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Condo association ‘borrows’ for Marina City ‘50 year’ booklet
(Above) Cover of a 32-page booklet about Marina City that contains factual errors and many images “borrowed” without attribution. October 13, 2012 – A soft cover book intended to promote Marina City’s 50-year anniversary as a residence has some residents wondering if the condo association really should be in the publishing business. The book contains factual errors, numerous unattributed images swiped from Marina City Online, as well as text originally written for MCO’s history section. The 32-page booklet contains historical photos of Marina City plus more recent images by Cesar Russ, a professional photographer who is one of Marina City’s commercial tenants. The text gets off to a shaky start by claiming Marina City was built “in the heart of Chicago’s Loop.” Not only was Marina City built just north of the Loop, it was for some time the only tall local structure north of the Loop. Immediately after that, the booklet gets wrong the number of floors in each tower, the number of apartments, and the number of vehicles the parking ramps can accommodate. Then it gets Marina City’s year of completion wrong. Marina City Online appears to have been raided for both images and text. Two paragraphs – about a lighted sign on the east tower in 1961 – are copied verbatim from City Within A City, published by MCO as the first comprehensive history of Marina City. The lifted text even includes a direction indicator for an illustration (“left”) but in the condo association’s version, they do not have the illustration. Images borrowed without attribution include photos given to MCO by Portland Cement Association and folk singer Mike Kobluk, along with nine film frames that MCO extracted to illustrate articles about movies filmed at Marina City. According to credits on the next to last page, residential property manager David Gantt, an assistant, John Janiec, and Beatriz Ronzero, creative developer for Cesar Russ, created the book. Reached for comment by email, Gantt responded, “All images were copy write [sic] protected from the Chicago History Museum or donated by the offices of Cesar Russ. I directed Beatrix [sic] to use only their own images or those from the museum.” Russ, however, did not respond to a request for clarification. |
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