In Holiday Season Adjusted for Recession, Chicago Finds a Tree to Fit

By MONICA DAVEY
Published: November 24, 2009

CHICAGO — This city’s Christmas tree, which by tradition will be lighted by Mayor Richard M. Daley on Wednesday, has already suffered slights.

As the tree awaited its grand moment in Daley Plaza downtown, one passer-by this week deemed it spare and wondered whether its branches might break off. Another resident, in one of several letters to local newspapers on the topic, likened Mr. Daley to the Grinch for erecting what the writer called an “ornamental evergreen shrub.”

In truth, Chicago’s tree is big. This blue spruce stands 50-some feet tall, and took decades to grow, in the care of the generous suburban family that donated it to the city. If you count the base and the star on top, which city officials appear to prefer to, it stands 60 feet tall, they say.

Still, it is a speck of what once filled the plaza. Since 1956, when Mayor Daley’s father ran the city, multiple trees have been shaped together to make an elaborate display. Just last year, 113 trees were fashioned into a towering 85-foot creation. But in recent years, the cost of the weeks of construction and a surrounding display had approached $350,000, a price too steep, the city decided, at a time of deep budget cuts.

Chicago is hardly alone in its downsized jollity and energy-saving lights. In Austin, Tex., a beloved “Trail of Lights” tradition will look different — and shorter — this year, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the State House in South Carolina, the fir provided by garden clubs is shorter and cheaper.

“It’s only about six feet less than last year,” said Jane Suggs of the Columbia Garden Club. Ms. Suggs, despite what she acknowledged had been taunts from some that Charlie Brown might have selected it, called the tree magnificent.

Likewise, some Chicagoans say this tree, which along with the surrounding display will cost about half of what it did last year, suits their mood now. And city officials said they had also heard from those who found the old model too big, too artificial, too much.

“People say they like how real and natural this looks,” said Megan McDonald, executive director of the mayor’s office of special events, “that it is like one they could have in their home.”


source: nytimes.com