The city and suburbs have come alive with light, as they tend to do this time of year with ever increasing wattage and artistry. My colleagues Kayla Samoy and Emily McClanathan captured in Sunday’s paper some of the season’s light explosions, ranging as far afield as “Illuminated” in Rockford, the work of Hoichi Kurisu, a designer who was born in Hiroshima, Japan, and trained in Tokyo. “His 12-acre outdoor creation, Anderson Japanese Gardens, gets a festive makeover each winter,” McClanathan wrote, “with colorful lighting and white string lights adorning the trees that line the garden’s streams, waterfalls and ponds”
Though I have been intrigued by and come to appreciate some of these extravaganzas, I am more powerfully drawn to subtler displays and that’s what I was doing Thursday night, standing inside the oldest firehouse in the city.
Chicago Fire Department Engine Company 98 / Ambulance 11 is located at 202 E. Chicago Ave. Two stories of limestone, it was built in 1904, when its neighbors were little more than the Water Tower and Pumping Station just to the west. To the east came Seneca Park three years later, named for the Seneca, a group of Indigenous Iroquoian-speaking people. Then, in 1988, ground was broken for the Eli Schulman Playground which opened in the park in 1990 and underwent a fine restoration in 2021.
Schulman was the man who operated a restaurant across Chicago Avenue, where the Lurie Children’s Hospital now stands. It was a hangout for celebrities and politicians, drawn as much by the food as by the personality of the owner.
Frank Sinatra gave Eli a watch as a token of affection and Jim Thompson, a young lawyer who became a frequent customer, once said, “Eli is the man more responsible than any other for convincing me that I could be governor of this state.”
He also happened to create a cheesecake recipe that would become a thriving business, Eli’s Cheesecake, operated by his son Marc.
Trees in the park were illuminated last Thursday. Marc Schulman is the person who created this “tree lighting” 16 years ago and there he was in the firehouse Thursday greeting the rain-drenched and wind-swept crowd that filtered in and eagerly lined up for hot chocolate, pizza and, of course, slices of Eli’s cheesecake.
A trio from the Lola Bard Holiday Carolers sang. Old friends greeted each other, some having not seen one another in a year. This is a relatively sedate but charming gathering, a neighborhood event.
A few in the crowd knew that Schulman can also be considered the father of that other, and massive, holiday event, now known as the Wintrust Magnificent Mile Lights Festival. It started when Schulman lived with his wife Maureen and their three daughters in a nearby highrise. One night in Nov. 1991, he walked out of the building, saw a few strings of lights adorning a few trees and thought, “This should be a bigger deal.” As a member of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, he suggested just that at a meeting of the organization the next spring, and so did the first “festival” occur. Hard to believe, but it was a modest event with a few horse-drawn carriages and one double-decker bus.
(For those of you interested in deeper history, know that there had been holiday lights on Michigan Avenue since 1959, when a couple of designers named Joe Kreis and George Silvestri put strings of delicate lights that Silvestri had found in Italy through the six barren elm trees in front of Saks Fifth Avenue).
I have long thought of Christmas decorating as uniquely American folk art, and like all art forms has its critics and its fans. I once wrote, “Let’s not even get into Santa standing on a lawn next to Elvis or Baby Jesus. Lights are the foundation of this art form and they exist in places in this city far away from and much harsher than Michigan Avenue. … But even there you will find strings of lights in and around windows — the holiday glows.”
At the firehouse, a few people made short speeches. A poem, “Our Community Lights Up for All,” by Streeterville resident Sally Park, was read by Kasey Foster, the artistic director of Lookingglass Theatre, which has been a firehouse neighbor since 2003. Jamey Lundblad, the managing director of Lookingglass, was there too and excitedly told me and the company is “working diligently to reopen on Jan. 30.”
Soon, the large red firehouse door lifted and people began to stream into the park, led by David Eigenberg, one of the stars of the NBC show “Chicago Fire.” His “special guest” chore was to flick a switch and turn on the lights draped through the trees in the park. He’s done it before and so pulled it off quickly.
And into my mind came one of my favorite holiday thoughts, courtesy of Park Ridge native Christina Patoski who wrote in her 1994 book, “Merry Christmas America: A Front Yard View of the Holidays,” “It’s so wonderful to be driving and turn down a street I’ve never been on before and then see a light, a decoration on a lawn or in a window. What does it tell me? It tells me that there is hope in the world.”
It certainly felt that way when Eigenberg flicked the switch. And then there was light, and then everybody went home.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
