Now let’s talk about the lake.

Chicago exists because of water, with the early 1830s land boom that created the city a byproduct of a plan to dig a canal connecting the Chicago River to the Illinois River and, via that, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River systems.

As far back as 1836, a year before the town of Chicago became the city of Chicago, the lakefront was deemed “Public Ground—Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever.”

The rules protecting this land have changed over the years — the Field Museum wouldn’t be able to build on the lake by today’s laws, as George Lucas can attest. But that guiding principle of a public lakefront is why Chicago has open fields, beaches and bike paths instead of private beaches divvied between condo developments like Miami, or skyscrapers all the way up to the water like Manhattan.

This tour isn’t about the rules; it’s about the people who pushed their buildings further and further into parkland, “transforming the breathing spot for the poor into a showground of the educated rich” as Montgomery Ward put it in the early 1900s.

I’ve written about some of these places before, and there you can find links to stories about how people use this lake. Other spots on the tour I left silent for you to wonder and maybe research how this got there.

The landscaping will be done by SCAPE and Studio Gang, and after the triumph of Aqua a building short of the river’s edge, anything within a mile of Jeanne Gang is OK in my book.

It will be lovely.

Fuck lovely.

I like the idea of a museum devoted to narrative art from comic strips to pin-ups. But the $400 million plan is flawed, the collection ill-defined at best, laughable at worst, and the land a public trust that deserves more respect than to be foisted to a billionaire as thanks for making up light sabers.

So, venturing from vignette to editorial, here’s 1,001 Chicago Afternoons’ reasons the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art should, either through the pending city council vote or the current lawsuit by Friends of the Parks, go down in flames like the lumbering AT-AT it is.

The Collection

The Lucas Museum will have a collection the size of… dunno.

That’s not sarcasm. The only indication of the size of the collection comes from disclaimers on the website about what’s in the “seed collection,” divided into the three sections of Narrative Art, Art of Cinema and Digital Art.

For Narrative Art (305 stills displayed in the section):

“Much of the artwork displayed in this section is part of the Lucas seed collection, which spans a century and a half. Artwork not included in the Lucas Collection is featured to illustrate the history of Narrative Art.”

For Art of Cinema (251 stills):

“Much of the artwork displayed in this section is part of the Lucas seed collection, which spans a century and a half. Artwork not included in the Lucas Collection is featured to illustrate the narrative quality of the Cinematic Arts; it represents work that will be exhibited at the Lucas Museum.”

For Digital Art (14 stills):

“Not all of the artwork in this section is part of the Lucas seed collection. Artwork not in the Lucas Collection is featured to illustrate the digital medium’s role in the creation of Narrative Art and represents work that will be exhibited at the Lucas Museum.”

So all we know about this museum’s collection is that it doesn’t have all of the 570 pieces of art displayed on the site.

The Art Institute of Chicago’s collection has more than 300,000 pieces in it. Even Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art has more than 1,100 pieces in its permanent collection and that’s located in a tiny storefront southeast of a bar shaped like a train car on Milwaukee.

The Lucas plans call for a seven-story, 400,000-square-foot building on public land south of Soldier Field for something that, if it has 570 pieces, isn’t letting anyone know it does.

The Land

Lucas’ collection of something under 570 is just a “seed,” implying they’ll get more. So that means this deal forks over 17 acres of prime lakefront real estate at a rate of $10 per 99 years for a gigantic TBD.

As I’ve written about before, all land along Chicago’s lakefront is legally, historically and culturally public land. This is the people’s land.

This is our land and we’re turning 17 irreclaimable acres of it over for an ill-defined museum just because it’s in the name of a man who has a 3/4 success rate on Indiana Jones movies and is shooting for 50 percent at best on Star Wars.

It is parking space now. Actually, part of the current holdup is that the Bears want to ensure tailgating can still proceed apace. So I am aware I’m not pulling Lorax rules and speaking for the trees.

But I don’t think “It’s developed today” is a very good plea for “It should be much more developed tomorrow.”

I don’t think a past mistake justifies future ones, and I don’t think a surface parking lot justifies a seven-story castle of a museum we don’t know contains 570 items.

The Options

I am, surprisingly considering their rightie bent on most matters, with the Chicago Tribune editorial board on this.

I’m very much in favor of plans like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Burnham Sanctuary, which would “turn a million square feet of black steel and concrete back to natural systems, back to Burnham Park, back to the people.”

To put it another way, a firm that does architecture — the John Hancock Center, Sears Tower, One World Trade Center and the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai — described this little lot of the world as “where architecture has never been the right thing to do.”

It’s not choosing between what is and what Jar-Jar and Rahm-Rahm promise. It’s choosing between what is and what could be.

It’s choosing not between a parking lot and a private temple to a billionaire’s dreams, but between a parking lot and maybe a bit of grass where we can lay and dream our own dreams under a summer sun.

Keep Off the Grass

That bit of grass is my real reason for wanting the Lucas Museum to take hold inland, maybe in a Blair Kamin reader’s suggestion of the current State of Illinois building Rauner wants to hock.

There’s something sacred and noble about a bit of green. There’s something real and pure. There’s something kindly and nice knowing the most valuable amenity of the city is kept for its people, heaven on earth and horto in urbs kept for anyone who wants to pull up a blanket and a nap under the sun.

There are no fees for public land. No ticket stubs or half-priced admissions on summer Tuesdays. Just Chicagoans getting a cost-free chance to enjoy Chicago.

It’s not there now, just parking lots for the Bears. But it could be.

Our land could be ours again if we try.

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Staring into space in powers of 10 just north of that land

Neil Armstrong is dead.

In 1977, the Eames Office released a new version of their film “Powers of Ten.” Don’t watch it alone.

The short movie — only nine minutes long — started with a one-meter square shot from above of a picnicking couple in the grass between the Chicago Bears’ Soldier Field and Burnham Harbor. It then starts to zoom out by one power of 10 every 10 seconds. So 10 seconds in, you’re looking at a 10-meter square. Ten seconds after that, you’re looking at a 100-meter square.

After sliding past Chicago, the Midwest, the Earth, the solar system and the galaxy, the film continues 100,000,000 light years out or 10 to the 24th meters. It looks like a simple starry night, but each star an entire galaxy. It’s an endless black, with you stuck knowing a picnic in Chicago is the right dead center.

“This lonely scene, the galaxies like dust, is what most of space looks like,” the narrator tells. “This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception.”

It then zooms back to the picnicking couple in Chicago, then eases in to the man’s hand, his blood cells, his DNA and finally to  a proton on a nucleus of a carbon atom on the picnicking man’s hand at 10 to the -16th meters.

When I heard the first man on the moon died, I wanted to go to this spot.

I compared a YouTube video of “Powers of Ten” to a Google Map of the same spot. The layout was different — Wikipedia later told me the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive hadn’t run on that side of Soldier Field since 1996. I even checked Geocaching.com, to see if someone had logged the coordinates of the spot so I could track the exact location via GPS satellite.

It then occurred to me I had all tech this couldn’t get to a picnic spot. Neil and crew had the equivalent of a graphing calculator and got to the moon.

So I went to the area, picked a spot that looked rightish and flopped in the grass to look up at the sky.

Neil Armstrong was a childhood hero of mine. The first man on the moon. Apollo 11, the Eagle landing, “One small step.”

I liked him because he was brave, brainy and above all silent. Over the years, I would hear trickles about Buzz Aldrin. He would be giving a speech or guest starring on “30 Rock.” I watched the video of 800-year-old Aldrin cold-cocking that conspiracy theory jerk over and over again. Sheer poetry.

But Armstrong was silent. He returned to a simple life in Cincinnati, sort of a wry pun on the town’s name. Yes, he was active, involved and highly decorated. But he lived in such academic, rarefied circles, I never came across him. I saw Aldrin age. I think the first picture I saw of Armstrong not in a space suit ran with his obituary.

Silent Neil Armstrong then was left in the 1960s, always the first man on the moon.

Although we know Armstrong’s most famous quote, here’s one I think is a contender for most poetic.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

Maybe this is why I went to the spot of a 1970s educational film as my tribute to my childhood hero. Both made us look out at the stars to see how tiny and how great we really are.

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