Chicago From The Sky: A Region Transformed
Photography is a great abettor of memory, says Lawrence Okrent in the introduction of his new book, Chicago From The Sky: A Region Transformed. With more than 250 aerial or rooftop shots of the city, the book has coffee-table copiousness, and yet delivers more than pretty pictures to any Chicago lover who lingers over its pages. Okrent's work is an invitation to study the city, to observe its sometimes vast changes over the the last couple of decades, and to recognize what came before. We pavement-bound creatures have short memories. Buildings and street corners fade into the backgrounds of our lives, and we only wake up to them when something happens, like a favorite restaurant or theater closing. We complain, and then we adapt and forget. But Okrent would have us pause and consider Chicago's evolution, at least in the recent past. He's an urban planner and zoning consultant, which means that developers hire him for advice on a project's design and on how to get it approved by city officials. Since the early 1980s, Okrent has taken to the sky to document sites he's working on and their surroundings. His book is drawn from his archive of more than 25,000 photos. He's given himself a side job that to a lot of people would be one of the best jobs in the world, going aloft to photograph one of the world's most beautiful cities in search of insight and opportunity. Okrent pairs before and after photos. Ask somebody what came before Millennium Park and you're liable to get a blank stare. Okrent shows us the rail line and surface parking that, in retrospect, made the city look not quite ready for its closeup. The functions still exist, but are just hidden. It's as if you were in the plane yourself, with a Chicago expert as your guide. Going to that trouble would be expensive, while the book will set you back $35.64 at Amazon. Chicago's Books Press is the publisher and its website if chicagosbooks.com. --David Roeder, Chicago Sun-TimesPhoto tour-books are as commonplace as broken-hearted Cubs fans, but there's a new one that's worth a look. It's less a tour book than a pictorial history, and its strength is a series of spectacular aerial photographs that tell the story of one of the great building booms in the history of the city and its suburbs. The book, Chicago From The Sky: A Region Transformed, is by Lawrence Okrent, a Chicago planning and zoning consultant who doubles as an aerial photographer. Okrent's specialty is the big, blue-sky view from above, typically taken with a zoom lens-equipped, Nikon D300 from the open window of a Cessna 172 airplane. The God view, I call it. It tends to make all the annoying complexities of life fade away. Still, this vantage point offers an expansive perspective that is hard to grasp from the sidewalk or the confines of a car. By pairing before and after versions of such photos from the years 1985 to 2010, and by adding spare but informative captions, Okrent makes a familiar story seem fresh. It's the story, in essence, of the enormous changes to the cityscape that occurred during Mayor Richard Daley's soon-to-end mayoralty. See the chip-shot golf course just west of Lake Shore Drive? Now it's a cluster of high rises called Lake Shore East. See the 380-foot deep quarry pit in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood? Now it's a park with a fishing pond bounded by the old quarry wall. See the Robert Taylor Homes, the enormous public housing complex where Chicago filed away its poor? Now it's gone, replaced by a vast swath of grass. And so these pages go, ranging from Millennium Park to mixed-income public housing, in what often reads as a paean to Chicago's unquenchable appetite for change. Mark Twain best articulated this quality with his often-quoted line that Chicago outgrows a visitor's prophecies faster than he can make them. Okrent adds his own poetic riff that the steel, stone, brick - --Blair Kamin, Chicago TribunePhoto tour-books are as commonplace as broken-hearted Cubs fans, but there's a new one that's worth a look. It's less a tour book than a pictorial history, and its strength is a series of spectacular aerial photographs that tell the story of one of the great building booms in the history of the city and its suburbs. The book, Chicago From The Sky: A Region Transformed, is by Lawrence Okrent, a Chicago planning and zoning consultant who doubles as an aerial photographer. Okrent's specialty is the big, blue-sky view from above, typically taken with a zoom lens-equipped, Nikon D300 from the open window of a Cessna 172 airplane. The God view, I call it. It tends to make all the annoying complexities of life fade away. Still, this vantage point offers an expansive perspective that is hard to grasp from the sidewalk or the confines of a car. By pairing before and after versions of such photos from the years 1985 to 2010, and by adding spare but informative captions, Okrent makes a familiar story seem fresh. It's the story, in essence, of the enormous changes to the cityscape that occurred during Mayor Richard Daley's soon-to-end mayoralty. See the chip-shot golf course just west of Lake Shore Drive? Now it's a cluster of high rises called Lake Shore East. See the 380-foot deep quarry pit in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood? Now it's a park with a fishing pond bounded by the old quarry wall. See the Robert Taylor Homes, the enormous public housing complex where Chicago filed away its poor? Now it's gone, replaced by a vast swath of grass. And so these pages go, ranging from Millennium Park to mixed-income public housing, in what often reads as a paean to Chicago's unquenchable appetite for change.  Mark Twain best articulated this quality with his often-quoted line that Chicago outgrows a visitor's prophecies faster than he can make them. Okrent adds his own poetic riff that the steel, stone, brick and glass that tare the bones, flesh, and skin of this extraordinary city are no more permanent than the weather. Throughout, Okrent's images are sharp and his text is lucid, shedding light on little-known corners of the region. The author further leavens his text with historic postcards from his personal collection. And, he hits just enough suburban highlights, from the spurt of high-rise construction in downtown Evanston to the growth of the Prairie Stone commercial complex around the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, to justify the book's title as a regional survey. This is an impressive work. While Chicago From The Sky lacks the scholarly heft of Harold Mayer and Richard Wade's Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, the urban history classic that charts the city's development from 1830 to 1969, it remains an illuminating update. Surely it will end up on numerous coffee tables, where it can be counted upon to delight and, perhaps, educate those flipping through is glossy pages. --Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune