I thought I knew what real fear was seven years ago, sitting in a locked-down hotel after two explosions ripped through the crowd packed along the homestretch of the Boston Marathon course. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic, all the world has become Boylston Street. Every day brings new shock waves. We're frozen in place while brave first responders run toward the disaster. And we have no idea where the finish line is.

That day in 2013 changed me forever. I wrote this essay a year later to explain why. I took the guilt I felt for letting some important relationships slide, and I took action. I'm not perfect at it -- who is? -- but I gave more. I checked in more. I said yes more. I tried not to pass up opportunities for reunions and celebrations. I got closer to building a life without regrets.

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When I'm swamped by despair at the thought of losing loved ones without being able to hug them again, or say goodbye, or grieve in any recognizable way, I try to remind myself that it's what I've done all along that counts.

Editor's note: This piece was originally published on April 20, 2014.

BOSTON -- Larry and Stephanie Guidetti were standing three rows back in a dense crowd when the bombs exploded on the sidewalks across the street, first to their right and then to their left on the finishing stretch of the Boston Marathon. Their 27-year-old daughter, Gillian, was still out on the course, somewhere close, according to the race tracker they'd been checking all afternoon.

Stephanie was a nurse for 23 years, trained to cope with life and death on the job. Larry has logged 44 years as a math teacher, coach and guidance counselor. He has dealt with the aftermath of suicides and car wrecks and heart attacks.

But what faced them at that moment was wholesale shock and gore. People turned away, fleeing to either side and behind them. Stephanie's body iced over. Her mind congealed into a single thought: Please, God, let her be OK.

Larry's head instantly cleared of all but the essential. He worked the equation. If there was a third bomb, he reasoned, it was likely to be on their side of Boylston.

"We need to get into the street,'' he told Stephanie. He climbed over the metal barricade and yanked it just wide enough to let her slip through. She grabbed his arm. They began walking in the opposite direction from where the runners had been flowing moments before.

Their path took them past the swath of devastation in the second bomb zone. "Don't look,'' Larry said. But it was unavoidable. He remembers more than she does: Severed body parts, pools of blood, first responders crouching over the wounded, a man with clothing still smoldering.

Stephanie, dazed and frantic, tried to call Gillian. Police stopped their forward progress after a few minutes, gesticulating toward side streets. "They were saying, 'Get to safety,'" Stephanie recalled later. "I thought, 'Where is that? We don't know where that is.'"

A couple of blocks away in the media workroom in the locked-down Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel, I was fielding an onslaught of texts and tweets from concerned friends, colleagues and near-strangers. I'd never grasped how many people had a piece of the Boston Marathon. Everyone seemed to know someone who was running or someone there to support a runner.

Were there more bombs? Could there be one in the building where I was pinned down? Fear clawed in my stomach briefly. I stiff-armed it away.

It never occurred to me that I could have loved ones in danger.

Larry is my father's sister's oldest son, a cousin I adored as a child. He is one of an ever-dwindling group of people who can summon up the faces and voices of my grandparents, who emigrated from Italy as children. He can remember my father, Vincent, as a young Army veteran from Springfield, Massachusetts, who brought home a beautiful blonde named Susan from Minnesota.

Yet I had no idea Larry and Stephanie were on Boylston Street, or that Gillian was running. And they had no clue I was in Boston. We shared 50-plus years of family history, but we weren't in regular touch.

Our family was fortunate compared to many. Gillian, running her first full marathon, was stopped roughly a mile from the finish and didn't understand the scope of what had happened until she got back to her apartment near Fenway Park. Larry and Stephanie made their way there and took her to dinner and told her they were proud of her.

Somewhere in the blur of the next few hours -- none of us can remember how -- we discovered how close we'd all been to the finish line. I felt anguished. I wanted to shoulder their experience and erase it from their brains.

Like many that night, I was swamped by the what-ifs. Runners who were forced off the course wondered where they might have been if they'd run a little faster. Spectators shuddered at the randomness of where they chose to stand. The thought that kept piercing me, making my legs rubbery, was that I could have lost people dear to me that day when I hadn't tried my best to keep them.

We are all returning to Boylston Street on Monday. And we have made some changes.

The lucky among us have that one house whose blueprint never fades, the one you walk through in your waking dreams. That was my cousins' house in West Springfield for me. It remained virtually unchanged through my childhood and nomadic adolescence and early adulthood. It was the safest place I knew.

My father was very close to his sister, Norma, and we visited often. I sneaked candy from the dish she kept filled in the living room, and soaked in the big white claw-foot tub upstairs. Out back, a gate in a low picket fence led to the yard where my uncle Frank tended wildly prolific tomato plants. In the winter, he flooded one end so Larry and his brother, Gary, could play hockey with a homemade goal. Just off their shared bedroom was a tiny triangular alcove stocked with board games. It was kid paradise.

Their baby sister, Corinne, four years older than me, hung beads in her room and plastered the walls with rock n' roll posters. I hung on her every word. I learned to play pool on the table Gary built in the basement, and drank my first cup of coffee -- really, milk with a splash that turned it beige -- in a white china mug with pink roses in my aunt's kitchen.

Larry went off to Providence College in the late 1960s and came home telling animated tales of basketball stars Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin Barnes. I was a bookish little girl who loved sports when that wasn't so common, and he drew me out as I burbled on about baseball. It was one of the first affirmations I had that I wasn't a total weirdo.

We grew up. I went to my cousins' weddings and held their firstborn sons. My work as a sportswriter frequently brought me to the Boston area, where Larry and Corinne had settled with their families. Then my travel pattern changed and the visits thinned out.

My aunt died of breast cancer in 2002. My uncle, his spirit broken, followed six weeks later. Gary, a talented contractor, moved into the house and did some remodeling, but it was still my touchstone, always there for me. He married a second time in the backyard with his own vegetable garden ripening in the July sun, a wedding I missed because I was covering the Tour de France.

A year later, he died suddenly after a brief illness. Once again, I was on assignment in France, and once again, I missed the family gathering. I wept over the phone with Corinne and privately questioned my priorities. Siblings and cousins are the ones you envision your arms around as you get older, helping you through unfamiliar territory as parents pass away, houses pass into other hands and the generation under you lifts off. This was out of order. Apparently, my sense of order had been an illusion.

I promised myself I would do better by my cousins, but more years evaporated. The night of the marathon bombings, I cast back in memory for the last time I had seen Gillian and all I could picture was a winsome, wide-eyed little girl. Now, I learned, she managed operations for the pulmonary clinic at Boston Children's Hospital and had raised more than $5,000 in marathon pledges for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Stephanie left nursing for health care marketing. Larry is in his 29th year at Westford Academy outside Boston. Both will retire within the next year. I'd seen them more recently, at my father's 85th birthday celebration. Larry took the occasion to give a beautiful speech about my dad's influence on him, articulating things I'd never heard or understood before.

"I was bucking the system,'' Larry told me last week, reprising his remarks at my request since I hadn't taken notes at the party. "I was going to be the first Guidetti to go to college. He always would encourage me. Whenever I had doubts about whether I'd be smart enough or good enough, he was my model: 'If Uncle Vincent did it, and he thinks I can do it, I can do it.'"

In the days after the bombings, I thought a lot about what more I didn't know about the people I'd known the longest. Gaps had opened up in my life -- inadvertent, perhaps, but they needed attention. Actor Tim Robbins' famous line from "The Shawshank Redemption'' -- "Get busy living or get busy dying" -- scrolled through my head. I told myself I better get busy getting reacquainted with my extended family.

The scar tissue that binds Boston now is also connective tissue. I suspect it feels that way for many torn and touched by the tragedy. I know it does for my cousins and me.

I returned to Boston last August and retraced all my steps from marathon day, reclaiming the end of the race for myself. Then I had a meal with Larry and Stephanie and Gillian. We made a pledge to each other to keep the lines open. I had gotten out of the habit of making personal plans on business trips, afraid work would intervene. That reduced love to an ordinary obligation, and that had to stop. From now on, I told them, I would never visit without calling first. Even if we couldn't see each other. Just to check in.

On Boylston Street last April 15, Stephanie dialed her daughter and improbably got through. Gillian was on Beacon Street, running on fumes and unaware of what had happened.

She heard her mother scream something about explosions and felt a surge of irritation. Everything looked normal where she was. "What are you calling me for?'' Gillian shouted into the phone. "I'm running a marathon. I'll call you when I'm done.''

"I figured she was exaggerating,'' Gillian told me. "I hung up on her. If anything had happened ..." Her voice trailed off.

Her mother can laugh now about Gillian's exasperated tone, the phone clicking off in her ear. Those few seconds told her what she needed to know: Her daughter was all right. There would be more time to talk, but not all the time in the world. "We are much more conscious of the time we spend together,'' Stephanie said. "We bought season tickets for the Boston Ballet. We're being smarter about what we're doing.''

Gillian decided almost immediately that she wanted to enter the marathon again and accepted the automatic invitation offered to non-finishers. The harsh winter challenged her training plans, but she was forced indoors only twice. On mornings after a heavy snowfall, she went to the Museum of Fine Arts, where the sidewalks were always "impeccably shoveled,'' and ran around the building for an hour.

Her parents will be at the finish line. They have seats in the grandstand with Stephanie's parents, who are in their 80s, and their son, Geoffrey, who has come from California. "I feel very supported,'' Gillian said. "I'm sure it's not going to be easy for them to go back.''

Life has felt more precious and fragile to Larry over the past year, and he will carry that with him to Boylston Street.

"I know my eyes will be darting around,'' he said. "I'm not afraid to go back and I want to go back, but I'm not going to totally relax until she finishes the race and we leave the race site. But if anybody's doing something brave in our family, it's Gill. She's running it. I'm just being a supportive, loving father.''

Stephanie was just as resolute. "We're not going to let terrorism dictate what our family does,'' she said. But she was shaken enough that she sought counseling last spring. She still finds it helpful to talk. And there is one thing she treasures from that terrible day.

"Larry was unbelievably cool under pressure,'' she said. "Much more so than me. I really admire that. I reacted like a mother, not a medical professional.

"It was another aspect of my husband I didn't know about, and we've been married 34 years. It's always nice to discover something new about someone you've known for a long time.''

The timing of this year's marathon was fortuitous. We had Easter dinner together Sunday. Twenty-one people around two tables hushed only once, when Stephanie asked them to hold hands. "We thank you for the blessing of family,'' she said.

Later, I picked up my dessert plate and sat next to Gillian and asked how she felt. She is excited that the day has come and will be excited when it's over, she said, echoing many others I'd spoken to over the past few days in Boston.

She recalls the exact spot on Beacon where she got her mother's call, and where she and others were stopped on Commonwealth Avenue, and she is eager to put those waypoints behind her. She said she is better prepared than she was last year. She's confident she can do the distance. But she will be nervous at the start in Hopkinton, same as she was last year.

"It's kind of daunting,'' she said. "All my family is waiting for me 26.2 miles away, and I have to run to them.''

What safer destination could there be?

Writer's note: Gillian did finish the marathon in 2014. She and the other family members I wrote about here are safe today. I called Larry and Stephanie recently, and the resolve and resilience in their voices helped sustain me. I caught up with Gillian by text. She's married now, with a beautiful 15-month-old daughter, and is a director of operations at the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary -- a facility that sits in the shadow of Mass General. She's still going to work two or three times a week amid the stress and peril of this pandemic, making sure staff can function and patients are served. I'm so proud of her.

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What the Boston Marathon bombing taught me about family and gratitude - ESPN Philippines

CALHOUN, Ga, Apr. 23 /CSRwire/ - Mohawk Group announced today that the commercial flooring manufacturer is the Luminary sponsor of the annual Living Future Conference. This years event, a completely virtual experience, will take place May 78, 2020, and be followed by six additional weeks of sessions and summits. The Living Future Conference is a game-changing platform and program created by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) for the green building movements most innovative leaders to come together to ideate and exchange expertise.

For the first time, the conference will be a completely digital and carbon-neutral event. This years theme of Sustaining Hope Within Crisis was originally intended to reflect immediate issues around climate change, but took on a new relevance in light of current events. The educational and inspirational lineup still operates under a singular commitment to creating a collective message of hope that can reach more people with greater urgency to share ideas, stories, obstacles and concernswith an underlying sentiment that while we may be isolated by distance, we are not isolated from each others minds, spirits, and energy for creating change.

Mohawk Group has been fundamental to the success of our sustainability initiatives in the manufacturing world. They've shined a light on what was done wrong and what could be done right, said James Connelly, ILFIs vice president of strategic growth. They have been steadfast in their support of the Institute through this crisis and through trying to envision a future where companies like Mohawk Group actually make the world a betternot just less badplace. Their continued support means that Mohawk is the leader in driving a transition for the entire industry.

The manufacturer has partnered with ILFI since 2014, the same year it achieved a Declare label for its proprietary FlexLok carpet tile installation system. Two years later, Mohawk Group achieved the organizations Living Building Challenge Petal Certification for its Light Lab Design Center, which became the first Petal Certified project in the state of Georgia and the first restoration project in the Southeastern U.S.

At Mohawk Group we believe in this platform and this transformational movement that uses opportunities like this conference as part of its efforts to make a true impact each year, said Rami Vagal, Mohawk Groups senior sustainability manager. We are proud to partner with ILFI to support their mission, and share a vision for a future where we can make the planet better together through more sustainable green building practices, certifications, outreach and advocacy.

Following the successful implementation of Living Building Challenge Petal Certification, Mohawk Group pursued and achieved Living Product Challenge Petal Certification for the programs first floor covering to meet its stringent requirements. Designed by ILFI founder Jason F. McLennan and his team at McLennan Design in collaboration with Mohawk Group, the award-winning Lichen collection is inspired by the idea of Natures Carpet and assemblages of multi-hued, multi-textured lichens and their regenerative role in our ecosystem. Building on its success, the manufacturer went on to achieve Petal Certification for its full carpet tile platform produced at Mohawk Groups Living Site in Glasgow, Virginia. One of the latest additions to its Living Product portfolio, Owls, was also designed in collaboration with McLennan, who will be delivering the Living Future keynote.

The Living Future 2020 Online Conference includes two days of live events on May 7 and 8, followed by six weeks of additional content. For the first time ever, all content will be recorded and available as an option to attendees interested in viewing workshops, sessions, and summits in their own time. In addition, many sessions and workshops offer Living Future Accreditation, in addition to other industry standard continuing education unit credits.

Register for the Living Future 2020 Online Conference and access the full schedule and speaker list by visitingunConference.Living-Future.org.

About Mohawk GroupAs the worlds leading producer and distributor of quality commercial flooring, Mohawk Group believes that better floor coverings emerge from better design, innovation, sustainability, project solutions and operational excellence. Mohawk Group addresses the unique challenges and opportunities in contract interiors with a comprehensive carpet and hard surface portfolio of all types and price points. As the commercial division of Mohawk Industries, the company has a heritage of craftsmanship that spans more than 130 years. To learn more about our full line of flooring products, please visitMohawkGroup.com.

About the International Living Future InstituteThe International Living Future Institute is an environmental nonprofit committed to catalyzing the transformation toward communities that are socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative. ILFI is premised on the belief that providing a compelling vision for the future is a fundamental requirement for reconciling humanitys relationship with the natural world. ILFI operates the Living Building Challenge, the built environments most ambitious performance standard. It is a hub for many other visionary programs that support the transformation toward a living future. Learn more atLiving-Future.org.

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Contact:Luke Chaffin762-204-5607luke_chaffin@mohawkind.com

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Mohawk Group Announces Support of ILFI and Living Future 2020 Online Conference as Luminary Sponsor - CSRwire.com

Its a fun night for the NFL, which is broadcasting the first virtual draft in its history.

The setup is quite extensive, with Verizon providing more than 100 phones and service for live video/communication, Bose providing more than 132 headphones and Amazon Warehouse Services managing more than 100 video streams, as well as the drafts Infrastructure, according to ESPN.

But more enjoyable is seeing the carpet Bengals coach Zac Taylor has in his home office, how many televisions Vikings general manager Rick Spielman is using or which recliner looks the comfiest in Joe Burrows home.

Here are some of our favorite war rooms, starting with the home front in Tampa Bay:

Taylors carpet looks like it was steam-cleaned or installed just before the draft.

Burrows place looks comfortable enough to take a snooze.

New Washington head coach Ron Rivera shows off his team pride.

If you ever need some bookshelves, coach John Harbaugh should have you covered.

Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury goes for more of a minimalist look.

If watching the draft on one TV isnt enough, you might want to visit Vikings GM Rick Spielman.

Even commissioner Roger Goodell made sure his basement is dressed up for the occasion.

Bucs coach Bruce Arians had every northerner jealous with his short-sleeve polo and khaki shorts.

Detroit GM Bob Quinns has IT waiting in a Winnebago outside his home in case something goes wrong.

Jerry Jones broke out with the crystal and social distancing efforts before making his pick for the Cowboys.

Alas, all have been trumped by this guy.

Contact Mari Faiello at mfaiello@tampabay.com. Follow @faiello_mari.

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Whats better than the NFL draft? Getting a glimpse of these war rooms - Tampa Bay Times

Basia Goszczynskas latest work explores the connection between humans, plastic waste and manufacturing innovation

Apr. 23 /CSRwire/ - Commissioned by Mohawk Flooring North America, and built using materials sourced from its internal recycling facility,Overflowis an artistic interpretation that incorporates the stages that single-use PET plastic bottles undergo during the patented Continuum process to produce EverStrand, Envirostrand and Air.o carpeting. Get an inside look at Brooklyn-based artist Basia Goszczynskas creative process behind the installation, as well as the powerful partnership that showcases how thoughtful product design, innovation and sustainability in the flooring industry is reducing the waste stream.

Click hereto learn more about Continuum.

About Mohawk

Mohawk Industries is a leading global flooring manufacturer that creates products to enhance residential and commercial spaces around the world. Mohawks vertically integrated manufacturing and distribution processes provide competitive advantages in the production of carpet, rugs, ceramic tile, laminate, wood, stone and vinyl flooring. Our industry-leading innovation has yielded products and technologies that differentiate our brands in the marketplace and satisfy all remodeling and new construction requirements. Our brands are among the most recognized in the industry and include Mohawk, American Olean, Daltile, Durkan, Feltex, Godfrey Hirst, IVC, Karastan, Marazzi, Pergo, Quick-Step and Unilin. During the past decade, Mohawk has transformed its business from an American carpet manufacturer into the worlds largest flooring company with operations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, India, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia and the United States.

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VIDEO | Overflow: Mohawk Makes a Wave of Change - CSRwire.com

No stranger to affordable technology for the home, Wyze has recently expanded its offerings beyond cameras, locks, and bulbs, now dipping its toes into fitness items. Today were taking a look at one of those the Wyze Scale. Priced at an astonishingly low $19.99, the Scale does more than just report your weight. It can also track a ton of other metrics like muscle weight and metabolic rate. Head down to the video below to check it out.

Wyze has also released a fitness tracker, the Wyze Band, but that review will come a little later. Weve also checked out some Wyzes other products like the Cam Panand Wyze Lock and are always amazed at the affordable price points for their features.

Getting the Wyze Scale out of the box, we have the quick start guide, the Scale itself, and four AA batteries.

Setting up the Scale is very straight forward. Put the batteries in and open the Wyze app. Select add a product and choose the Wyze Scale. Youll be asked to enter some of your metrics like birthday and height so that the app can calculate figures such as BMI and metabolic age. Then step on the scale, install any updates, and youre good to go.

With an attractive dark blue and black color scheme, the Wyze Scale sports a modern design. Its hard to believe this is only $19.99. One thing to keep in mind here is that unlike the Withings Body+ scale, there arent any feet included that can be installed to use the Scale on carpet. The Scale must be used on a hard floor to get an accurate measurement.

On the screen, the Scale will show weight and body fat percentage after a short time scanning. You can also get the scale to measure and track your heart rate, but that must be prompted from within the Wyze app.

Also within the Wyze app are a ton of other metrics. Everything from muscle weight, metabolic rate, and bone mass to metabolic age. If youre like me and dont know what a lot of these really mean, Wyze tries to quickly explain them in the app to give an idea of what those metrics can tell you.

Both with the Wyze Scale and the Withings Body+ Ive had for a while, Im not sure how accurate these readings are. I havent compared them to any official tests. I do think theyre great for tracking trends, though. You can see if your BMI is going up or down along with your weight, etc.

While weight and BMI were very similar between the Wyze Scale and the Withings, the other metrics did differ a bit. For example, the Withings Body+ scale had me at 16.2% body fat while the Wyze Scale had 19.7%.

To make it even more useful, the Wyze Scale can also connect to third party applications. Currently, it can connect to Apple Health and Google Fit with support coming soon for other programs like Fitbit and Samsung health.

Its still hard to believe that the Wyze Scale is only $19.99. With its modern design, ease of use, and variety of metrics tracked, it has a lot to offer for that price. Like I stated earlier, Im not sure of how accurate those measurements are, but they are great for tracking trends.

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Wyze Scale Review: Classy looks and Apple Health support for $20 [Video] - 9to5Toys

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, March 4closing date to be announced; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 15, 2020January 18, 2021

an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, February 28April 25, 2020

(The gallery is temporarily closed.)

In 2002 Gerhard Richter was included in a conversation about the restoration of the great gothic cathedral of Cologne. The building had survived the thousand-bomber raids that flattened the city in 1942, but the stained glass of the enormous tracery window in the south transept had been lost, and the cathedral chapter now wanted to replace the plain-glass postwar repairs with something that lived up to the buildings spectacular presence and spiritual purposeideally, a work by a major artist, commemorating victims of Nazism.

Richter was, in one sense, an obvious choiceone of Germanys most prominent artists, he had lived in Cologne for years. In other ways, the decision was curious. Richter is not religious, and while his work had made glancing references to the Third Reich, his position on the often reflexive commemoration of war crimes was not uncomplicated. For the cathedral, he considered, then rejected, the possibility of transmuting Nazi execution photographs into stained glass. Instead he turned to a 1974 painting of randomly arranged color squares, part of a series that had included paintings, prints, and a design for commercial carpeting. Colognes archbishop, who had wanted something demonstrablyeven exclusivelyChristian, did not attend the unveiling.1 But while Richters window is, in theory, a repriseits approximately 11,500 color squares were arranged by algorithm and tweaked by the artist to remove any suggestion of symbols or ciphersthe experience it provides is utterly distinct. The squares are made of glass using medieval recipes, they rise collectively some seventy-five feet, and are part of a gothic cathedral. When the sun shines through and paints floors, walls, and people with moving color, the effect is aleatoric, agnostic, and otherworldly. It should mean nothing, and feels like it could mean everything.

Decades earlier, fresh from two rounds of art schoolone in East Germany, one in WestRichter had made a note to himself: Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A good picture takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Richter is contemporary arts great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the worlds most influential living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectualpersonally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia. One measure of his status is that visitors today enter the Reichstag flanked by two soaring Richters: on one side a sixty-seven-foot glass stele in the colors of the German flag; on the other, facsimiles of Birkenau (2014), the paintings through which he finally succeeded in responding to the Holocaust, abandoning earlier attempts across five decades.

The Birkenau paintings, which had never been seen on this side of the Atlantic, were among the eagerly anticipated inclusions in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, the last exhibition to be held at the Met Breuer before the building is ceded to the Frick Collection in July. A streamlined, eloquent summa of Richters career, curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, the show opened on March 4, nine days before being shuttered by Covid-19 (along with a concurrent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery). Im one of thousands who missed that brief window. It is not yet known whether the show will reopen in New York before it travels to Los Angeles in August. In the meantime, we are left with an expansive website (the museum has posted images of all works in the show, installation shots, and some film clips), a weighty catalog, and memories of works seen in person. This is, of course, not ideal: many of the things shown depend on properties of scale and reflectivity that cannot be experienced in reproduction. But this is a retrospective about retrospection, and the situation is not without a certain resonance.

The opening wall is a preview of the elliptical path taken through Richters career. Table (1962), the first painting Richter put into his catalogue raisonn, is a mix of Pop-ish consumer culture (the titular subject was clipped from an Italian design magazine) and ersatz expressionism (it devolves at the center into circular sweeps of paint thinner). Eleven Panes (2004), forty-two years younger, is a leaning stack of eleven-foot-tall sheets of glass, individually transparent but collectively reflective, windows ganged up to make a stammering mirror. The small photo-painting September (2005) bears a discreet echo of Tables inchoate mess in the desolate cloud leaking from the South Tower on September 11; the brash colors of the source photograph have been drawn down, the orange of the explosion scraped away, time hovers like a bee, neither frozen nor moving forward. Even in reproduction, the arrangement of these works is affecting: three visions of the world being unmade and made again. In real life, this idea would be further extended by the ephemeral animation of passersby reflected in the glass. The installation photographs, however, were cleverly constructed to conceal the photographer in the mirroran uncanny absence that evokes the emptiness of public space in Covid-time.

American audiences came late to Richter. In the 1960s and 1970s the hegemony of American Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism tended to crowd out curiosity about what was going on elsewhere. Richters first solo show in New York in 1973 did not ignite great excitement, and for many years he was understood here primarily as a graphic artist; his first interview in the American press appeared in The Print Collectors Newsletter in 1985.2 By then, a series of influential exhibitions (as well as favorable exchange rates for American dealers and collectors) had stoked new interest in European art, but Richters reputation lagged behind those of Germans such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer who made raw work that spoke of war and atonement in no uncertain terms.

Richters oeuvre, by contrast, was measured and indirect and took a confusing variety of forms. His foggy photo-paintings suggested an oxymoronic lugubrious Pop, the random color squares an ebullient Conceptualism, and his soft-focus landscapes and portraits channeled both the Sturm und Drang of German Romanticism and the cool distance of contemporary photography. Uncertain terms were Richters mtier, and critics simply did not know what to do with it. Many concluded he was a cynic bent on invalidating art itself: Richter wars on poetries, declared a 1989 review in The Washington Post. When he depicts a cloudy sky, or a log fence and a red-roofed barn in the quiet countryside, he somehow makes you queasy. Even admiring critics like Peter Schjeldahl acknowledged Richters reputation for severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty.

It was not until the 2002 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, organized by Robert Storr, that American audiences really warmed to Richter. He was then seventy years old, and the emotional hypervigilance of his early work had softened. American viewers had also matured: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of that hopeful experiment in peace and prosperity, the European Union, bathed Germany in a more benign light than it had enjoyed in the anglophone world for a century. The photo-paintings now looked plangent rather than snide; the multivalent shifting of styles was recognized not as sarcasm but as a defense against dogma; the portrait of his daughter turning from the camera (Betty, 1988), hushed and luminous, made no one queasy. His peculiar breadth was evidence of a patient regard for the world. Richter, it turned out, was a mensch.

Painting After All recapitulates this history (indeed, it features many of the same paintings), while extending the timeline both later and earlier. The shows interest in memory is visible through groupings and inter-gallery vistas that illuminate continuities and repetitions across time. The catalog takes a more didactic approach, and how you feel about it probably depends on how you feel about Buchloh, Richters long-time interlocutor (though the two have famously disagreed about some of Buchlohs conclusions) and an art historian deeply entrenched in Frankfurt School social theory and philosophical postulates. Perhaps because of the wealth of Richter literature already in the world, the text bypasses the usual career overview; each of its seven authors (all but one quotes from Buchloh) targets a specific subset of works. This has the advantage of illuminating some less-visited corners of Richters oeuvre (Hal Fosters discussion of the glass works and Peter Geimers pocket history of German abstract photography are particularly useful), though readers new to Richter may feel like theyve accidentally enrolled in the second term of a class in which every other student has taken the intro.3

Richters biography mattersnot because he has made it the subject of his work (he has not), but because the historical systems and events he has lived through have directly informed the way he thinks about art and about history. Born in Dresden in 1932, he grew up in smaller towns along the Polish border during World War II. In postwar East Germany he received a rigorous technical training at the venerable Dresden art academy, but had only limited exposure to modern art: We werent able to borrow books that dealt with the period beyond the onset of Impressionism because that was when bourgeois decadence set in. (Only one work from this period, a remarkably prescient series of monotypes, is included in Richters official catalog; it was on view in facsimile form at both the Met Breuer and Marian Goodman.) After some early success as a painter of affirming Socialist Realist murals, he was permitted to travel to West Germany in 1959 to visit the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, where he encountered paintings by Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock that upended everything he knew about pictures. Two years later he defected to the West, writing to his favorite professor in Dresden, mine was not a careless decision based on a desire for nicer cars.

Dsseldorf, where he reenrolled in art school, was a world apart from the monoculture of official East German art: Beuys had recently arrived with his mystical cult of personality, the Zero group was developing its language of impersonal geometries, and Informel (Europes attenuated answer to New York School abstraction) was championed as the subjective antidote to totalitarianism and its instrumentalizing of soppy figuration. Even in the West, artistic style was a badge of political allegianceabstract/universalist vs. figurative/populist. And both Germanies, focused on building their respective new societies, chose not to ruminate on the unprecedented destruction perpetrated byand inflicted ontheir people. It would not be until the cusp of the millennium that W.G. Sebalds On the Natural History of Destruction anatomized the silence around the German civilian experience of the war: When we turn to take a retrospective view, Sebald wrote, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.4

Among the group of young, irreverent artists Richter met in Dsseldorf was Sigmar Polke, who for several years provided a crucial, puckish complement to Richters circumspection. Discarding the various high-minded models around them, Polke and Richter began painting from newspaper clippings and magazines, toying with the ways mechanical reproduction remakes its subjectsthe flattening and fragmentation of cheap printing and the unseemly croppings and juxtapositions of the commercial printed page. The stupidity of copying was part of the irreverenceserious modern art is supposed to despise the copy. But copying, done attentively, is a way into something. Academic art training depended on it as a means of internalizing the canon, but even as children we copy something when we cant get it out of our heads. Richter began keeping photographs, clippings, and sketches of potential source material that would become Atlas, his now career-long half-archive, half-artwork of things somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away.

Most of Richters subjects appeared affably Popfamilies by the seaside, tabloid perp walks, household goodsbut where Pop Art tended to ratchet up the volume with brighter colors and sharper edges, Richter turned the dial in the other direction, painting everything in plaintive grays with a subaqueous wobble. And the subjects were not all as banal as they seemed. Scattered amid the race cars and drying racks were bombers dropping their payloads and family members destroyed by the Third Reich: Uncle Rudi (1965), smiling jauntily in his enormous Wehrmacht overcoat, later killed in combat; Aunt Marianne (1965), shown as a teenager with the infant Richter, years before she was institutionalized as a schizophrenic and starved to death by the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia of the unfit. Richters paintings of Rudi and Marianne are no more or less anguished than his ones of kitchen chairs. But for German viewers in the 1960s they must have invoked numberless pictures of relativesvictims, villains, heroesremoved from display as markers of a world best not mentioned.

By the 1970s Richter had also become intrigued with the possibilities of pictures that originated not in a preselected image, but in an a priori set of rules. The random color squares that later dappled worshipers in Cologne Cathedral were one result; a body of heavily impastoed canvases made by moving paint around in semi-predetermined ways was another. This edging toward Conceptualism did not mark an abandonment of representation, however. He continued making paintings from photographs, now usually his own, including color landscapes so refulgent they might, in thumbnail, be mistaken for Turners. Some of these were tricks, painted from photomontages that unravel as you look. Others, like his lit candles and misty skulls, balanced reality and Romanticism on a knifes edge.

Gradually Richters art-historical allegiances were laid bare: Caspar David Friedrich, Vermeer, Velzquezpainters with a gift for inviting us through the illusory window while showing us how the trick was played (the oversized sequins of light that Vermeer scatters on metalwork and bread rolls call attention to the materiality of paint as surely as any Pollock drip). In the portraits of his friends and family especially one senses the double desire to capture the emotional load of a moment and to reveal the means by which image turns into feeling. When things slip too far toward tender, he adjusts the surface with lateral swipes of paint or abrasions, pushing and pulling until that magical space between looking and knowing is reached.

Academic writers often view Richter as a master strategist plotting from on high, but his own statements suggest something less mandarin: It is my wish, he told Storr, to create a well-built, beautiful, constructive painting. And there are many moments when I plan to do just that, and then I realize that it looks terrible. Then I start to destroy it, piece by piece, and I arrive at something that I didnt want but that looks pretty good. In 1980 he began using squeegees to drag paint in broad, uneven swaths that partly obscure whatever lies belowphotographs, printed matter, prior paintings. Its the look of mechanical failuremachine parts wearing badly, jammed printers, skid marks, abraded film. When repeated over and over, it generates complex color fields full of fissures and pockets exposing older strata. Geological metaphors feel aptthe surfaces resemble landscapes shaped by the scouring and dumping of glaciers. Richter has limited control over what happens in any one layer, so composition becomes the joint product of accumulation and knowing when to stop.

Sometimes I think I should not call myself a painter, but a picture-maker, Richter remarked in 2013. I am more interested in pictures than in painting. Painting has something slightly dusty about it. I suspect it is not paintings long history that bothers him, but a more specific quality. Dust accumulates on things that are settled, immobile. And painting, in our culture, has the unassailable fixity of a monument. Its a property Richter has repeatedly undermined, cutting up paintings and distributing the pieces as editions, rereleasing finished paintings as photographic editions and digital facsimiles under Plexiglas. (The Aunt Marianne in Painting After All is not, in fact, a painting.) Like Jasper Johns, his near contemporary, he is fascinated by doubling, mirroring, and illusionthe same-not-same quandary of image and object. His many prints, facsimiles, and artists books are not so much spin-offs of his paintings (though that is how they are often regarded) but partners with painting in a bantering, ongoing conversation. Even the persistent doubling back and restructuring of earlier work can be seen as a corrective to the presumed finality of painting.

One squeegee painting from 1990, Abstract Painting (#724-4 in his catalogue raisonn), has been repeatedly reformulated: resized and defocused in photographic editions, digitally refracted as kaleidoscopic tapestries and stained glass windows for a sixth-century monastery in rural Saarland, and slivered in a Photoshop version of Xenos paradox for the series called Strip. (The image was digitally bisected and mirrored; those halves were each bisected and mirrored, then those quarters, and so on, to produce 4096 (212) segments, each less than 100 microns wide, that fuse together in the eye to produce a pattern of stripes. These patterns were then cut up, arranged in different orders, and printed at different sizes.) The Strip in Painting After All runs an optically dazzling thirty-three feet across.

The monumental painting sextet Cage (2006)also in the US now for the first timestarted out as photo-paintings of scientific images of atoms (resembling fuzzy photographs, these are records of particle behavior translated into light and dark to accommodate human sensibilities). Having committed the pictures to canvas, Richter found himself bored by the result and began adding color, painting in and scratching out. At the end of four months, the atom arrays were present only as an inherited rhythm within the complex accretion of paint. In its grandeur of agitation and resolution, Cage may be as close to the sublime as contemporary painting can get. Perhaps it was to knock the dust off that sublimity that Richter followed up with two facsimile editions, breaking Cage 6 into sixteen parts that can be carried in a flight case and hung in any configuration that suits the owner.

Everything, Richter demonstrates, is a derivative, everything is contingent, nothing is immutable. This has implications for how one thinks about history. Even about catastrophes.

The Birkenau paintings are also abstract responses to failed photo-paintings, but the underlying images are of a different moral order: four photographs taken clandestinely in late summer 1944 by Sonderkommando prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The ethics of using, exhibiting, or even viewing Holocaust photographs has always been complicated. Moving east with American troops in 1945, Robert Capa declined to use his camera: From the Rhine to the Oder I took no pictures. The concentration camps were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. As early as the spring of 1945, Peter Geimer explains in the catalog, the Allies began circulating camp photographs in Germany, but the anticipated ethical shock never materialized, and the pictures disappeared. Richter remembers being shown them for the first time by a fellow student in Dresden in the mid-1950s: It was like irrefutable proof of something we had always half known.

Shoah director Claude Lanzmann objected not just to the numbing effects of profusion, but to visual representation itselfthe illusion of a presence when the reality was one of appalling absence. The opposing view, voiced by Jean-Luc Godard and others, was that documents are our strongest defense against amnesia, and that images can be powerful agents of imaginative reconstruction. (Whether or not imagination should have a role here is the heart of the conflict.)

As the only pictures taken by victims of the killing system they document, the Sonderkommando photographs occupy a special place in this debate. In 2001 the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote an essay for an exhibition in which they were shown and was roundly attacked in the pages of Lanzmanns journal, Les temps modernes. Didi-Huberman responded with a carefully considered book, Images malgr tout, which Richter read in Geimers German translation, Bilder trotz allem. In English the title is Images in Spite of All, but the German can also be translated as Painting After All.

The Sonderkommando photographs are unique not only because of who took them and what they show, but because of their appearance. They had to be shot secretly from a distance and are hard to read. Two of them look out through an angled trapezoid of doorway onto a landscape where people are working by a bonfire, smoke rising against silhouetted trees. It takes a moment to register the barbed wire and to understand that the things piled on the ground are not logs but bodies. The other two photos show tree trunks at a sharp angle. One is a misfirejust black trees and white sky. But one includes a wedge of land over which small figuresnaked womenare walking or running. Reconstructions show that they are headed to the gas chambers and that the bonfire pictures were shot from within one of the gas chamber buildings.

The human element is overwhelming once recognized, but it occupies only a small area and reveals itself slowly. The pictures initial impression is one of visual dynamism, modernist angles slamming into tropes of Friedrich-era Romanticism: soaring trees, billowing vapor, nature seen through a doorway. Perhaps because of the paradoxical way form and content cut across each other here, Richter felt it might be possible to make them into paintings. He flipped them left-right, projected them, and transcribed them onto canvas.

Their failure as photo-paintings has, I think, nothing to do with visual quality and everything to do with history. Richters photo-paintings work because, no matter how intimate the subjects, they function as types. Individuals and events are elided, commonalities revealed, through a concentration on form. Even his elegiac paintings of dead Baader-Meinhof members are as much about the dislocating formats of news as they are about the wasted lives in question. Given the Sonderkommando photographs singular status as historical documents, however, they cannot be stand-ins for anything elsenot for the look of clandestine photography, not for mans inhumanity to man, not for German accountability. They do not work as pictures in Richters sense of precluding the emergence of any single meaning or depriv[ing] a thing of its meaning and its name. Here, meaning and name are untouchable.

Richter did not abandon the images but, as with Cage, began working into and over them, pulling paint horizontally and vertically, layer upon layer. The Met website shows the progression from source photo to drawing, to photo-painting, to successive states of overpainting. The final canvases have the tenor of a forest after a firetwitchy, ashy crusts over an underworld of dun, crimson, and kelly green. They are complex, scarified, and alsoheres the rubbeautiful. In places the juddering repetition of fragmented color recalls, of all things, late Monet water lilies.

Max Glickman, the Holocaust-obsessed cartoonist in Howard Jacobsons novel Kalooki Nights, captures the moral vertigo induced by the collision of aesthetics and the Holocaust: A mass grave at Belsenthe bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, thats if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.5 Perhaps to brace us against that fall, Richter has gone to some lengths to structure how we experience the paintings. They do not stand alone. The original photographs are hung on an adjacent wall, in prints small enough to be understood as documents, and large enough to be legible. There are sources and there are commentaries, Richter tells us, events and reverberations of those events. More eccentrically, he has doubled the paintings themselves. The four canvases hang opposite four full-scale not-quite doppelgngers, each divided into quarters. Source, commentary, and gloss.

The events of 1944 are beyond our reach. The subject of these paintings is not that world, but our ownthe place where we actively choose to know or not know, see or not see. At the Met Breuer, the whole confab of paintings, facsimiles, and historical photographs is further multiplied by a thirty-foot-long stretch of gray mirrors at the backSebalds looking and looking away at the same time made inescapable.

The writer William Maxwell, who, like Richter, was a habitual spinner of fictions that were barely fictions, once had a (barely fictional) character observe:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memorymeaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivionis really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.6

Richters oeuvre is, at some level, a six-decade-long disquisition on this lieits inevitability, its emotional utility, its shape-changing instability. His stylistic ticsthe hazy edges, overlaying, chopping into pieces, and reconfiguring of partsare visual reminders that you are not seeing everything, that availability to the eye is no guarantee of clarity. The story always changes with the telling. Uncertainty is truth.

Fair enough. But what is perhaps most remarkable about Richters art is its affirmation that this is not a bad thing. The story of the color-square painting that became a carpet that became a cathedral window (and now, undoubtedly, somebodys cell phone wallpaper) is not a tragedy, its an assertion of endless possibility.

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Gerhard Richter: The Master of Unknowing | by Susan Tallman - The New York Review of Books

You may think that just because your windows aren't drafty that there's no obvious reason to replace them. But that isn't the only tell-tale sign that it's time for your windows to get a much-needed upgrade.

Here are some not-so-obvious signs that your windows are no longer doing their job, courtesy of our friends at Bay State Window & Door:

1) Things in your home are faded. The sun's damaging UV rays can harm more than just our skin. When your window isn't equipped to allow natural light in while keeping damaging ultraviolet rays out, there's a good chance that your upholstery, carpets, and wall decor will pay the price. If your materials have faded, become discolored, or are literally falling apart because of direct sunlight, it's a sign that it's time to replace your windows.

All of the brands Bay State Window& Door carries, including Diamond, Kas-Kel, Alside, and Harvey can be ordered with Low-E technology. These windows have low thermal emissivity (Low-E) technology built into the glass panes to allow natural light in without all of the bad stuff. Low-E windows' thin layer of coating also keeps reflective out, making your home cooler in the hot summer months.

2) You have difficulty opening and closing your windows.Not being able to close a window in your home creates two obvious problems. First, a window that doesn't close correctly is not doing you any favors when it comes to your heating bills. Not only do they allow the cool drafts to come into your home, but they are letting heat escape, as well, creating a spike in your homes heating costs. Secondly, a window that doesn't close properly is likely not locking properly, either. If your troublesome window is on ground-level, your home becomes more vulnerable to a break-in by being easily accessible to intruders.

Replacement windows can quickly be installed in as little as one day, making your faulty windows a thing of the past. Bay State Window& Doorproducts are ENERGY-Star qualified and can achieve a U-Factor of .30 or better. They also have interlocking rails combined with double locks to not only provide additional security for your home but also help to achieve a proper seal. Dual night latches prevent the window from opening more than a few inches allowing fresh air into your home with the security of a locked window.

3) You hear a lot of noise through closed windows.If you have been working from home for the past few weeks, you may have noticed that you can clearly hear every dog bark, lawnmower, passing car, and even the mail carrier opening your mailbox. If the noise level made you second guess whether or not you had an open window somewhere, it may be time to update them. Old single-pane windows allow noise to pass through the glass, around the pane, and through the window sash. On top of that, your noise can also be coming from insufficient window calking and foam insulation from a poor window installation job.

BayStateWindow & Door offers a variety of styles for your new construction and replacement window project. These windows have insulated glass, Low-E technology, and argon built-in to allow for energy efficiency. Brands like Diamond automatically offer double-thick glass to cut down on noise even more than standard thick window glass if you need added sound reduction.BayStateWindow brands also come with jamb wrapped foam insulation or they hand stuff insulation into the cavity of the wall for a perfect, insulated fit.

If you've noticed any of the above things about the windows in your home, now is the time to update them. For a quote on your replacement window, door or screen project, call Michelle at 508-992-8847 to schedule a consultation withBayStateWindow & Door, Inc. of New Bedford, MA.BayStateWindow & Door proudly carries Diamond Windows & Doors, KasKel, Harvey, Alside, Therma-Tru, and CustomBuilt widow and door brands.

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Not-So-Obvious Signs that It's Time to Replace Your Windows - wbsm.com

A judge has set an April 30 deadline for the city of New Orleans and the developer of the Hard Rock Hotel to take action on a proposal to remove two bodies that remain in the partially collapsed building and bring down its upper floors by July.

Attorneys for the developer, 1031 Canal Street Developer LLC, filed a motion the week of April 20 for the city to approve the plan. The plan involves using cranes with wrecking balls, shears and other tools to pick apart and dismantle the structure from the top down. It would also require the removal of two adjacent historic buildings.

The city and the developer have been at odds for months over how to demolish what is left of the hotel, which collapsed while under construction on Oct. 12, killing three workers on the site. The developer favors a traditional, piece-by-piece demolition, whereas the city believes implosion is a safer option.

In their court filing, attorneys for the developer call the plan for a conventional demolition the safest, fastest and most effective way to demolish the site without further impacting neighboring properties and to attempt to recover the remains of the workers inside the building. They say implosion will provide little, if any recovery of remains and would destroy evidence.

The developer indicated earlier this month it had worked out a deal with Kolb Grading to dismantle the building and applied for city permits on March 27 to move forward with its plans for a conventional demolition. On Friday, the developer submitted engineering drawings to meet the citys requests for additional information. The city went back to the engineer with additional technical questions.

At a court hearing April 23, Civil District Court Judge Kern Reese ordered the developer provide the city with answers to these questions by April 27, at noon. The judge set a deadline for the city to respond by April 30 at noon as to whether the city will issue a permit for the demolition plans. Based on the citys actions, the judge will make additional rulings at a 2 p.m. hearing that day.

A city spokesperson said in a statement prepared for ENR that the city is reviewing the plans, and has no further comment.

The developers attorney, Kerry Miller of Fishman Haygood LLP, said 1031 Canal Development, LLC was pleased to be able to present its demolition plan for the Hard Rock building this morning in court, including details how the conventional demolition being advanced will not damage neighboring properties. 1031 Canal remains committed to a safe demolition process and is hopeful that work will begin soon.

The new demolition plan involves removing the remnants of twotower cranes that were brought down in a controlled demolition a week after the collapse. One of the cranes remains draped over the top of the building, and the developers attorney indicated in court documents that the crane presents the biggest risk to the demolition crew.

Removing the crane would make it possible to clear out enough debris to access the two bodies trapped inside the rubble. Workers have been unable to safely recover the bodies because officials say the structure is unstable.

According to court documents, the last stages of the demolition involve tearing down floors nine through 18 the collapsed, unstable hotel structure and then floors one through eight, which consist of a concrete parking garage that is believed to bestable.

The demolition proposal comes after months of setbacks. The original plan was for demolition contractor Dem/Tech, an affiliate of Kolb Grading, to perform a controlled demolition of the hotel using explosives. That plan was replaced by a more conventional demolition, in which the building would be stabilized using temporary supports and shoring while workers take it down piece-by-piece. This change of plan pushed the schedule back to at least December 2020.

In January, the city of New Orleans announced plans for the hotel to come down in late March in a controlled demolition by D.H. Griffin Cos., the same firm that oversaw the implosion that brought down the two tower cranes. But that deal fell apart after the State of Louisiana refused to provide indemnity to D.H. Griffin and its subcontractors, and the company was unable to secure the $50 million in liability insurance it needed to move forward with the demolition.

The developers new demolition team is led by Kolb Grading and subcontractor Marschel Wrecking. If the new demolition plan for the hotel is approved, the upper floors of the building would be taken down by July 24, before the start of the 2020 hurricane season.

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Judge orders New Orleans, Hard Rock developer to take decide on demolition | 2020-04-23 - Engineering News-Record

Illinois environmental enforcement officials and the state attorney general have entered the fray in the controversial demolition of an old coal plant that blanketed much of the Little Village neighborhood under piles of dust earlier this month.

Gov. JB Pritzkers Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has accused the developer behind the demolition with breaking air and water pollution laws, while Attorney General Kwame Raouls office on Wednesday said it was reviewing the incident.

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April 17, 2020

The double-barreled move from the state against developer Hilco Redevelopment Partners comes a week after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoots administration said it was fining Hilco $68,000 for its role in the demolition of a smokestack at the plant.

Hilco could face tens of thousands of dollars in additional fines as a result of the state EPA violations, according to the state law. While Chicago has limited authority to enforce its local ordinances related to construction dust and air quality, Raoul has broad powers to enforce the Illinois Environmental Protection Act.

Photographs and videos taken during and following the implosion show a large cloud of dust and airborne material, Illinois EPA officials said in a statement Wednesday. While some dust suppression controls were utilized, a substantial plume of dust exited the site from the implosion.

The state EPA referred the case to Raouls office following the April 11 incident at the former Crawford coal power plant. The botched demolition, which happened with little notice and during a respiratory pandemic,blanketed the community with dust, which was widely recorded on video and in photographs.

We received the referral from the Illinois EPA and it is under review, said Annie Thompson, a spokeswoman for the attorney generals office.

Specifically, the EPA said in its violation notice, Hilco violated the state Environmental Protection Act by failing to comply with its stormwater protection permit that required the control of dust during demolition and construction. The company also failed to adhere to a stormwater pollution prevention plan and did not establish and follow procedures to prevent or mitigate air pollution, the state EPA said in the notice.

In all three areas, the EPA told Hilco that compliance is expected immediately.

Hilco and its demolition contractor used explosives to implode the tall smokestack at the old Crawford site.

The demolition of an on-site smokestack resulted in a large dust cloud that adversely affected residents in the surrounding area, the EPA violation notice sent to Hilco on April 16 stated. Due to the nature and seriousness of the alleged violations, please be advised that resolution of the violations may also require the involvement of a prosecutorial authority.

Hilco received its stormwater permit in 2019, the state EPA said in its statement. According to the statement, Hilco itself reported to the state EPA on April 15 that it violated its permit.

The citys $68,000 in fines are being assessed, the mayor announced, based on violations of four city ordinances that relate to construction and demolition dust as well as air pollution.

Lightfoot has said the citys health department will be working hand in glove with the Illinois EPA to determine additional enforcement measures that may be taken.

Lightfoot issued a stop-work order at the site, but is allowing the developer and its new contractor Heneghan Wrecking to clean up debris from the implosion.

This isnt the first time Hilco faced environmental violations.

In Maryland, Hilco and its partners were fined for environmental violations related to the demolition of retired steel mill buildings, according to a settlement. Contractor MCM Management Corp., which worked on the Crawford site, also was part of the Maryland project.

In a 2015 agreement with the Maryland Department of the Environment, the developers and its contractor settled, and were forced to complete $3.375 million in environmental projects. The companies also were fined $375,000.

Last week, the Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson confirmed he has opened an investigation into the implosion.

Representatives from Hilco did not immediately return calls for comment.

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Developer in Little Village Demolition Gone Wrong Cited By State EPA With Violating Pollution Laws - Better Government Association (BGA)

On Monday, the Webster County Fair Board voted to cancel most aspects of this summer's Webster County Fair in Marshfield.

The fairs signature events including the rodeo, livestock shows, showcase exhibits are canceled, according to Bill Roberts, manager of the Webster County Fair.

"It's a yearlong process to organize a fair," said Robert. "We have so many uncertainties right now with all that's going on. By not knowing, there are things like our catalog, ad sales and sponsor sales that we just can't get done in that period of time."

With the present economy and restrictions on large gatherings, Roberts said that contributes to other concerns, as far as participation in fair events or if they're even allowed to even host them.

"This year, the demolition derby was scheduled for Saturday, July 4, but I just don't know what people are saying about making derby cars," said Roberts. "When we look around, livestock shows are being canceled. Those are cattle that would show and continue onto our fair."

Because of school closures, Roberts said agriculture mechanics projects wouldn't be completed in time by FFA students. He noted other counties they know around the area have canceled their rodeos, along with their tractor pulls.

"We learned that one of the Mason groups that helps with our truck and tractor pull are canceling their event, so I don't know about contestants," said Roberts. "Then you have the concerns about ordering food ahead of time and I don't know what the response of people is going to be once we open. In our present climate, we don't know if they will respond or will they stay home."

The fair board is currently planning a truck and tractor pull on Saturday night (July 4), to coordinate with the Marshfield Chamber of Commerce's fireworks display, which they do during the Fourth of July celebration.

"We still want to leave options open for a community event since we know so many people enjoy attending the fair," said Roberts. "Kevin Cantrell, our fair board president, is talking to the Marshfield Chamber of Commerce more about that."

Kyle Whittaker organizes the livestock shows in the Webster County Fair. While he wasn't able to attend the Monday meeting, he said he was disappointed by the news.

"It is a longstanding tradition for the community," said Whittaker. "Hopefully, other Fourth of July celebrations will be able to move forward as normal (parade). This situation has definitely changed a lot of aspects of everyday life. It would appear the fair has fallen victim to COVID-19, as well."

There was some confusion about the cancelation when it was announced in a brief announcement by The Mail after Roberts and Whittaker both confirmed the news. Kevin Cantrell reached out to The Mail to say that the board is hoping to salvage some part of the fair.

We dont know what the big group regulations are going to be, Cantrell said. We had to cancel it because of the fair book.

The fair book is where the board announces its competitive categories, including livestock, home arts and more.

We are going to meet June 1 and maybe we can pull out a Saturday or Sunday night fair, Cantrell said. I dont want to answer a bunch of questions about it now.

If some aspects of a fair are offered, they would be presented on July 3 and 4.

We dont know. Our hands are tied. We dont know what we can do right now, Cantrell said. I didnt know Bill was going to release it yet.

Cantrell clarified at animal exhibits, the rodeo and the demolition derby are all off.

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Fair events called off: No livestock shows, showcase exhibits, demolition derby. Board still trying to put something together for the public. -...