The Magic Bridge
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No one knows more about all things visual than the Art Institute, so I must be mistaken in thinking that this attenuated ramp, which rises in a straight shot at a five-degree angle from the midsection of the park to the third floor of the new wing, will be a blight on the eastern horizon. (I’m also probably getting the wrong signals from the extruded aluminum sunscreen over the east pavilion’s glass roof. Piano has dubbed it a “flying carpet,” but to me it whispers “patio enclosure.”) Cuno says the bridge will be “gossamer light” and “just seem to hang in the heavens,” and it will solve part of the problem of getting pedestrian traffic across Monroe Street, hooking up with a second main entrance for the museum.
The Michigan Avenue entrance, which Cuno says “will always be the identity of the museum,” might seem “not just noble but intimidating” to some people. The new entrance via the bridge, on the other hand, will function like a true flying carpet, transporting park visitors to the museum before they even realize where they’re headed. “They’ll find themselves coming up our bridge, as an event, and coming to our museum,” says Cuno, “and they’ll have gotten there much to their surprise.” By conservative estimates, he says, Millennium Park will attract three million people in a summer. “If 20 percent of them go across the bridge, that would be 600,000 people. If half of those come into the museum, that’s 300,000, and most of them will likely be first-time visitors.”
On March 1 in a Dallas federal courtroom, the SEC won a guilty verdict on six charges it had brought in a 2004 suit against hedge-fund hotshot Conrad P. Seghers, who along with his partner, James R. Dickey, had allegedly misrepresented investment information to approximately 30 clients, including the Art Institute, between 2000 and 2001. (Dickey settled with the SEC shortly before the trial.) The museum had invested $43 million with Seghers’s firm, Integral Investment Management, on the recommendation of the museum’s Atlanta-based financial adviser, Kennedy Capital. (Kennedy executives told the Wall Street Journal they had an arrangement with Integral that gave them a cut of both the management fee and any profits.) After the $43 million vanished in just over a year, Kennedy was fired and the museum’s longtime financial VP took what was described as a planned retirement. Seghers, who handed the money over to a twentysomething California fund manager, has now been convicted of fraud. The museum has its own suits pending in the matter.
