michael reese hospital reduced to a small collection of fragments

reese was bitter from the beginning. nearly 30 buildings being vacated, or had been abandoned for years. an awful salvage experience were everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

my relationship with the wrecker i had worked with for years grew tumultuous. it was hard to develop a system as to where to begin and where to end.

so many buildings, not much time.

i was truly overwhelmed. the salvage task i faced was a campus of medical facilities - all to be decimated to make for the possibility of "olympic park." i briefly described the experience in an earlier post, so i will not go into any detail here. at least not at this point. the salvage book will expound on those experiences later this year - both in pictures and narrative.

instead, i am writing about rubble i collected from the demolition site of the old "main" michael reese hospital building.

after the wreckers left for the day, we came in to collect what we could find that were in some ways intact. there was  no salvaging ornament in the my very ironclad systematic and controlled manner, where artifacts would have been documented, removed intact and ultimately, undamaged. so in a sense, it was more of a recovery operation.

we spent hours rifling through the debris looking for terra cotta and limestone ornament that had enough of a cohesive design remaining so we could easily identify where on the facade it was located. that way, in the future, one could study it, gain a sense of scale, and so on.

i never experienced a situation like this before. and believe me, trudging through loose rubble with clunky steel toe boots was an invitation to a broken ankle or even worse, severe injury or even death from above - where loose elements were dangling in the air after being jerked around all day from the wrecking ball or backhoe bucket.

i never felt so defeated or discouraged. the art of salvage was abandoned for scavenger-like behavior.

i could not complain however. we were given exclusive access to this site as city officials looked the other way. someone important wanted to see some recovered pieces find their way to a school that contains a large deposit of architectural remnants of chicago.

in addition, i was able to photodocument the demolition, up-close and personal - a rare privilege that no other photographer had. the onlookers and other photographers wanting to document the demolition were blocks away, on the other side of a fence and under the watchful eye of security guards who were given the task of closely guarding the demolition site until "old main" was reduced to rubble and hauled away.

every day, for what seemed like years, i drove down to this site, where little by little, this building was dying a slow and painful death. i just tried to focus on collecting important remnants and documenting it photographically, for future study - much in the same way richard nickel did in his time.

the wreckers were moving at a very fast pace. at night i was home researching articles pertaining to opening ceremonies and so on around 1906-07. i thought, there very well may be a time capsule housed deep within that cornerstone, that had yet to be impacted by the wreckers.

i managed to convince an on-site supervising city official to intervene by asking the wreckers to carefully extract the stone and determine if that little copper box housing god knows what existed.

they made a half-ass attempt and found nothing. to this day, i'm still not convinced that a time capsule existed in that cornerstone.

regardless, what really shocked me, was the complete and utter disregard for the corner stone that contained a wealth of information in the form of lightly incised lettering.

i discovered this on one of my trips, where limestone fragments that were a part of the cornerstone were scattered all over the place. i shook my head in utter disbelief.

there was a stone fragment that contained the architect's name. i collected that and lugged it back to the shop. i was so damn pissed off, that i didn't feel like doing much else that day.

day in and day out i photographed nearly a thousand images - ranging from the smashed cornerstone, to exposed mechanical and structural members. i documented where certain artifacts were discovered in relation to the building's foot print. i really managed to capture a treasure trove of information in the form of imagery that could be used in the future.

and then one afternoon, shortly after i returned from buying yet another external hard drive for backing up images and information, my computer was stolen from my office. how fitting i thought. from day one this salvage was a nightmare. there was just too much happening with the city, wreckers and so on. i just could not move forward without my system falling apart from shifting opinions and last minute do's and dont's.

this was probably the one salvage where if i could have gone back in time knowing what i know now, i would have simply walked away, never even thinking about looking back.

so i gathered the few fragments that meant the most to me and assembled them together in a group. i photographed them. after the last shot i took of this arrangement, i think i'm finally at peace with it all.