting it looks like a baboon. Or a bird. Or an aardvark. Or a woman. Or Picasso’s Afghan hound. Or something a welder made on his lunch break. We booed it when it went up. We really did. An alderman actually tried to replace it with a statue of Ernie Banks. Someone even staged a protest with a giant pickle!
And yet… we climb on it. We slide down it. We meet under it. We decorate around it. We complain about it like it’s a cousin who shows up to every family gathering wearing something questionable, but god help the outsider who tries to insult it.
Because somewhere along the way, the Picasso stopped being “that weird thing in the plaza” and became part of the city’s DNA. A little confusing. A little abstract. But totally ours.
So there I was, proudly showing off our architectural royalty, and my Danish guests were practically vibrating with excitement to see the Picasso. And when we finally turned the corner into Daley Plaza, they lit up like they were meeting Beyoncé.
Maybe that’s the real Chicago story: We grumble, we roast, we roll our eyes… and the whole world is standing there saying, “Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”
And honestly? We are.
- 60
Comments(6)