Greg Hinz in Crain’s breaks news of a possible deal for $3 billion in state infrastructure bonds, funded largely by growing gas tax receipts. The state requires Republican support since bonds need a 60% supermajority in the General Assembly, so the plan is naturally to buy Republican votes with gold-plated suburban roads.

bq. The unofficial chief negotiator in the continuing talks, House Transportation Committee Chairman Jay Hoffman, D-Collinsville, met late in December with Mr. [Frank] Watson [R-Greenville] and is expected to meet soon with House GOP Leader Tom Cross of Oswego. Inevitably, most of the road money will be spent in GOP areas Downstate and in the Chicago suburbs, he says.

Compass rose

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

A web of silvery tracings emanates from an angular design recently circumscribed in a very well-trod public building as part of an update to some dreary, if efficient, Modern spaces. (So well trod, in fact, that I’m surprised that the original terrazzo could receive this inlay without requiring extensive refinishing, although I suppose the material’s quite durable.) Interestingly, and probably unintentionally, the hexagonal shape of this design complements the overall building — a rare one in Chicago which often rejects rectilinearity in favor of flowing 60/120-degree turns. This particular space has its own name; better yet, describe where the arrows might lead someone. Yes, that’s a bit of a trick question.

The feet may be a hint; I cropped out anything obvious, but that’s not a pair of shoes you see: rather a single shoe, the other midflight, with something else. (I’ll replace with the uncropped photo after it’s guessed.) Also note the grain of the original terrazzo; you may already have spent hours elsewhere in this building staring at it out of exasperated boredom.

One neighborhood group seems, kind of, to get it about parking: the “Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference”:http://www.hydepark.org/transit/parkingwoes.htm#uofc, and apparently also the university, sees that parking demand and parking supply both matter. Maybe that Chicago School economics comes in handy after all.

Clear across town, the “Andersonville Chamber of Commerce’s”:http://www.andersonville.org/ crusade against chain stores (following similar efforts in cities like “Austin”:http://www.ibuyaustin.com) has morphed into “Local First Chicago”:http://www.localfirstchicago.org/ (link not yet working), a cooperative marketing program for those “Signs of a Vibrant Community”: local, independent businesses. The little logo shows The Bean superimposed on a “Chicago flag”:http://introvert.net/2005/chiflag, and the back lists 46 businesses in Andersonville, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, and Wicker Park/Bucktown.

The new “smoking ban”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-051206smokebanpass,1,161125.story?coll=chi-news-hed (hooray!) includes an interesting performance-based exception that I hadn’t seen before: “if a restaurant bar or tavern can show it has installed air purification equipment that ensures the same air quality inside as outside, it will be granted a permanent exemption from the smoking ban.”

Well, if the goal is to ensure indoor air quality, I suppose that regulating the actual air quality rather than how you get there (banning smoking, purifying air) gives the same result.

What’s most remarkable about this, of course, is that the mayor largely stayed outside the entire debate. City Council hasn’t had a good floor fight in years, since most legislation (including, in the end, the smoking ban) sees the arms twisted behind the scenes. But this time, we got real politics.

The text of I said at last week’s Landmarks Permit Review Committee hearing about the Association House development follows after the jump. No, I’m not overjoyed at losing a sunny view and neighboring open space, but the opposition’s vicious tactics and weak rationales have dismayed me:

• They constantly decry the “high density,” even though the bulk exactly matches 1609 N. Hoyne, a building the WPC approved just two years ago, and countless other buildings up and down the street, and the dwelling unit density is lower than the block’s average.
• They attack the height, although the roofline matches neighboring buildings’ rooflines and the set back fourth story will not be seen from the street.
• They claim that there is a parking problem, yet I can always count a few open parking spaces on my block. Parking problems are like traffic: anyone who drives is part of the problem.
• They say that the architecture is “bad” and that modern architecture has no place in a historic district — a notion that their often-bragged-about travels to Europe should have disabused them of. By that logic, the radical Prairie School lines of the current Association House had no place amongst the Victorians and should be demolished. The architects use historically appropriate materials, including face brick and copper-zinc roofs, and do not include any blank walls, contrary to what Michael Moran claimed in a Chicago Journal letter.
• They claim that 34 votes at one meeting qualifies them to speak on behalf of 15,000 neighborhood residents, all while they loudly claim that others (including me) are “abusing” positions merely through self identification. (The Committee made it clear that they understood who was speaking on behalf of whom, and that I in particular spoke only for myself.)
• They offer no solutions beyond attacking the developers, the architects, those of us trying to view this fairly, and the board of Association House — an institution which has served the residents of our community for a century, only to get a loud “thanks for nothing” when it, unlike the residents it serves, managed to eke out a profit from its displacement. They suggest alternate uses of large mansions, a park, or a school, although 1% of the block’s housing is single-family, a new city park is under construction a block away, and local K-8 students can choose between solid Pritzker, the new Drummond magnet, and two charter schools.

Anyways, here goes:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I am an immediate neighbor of Association House; my sunny kitchen, where just this morning I was reading Preservation magazine, sits just eight feet from the property line.

The notion that the proposed development is out of scale for the Wicker Park neighborhood is based on an unnecessarily literal reading of the term “context.” By the letter of the law, the Landmarks commission evaluates proposed development within the context of the Landmark District, which in Wicker Park includes many blocks north and south of North Avenue, but less than half a block actually on North Avenue.

As it stands, the Cloisters (the building I live in) and the National Register-listed three- and four-story mixed-use buildings clustered around Milwaukee, North, and Damen (or lining North further west) were excluded from the landmark district, since the district sought the area’s 19th century character. Yet I believe that “large, high density,” and more recent (if 1890s-1920s can be called recent) buildings like the Cloister, the Flat Iron, etc. contribute just as much to our neighborhood’s urban character as the houses on Hoyne or Pierce.

More importantly, these larger buildings, not houses on the side streets, define the urban character along North Avenue — which, after all, is State Highway 64. For over a century, the prevailing character of development along North Avenue, as with other section-line streetcar arterials in Chicago, has been of three- to four-story buildings, which the site’s B3-2 zoning implicitly acknowledges. By the standard that Wittman has applied, every single building built since my great-grandfather’s time, including my own building and even the current Association House structure, has been woefully “out of character” and should never have been built.

The opponents have said that large single-family mansions would be more appropriate to the neighborhood context, but this block (my block) has 92 apartments and one single family house. Exactly six percent of units in the broader census tract are detached houses.

From a planning perspective, buildings around urban transit nodes should be of larger scale and higher density, since density sustains the urban services (like retail and transit) which make our neighborhood a convenient, urbane, diverse, and exciting place to live. The architects chosen for this proposal have skillfully created buildings that honor and enrich their surroundings by using traditional materials in modern ways.

Last, I find it profoundly undemocratic that thirty four self selected individuals, almost uniformly white and middle aged, can claim to have definitively spoken on behalf of a neighborhood with 15,000 residents.

The new Regional Planning Board that will combine NIPC and CATS has launched online. It’s so cool that they’ve chosen the Sears Tower for their headquarters.

The chief of the local Salvation Army “said that Ald. Dorothy Tillman objected to the [$135 million community center] because she said her ward would be better served by retail and grocery stores on the site.” — Jeremy Mullman in Crain’s

Right. As if there aren’t enough vacant _blocks_ in the bombed-out Third Ward to accommodate grocery stores.

The northern winds violently blasted across the country on Tuesday, delaying my flight back to Chicago by four hours — and even then, the plane shook alarmingly during descent and while on the ground. I went from a high in Raleigh of 71F to a low in Chicago around 15F. So, it’s been time to dig out the accessories for “Bike Winter”:http://bikewinter.org/tipsAndResources/chicagowinterweather.php, like a hat, the larger helmet (to fit said hat under), and windproof gloves. I may also try out the new booties from Canada.

I’ll bike to work when the temperature is between 10F and 85F, when winds are below 20mph (unless if it’s headed my way, of course), and when the chance of precip is below 35%.

Blair Kamin notes in today’s Trib that the sudden recent spate of 600’+ tower proposals does have something to do with the trend towards Vancouver-esque point towers — partially thanks to the West Coast-honed tastes of Deputy Chief of Staff Sam Assefa:

“Why Vancouver? Because it offers an eminently livable model of tall, thin high-rise towers set on townhouse podiums.”

Well, sure, but the gross density of the Vancouver model towers is

Four+one = ?

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

This building type — known for its four levels of studio apartments stacked atop one layer of parking — is ubiquitous in some parts of Chicago and, unfortunately, in some parts of urban California. (Unfortunately, since the ground-level supports have a way of snapping during earthquakes.) Today, we think of these as eyesores and grieve over the mansions that disappeared in their wake, but they are a peculiar reminder of the very different society that was postwar America. These cheap concrete frame and picture-window constructions sprouted in many lakefront neighborhoods, especially Lakeview and Edgewater, as three factors collided:

(1) a pent-up demand for studio apartments, which became fashionable as changing social norms made it acceptable for young men and women to live on their own, as residential hotels and rooming-houses became socially unacceptable, and as the baby boom created an unprecedented number of new households after a twenty-year construction drought;

(2) cheap new construction materials and techniques, particularly reinforced concrete, air conditioning, and aluminum window frames, arriving at the same time that architectural modernism permeated the public imagination.

(3) the permissive new 1957 zoning ordinance, which projected that Chicago would grow to five million residents (from its already overcrowded 1960 peak of almost four million) and would require many new residences — especially along the perpetually popular lakefront, which would be served by a new subway line. Their boundless optimism crashed and burned in the 1970s-1980s; instead of growing, the city’s population plummeted by over a million, none of the new subway lines
envisioned ever materialized, and much of the city’s economic might trickled out to the suburbs or gushed to the Sunbelt, the Third World, and to super-dominant global cities.

In 1967, the City Council amended the zoning ordinance to ban all-studio buildings and construction of the 4+1 ceased almost overnight.

This particular 4+1 occupies a site near a quiet corner miles and miles from any of its sisters. Guessing the neighborhood will be easy, so I’ll up the ante and ask: of the city’s countless Starbuckses, which one is this nearest?

Shruti Daté Singh writes in Crain’s:
“Bridgeport’s alderman, James A. Balcer (11th), hopes the World Series will boost his efforts to redevelop the Halsted Street corridor. He wants more stores, coffee shops and high-end restaurants.”

Probably not what the Lumpen kids had in mind when they christened (in a strange bit of irony so bitter that it circles right around to sound smarmy and booster-ish, especially when uttered by “artists”) Bridgeport as “the community of the future”:http://lumpen.com/communityofthefuture/home.html.

Update: Not only did the Sox win, but “a Missed Connection”:http://chicago.craigslist.org/mis/106744217.html was made aboard the #44 Wallace: “I never see cute, IPod-wearing, backpack-carrying boys on my bus… I’m crazy about your hair. I hope you were impressed with my lefthand text-messaging/righthand IPod scrolling moves. Double-fisting technology is hot?” Next up: well, who knows? As Lawrence Downes wrote in the Times on Sunday, “Packs of rabid wolves sweeping down from Canada… Sinkholes swallowing Nebraska. An asteroid.”

Today’s “most popular” article at the Trib is a letter by Thomas Condon with some South Side imperialist pablum:

This is an essential part of the difference between the North Side and the South Side. The North Side is home to the more “tender” Chicagoans, those latte-swilling, status-car-driving dandies who think that Lincoln Park is a tough neighborhood. Many are just enjoying their “urban experience” for a few years before moving back to Schaumburg and buying the inevitable minivan.

The South Side is where the real meat of Chicago resides. These are the people and neighborhoods who built America with steel mills, won World War II with manufacturing and continue to supply the real muscle for Chicago’s economic engine.

And we aren’t moving to Schaumburg. Ever.

Well, no. The north side and downtown areas successfully reinvented themselves for the post-industrial economy, but not the south side — which still suffers from higher unemployment and lower incomes. Low per-capita income doesn’t sound like “muscle for Chicago’s economic engine.”

And while they might not move to Schaumburg (hardly anyone does, as it’s a business only town), white south siders WILL move to Oak Lawn or Bolingbrook or Olympia Fields, and black south siders will move to Park Forest or University Park. Indeed, millions have — how else did huge swaths of the south side end up so denuded and depopulated?