Chicago

“Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived for only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, a kind of prototype of a city….” Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris, Pantheon Books, NY, 2003

I’ve decided to take Calvino’s idea further and begin writing about Chicago, a place where I have never lived and only visited as a boy. As mentioned, I have been reading Calvino; I’ve been thinking about Chicago because our son Benjamin is now living and working there. Yesterday I was reminded of Chicago by neither Benjamin nor Calvino, but because I was buying bathroom tiles across from the big ex-Sears building on First Avenue in Seattle.

It has long been common for stores selling lower priced goods to line up on streets adjoining Sears stores- looking for spillover shopping. The shops aren’t much to write about, but the situation on First Avenue is pretty interesting. Next to Tiles for Less used to be another low-rent flooring place, there is now a busy Vietnamese noodle soup emporium. That’s not news in Seattle, but at lunchtime there is a steady stream of people coming to the eatery with plastic ID’s dangling from their necks from the Sears building. They work at Starbucks world headquarters, housed in the Sears structure.

There is still a Sears store on the first floor of the building, but the rest of the huge edifice (which was once the largest Sears building W of Chicago) houses Starbucks. The building, adjoining the main rail line running through Seattle, was built as a warehouse for Sears goods arriving by train from Chicago. The store itself was always at street level, but the upper stories, which span a few city blocks, stored goods for distribution throughout the west. The floors were made of maple, and the warehouse ‘pickers’ traveled their length to fulfill orders on roller skates .

In the building Starbucks has a small corner café for the public, and a showy, much larger one for employees in the interior mezzanine . What Starbucks doesn’t have in the building is burlap bags of coffee. Yes, the company is the largest purchaser of ‘specialty’ coffee in the world, but what it packages is an atmosphere, a place to meet, now even books and CD’s.

On the other hand, Sears has from its beginnings in the 19th century been about stuff: goods, implements, appluiances, commodities. Sears wanted to put itself in the midst of American life, and was purposely based in Chicago- in the middle of the country, in the middle of the country’s farm belt. Richard Sears started his company in Minnesota, but early on moved it to Chicago, at the nexus of those very rail lines that brought trainloads to Seattle.

Along with Montgomery Ward, its fellow Chicagoan institution, Sears perfected mail-order sales, going to extraordinary lengths to assure its far-flung customers that the company could be trusted. This was no small issue- most Americans then lived in rural areas, and the large farm population was especially isolated. People were used to buying from people they knew. Sears had to establish a basic human connection to its customers, while in fact its network was strung together almost entirely by the words printed on the pages in the Big Book. These very same issues were repeated almost a hundred years later as companies began selling on-line, one of the most successful being Amazon, also headquartered in Seattle.

Sears sold pretty much anything and everything out of its catalogue: the kitchen sink, even the kitchen in pre-packaged houses and chicks to raise for eating therein. But really what they sold was the connection to the enormous network they produced, which in time included that big building on First Avenue in Seattle. Richard Sears was a genius at writing advertising copy, which he rolled out on hundreds and hundreds of thin pages in each catalogue. He ran an unceasing campaign to get the reader to believe that s/he belonged to and was an essential part of a big operation reaching out from Chicago.

This entity, this movement, embraced the country with wide open arms from the city in the midst of the wide-open spaces. When someone bought from Sears they joined and were welcomed as if into a special club. The catalogue copy often showed lithographs of the enormous buildings that Sears erected in Chicago, celebrating the grand scale because it was necessary and important in order to provide individualized service. Costco- another Seattle mega-company, has gone a step further and asked people actually to pay for that belonging.

Sears eventually developed a network of stores. But even with them, its business took place in people’s homes. It created an enormous network so people could feel comfortable letting the company right into their personal space. You could, you did, shop with the catalogue on the kitchen table. Again, this all sounds so contemporary as we are now told we can bank in our pjs at 3AM (what fun!). Sears was in the business of creating an infinitely flexible sense of space, one that could be expanded or contracted at will, built up to huge warehouses and manufacturing plants, collapsed down to get inside one’s mailbox

Starbuck’s operates with a different model. It has created tens of thousands of small ‘shops’, sometimes kitty corner to one another. It is about creating intimacy away from home, while at the same time assuring its customers they're sipping liquid from a spigot that runs round the world.

As it happens, I used to sip coffee on the street corner outside the first Starbucks, way before there was a Starbucks. In Berkeley in the 1960’s, there were two competing visions of what a coffee place should be. There was the Med (short for the Mediterranean) on Telegraph Avenue, which was the epicenter of Berkeley street life, itself was an epicenter of hippie life. For all the world, the Med looked like an Italian café (which I had not yet seen in-situ, and which was actually operated by guys who were then called Persians). It was large, open to the street, had marble tables, marble countertops and made big coffee drinks which it dispensed in large heavy glasses. It attracted a spectacularly exhibitionary crowd- especially on Sundays. Tables were ‘reserved’ by virtue of everyone knowing that certain tables belonged to certain people. And on Sunday in costume, groups parked themselves with dogs, babies and lots of hair around the tables and stayed for hours. The place was crowded, noisy, full of smoke, and the coffee pumped out of big stainless espresso machines was always good.

On a corner in a primarily residential neighborhood in North Berkeley was Peet’s Coffee, owned and operated by the Englishman, Mr. Peet, who was usually behind the counter, and who was really above all a tea-man. But he sold different blends of coffee for taking home, and everyday featured one of his coffees that was brewed and sold for consumption there. The shop had little room, and people took their cups of coffee out onto the sidewalk in front of the shop to drink it and hang out.

When we moved from Europe to Seattle in 1973 and went to the Pike Place Market to buy food, we found a small shop selling coffee. Upon entering, it seemed like we had somehow slipped through a timetravel machine, taking us back to Berkeley. I remarked to the guy behind the counter that the place distinctly reminded me of Peet’s, and he explained that was because he and his two partners had gone down to Berkeley and ‘studied’ with Mr. Peet. He introduced himself as Zev, and we are still friends. This was then the only Starbucks (strangely the original store has been removed from the company history- a second Pike Place Starbucks, a couple blocks South, and not characteristically on a corner, now sports a plaque saying it was the original store; camera totting tourists and tour buses regularly visit).

The store didn’t sell coffee in a drinkable form- only beans to take home. Years later, when the partners sold Starbucks, by then a small chain of Seattle coffee stores, to Howard Shultz, one of the original partners went down to the Bay Area and with his profits purchased Peets, which had grown to a few more shops. Peets itself has now expanded nationally.

The very intimate Pike Place Market Starbucks masquerading as a corner Peet’s Coffee shop, became the default model for the other Starbucks and eventually for the corporate Starbucks following in its wake, of course with the spigot of flowing coffee. Starbucks delivers its network not through the mailbox, but through the liquids it pours. Its message, determined in the upper reaches of the old Sears building, tells us how the Starbucks pipeline connects (ethically) to an international network of fincas, coffee graders and baristas. Sears developed a sense of connectivity that delivered both intimacy and enormity, so did Starbucks. Both companies understood that many people want to revel in private and public at the same time.

Both of the corporations manufactured a sense of personalized space to deliver their products. Much of my work as an artist is also about creating a personal space, a way of bringing the network of things into up-close proximity with the viewer. Of course this is a time honored enterprise- Walt Whitman was cataloguing the world of stuff before Richard Sears produced his. Since this website is about residencies, and since I neither reside nor am ‘artist in residence’ in Chicago- it intrigues me to play with the notion of exploring Chicago for its connections. What does it mean to think up an ‘installation’ about a large metropolitan city without being there, or for that matter, without it being installed? Can I too. like Mr. Sears find a way to deliver my sense of space across the country with words?