Merchandise Mart

Christopher Kennedy announced Thursday that he is stepping down as president of MMPI, the real estate management company that owns the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Long a key part of his family's portfolio, Kennedy has been at the Mart for 25 years, serving as president since 2000. He will be succeeded by Mark Falanga, a senior vice president at the company for 17 years. Formerly known as Merchandise Mart Properties,Inc., MMPI was purchased from the Kennedy family in 1998 by New York-based Vornado Realty Trust.

My grandmother was "the help. " Every weekday morning, she would leave our 24-story apartment building on the South Side and go downtown to the Ira A. Jones glassware company in the Merchandise Mart, where she worked as a maid for 30 years. She retired in the early 1980s. My grandmother wore powder blue or white smocks — she would never wear the white ones after Labor Day — as she dusted and cleaned the showroom and sometimes took inventory of expensive glass and porcelain giftware: Elegantly sculpted swans, whales and elephants; glass-blown candle holders, ashtrays and ornate cocktail glasses; hand-decorated pieces of jewelry.

Merchandise Mart officials are to unveil plans Wednesday for a 200,000 square foot technology center designed to allow computer users the opportunity to view under one roof the products of all major computer manufacturers. The center, tentatively scheduled to open in early 1992, will be on the fifth floor of the Mart.

I had just 30 minutes to talk with Christopher Kennedy , the outgoing chief of Chicago's Merchandise Mart and the eighth of Robert F. Kennedy 's 11 children. So I got to the point. "Are you going to run for office?" "For what? What would I run for?" Kennedy replied, sounding incredulous. He seemed to have forgotten he was one of those Kennedys. "I don't know," I said. "Governor?" "There's a sitting Democratic governor, who has done a very good job and will be there for re-election," he said.

A 35-year-old man charged Saturday with sexually assaulting a woman at the Merchandise Mart had a previous sex-crime conviction, police said. Derrick Moody of 504 E. 95th St. was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated battery after he allegedly raped a 58-year-old woman Friday night on the 15th floor of the Merchandise Mart, authorities said. In 1992, Moody was found guilty of attempted aggravated criminal sexual assault and was sentenced to 7 years in prison, said Belmont Area Sgt. Thomas Sappanos.

Jill Prescott Culinary School, formerly Ecole de Cuisine in Kohler, Wis., is landing in a 7,000-square-foot school in the Merchandise Mart that's scheduled to officially open May 22. A chef, cookbook author and host of a public television cooking show, Prescott will offer professional cooking techniques for the home chef in several state-of-the-art teaching kitchens. Classes will be held in a 1,300-square-foot cuisine room, a 700-square-foot pastry room and a 1,000-square-foot studio/demonstration room.

The Dessin Fournir Companies' Galerie opened in early January at the Tui Pranich showroom at The Merchandise Mart. The Fournir companies specialize in custom high-end furniture, lighting and fabrics. The companies include Dessin Fournir, the namesake line of exclusive traditional furniture, Gerard, a collection of turn-of-the-century eclectic designs, ClassicCloth, an ultra-luxurious resource for textiles, Palmer Hargrave, an elegant lighting collection, and Kerry Joyce, a traditional furniture line with this designer's own twist on elegant style.

Collectors, designers and the general public are invited to attend the sixth annual Chicago International Antiques & Fine Art Fair Friday through Monday on the second floor at the Merchandise Mart. About 60 antiques dealers are expected to exhibit at the fair. Items on display will range from collectible cars to fine wines, furniture to books, manuscripts to textiles and even an expanded Young Collectors Program "aimed at educating the younger audience on the benefits of collecting."

We always dig the annual DreamHome event at The Merchandise Mart. It's a cheap ($5 suggested donation) and convenient (located in the same busy thoroughfare passed through every day by hundreds of commuters) way for the general public to soak in high design usually reserved for the design trade and its clients. This spring, we're digging the DreamHome even deeper, as it features a few enhancements. The nine-room showhouse -- orchestrated by 10 local designers -- features a slightly larger, significantly more open layout than in years past.

Three men have been arrested and charged with gambling in a Merchandise Mart bar, police said. After receiving a tip about gambling inside Dunphy's Bar and Grill at 222 Merchandise Mart, two officers ate lunch there Monday afternoon and observed two men playing video poker and exchanging money and bets, spokesman Matthew Jackson said. Ernest Sanchez, 42, of Whiting, Ind., and Jack Hobbs, 35, of New Lenox were charged with gambling, police said. The gambling took place within sight of the bartender, Charlie Serrano, 44, of the 1000 block of North Mozart Street, police said.

Christopher Kennedy announced Thursday that he is stepping down as president of MMPI, the real estate management company that owns the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Kennedy's family is the previous owner of the Merchandise Mart, and he has been with the company for 25 years, serving as president since 2000. He will be succeeded by Mark Falanga, a senior vice president at the company for 17 years. Formerly known as Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., MMPI was purchased from the Kennedy family in 1998 by Vornado Realty Trust.

Christopher Kennedy announced Thursday that he is stepping down as president of MMPI, the real estate management company that owns the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Long a key part of his family's portfolio, Kennedy has been at the Mart for 25 years, serving as president since 2000. He will be succeeded by Mark Falanga, a senior vice president at the company for 17 years. Formerly known as Merchandise Mart Properties,Inc., MMPI was purchased from the Kennedy family in 1998 by New York-based Vornado Realty Trust.

Some but hardly all sculptures look sad in the rain and one recent drizzly afternoon we were staring at some sad ones outside the Merchandise Mart. There were familiar, those sculptures of the heads of such bygone merchandising moguls as A. Montgomery Ward, Julius Rosenwald, Frank Winfield Woolworth, George Huntingtom Hartford, Edward Albert Filene, Robert Elkington Wood and Marshall Field. They have been sitting there since 1953, eight bronze busts, four times life size atop soaring pedestals.

James Bidwill was a tireless booster of Chicago. Mr. Bidwill, an executive with The Merchandise Mart for nearly 30 years and a longtime participant in various business organizations, was known to many as the city's ambassador. He loved to mingle and travel worldwide making connections and plugging Chicago. "He was a consummate promoter of Chicago," said longtime friend Joe Balasa, who also worked with Mr. Bidwill. Mr. Bidwill, 77, died Tuesday, March 8, at St. Patrick's Residence, a nursing home in Naperville, from complications of leukemia, his daughter Debbie Collins said.

Italian wine dinner: Chef Mario Longobardi hosts "An evening in Italy," a five-course dinner with wine pairings by Robert Owings of Vintages — A Fine Wine Merchant. $75; 7 p.m. Monday; Mario Trattoria, 6 S. Dunton Ave., Arlington Heights; reservations, 847-577-2840. Sparklers meet cheese: Diana Hamann teaches a class on Sparkling Wine from Around the World and Their Cheese Match Made in Heaven. $65; 6 p.m. July 2; The Chopping Block, Merchandise Mart; register, 312-644-6360 or thechoppingblock.

Art Chicago has descended upon the city every spring for as long as we can remember. (In case you're keeping score, this is its 30th anniversary.) But among those of us for whom 17th century French landscapes and $50,000 price tags are more fairy-tale than art fair, NEXT: The Invitational Exhibition of Emerging Art, is quickly becoming the must-visit event under the Merchandise Mart's annual visual-arts big top, Artropolis. It's happening again this weekend, and an estimated 50,000 folks will flock to the Mart to shuffle slowly past thousands of pieces of art over the course of three days.

The family of the woman who collapsed and died earlier this week at the Merchandise Mart filed a petition Thursday in Cook County Circuit Court requiring city departments to preserve 911 tapes and reports pertaining to the response to a call for emergency help, said Daniel Kotin, the family's attorney. The Office of Emergency Management and Communication and the Chicago Fire Department have launched investigations into the incident, in which it appears emergency guidelines were not followed and improper personnel were dispatched, officials said.

The Illinois Appellate Court on Tuesday upheld a trial court ruling allowing the Kennedy family to keep the final $47.4 million from the 1998 sale of the Merchandise Mart. The appeals court affirmed a 2000 ruling by a circuit court judge that lender MetLife Inc. breached its loan agreement with the Kennedy family by demanding the huge fee as a penalty for the early payoff of a $250 million loan on the 3.7 million-square-foot Mart. The disputed amount has been held in escrow since 1998, when the Kennedys, represented by the Chicago law firm Jenner & Block, paid off the mortgage after selling the Mart and most of their other real estate holdings to New York-based Vornado Realty Trust in a transaction that was valued at $625 million.

Maurice Gamze, an engineer who deplored wasted energy, was an early proponent of conservation tactics like cogeneration and an innovative designer of heating and cooling plants for buildings, including Chicago's mammoth Merchandise Mart. Mr. Gamze, 81, died Monday, Dec. 14, in his Highland Park home, said his wife, Hynda. He had Lewy body disease. A principal in Gamze Korobkin Caloger Inc. for 40 years, Mr. Gamze and his partners early on embraced the concept of Total Energy, a system that produces heat or hot water and also electricity.

Joan Blutter left England for Chicago after World War II and became one of the city's best-known interior designers, with clients who included real estate magnate Arthur Rubloff and fellow Brit Barbara Taylor Bradford, the writer. Mrs. Blutter, 86, died on Sunday, Nov. 15, at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, said her daughter, Janet Shiff. She had checked in a day earlier with stomach pains, and intestinal complications ensued. Initially working out of her North Side home, Mrs. Blutter took space for Joan Blutter Associates in the Merchandise Mart in 1970 and changed the firm's name to Blutter/Shiff Design Associates when her daughter joined as her partner.