Daniel Burnham, who brought forth Chicago's bold city plan at the end of the 19th century, envisioned its lakeshore parks as great outdoor stages for the spectacle of public life. But for decades the northwest corner of Grant Park was just an open pit of railway tracks with an adjacent parking lot. Now it's all been artfully re-arranged into the 24.5-acre Millennium Park, a civic phantasmagoria like Antonio Gaudi's Park Güell in Barcelona, with the difference that this one is the product of an ensemble of creative spirits. Look one way and there's "Cloud Gate" by the London-based artist Anish Kapoor, an irregularly shaped metallic blob that reflects back the city and its people in funhouse mirror distortions. Look another way and there's the "Crown Fountain" by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa — a pair of 50-ft. glass block towers on which the giant faces of hundreds of individual Chicagoans appear in sequence. Before any one of them makes way for the next, it appears to spit a jet of real water that lands in a reflecting pool between the towers. Kids love it; inner children are pretty fond of it too. The jewel in this crown is a whirling dervish of a bandshell by Frank Gehry. It reaches toward the audience by means of an inspired forcefield, a trellis of overhead cables that emanate outward from the bandshell and hold suspended audio speakers like bunches of grapes, extending sound another 600 ft. from the stage into the crowd. Intended to accommodate 4,000 visitors in fixed seats and 7,000 more on the surrounding lawn, Gehry's bandshell makes its segment of the park an outdoor living room that's truly alive.
Come fly with us, and Leo, through the best (and worst) of 2004. Tops in the cinema this year include Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator. Elsewhere, Deadwood was good TV, and a Strange tale fascinated readers.