“She’s a grandmother, she lives in a big house in Chicago, and you’ve never heard of her. Does she run the world?”
That was the first line of perhaps the most famous article ever written about an official of the city of Chicago . Felons and mayors excepted.
It was written in 1999 by Malcolm Gladwell and published in The New Yorker, the same magazine that published A.J. Liebling’s snotty takedown of Chicago as the “Second City” and a publication that, historically speaking, has written relatively little about the examined life astride Lake Michigan. The Gladwell article — which was, at the time, the topic of much discussion among Chicago’s chattering classes that its thesis became unavoidable and unassailable — was about Lois Weisberg, a close confidant of Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first commissioner of cultural affairs under Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose death, at age 90, was announced Thursday.
Gladwell’s article was titled “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” and it posited Weisberg as an uber-connector, a human nexus bringing together such disparate clans as actors, writers, doctors, lawyers, musicians, architects, visual artists, hoteliers and, of course, politicians. A Kevin Bacon of urban affairs, you might say.
Somebody who knew everybody. The human equivalent of the hub of a computer network. Gladwell expanded on the themes of “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” in his subsequent 2000 best-seller, “The Tipping Point,” which has sold about 2 million copies, only adding to Weisberg’s fame as one of Chicago’s — heck, the world’s — great unifiers.
What Gladwell did not discuss, of course, was that one person’s generous act of connecting is another person’s definition of patronage, of a favor bank, of using influence to game the system or circumvent the rules. Of clout. The act of connecting is becoming ever more fraught. Still, you did not need to know Weisberg to be fascinated by “Six Degrees” — although it was even more interesting if you did.
Either way, by 1999 Gladwell had already mastered the skill of using a seemingly tiny example, or a seemingly insignificant person, to make a broader point. Take this observation in his Weisberg piece: “poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.”
That phrase — a riff on Weisberg’s ability to build community — was so potent as to motivate a woman named Liz Dow to build a creative connection network in Philadelphia that trains people to, in essence, be more like what Gladwell said Weisberg was like. Other cities have copied Dow, which means that they have copied Weisberg, as defined by Gladwell. How fascinating.
After Weisberg’s death the Gladwell article was much discussed all over again. Weisberg was eulogized as, well, what Gladwell said she was.
There’s no question that Weisberg knew and brought together a lot of laudably diverse people for the greater good of her city. (For the record, I knew Weisberg, although only a very little.) But despite her fame as a Gladwellian connector, I don’t think that is the main legacy of this remarkable woman. It was not her main contribution to Chicago.
Knowing people is one thing, doing things is another.
Weisberg was no metaphor. She was a producer — a cultural, artistic producer. Perhaps the most significant architect (or savior) of cultural Chicago the city ever has known.
Consider the evidence: No Weisberg means, arguably, no Taste of Chicago. No Chicago Blues Festival. No Chicago Gospel Music Festival. No Cows on Parade (those cows were copied everywhere; I saw some in France last summer). No After School Matters, surely the most successful arts-education initiative in the history of the city. No Storefront Theatre. No South Shore Line.
Maybe no Millennium Park. Maybe less free and clear space on the lakefront. Maybe many fewer neighborhood festivals. Definitively no Lookingglass Theatre on Michigan Avenue. Certainly no Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of Slate Group. Certainly no Joe Weisberg, creator of the FX series “The Americans.”
These, fundamentally, are acts of production rather than connection, of doing rather than networking.
Chicago’s combined Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, now run by Commissioner Michelle T. Boone, still does a lot of producing, a legacy, really, of the expectations and habit of the Weisberg years.
The difference is that when Weisberg was in office, civic producing was essential. There was far less going on downtown. That has changed. Now, Millennium Park runs independently, George Lucas is ponying up for a museum and the private-sector producers of Lollapalooza keep expanding. You could argue that Weisberg has made it possible for Chicago, which now has many demands on its resources, to become less active as a cultural producer itself, and more supportive of the producing efforts of others.
To put all that another way, Weisberg produced so much during her professional life in Chicago that she made it easier for everyone who followed her to make connections.
Remarkable.
cjones5@tribune.com Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
