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The key challenge was to capture the neighborhood's identity in a way that respects and celebrates the gay community," explains architect Edward Windhorst about his design for the world's first ever gay streetscape. By August 1998, the project's gay rainbow symbolism will stretch for ten blocks along the strip of Chicago's North Halsted Street known to locals as "Boystown."

Amsterdam has its parkette commemorating gays killed in the Holocaust. New York City's tiny Sheridan Square sites George Segal's romantic sculpture "Gay Liberation." But this Windy City project will be the first time that a whole urban zone will be marked off as gay space by a government agency-- the Chicago Department of Transportation. NGLTF's spokesperson Mark Johnson reports, "This is a first in the country. No other city has formally promoted a neighborhood for its homosexual community."

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The 3.2 million dollar streetscape is one of twenty-four such projects currently underway as part of Chicago's "Neighborhoods Alive!" program, which upgrades infrastructures-- sewers, sidewalks, pavement, parking, lighting-- as it pays tribute to the city's rich cultural diversity.

That this initial architectural acknowledgment of the gay community should take the form of a streetscape is historically apt. University of Chicago history professor George Chauncey emphasizes the importance of street life to gay life in his essay "Gay Uses of the Streets" from Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. With their potential for cruising and ambiguities of public and private presences, the streets are a natural place for gay culture to ribbon its way through the fabric of society.

The streetscape's original plan was bold and embracing, if a bit strange. Two 25' vaguely **-shaped mid-street tubular steel sculptures were to serve as the area's gateways-- one placed at each end of the ten-block thoroughfare. Though abstract, the sculptures could easily be read as angels, crucifixions, or dragonflies. [illustration 1] Each was collared by gay rainbow rings made of l.e.d. lights (not neon, as reported in the general media). The rainbow lighting would then repeat on thick 25' high pylons running up and down both sides of the street at roughly ten pairs per block. Now, that's high profile.

Architect Windhorst admits not knowing much about the gay community prior to the project: "I walked through the North Halsted area to find out how gays represent themselves. And overwhelmingly what I saw in shop windows, on car bumpers, and in the air were rainbow flags; so rainbow stripes became my theme for the project."

The design never included any gay words, texts, images, or other symbols beyond the rainbow motif itself. For many Chicagoans, this motif might well signal not gays but Jesse Jackson's Chicago-based Rainbow Coalition. In any case, the streetscape will be meaningless to anyone who is not au courant with gay symbolism. As Lorraine Hoffman, vice-president of one of the local neighborhood associations, put it, "If you're from Kalamazoo and are driving up Halsted, you might think, 'Hmmm, this is pretty.' If you were gay, you might pick up on the symbolism." So any role the project might have had as a tool for social education and enlightenment was highly circumscribed right from the start.

Then came changes. We The People, not the art of architecture, would have the final say.

Unveiled publicly in August 1997 at North Halsted's annual gay street fair, the design sparked a firestorm of criticism, including some 5000 letters sent to the city-- the largest number of unsolicited responses the city had ever received on a proposed civic project. So heated was the air with threats and tensions that city officials took precautions against the prospect that fistfights would break out at a series of town-meetings held on the project.

Protests from libertarians and social conservatives were predictable. Libertarians argued that government should not be promoting any particular style of living. Or as one disgruntled town-meeting attendee, Carol Hillinger, put it, "I have a problem designating any area for anything." Social conservatives and the religious Right argued that government should not be promoting this particular style of living. Paul Caprio, the director of the conservative political action committee, Family-PAC, claims that this recognition of the gay community was "an insult to Chicago's great Greek and Chinese communities" and to the analogous recognitions which these groups have received from the city. For libertarians, the project lacked governmental neutrality. For the religious Right, the project was the end of civilization as we know it. The Rev. Charles Lyons of Chicago's Armitage Baptist Church held that the city is choosing to "wallow in the slime of moral decadence by celebrating perversity."

More interesting were the responses of the locals. Many residents of the North Halsted area-- both gay and straight-- objected that the project in effect both outed and libeled the community by presuming a uniform identity for everyone within the designated zone. Conservative gays alleged that the streetscape made public what should be kept private-- sexuality. Others wondered whether the project, what with all of its decidedly, if inadvertently, phallic elements, adequately represented the lesbian community, which in any case does not revolve around the Halsted Street axis, but has its strongest public presence farther north and west in the area called Andersonville.

At public hearings, local heterosexuals argued-- in coded terms, of course-- that the project falsely assigned to them a disreputable identity. As Windy City Times writer, Louis Weisberg, summarized at year's end: "Heterosexual residents of the area warned of falling property values, public orgies, and ruined children. While professing to love their gay neighbors, many said they'd feel compelled to move if those same neighbors were officially recognized by the city."

It is telling that no such objections met the same architect's earlier community-affirming streetscape-- the Division Street Gateways project for Chicago's Puerto Rican neighborhood. [illustration 2] "There wasn't a whisper of protest from any quarter on that project," reports architect Windhorst-- and this even though the 1995 Division Street project uses as its signature motif a triumphantly billowing Puerto Rican flag. In an abstraction of tubular steel, the flag forms an arch over West Division Street at each end of the Puerto Rican streetscape. Chicagoans will remember that in the 1970s Puerto Rican nationalists in Chicago committed terrorist acts on behalf of this territorial flag. Congested issues of history apart, the fact that here one government is flying the flag of a collateral government might well be thought to raise troubling or at least puzzling issues of conflicting civic loyalties-- for Puerto Ricans and non-Puerto Ricans alike. But not a ripple of questioning or dissent greeted the flag's metallic unfurling. Indeed the project won several architectural awards. It is striking and beautiful.

By contrast, the North Halsted project suffered the fate of reports written by committee. Where the original design at least created a peppy and unified foreground presence for the whole area, the revised version is so tepid as to be a merely quirky intrusion into an already architecturally undistinguished area. The sculptures, colored lights, and pylons are all gone, gone, gone. In their stead is one pair per block of painted 23' futuristic metal shafts, which are positioned mid-block in order to keep their rainbow rings safely out of sight from residential side streets. [illustration 3] No scaring the horses. Which, in any case, will now be illuminated by Victorian-style street lights which are out of synch not only with the street's tedious 1920s buildings but also the new Buck Rogers-style rainbow shafts. The Victorian lamp posts were added to the design at the specific request of local gay residents, who thought the faux history would add a touch of class to the street. This particular bit of re-muddling makes one wonder how we gays have, of a sudden, lost our famously good taste.

The original plan included mini-plazas at street corners to facilitate socializing. They would also have facilitated cruising. And so these too were scotched by public pressure in the final plan. What started off as a good-faith effort by architecture to assist social progress has in the end become both an artistic trainwreck and a vehicle for wider social forces to freeze-dry gay culture and impose upon it a secondary virginity.

City officials gave the revised design final approval in November 1997. Ground-breaking for initial sewer work began at the end of February 1998. Half the project is to be completed by late June for Chicago's annual Gay Pride parade, which originates in the North Halsted area. The completion date is slated to coincide with the area's annual August Halsted Market Days, where the gay festivities are always so hopping and popping that no one will even be able to notice that the City's telltale rainbow rings are there.

Author Profile:  Richard D. Mohr

Richard D. Mohr is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois-Urbana and author of "Knights, Young Men, Boys" from Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies (Beacon Press, 1992).