I can’t go the extra step and give them that fifth star, though, because the
staff has a way of being a little clueless and stubborn in its cluelessness.
Consider their actions a few years ago, for example, when in the middle of a
city where there is never enough food for many, they purchased mass quantities
of an inexpensive and nourishing food (squash), sprayed it with insecticide, and
filled the ground during their autumn flower show with vegetables that were then
left to rot. A needed food source for Chicago’s many poor was largely wiped out
by an idiotic fashion that this helped promote of buying not one, not two, but
dozens of large, family feeding winter squash as a decorative statement and as
conspicuous consumption. In a city in which the signs of malnutrition are not
hard to see in many of its residents of all ages, children included, this was
unconscionable.
(Note: I fully expect a neo-con or non-recovering libertarian to start flaming
on this point, and reserve the right to honor my New Year’s resolution to start
ignoring the loons. Yes, boy and girls, when your actions affect others, we get
to pass judgment on that, and the food supply is finite in a way that market
incentives won’t budge past a certain point, because there’s only so much land,
so much good weather and so much sunlight. That’s reality, accept it or
don’t).
In fairness to the staff, after a few of us wrote to them about this, they
did refrain from wasting food and taxpayer dollars in this manner the next year,
but the thought really should have occurred to them without prompting. Where they
have been less willing to budge has been in their bizarre adherence to a bright
idea that some manager had a few years ago, of how to slip an extra show in each
year. Somebody - I don’t know his name - decided that if the chrysanthemum show
began earlier and ended earlier, that an extra "winter show" could be started.
That sounded great on paper, maybe, but the fact that somebody overlooked was
that chrysanthemums won’t bloom until the cold weather hits. He also overlooked
the fact that in Chicago, as in much of the Midwest, we tend to have this thing
called "Indian summer", the beginning of autumn frequently acting like an
extension of Summer, right up until sometime around Halloween, by which point
the temperatures are almost guaranteed to drop off a cliff.
The end result of this was that in the first year this bright idea was tried,
the show that had been the high point of the year for the conservatory ended in
a sadly anti-climatic fizzle; the flowers just did not have time to bloom, and
tax payer dollars went foolishly to waste as bed after bed of expensive,
unopened buds were torn out to make way for the poinsettias. One might have
hoped that management would have learned something from this fiasco, but a la
Dilbert, management made its own reality and declared the experiment to be a
success. This has now been policy for a few years, with the result that unless
the cold hits early, the chrysanthemum show is a wash, with less than half of
the flowers opening before the end.
If you’re paying taxes in Chicago, you’re paying for some of the most
expensive mulch in the Midwest, but these guys, showing remarkable courage in
the face of the easily observable facts, just won’t budge. One strains to
imagine what they were thinking about the first time - just how deep and dark a
secret is the existence of warm October weather in our area - but to make the
same dumb mistake year after year, at taxpayer expense? Not cool.
Roll your eyes, walk on past, and enjoy the orchid house and the fern room,
which usually has a nice aural installation to add to the "age of the dinosaurs
look". No doubt about it, this is one of the places to go to escape the winter,
and it is a warm, beautiful bit of trapped summer in the midst of the midwinter
wasteland, but to give five stars implies a level of perfection that the
managerial ego tripping keeps the conservatory from achieving.
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