Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Page A

little Tribune tower in my apartment.
    The Trib ’s great editor Joseph Medill helped found the Republican Party to advance the antislavery cause. Medill was such a passionate abolitionist that he wrote in a Tribune editorial in 1856, “We are not unfrequently told that we crowd the Tribune with antislavery matter to the exclusion of other topics . . . we plead guilty.”
    Medill and company’s friendship with the president wasn’t necessarily always in their favor. At the height of the Civil War, they went to the White House and pleaded to get out of the president’s new request for six thousand more Union draftees from Cook County and Chicago—this after the area had already given up some twenty-two thousand men. According to writer Lloyd Wendt, after Medill asked for mercy, Lincoln turned on him with that Lincolnesque biblical wrath, scolding, “It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home, and raise your six thousand extra men.”
    Needless to say, Lincoln got his Chicago soldiers. And, reporting the news of the president’s assassination on April 15, 1865, the headline of the Chicago Tribune simply reads, “Terrible News.”
    The whole city burned to the ground, in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the city became the place where every major architect in the country, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on down to Miesvan der Rohe, worked on reinventing what a city skyline is supposed to look like. Montgomery Ward—just a few blocks down Michigan from the bridge—and Sears and Roebuck revolutionized consumer merchandising, with mail-order catalog sales. In 1920, Al Capone came to town, the same year Prohibition went into effect. One year after that, Vincent “The Schemer” Drucci, a member of the Dion O’Banion gang, chased by police, drove onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge just as it was opening to let a boat pass. He jumped the gap, only to crash straight into the other side.
    Decades pass. Manufacturing at the corner gives way to the service economy—now it’s all banks and advertising agencies and law firms, skyscrapers instead of warehouses. Railroads give way to the world’s busiest airport, on the north side of town. Only an eight-minute walk from the corner is the site of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, the place, you could argue, where modern televised democracy begins, since that’s the debate Nixon was said to lose not because of the issues but because he looked so ghastly sweating under the lights. And just a short walk from there is the building where Hugh Hefner ran Playboy magazine during its heyday.
    As long as we’re on the subject of the decline of Western civilization, the second floor of the NBC Tower, tucked between the Equitable Building and the Tribune Tower, is where The Jerry Springer Show is taped. It just wouldn’t be the haunted landscape around the Michigan Avenue Bridge if some symbolic television apocalypse did not happen here each day. The constant profanity makes the show intoan unintelligible barrage of bleeps. Watching it is like listening to a constant storm warning, which is exactly what it is.
    Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but one way you can measure the importance of this corner to our national psyche is the number of times it shows up in motion pictures—specifically, the action-adventure kind. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey—there’s barely an actor worth the cover of Entertainment Weekly who hasn’t