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From that proclamation, Lois Wille drew the title of her classic 1972 book telling the tale of Montgomery Ward’s lonely turn-of-the-century legal struggle to defend the lakefront. Any Grant Park debate will cite Wille. Her history recalled that the Illinois Supreme Court banned buildings from the lakefront in 1897 and even museums in 1909. (The Tribune said the Art Institute was the grandfathered exception.) Wille used to run the Tribune‘s editorial page, and the Tribune naturally enlisted her book in its cause. The editorial informed us that “the Supreme Court ‘conceded that a museum was a proper building to place in a public park,’ Wille wrote. ‘But the issue here was more than a park, the court said. The issue was open space’ — the preservation, decreed in 1836, of unobstructed views of Lake Michigan.” In the Tribune‘s view Millennium Park is already “the camel’s nose under the tent,” and with the new museum on the east side of Columbus Drive, “Here comes the camel.”
“I resent the selective use of quotes from my book, ‘Forever Open, Clear, and Free,’ to justify the editorial’s conclusions,” she wrote. “I was offended, too, that as a past editorial page editor of the Tribune, I was not informed by either the current editorial page editor or the author who wrote the editorial that the Tribune would take this position and use my name and my book in an apparent attempt to buttress their arguments. A few weeks ago, Bruce Dold [present head of the editorial page] asked me how I felt about a new Children’s Museum on East Randolph in Daley Bicentennial Plaza. I responded that I was enthusiastic about the plans and the site and gave a detailed explanation of my reasoning. I didn’t hear from him again.”
Are there other issues? I asked. “We have a good relationship,” Wille declared. “I’m fond of him [Dold], and most of the stuff I like.”
