The Columbus mosaics are hardly the only pieces of public art languishing in storage. John Warner Norton’s 1929 mural Printing the News, Distributing the News, Transporting the News, removed from the concourse ceiling of the Riverside Plaza building more than five years ago, is still rolled up in a warehouse on the northwest side.
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The 180-foot-long mural, the subject of a 1997 Reader story that I wrote, was originally commissioned by the Chicago Daily News for its Holabird & Root building at Madison and Canal. A Lockport native and longtime instructor at the School of the Art Institute, Norton did architectural paintings for many downtown art-deco skyscrapers and other buildings in Chicago and the midwest during the early decades of this century. The mural, which uses graphic symbols and semiabstract geometric forms to depict a day in the life of a modern newspaper, is considered his masterpiece–one local conservator called it the “Sistine chapel of Chicago.” Norton and three assistants painted the 19 canvas panels–3,330 square feet–in a studio, then affixed them to the concourse’s vaulted ceiling in 1930.
As it turned out, Schmitt Studios’ bid–reportedly in the $500,000 range–was deemed too high by Equity Office Properties. The mural was returned to Chicago in August 1995 and placed in the temperature-controlled warehouse of a local art-moving and storage company. At that time a west-coast conservator evaluated the mural and estimated that up to 40 percent of its paint had been damaged when it was removed, which would make for an even costlier and more complicated restoration.
Strilky is less sanguine. “Someday someone will do the job, but I don’t think any of the current players will be alive. Fifty years from now maybe they’ll say, ‘There were people trying to do the right thing back then.’” –J.H.
