August 13th, 2008 · Comments Off
Statue of hospital benefactor, Michael Reese, in front of Main Reese
The Michael Reese Hospital Legacy
The long anticipated demise of Michael Reese Hospital, a stellar healthcare institution and a linchpin of Chicago’s South Side throughout most of the 20th Century, has become a certainty.
A deservedly dignified elegy for Michael Reese, where I completed my psychiatric residency in the 1970s, appeared last week in the Chicago Tribune, prompting me to write this leave-taking post.
An excerpt from the Tribune’s obituary, Congregation To Mourn Destruction Of Temple And Loss Of A Hospital, offers the philosophical perspective on which Reese was was founded and which sustained it thereafter:
“Jews came [to America] with the basic premise we would take care of our own,” said [Marc] Slutsky who practiced psychiatry at Michael Reese for more than 20 years. “Jewish hospitals became a manifestation of that.”
Another selection from that article indicates the role Reese played in healthcare and its importance to Chicago and the South Side:
In its prime, Reese trained more doctors, did more research, delivered more babies and provided more free care to the indigent than any other private hospital in the area. A doctor there developed the first incubator for infants. Another pioneered major innovations in cardiac care. When much of its middle-class Jewish clientele and constituents migrated to the suburbs, Reese struck a deal with Mayor Richard J. Daley to stay and rehabilitate the South Side.
Wikipedia lists other medical accomplishments attributable to Reese:
Louis Katz, the Medical Research Institute’s first full-time investigator and former president of the American Heart Association, was one of the first to explore the relation of coronary heart disease to cholesterol concentration in the blood. Cardiovascular Institute researchers Dr. Alfred Pick and Dr. Richard Langendorf, perfected the use of the electrocardiograph. Leonidas Berry was a pioneer in the development and use of the gastroscope. Dr. Samuel Soskin and Dr. Rachmiel Levine made important discoveries about the “gatekeeper” action in insulin, which is of fundamental importance to the understanding of diabetes. Dr. Albert Milzer and his research team were the first to kill the polio virus and make an effective vaccine against this debilitating virus.
The introduction to Meeting the Future, Honoring the Past by Dorothy H. Gardner enlarges on the origins of the Hospital:
Fortunately for humankind, care for the poor is among the many great traditions of the Jewish faith. Historically, this has often meant caring for “our own.” This was a primary motivation of the Jewish philanthropists who founded Michael Reese Hospital in 1879. No less important was securing an environment to train Jewish physicians denied admitting privileges and access to medical education elsewhere.
Main Reese Building (Built 1907)
The History Of Michael Reese Hospital
This summary of Reese’s founding and its early years, found in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, expands further on the hospital’s self-determined vision as well as laying out the pertinent factual data:
Among the many institutions destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was the hospital on LaSalle street (between Schiller and Goethe) established by the United Hebrew Relief Association. When Michael Reese, a wealthy real-estate developer, died in 1877 his will provided sufficient funds to build a new hospital. An 1836 Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, Reese had made a fortune in land speculation and silver mining by the 1850s. When the hospital was completed in 1880 Reese’s heirs requested that it be named in his honor and that it serve all of Chicago without regard to race, creed, or nationality.
The original Michael Reese building, located on the corner of 29th and Groveland Avenue, was replaced in 1907 by another, larger building on the same site. The hospital’s medical innovations included Julius Hess’s infant incubator (around 1915) and the first permanent incubator station for premature babies (1922). In 1946 Michael Reese Hospital along with a number of other area organizations formed the South Side Planning Board to refurbish the area surrounding the hospital, which had suffered considerable economic and physical decline. Like Illinois Institute of Technology and Mercy Hospital, Michael Reese preferred urban renewal to leaving the area altogether.
During my psychiatric residency at Michael Reese in the 1970s and my service on the Attending Staff for several years afterward, I became acutely aware that Reese was a flawed institution; at no time during my years there, however, did I detect any slippage from the mission that was embedded and integrated throughout the medical center. Reese took its role as benefactor to the ill very seriously and expected equal dedication from the clinicians it employed and those allowed to join its medical staff.
Of course, dedication to humanitarian goals is no guarantee of an organization’s survival - and may even be a cause of its decline.
The Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Institute At Michael Reese Hospital
The Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Institute (P&PI) holds special meaning for me because it was the site of my psychiatric training and practice at Michael Reese.
When I entered the residency, the head of P&PI was one of the Grand Old Men of psychiatry, Roy Grinker, MD. Rather than recount his numerous accomplishments here I will only note that he was an internationally prestigious and influential figure intimately associated with Reese, qualities apparent in this excerpt from The Biopsychosocial Model: Anything Goes?
After Meyer, Grinker (1900-1993), longtime chairman of the Michael Reese Department of Psychiatry in Chicago, can be seen as perhaps the leading thinker in this model. Roy Grinker, being one of Freud’s last analysands, had been trained not only in psychoanalysis but also in neurology and was an active clinical researcher whose empirical studies focused on the impact of war trauma on soldiers. He was highly critical of the orthodox evolution of the American Psychoanalytic Association and organized a rival group. For years, as the editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry, he had a major impact. He coined the term ‘biopsychosocial’ and emphasized its link to the then popular biological paradigm of ‘general systems theory’, a holistic view that saw reductionism as unscientific and that emphasized that the whole of a biological system is greater than its parts and that indeed no part could be understood except in relation to the whole.
Regardless of ones acceptance or rejection of the biopsychosocial model, Grinker’s leadership and the accomplishments of other senior psychiatric staff assured that Michael Reese psychiatry was treated with high regard.
When I arrived at Reese, Wexler Pavilion, then only a few years old, impressed me as a well appointed, attractive setting to practice outpatient psychiatric treatment. The awkwardness of the pie-shaped offices that occupied the perimeter of the building was a small price to pay for such relatively luxurious surroundings.
Wexler Pavilion
The fate of Wexler Pavilion mirrors the course Michael Reese has taken. Lee Bey, who is responsible for the outstanding photos found in this post and who writes about architecture, among other topics, at Lee Bey: The Urban Observer, describes Wexler Pavilion in Michael Reese Hospital,
The empty circular Simon Wexler Psychiatric Research and Clinic Pavilion was designed by Chicago architects Ezra Gordon and Jack Levin. Built in 1962, this beautifully humane building was an outpatient facility with 35 interview rooms arranged around the circumference of the building. There is a skylight at the top and a research lab. Wexler was founder of Allied Radio Corp. His widow donated $150,000 of the building’s $450,000 cost. The photo below (shot through a window) shows an interior staircase leading to the interview rooms. Peeling paint hangs from the ceiling and has collected on the floor.
Wexler Stairs
Those stairs connected the classrooms, administrative offices, and inpatient floors of P&PI with the outpatient offices of Wexler Pavilion.
Wexler Pavilion
Shown below is the obviously deteriorating building, constructed in 1970, that housed the Siegal Institute, which was dedicated to the treatment of children with defective fundamental communication processes secondary to blindness, deafness, or profound childhood psychological disorders such as aphasia.
David T. Siegel Institute for Communicative Disorders
The Passing Of An Era
When my residency began, Michael Reese was, at least by my reckoning, in the final phase of its Golden Age.
The entire medical center was then populated with outstanding physicians, many of whom commuted from the North Shore suburbs to Reese’s South Side location rather than work at medical centers that were more conveniently located and which served a far richer and better insured clientele, and extraordinarily skilled and talented nurses. Patients and clinical staff displayed high morale. Residencies in psychiatry and other medical fields were accounted not just competitive but desirable.
On the other hand, it was obvious that Reese was the victim of worsening fiscal disadvantages which were primarily the consequence of serving a population with an increasingly larger proportion of impoverished patients who received charity care and patients funded by government assistant at rates so low that the Hospital lost money on every day of treatment rendered. Less money meant an increasingly shabby environment, reduced staffing, and delays in purchasing new technology. Tellingly, senior physicians could be heard complaining that not every resident planned to remain at Reese after completing training.
This was also a period during which many of Reese’s clinical leaders were retiring or seeking greener pastures at other facilities. That Grinker’s directorship of P&PI ended during my residency did not directly cause the problems but did epitomize them.
Then inexperienced with organizational psychology, I was surprised by the rampant, readily apparent hubris on display at Michael Reese, a quality which condensed and petrified as the problems worsened. Flexibility was nonexistent at administrative levels, archaic rules limiting innovation on the part of the private staff were rigorously enforced, and a bunker mentality prevailed.
In many ways, the situation at Reese in those days evoked nothing quite so much as the movie scenes of war correspondents reporting on a civil war in one or another Latin American or African nation, all the while residing, between assignments, in the country’s one remaining luxury hotel. Transiently safe within the surrounding chaos, they can, while the generator is working, drink parasol laden drinks and nibble on canapes within earshot of both the government’s reassurance that the revolution is all but quelled and the gunshots of nearby skirmishes marking the advances of the rebels.
This inward turning bravado should be understood in the context of the times. Healthcare organizations were, in many respects, insular kingdoms. Consider that it was typical for medical students who served residencies at hospitals other than those associated with their medical schools to be re-taught procedures, their senior residents explaining, for example, “This is how we put in a central line at Johns Hopkins/UCLA/Loyola/Michael Reese.”
Regardless, exclusively internal validation in the guiding of an institution is risky. As late as the latter part of the 1980s, when I knew several individuals still working at Reese, its free-fall was apparent - as was its insistence that reshuffling of old, failed strategies would be successful.
Over the past decade, I have had little involvement with Michael Reese, but from news reports it appears that a succession of increasingly desperate schemes to improve the Hospital’s finances have failed.
The corporate entities responsible for Reese have now officially informed the appropriate governmental agencies that the facility is no longer fiscally viable and will be closed.
The finale for Reese is likely to be the transformation of its 37 acres into the Olympic Village as part of the city’s bid for the 2016 Games. While this notion has been bruited about for several months, a formal plan seems to have solidified, as reported in the 8 August 2008 Trib:
Last month, Chicago proposed an $85 million deal for the purchase of the Michael Reese Hospital property from Reese’s landlord Medline Industries as a potential site for a 2016 Olympic Village.
The Final Goodbye
Michael Reese certainly deserves the regrets, the mourning, and the commendations for its past accomplishments. And I will join my voice to that chorus.
But, it is instructive to consider one more building on the Reese campus, again photographed and described by Lee Bey.
Laz Chapman Pathology Institute
Excerpt and photo from Lee Bey: The Urban Observer - Michael Reese Hospital:
The former waiting room above–look at the dust settling on those red chairs like old ghosts–is the shuttered Laz Chapman Pathology Institute. The institute once hosted research on kidney and lung diseases. It had the very latest in electron microscopes, animal testing labs–even an autopsy room–when it was built in 1965. Laz Chapman, for whom the building is named, was CEO of H. Kramer & Co., a brass-smelting company in the Pilsen neighborhood. His estate funded the $400,000 cost of construction. And that painting, there, above the down staircase: I wonder if that’s Chapman himself looking out over the decay?
As the decrepit ruins of the Chapman Pathology Institute remind us, the demise of Michael Reese is also fittingly memorialized by Shelly’s poetic commentary on the desolation that mocks the hubris of the once great.
OZYMANDIAS
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Credit Due Department
The impressive photos in this post were taken by and used with the permission of Lee Bey, whose blog, Lee Bey: The Urban Observer, is worthy of perusal by anyone with an interest in Chicago or in architecture.
Footnotes
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Tags: Fascinations · Local · Self-Referential
January 11th, 2008 · Comments Off
Atomic Ranch - The Magazine About The House Where The Girl Next Door Lived
Somehow, Atomic Ranch, which may be the coolest name for a house magazine ever, has been published quarterly since Spring 2004 without coming to my notice until a week ago when an issue caught my eye at the local Borders.
Devoted to 40s-70’s ranch homes and modernist track houses, Atomic ranch is a design and nostalgia bonanza for those with a taste for what the more uppity rags label Midcentury Modern and Boomers who grew up in or aspired to such dwellings.
DrHGuy qualifies for both categories.
Yes, you read that correctly. DrHGuy’s parents, the folks who built, furnished, and decorated the log house featured in The Parental Home Curios Photo Safari, one wall of which is depicted below, also built, furnished, and decorated - precisely as DrHGuy was entering adolescence - a turquoise ranch home with the pathognomonic sunburst clock on the wall.
Go figure.
The furniture included saucer chairs (for adults), a sectional sofa, and a coffee table, the shape of which was held to resemble either an amoeba or an easel.
The curtains were of a pattern not unlike that displayed below.
Not that my parents didn’t have their limits. There was no car port, no Eames chair, and certainly no Tiki bar.
Nonetheless, we were Atomic Ranch folk - although we were the branch of the family that lived in the Ozarks hills where the Fifties didn’t arrive until the mid-Sixties.
Contents
Atomic Ranch has how-to stories, iterations of the obligatory house restoration saga (i.e., we thought it would be fun, it went 300% over budget, took two years instead of two month, it nearly broke up our marriage, and we love the results), and an occasional enraged editorial about Midcentury Modern gettin’ no respect, but mostly Atomic Ranch is a showcase for pictures of ranch houses, their furnishings, and their associated cultural artifacts.
An article in the most recent issue, for example, displays a batch of the first pocket-sized transistor radios.
Although DrHGuy’s five transistor rust colored Silvertone is not among those pictured, the ones shown evoke that plastic-encasede miracle that linked a twelve year old kid in rural southwestern Missouri with pre-Beatles Rock and Roll as practiced by AM stations in Chicago, Kansas City, Little Rock, and a couple of towns in Texas, the call letters of which have long since been forgotten. What hasn’t been forgotten are the music, the DJs, and the exotic and erotic excitement of the thing.
That kind of iconic content makes scanning Atomic Ranch an endearing memory-fest for those, like DrHGuy, of a certain age as well as an entrée to a visual feast of homes and furnishings that were integral parts of this nation’s most optimistic era - and the most fun you can have in an Eames chair with your clothes on.
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Tags: Fascinations
October 26th, 2007 · 2 Comments
Cyber-Bookmarks From DrHGuy: 26 October 2007
Cyber-Bookmarks From DrHGuy are annotated links to arguably worthwhile, recently published online reading, new or revised websites of potential utility or ostensible interest, and other internet-accessible experiences that, were it not for the casually collected, cavalierly collated, & capriciously collocated components comprising these posts, could easily be overlooked - which would be, in some cases, a shame,
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Suspended Elegance
Walking On Air: The Joy Of Footbridges By Witold Rybczynski
Slate. 24 October 2007
I’ve long had a thing for footbridges. Indeed, one of the few disappointments in the process of designing Heck of a House was that, regardless of how the house was sited, I couldn’t rationalize a footbridge or two. Consequently, it’s no surprise that I’m taken with Rybczynski’s footbridge slide show with annotations featured in Slate this week. The specimens shown range from spectacularly functional to wonderfully aesthetic with some combining the best of both qualities.
This display of fascinating footbridges can be found at Walking On Air: The Joy Of Footbridges
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In The Nude For Travel
Top Places In World To ‘Let It All Hang Out’ By Amy Rosen
CanWest News Service. October 2007.
I suppose I’ve had a thing for naked even before I had a thing for footbridges. In any case, when I ran across this article about the best buff beaches and boats, it seemed worth exploring, but I was convinced to include it in this edition of Cyber-Bookmarks after I read the intriguing, albeit ambiguous declaration that
Clothing-optional activities account for
$400 million of the U.S. economy
OK, I admit I am also enthralled by the vision conjured up with the discovery of “the 12-hectare Mira Vista Resort, a nudist dude ranch in Tucson, Ariz., which is done up like an 1800s Wild West town.” Immediately the picture of DS wearing only spurs comes to mind.
Several resorts in the US are listed as well as a retreat in the Mexican Caribbean, a French coastal resort in a town of 40,000 naturists, and a luxurious nude cruise marketed under the name - get ready - Hidden Jewels of the Caribbean.
This piece on travel au naturel is available at Top Places In World To ‘Let It All Hang Out’
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Putting The Fix On The Pix
Altered Graphics From The Heck of a Guy Files
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Top 15 Manipulated Photographs By jfrater
TheListUniverse.com. 19 October 2007
DrHGuy has, as indicated by the above collage of samples taken from Heck of a Guy Blog, occasionally fine-tuned a photo to remove a distraction or highlight some portion of the image. These amateur-level antics, however, are not in the same league as the big-time manipulations on exhibit in this listing. I’ve included one sample below to give readers a taste of the offering.
This nearly iconic portrait of U.S . President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body. Putting the date of this image into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1881.
This impressive and worrisome photo essay can be viewed at Top 15 Manipulated Photographs
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Once You Go Mac You Can Still Go Back To PC
The Complete Guide to Mac/Windows Interoperability By Gina Trapani
Lifehacker.com. 19 October 2007
If, like DrHGuy, you’ve got a crush on a Mac and are considering leaving your PC but can’t afford to lose those PC programs in the property settlement and don’t want to worry about the incompatibility problems between the blended families, now you can set up housekeeping with your beloved Mac and still enjoy a friends with benefits arrangement with your old PC.
Today, Mac OS and Windows can work together on the same network, share files, and use many of the same gizmos. Lifehacker offers a nifty primer about what does and doesn’t work when one dallies spontaneously with Mac and PC.
This timely info can be found at The Complete Guide to Mac/Windows Interoperability
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Welcome To Babel: Translating Sacred Poetry
Psalm Springs - How I Translated The Bible’s Most Poetic Book By Robert Alter
Slate. 26 September 2007
Translation of poetry is a puzzle so complex, multifaceted, and difficult that it seems to most of us as mystical as advanced physics calculations. In the case of the Psalms, of course, one adds to that task the burden of dealing with one of the world’s major religious texts that is also replete with historical import. Oh, and also add the fact that the Psalms were composed by “anonymous poets over a period of more than five centuries,” and one quickly realizes that this is not a job for the timid. Yet, the process involved in translating poetry offers a unique insight into the workings of literary thought. I’ve re-read this essay about the translation of these Hebrew poems into contemporary English a half -dozen times in the month since it was published and found it rewarding each time.
This excerpt is typical:
In many lines, however, a little resourcefulness can produce rhythms resembling the Hebrew’s. The King James version of Psalm 30:9 reads: “What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?” (The 1611 translators used italics for words merely implied in the Hebrew.) From a rhythmic standpoint, this sounds more like prose than poetry. My version reads: “What profit in my blood,/ in my going down deathward?” This rhythm is virtually identical to the Hebrew, the second half of the line just one syllable more than the original. The alliteration of “down deathward” has no equivalent in the Hebrew, but it helps the rhythmic momentum and compensates for other places (including the first half of this line) where alliterations in the original could not be reproduced.
This article, as well as a link to a sound file of the author reading from his translations, is online at Psalm Springs - How I Translated The Bible’s Most Poetic Book
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Mr (and Ms) Fix-it
25 Skills Every Man Should Know: Your Ultimate DIY Guide
Popular Mechanics. October 2007
This is in every way a prototypal Popular Mechanics article, full of useful information presented with a moral imperative of self-reliance. Or, as the introduction puts it,
These days, you can outsource almost any job—but some things you need to know how to do yourself. Study our master list with step-by-step tips from the experts, and test your DIY aptitude each step of the way.
My only criticism is the gender-indicative title. I find none of the tasks listed, from Fillet a Fish to Perform CPR to Protect Your Computer to Patch A Radiator Hose, to be testosterone-specific.
Come to think of it, with the possible exceptions of the items dealing with computers, I suspect Mary from View From A Farm House Window can perform each of these items better than I can.
Regardless, this how-to guide can be found at 25 Skills Every Man Should Know: Your Ultimate DIY Guide
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Footnotes
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Tags: Aha! Items · Fascinations · Media Mayhem
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The 2002 Metropolitan Home Grand Prize House of the Year
The above photo illustrates “The Metropolitan Home Grand Prize House of the Year” article from the January 2002 issue of that magazine.
Viewers who have read the recent Heck of a Guy posts, Heck of a House: A Manor In The Jacobsenian Manner and More About Jacobsen, will not be surprised to learn that I originally purchased this issue of the magazine from the newsstand because the pictured Grand Prize House of the Year was so distinctly characteristic of the style of Hugh Jacobsen that I was intuitively certain that it was designed by or, like my own home, directly influenced by that architect.
The Pristine White Barn That Inspired The Grand Prize House
As it turned out, the article contained no reference to Jacobsen. Instead, the inspiration for the design was described as an epiphany:
After a year’s focused research into different architectural styles, the couple [the owners] stumbled upon a solution serendipitously, during a country drive. “We spotted a pristine white barn alone in a field,” recalls Tony. “It had no shrubs, no adornments, no distractions. That was it.”
Hmmmm. Ol’ Tony sees a barn and creates an original home design.
Remarkable.
Even more remarkable, the owners were able to spend a year preforming “focused research on different architectural styles,” yet somehow keep their final concept pure, uncontaminated by the work of at least one architect who designed a batch of houses that look a lot like theirs.
To build our home, Heck of a House, in the same style, Julie, Builder-Buddy, and I had to steal adapt Jacobsen’s concepts. I feel so dirty.
The Plot Thickens
To recapitulate, the six page article in this well-known magazine proclaiming this place the “Grand Prize House of the Year” presented it as an original design (inspired by a pristine barn) by the owners, Anne and Tony Vanderwarker, and a Virginia architect, Jeff Dreyfus, although, even to a amateur like me, the resemblance to Jacobsen’s work was unmistakable and immediately recognizable with a single glance at the photo of the house.
Still, my autodidactic architectural studies have admittedly been sparse, spotty, and sporadic. To assure that my suspicions weren’t the result of exposure to too many conspiracy theories, I emailed the article to the normally calm, cool, and controlled Builder-Buddy, who became apoplectic, sending the publishers a message studded with terms such as “absolute travesty,” “thinly veiled copy,” and “stealing his [Jacobsen's] design.”
The essence of the magazine’s reply consisted of the statement, “We erred in not crediting Mr. Jacobsen, which happened when a paragraph of text was mistakenly omitted from the story and no one noticed,” and a promise to print an apology. They also noted that Builder-Buddy’s “absolute travesty” note was “not the first” they received.
While it was. as I noted at the time, difficult to see how “after a year’s focused research into different architectural styles, the couple [the owners] stumbled upon a solution serendipitously” fits with “a paragraph of text [crediting Jacobsen] was mistakenly omitted from the story and no one noticed,” the magazine had ‘fessed up, and my interest diminished below the threshold that would have prompted me to expend a few bucks for the purchase of the next month’s issue of Metropolitan Home just to check the promised apology.
But Wait, There’s More
This episode came to mind as the topic of a Jacobsen-related post after I wrote the earlier blog entries referencing the architect. Because I could find little on the Internet directly from Metropolitan Home dealing with this matter, I extended my search and consequently discovered this pertinent article by Patricia Rogers, originally published in The Washington Post (February 10, 2002) and reprinted in The Milwaukee Journal:
Magazine Errs In Citing Source Of Home’s Design
A Virginia home infused with the purist vision of Washington architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen is prominently featured in Metropolitan Home this month. And prominently missing is any mention of Jacobsen. The house, the 2002 grand prize winner of Met Home’s annual house design contest for homeowners, grew from plans by Jacobsen originally published in 1998 as part of Life magazine’s Dream House series. Virginia architect Jeff Dreyfus, who gets the credit in the magazine for the design, along with homeowners Anne and Tony Vanderwarker, says his clients ordered the plans from Life but asked his firm to modify them. “It’s obviously that (Life) house, but we customized it. We moved rooms around, added a garage with an artist’s studio above and researched a lot of new materials.” Despite significant modifications, the house, with its signature Jacobsen-style pavilions, dormers and towering chimney, still bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Life house. A philosophical Jacobsen says all 85 houses built so far from the plans have been altered significantly. Nevertheless, “having them say ‘influenced by’ or ’school of Hugh Newell Jacobsen’ would have been nice.” Met Home Editor Donna Warner says she recognized a Jacobsen influence, but the Life connection “never dawned on any of us. Though the architect of record made many changes, we should have said it looked derivative. It was a terrible oversight on our part — a sad mistake.” The magazine will publish a correction noting Jacobsen’s contribution.
Yep, a paragraph of text was mistakenly omitted from the story and no one noticed in the email message to the complainers in northern Illinois became [The editor] recognized a Jacobsen influence, but the Life connection “never dawned on any of us. … It was a terrible oversight on our part — a sad mistake” when the Washington Post interviewed the Metropolitan Home Editor. I suppose that hypothetic
