Batcolumn

The story

In 1977, the U.S. General Services Administration erected a 101-foot Cor-Ten steel baseball bat balanced upright on its knob outside a federal office building on West Madison Street. Pop artist Claes Oldenburg had originally conceived a far wilder design in 1967—a skyscraper-high bat engineered to spin continuously at high speeds—before settling on a static, 20-ton open-lattice shell. Oldenburg initially intended to paint the bat bright red, but abandoned the plan to prevent it from visually clashing with Alexander Calder's bright red Flamingo sculpture standing four blocks away in The Loop.

The sculpture's lacy framework of 24 vertical struts and over 1,600 cross-braces was designed to echo Chicago's steel bridges, industrial cranes, and soaring architecture. But when the $100,000 monument was dedicated on April 14, 1977—with Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks attending the ceremonies—protesters greeted it with signs reading 'Expensive joke' and 'Tear it down.' Decades later, the gray lattice remains anchored in the plaza of the Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building, an absurd piece of federal pop art sitting right in front of daily office commuters.