Years ago, I joked with a biology student that his long hours in the lab were spent breeding aggression into the local squirrels, who seemed a little too acclimated to people. Eventually, this escalated into an imaginary project to create Flying Attack Squirrels. (I guess you had to be there to see the hilarity.) Little did we know that just a few blocks away was a playground so rife with flying squirrels that it was named Flying Squirrel Playlot Park, apparently because flying squirrels’ range once extended this far west.

A Page One article by Erik Ahlberg gives some reasons why the winning White Sox still face a half-empty stadium in a sporting town. Personally, I think that fixing the urbanism could easily increase attendance, while generating additional revenues. I know that I’d be far more tempted to go to a game; surely someone who cared more about sports (even if she cared less about urbanism) would be similarly tempted.

The Chicago White Sox have the best record in baseball, and their best chance in years of ending an 88-year drought of World Series championships. But here in one of America’s great sports towns, hardly anyone seems to care.

When the Sox recently faced another first-place team, the Los Angeles Angels, only about 20,000 showed up, despite delightful weather and a 2-for-1 ticket special… Despite a mediocre performance most of the year, the second-place Cubs have played to 98% capacity, and nearly had a sellout April 23 when they lost to the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates in near-freezing temperatures with 25-mile-an-hour winds blasting off Lake Michigan.

At the heart of the Sox’s troubled wooing of Chicago lies a conundrum worthy of Yogi Berra: They haven’t been good enough to win, and they haven’t been bad enough to tap into baseball’s romance with hapless losers. The White Sox won their last World Series in 1917. Even before the Boston Red Sox exorcised their 86-year curse last year, the White Sox had the American League’s longest drought…

Many people fault Comiskey Park, which one local columnist has described as having the feel of West Berlin during the Cold War. The park, which replaced the old Comiskey in 1991 and was renamed U.S. Cellular Field in 2003, is bordered by a rust-stained concrete wall, train tracks and an interstate highway. Some of Chicago’s toughest housing projects loom beyond the outfield fence. There are only a few bars within walking distance… The Cell, as the team’s ballpark is often called here, was one of the last efficient but unappealing fields built before stadiums in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and San Francisco showed how to design a park that’s equal parts ballfield and tourist attraction… But many Chicagoans prefer the cozy confines of historic Wrigley Field, with its ivy-covered outfield walls, hand-operated scoreboard and neighborhood teeming with saloons.

“Even if we win the World Series this year, Wrigley will still sell out next year,” Sox first baseman Paul Konerko says. “But I can’t guarantee we’d be sold out here…” White Sox General Manager Ken Williams says the team appreciates the mayor’s support. “We just need him to bring ten or fifteen thousand of his friends.”

1,260 additional condos isn’t really news, not given the tens of thousands of units planned around town already, but a new 500,000 sq ft lifestyle center is noteworthy. Alby Gallun reports in Crain’s that Centrum Properties has purchased 11 acres of the “LaSalle Park” tract in the South Loop, which has had a tremendously generous PD (at least 2,500 units) attached to it for years, and has proposed lifestyle retail on the south and residential on the north. Other parts of LaSalle Park have been sold to D2 Realty and Terrapin for residential uses and to Target for its new Clark/Roosevelt store.

Combined with 320,000 sq ft at the Southgate Market mini-vertical mall and the approved 670,000 foot lifestyle component of Riverside Park, plus ~450,000 feet in existing big box retail (Dominick’s, Jewel, Home Depot, Target, State Place), that’s nearly two million square feet of retail between Wabash and Jefferson — more than half of it in vertical formats. (I don’t know if anyone tracks retail in the Clybourn corridor, but my estimate is closer to a million feet.) The city has long identified Roosevelt as a retail corridor good for big boxes, which makes sense given not only the growing local population but also its great accessibility from points further south and west.

However, I have serious doubts about whether that much vertical or lifestyle-format retail will work — or is desirable — less than a mile from State Street. More convenience retail is certainly desirable, but do Centrum and Harlem-Irving (the retail developers for the LaSalle and Riverside tracts. respectively) understand that leasing up >300,000 feet (with a rent schedule that will pay for the 30′ platform), with no direct transit, a mile from the Loop, is entirely different than leasing Riverside Park expire. Sign of the times?

Edit Feb 2007: This is completely cliché, but after visiting Portland’s Pearl and South Waterfront neighborhoods, I’m convinced. What this corridor needs is development oriented transit — a streetcar. At $20 million (the estimated figure to start a South Lake Union line in Seattle, home of the $200 million/mile LRT and $3.5B “light” tunnel, and a tiny fraction of the TIF subsidy ask from just Riverside Park), a mile-long Union Station-LaSalle Street Station-Riverside Park streetcar along Wells is a clearly worthy use of the Riverside South TIF. Indeed, it’s a far more worthy use of the TIF funds than further development subsidies, since it provides public infrastructure and a rationale for even higher density. It could also even link into a Clinton subway, er, West Loop Transportation Center.

I believe that I live on the west side, primarily because I don’t want to be a “north sider.” (To date, I’ve never lived east of the river and north of Madison — only on the south and west sides.) Newspaper reports have ceased referring to Wicker Park as “west side” and just call it “near northwest” or don’t assign a side to it, assuming that everyone will know where it is.

In any case, Craig Z. picked up on the odd schism between west and north; in a comment to Eric Zorn:

The only reason people will argue with this is that they are going to say, “I live in a nice neighborhood! We are not on the West Side!”

In Chicago parlance, “West Side” means ghetto, crime, ignorance, hopelessness, decline, decay, futility. It means empty lots, shut-down factories, abandoned dreams. Most of all, it means the ’68 riots that broke out after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, from which some neighborhoods have never recovered.

In fact, these borders shift in the media depending on what type of story is being reported. In Chicago’s Near Northwest, if a trendy new restaurant opens, it’s on the “North Side,” but if someone gets shot, it’s on the “West Side.” This is true even if the shooting occurs north and east of the restaurant!

– The undeveloped portion of Homan Square, Sears’ old headquarters in Lawndale, has been purchased by a developer proposing conversion (of a million square feet in the Sears administration and merchandise development buildings) and new construction for a total of 1,200 (!) housing units. Lawndale’s housing market is not booming; there’s no need to suck all of the somewhat rising housing demand into Homan Square. One resident testified at the hearing, saying first that Alderman Chandler had not presented this plan to the community — which is truly astonishing, given the scope of the proposal — and that other areas of North Lawndale needed investment first. She’s completely correct, but of course the proposal passed.

– Three downtown high rises garnered significant zoning bonuses of 2 FAR for “significant” contributions to the affordable housing trust fund — somewhere between $1-2 million. That’s the profit off of, what, five downtown units?

– The Jeweler’s Row tower [critiques by Lynn Becker | Blair Kamin] was approved, of course. (Of course, since Mayor Daley lives in its precursor, The Heritage at Millennium Park, and the mayor’s brother’s law firm provided counsel.) While preservationists may have thought well of the many landmark districts approved in recent years, it also seems that the Daley administration is undermining the protective authority of landmark status. Solomon Cordwell Buenz has designed a slender, lovely, Vancouver-esque building of greenish glass; the developer has proposed a nice restoration of the podium (the Art Institute and University Club have signed on for lower floor space–Mesa apparently learned from the Heritage that the base should be pre-leased) and yes, the Loop is the right place for density. However, essentially demolishing the existing buildings to insert a 770′ tower sets a dangerous precedent on two fronts. First, the scale completely overpowers both Jeweler’s Row and Michigan Boulevard; while there are already oversized Modern buildings along Wabash, like 55 E Monroe and CNA, the goal of landmarking was to stop future buildings from overpowering the visual unity of Central Michigan. Second, if we can’t count on the landmarks ordinance for protection from massive new buildings, what can we count on? Corfman reports in today’s Trib that the potential new owners of 55 E Monroe (across Monroe from the site) considering a condo conversion of that building’s upper floors — which makes sense as long as, say, National-Louis doesn’t put up its own 800′ tower through the People’s Gas building light court. As Martin Tangora said at the Landmarks Commission hearing last week:

I’m worried about the millionaires that have been coming to you for 25 years with a cottage in Old Town asking to put 5,000 square feet on top and in back — how are you going to turn them down? How are you going to tell the owners of 20 North Michigan, an eight story building that’s one of the oldest in the street wall — how are you going to tell them that they can’t building a 70 story tower on the back all-but-30-feet of that lot?

What the city council should do instead is pass an ordinance authorizing the sale of development, or air, rights from landmark buildings to adjacent or nearby sites. This would allow owners within landmark districts to cash out, provide the density elsewhere, and maintain the historic scale of landmark areas. That way, the Cultural Center could have gained millions to protect the Heritage’s views; Tree Studios’ gardens wouldn’t have had to be ripped out and excavated for a subterranean retail box, etc. We do have a never-used “adopt-a-landmark” zoning bonus provision, but TDR is much more direct and understandable to developers.

– A 51-story residential tower on midblock Ontario just east of Michigan was also approved. SOAR and GNMAA oppose the proposal on traffic grounds, which is entirely appropriate: the PD upzones the site by one third, from 12 to 16 FAR, and then applies bonuses for setbacks and an affordable housing trust fund contribution — for a total of nearly 22 FAR. The entire intent of the bonus provisions in the downtown zoning was to encourage public amenities in return for upzones, but in this case most of the upzone has no basis in public amenity whatsoever. The other Near North upzone, over at Ontario and Orleans, at least had some basis in public purpose: the developers will rehab an old loft building and keep it in commercial use, while using an adjacent vacant lot for their 455′ condo tower.

As a rep from SOAR stated, the traffic “impact of new buildings should not be evaluated on single buildings alone”–the neighborhood actually needs some sort of planning on a site-by-site basis. Natarus says that he’s proud of the neighborhood’s opposition, since it shows that he did have “an open process.” Um, an “open process” doesn’t mean that you asked, didn’t listen to, and finally ignored input.

– The condo boom continues, but for how long? Just today’s agenda:

Address	Area	Floors	DU
110 W Superior	River North/Cathedral	26	77
21 S Wabash	E Loop/Jewelers	71	353
3517 W Arthington	Lawndale/Homan	8?	1,200
301 W Ohio	River North/Gallery	37	240
148 E Ontario	Streeterville	51	165
2559 S Dearborn	Bronzeville*	7	93
1255 S State	South Loop	19	253
1454 S Michigan	South Loop	30?	215
1001 W Van Buren**	West Loop	24?	145
3600 S Western	McKinley Park	4?	236
TOTAL	citywide		2,977

Next month promises at least 163 more DUs, although given the way things have a way of magically appearing on the agenda at the last minute, I wouldn’t be surprised if that balloons to 1,000+.

* interestingly, this WAS the old Lyric Opera warehouse, site of the legendary costume sales that brought thousands to a dumpy area right by Dearborn and Ickes (?) Homes.
** amending a long-stalled proposal of around 300 units; numbers are for the additional DUs allowed by the amendment. Student housing across the freeway from UIC? Who would have thought?

In his parting column, Lee Bey mentioned that a childhood bike ride past a little street called “Winneconna Parkway”:https://westnorth.com/img/winneconna.jpg, a little jog in a wedge-shaped part of the South Side’s relentless grid with a pond in the middle of it, was the first time he was really awakened to the possibilities of urban design. I still haven’t seen it — don’t get out to Grand Crossing that often — but it was quite interesting to read about how many nearby properties have been saved through CIC’s innovative Troubled Buildings Initiative in their “recent newsletter”:http://www.cicchicago.com/htdocs/resources/documents/CICnwsltr_Spring05.pdf (large PDF).

The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago launched today, with all of the features of the Encyclopedia of Chicago plus more — like the complete text of the 1909 Wacker Plan.

Oddly, I never noticed this in my six months of having a print copy around, but Chicago Critical Mass is now officially one for the history books! From the entry on bicycling, by Allyson Hobbs:

Bicycle advocacy groups including the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and Chicago Critical Mass have promoted the bicycle as a viable means of transportation. Since September 1997, Chicago Critical Mass has sponsored monthly rides from Daley Plaza to busy intersections and expressways in order to challenge �car culture� and to assert bicyclists’ right to the roads.

I was looking at the Regenstein’s fascinating collection of Census 2000 maps again and noticed this: my census tract is in a cluster of tracts notable for its singular lack of children.

Just how singular? The “urban, very well off; numerous young, unmarried adults and hardly any children” cluster scores “nearly 4 standard deviations above the mean” for non-family households. Four standard deviations = 32/1,000,000 = 99.9968 percentile. Wow.

One recent addition from the Map Collection: scanned Social Science Research Committee maps from the 1920s and 1930s. The ethnic origin maps show ethnic areas that are mere shadows; the population density has shifted around quite a bit–Little Village and the north lakefront are denser, but the rest of the city is much less dense. (The Black Belt was among the most crowded parts of town; now the heart of Bronzeville has a suburban-level population density of

The Trib has a middling article by Noreen Ahmed-Ullah on traffic problems along Devon Avenue:

The parking pinch is a sign of Devon’s coming of age, but some worry that it is an example of a bustling ethnic neighborhood choking on its own prosperity. Urban planners say the crowding is not necessarily a bad thing. They warn that any improvements to the area must find a delicate balance, enhancing the street without taking away its ethnic flair… Irv Loundy, past president of the West Ridge Chamber of Commerce, said Devon has a larger concentration of South Asian stores than anywhere else in the United States.

Here’s my little solution: combine the 49-Western and 49B-North Western buses, which are two separate routes only because of the most archaic of reasons. (The two ends of the #10 Western streetcar route were converted to buses back in 1948. When CTA converted the #49 middle segment to buses fifty years ago, they didn’t eliminate the distinction.) Extend the Western route east along Howard for one mile to the Howard terminal, and run express service seven days.

And voila: it’s now a one-seat ride from the Illinois Medical Center* (thanks to the medical students, it’s the third largest concentration of South Asians in the city after West Rogers Park and Hyde Park) to the heart of Devon. Since Western runs perpendicular to Devon, it avoids the traffic jams on Devon. The connection to Howard makes a better connection to the Red/Purple/Yellow lines than the current Devon-bus-via-Morse connection, which also has the disadvantage of getting stuck in said traffic on Devon.

* and Wicker Park, of course, but really, this isn’t just self-interest.

From yesterday’s Mass Transit Committee hearing:
– Madigan attended the hearing, appeared to be interested
– Pace has volunteered to take over regional paratransit, is looking into Medicaid
– RTA continues to be unhelpful and unsure amidst all this

Kruesi spoke to the City Club on Monday and made some realistic, although politically uncouth, remarks about raising sales taxes in the collar counties, raising gas taxes regionally, and maybe suing RTA on environmental justice grounds. Collar county officials and Metra are crying that they pay nothing for transit because they get nothing for transit — well, tough shit. Even the minimal transit service in the collar counties still requires huge subsidies from Cook County taxpayers. And if you want massive new expansions like the STAR Line, be prepared to pay higher taxes to run that service. (Update: Greg Hinz in the 2 May Crain’s says that Jeff Ladd may be on his last political favors.)

And Carole Brown, who’s caught in a sticky spot between angry riders and a political system she’s not quite part of, has taken the unprecedented (at least for the clubby world of Chicago politics) step of setting up a blog. A breath of fresh air! She cites CTA analysis showing that, if CTA had kept fare increases to 20% since 1983 (as Metra has), base fare would be $1.10 and there would be 70 million more annual rides on CTA today.

Some conjectural analysis: let’s say just half of those 70,000,000 rides are instead car trips of just three miles apiece — an average length for urban trips. That works out to:
– almost 100,000 fewer car trips a day inside Chicago — equivalent to shutting down Lake Shore Drive (at Foster)
– at 40c/mile in direct costs plus $2 in parking per trip, switching those trips to transit would save Chicago drivers $112,000,000 a year
– at city mileage of 21.5 mpg, switching those trips would save 4,883,720 gallons of gasoline and prevent literally tons of pollution: 53,720 tons of carbon dioxide, 13,419 pounds of carbon monoxide, and 1,750 pounds of volatile organic compounds (the principal precursor to smog/ozone)
– if said trips prevented the construction of just 1,000 parking spaces, that’s still enough parking to fill an eight acre site: two and a half city blocks, or the size of the eastern (street level) section of Millennium Park or Independence Park on the northwest side.

Reducing short car trips in urban areas is the single best way to reduce vehicular emissions — reducing VMT by 1% equals a 2-4% reduction in emissions, since stop-and-go urban driving is so inefficient.

…and some opportunities for high design on the near south side: the Near West Gazette is reporting that the big pile of rocks at 29th & Halsted (where the odd river grid meets Halsted in the north part of Bridgeport)–aka the Stearns Quarry, Chicago’s first and last, and later a landfill for incinerator ash — will become a park. From an article by Michael Comstock:

“Amenities will include prairie wetlands, boardwalks, walking trails, a soft surface running path, ornamental fencing, an athletic field, overlooks, a sledding hill [i.e., the pile of rocks], and preserved quarry walls. ‘The view from the hill is spectacular,’ said 11th Ward Alderman James Balcer. ‘You can see the whole downtown skyline.’

“While the view may be beautiful, the preserved quarry walls arte the park’s true highlight. According to the Park District… the quarry’s stone dates as far back as 400 million years ago, to the Silurian Age… The remnants of… coral reefs can be seen exposed in the quarry walls.”

Site Design Group will be the landscape architect. Also in the issue, an article by Felicia Swanson quotes Ernest Wong from SDG on a streetscaping project in Chinatown (potentially to be funded by McPier): “There’s an opportunity to look at something more modern in context… We’re exploring if there’s a way to do a new definition of what Chinatown is going towards. Chinatown could become the new architectural mecca of Chicago. There are so many award-winning structures already here.”

On the left, $0.87: what the sales-tax-payers of northeastern Illinois give to each CTA passenger as she boards a train in Chicago.

On the right, $3.63: what the same taxpayers give to each Metra passenger as she boards a train in a collar county.

What’s wrong with this?