Trump Tower's 'Urban Acne' Added To Downtown Disasters Tour
By Rachel Cromidas in News on Jul 23, 2015 1:30PM
With the presidential bid of America's favorite celebrity business man and orange-tanned xenophobe off to a laughable start, some Chicagoans are calling on the city to take down the 20-foot 'Trump' sign adorning Trump Tower.
Good luck with that, says acclaimed Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin.
Describing the sign as "urban acne," Kamin says there's unfortunately little legal recourse against the sign for the city (despite Tribune readers' suggestions to have the sign dubbed as "hate speech" thanks to namesake Donald Trump's offensive comments against Mexican immigrants). Rather, the best way to beat the sign, he argues, is with our words. That means it is our civic duty to keep criticizing the "grotesquely oversized, crudely detailed sign," presumably until higher powers than even Mayor Rahm Emanuel take notice.
The unsightly, glowing testament to the much-maligned Donald Trump, adorning an otherwise architecturally stunning riverfront tower, was hoisted onto the building last summer, to the dismay of virtually every writer who laid eyes on it at the time. City Hall has since passed legislation to control the size of signs along the downtown riverfront, but the damage of "TRUMP," (or "RUMP," depending on your angle) had already been done.
Chicago walking tour guide Margaret Hicks took matters into her own hands recently, Kamin reports, by adding the sign to the sites on her half-serious "downtown disasters" tour of Chicago. Other such disasters include the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the Eastland Boat Disaster of 1915.
"It's really glaring," Hicks told Kamin. "It takes away from the flow. Your eye just goes down the river and it just stops at the Trump sign."
That's the real tragedy in the Trump sign, Kamin writes—not just that it celebrates a highly unlikeable man, but that it prioritizes flashy commercialism over the beauty of the urban riverfront. But really, the arrogant sign's even more arrogant namesake was reason enough for us.