Delights — large and small — of holiday lights
A slender string of tiny red lights framed the large red door of Engine Co. 98/Ambulance Co. 11 at 202 E. Chicago Ave., just a block away from the frenzy of that shopper’s and stroller’s wonderland known as the Magnificent Mile. In a few days that mile (aka Michigan Avenue from Oak Street south to the river) would explode with more than a million lights and nearly a million people ogling those lights as they were turned on and began to glow in the sidewalk’s dozens of trees, and as bands played, balloons floated and Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, fresh from sunny/ warm Walt Disney World Resorts in Florida, and assorted entertainers and corporate types waved to the crowds attending the 28th Magnificent Mile Lights Festival.
But that was still a few days away and on this Thursday November night at this ancient firehouse, things were strikingly more sedate and intimate for the annual tree lighting at Seneca Park & Eli M. Schulman Playground that sits next to the firehouse.
There were only a few dozen people present inside the twostory limestone building that opened to fight fires in 1904. Some of them were notable: Dutchie Caray, seemingly ageless, though she recently celebrated her 90th birthday; and her nephew, a nice young man named Brendan Newell; 18th District Police Cmdr. Daniel O’Shea, Fire Commissioner Richard Ford II, and 2nd Ward Ald. Brian Hopkins.
Most of the others were people from the neighborhood, which is Streeterville, and they were nibbling pizza and sipping hot chocolate. They listened to some very nontraditional but still delightful music from The Remedy, a fourperson a cappella group that most
often can be heard at CTA stops. And there were all manner of treats from Eli’s Cheesecake, which made culinary sense, since the originator and host of this event is Marc Schulman, the president of Eli’s.
“This is really such a wonderful neighborhood,” he said, beginning his hosting chores.
As he spoke, it did not escape some people in the crowd that it is Schulman who is also the person responsible for the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival.
There had been holiday lights on Michigan Avenue since 1959, when a couple of clever 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.
Though an occasional in-town celebrity was sometimes called upon to host the lighting of the lights, the seasonal event was markedly informal.
Then, one night in November 1991, Schulman walked out of his apartment building a few steps off the avenue, saw the lights in the trees and said to his wife, Maureen, “They should make a bigger deal about this.” So, as a member of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, he suggested at a meeting of the organization the next spring that “We should make a bigger deal of this.”
It began modestly, with a few horse-drawn carriages and one double-decker bus. But with each passing year, the event attracted more people and more people are good for the businesses that line the street, and this was noticed by those who owned those businesses and the event grew. Schulman early on hoped that
“the lighting of the trees would become a holiday highlight. When Disney and Mickey and Minnie got involved after a few years, it went to another level. Yes, it is bigger and maybe not so intimate, but I think it still has a neighborhood feel.”
Schulman knows the neighborhood. He has long lived here with his wife and their three daughters were raised here. His father, Eli, for whom the playground next to the firehouse is named, long ran a popular restaurant, Eli’s The Place for Steak, on the site of what is now Lurie Children’s Hospital. The Schulman Playground was dedicated in 1990, two years after the restaurateur’s death.
So, if you think about it, Marc Schulman has the best of all holiday worlds: the extravagance of the Lights Festival and the subtle joys of the SenecaSchulman event.
But the same is true for all of us. This area is so alive with lights during the holidays that you can find whatever sort of illumination suits your style and taste. There is no need to tell you that they come in all shapes and sizes, and my colleague Steve Johnson did a fine job of detailing some of the biggest and best.
I have seen most that Johnson mentioned and am particularly fond of Zoolights at Lincoln Park Zoo. I am intrigued by and will drive to see Lightscape at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which Johnson raves about, writing of its “primal piece de resistance … the fire garden that adorns what is, in more temperate times, CBG’s Rose Garden. It is pagan. It is unexpected, seeing this destructive force tamed into a decorative array when you thought you would only be getting bulbs. It is multisensual, with the smell of burning wax augmenting the eternal, flickering allure of fire.”
The urge to light the night has existed ever since we’ve been wandering around dressed in animal pelts. We have ever been fighting the darkness and light brings a special hopefulness into winter’s bleakness.
So the crowd moved from the firehouse into the next door park and the lights went on and people applauded and one woman said, “This is my favorite time of year,” and then people walked out of the park on their way to dinner or shopping or home, some with their own holiday decorations.
Christmas decorating is a uniquely American folk art, and like all art forms has its critics and its fans. 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, places Mickey and Minnie never visit. But even there you will find strings of lights in and around windows — the holiday glows.
Some years ago, a woman named Christina Patoski wrote a book about this. A native of Park Ridge, she spent decades pointing her cameras at the ways in which we doll up for Christmas. In her lovely 1994 book, “Merry Christmas America: A Front Yard View of the Holidays,” she writes this: “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.”
That’s good enough for me.