As a complement to the Home Depot post from earlier today, I offer a view of the Procter & Gamble factory that my local Home Depot (North Ave & the river) replaced.

Alas, they didn’t know the value of a good loft building then. (Thanks to Chicago Switching for keeping that around.)

I’m surprised I’ve never seen these before, but in the past three days I’ve been treated to (a) a truck stuck under a bridge (in this case, a crane under the UP-N bridge over North Avenue) and (b) a bank shut after a robbery. The latter was the LaSalle Bank at State & Adams; I was getting cash and noticed a preprinted sign (done up in the standard graphic design scheme) on the bank door saying “this branch is closed due to an emergency situation.” Inside, the bank employees were milling about while cops took photographs. It’s odd that they would have those preprinted signs at the ready.

These are the kinds of things I’d photoblog about if only I was carrying a cameraphone — maybe soon.

Bike Traffic is reporting that CTA and the city DOT are collaborating on building five giant new 24-hour indoor bike parking facilities, with a cumulative capacity of over 400 bicycles. I’d be curious to find out where these facilities will fit in:

* Jefferson Park/Blue Line (112 spaces)
* Damen/Blue Line (104)
* Midway/Orange Line (154)
* 35th-Sox/Red Line (42)
* Howard/Red Line (70) [in phase two]

And, which Damen station? (There are now two, now that the Douglas branch’s Hoyne station has been moved.) The existing station is tightly wedged, although CTA owns some additional space under the tracks for a new structure — much of which is, ironically, now used for car parking.

Two local updates from the front lines of two vast social forces reshaping our city:

“Evil gay dog-walking busybody gentrifiers,”* from David Roeder‘s column:

Regular readers will remember the response I stirred up last summer when I referred to Morse Avenue in Rogers Park as a crime “hellhole.” My diatribe was about how crime kills business activity on a street that should fare better because of its lakefront location and access to the Red Line… it turns out my “hellhole” label inspired a Rogers Park resident, Craig Gernhardt, to start a blog that catalogs the daily indignities, large and small, that occur along the street. Gernhardt, who with his father publishes Gay Chicago magazine, is part of the community group Paws 4 Peace that has its own crime-fighting strategy. A dozen or so dog owners will use their daily walks to make the drug dealers uncomfortable. “We’ll just gather on their corners and start talking about the weather. They don’t like that and they’ll move on,” Gernhardt said. He uses the blog to challenge timid leaders and to embarrass property owners who contribute to Morse’s blight.

Mexican immigrants fleeing to the suburbs, reported by Brendan McCarthy in the Trib:

Marisol Luna, the newest character in the popular American Girl doll line, seems innocent enough. In the [story book accompanying the doll], Marisol moves with her family from Pilsen to Des Plaines after her mother declares that it is “time we get out of this neighborhood.” In another passage, Marisol’s mother tells her daughter that the neighborhood is dangerous, and that it is “no place for [her] to grow up.”

* before anyone gets upset, this is tongue in cheek: “evil” precedes “gentrifier” so often, it’s practically part of the term.

The CTA board voted to hold off on major cuts, at least until July. Then, we could be looking at effectively shutting down the system if the state doesn’t deliver on funding reform that the mayor, the governor, and all of the General Assembly’s leading Democrats have promised.

From the Trib (which now charges for even yesterday’s articles, so no further links!):

“It’s clearly betting the system,” acknowledged CTA president Frank Kruesi. He supported the delay, despite having warned in October that service cuts would be inevitable in January if state lawmakers declined, as they did last month, to provide a $82.5 million bailout to the CTA.

“I am deathly afraid of what will happen if [lawmakers] don’t do anything in the spring,” CTA chairman Carole Brown said before the board voted unanimously to put off service reductions that would affect dozens of bus routes and late-night and weekend train service.

“I’m not sure they will do the right thing. I am just hopeful,” added Brown, an investment banker who expressed unease about making a financial decision based on faith.

But Brown said the CTA risked losing the goodwill of lawmakers if service cuts were imposed on their constituents…

The cuts needed to balance next year’s budget would escalate to at least 40 percent of CTA service by summer — mortally wounding the nation’s second-largest transit system — if the legislature again doesn’t come through, transit officials said.

“Our transit system would be a ghost of its current self,” warned Michael Shiffer, CTA vice president of planning.

In addition to the massive service cuts, Shiffer said, the CTA’s base fare, now $1.75, would need to be raised to more than $2.15 in July if the state doesn’t raise the transit agency’s subsidy…

Yet passage of new funding is expected to be an uphill struggle. Not only is the state strapped for cash, but suburban leaders in the collar counties have so far successfully opposed CTA lobbying efforts to restructure the Regional Transportation Authority formula that funds the CTA, Metra and Pace. They fear a money grab for the CTA by Chicago Democrats in Springfield.

“I don’t think the CTA should count on $80 million magically appearing from the state,” said David Dring, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Tom Cross (R-Oswego).

Even if new money were approved in the form of raising sales-tax collections outside Cook County, suburban officials and Metra executives have made it clear they want the money spent on transit improvements in their communities — not Chicago.

Still, legislative leaders in Springfield have provided signals in recent days that despite wrestling with a state deficit topping $1 billion, they are building momentum for investing anew in Chicago-area mass transit, including Metra and Pace. The CTA came up empty during the General Assembly’s fall veto session, leaving the transit agency with a gaping $55 million budget deficit in 2005.

The funding sources being kicked around in the press so far, like gambling or Blago’s silly software tax, have been disappointing, as has the suburban Republicans’ refusal so far to understand that transit reform might actually improve Metra’s operations, and would certainly improve Pace operations. Of course, Pace doesn’t really have any political constituency: Chicagoans don’t understand the far-flung route network and no suburbanite would dare admit to riding the bus; even if it is the poorest of the three RTA service boards, it can’t call in any favors in Springfield.

According to the neat WGN/Trib Weather Blog (a compilation of the various weather features and graphics that dominate nearly a full page of the Tribune daily), the mild winters of late haven’t just been a fluke compared to the storied brutality of the late 1970s: the number of sub-zero days in Chicago has fallen from 15.4 days a year in 1975-79 to 4.1 days a year in 1990-99.

[update: this made Best Of]
The world has long needed a place to post anonymous but open letters. “Missed Connections” has long seen many of the “I just wanted to say you’re beautiful” sort, but rarely anything along these lines:

Hey neighbor! It�s me, the guy who lives one floor below you. We�ve traded brief hellos in the stairway or vestibule, but not much more than that… [I]t wasn�t only the girl-sex that piqued my curiosity, it was the apparently prominent role that your vacuum cleaner, or some other mechanical device, played in your Sapphic encounters. That and the fact that you both seemed to rile yourselves up by chasing each other around the room, rearranging the furniture, or some combination of the two. Now, as a hetero guy, I don�t claim to know the first thing about lesbian arousal… So I just assumed that you�d be turned on by the very same things that turn most people on — like, say, the sight of your partner naked, well-executed oral sex, the occasional dirty word, and so on. But the vacuum cleaner?! What, I ask, the fuck was up with that?!

Fellow pedaling photographer Luke Seemann found a great archive of historic color photographs of Chicago’s Loop and near south, west, and north sides, dating from 1938-1968, then traveled to see what’s there now. The results, especially in the “renewed” south and west sides, are astonishing.

The Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine runs (ran?) a weekly feature of just this sort of “then and now” photos; somehow, it’s more understandable that a city would disappear and reappear over the course of two hundred years. But just forty years?

A revised walking tour of the University of Chicago campus, now with 100% more Marxist class analysis — right after the jump…
Continue reading →

Two articles in the Trib’s real estate section recently point out mild unintended consequences of recent planning interventions:

Of the 98 low-income homes built since 2002 under a controversial affordable-housing ordinance, most “are younger, first-time home buyers who are yet to start a family,” a recently released analysis shows. Nearly 60 percent live alone. Although the city hasn’t tracked buyers’ race, officials believe a substantial number are white. (reported by Christine Tatum, originally in the Denver Post)

This problem plagues many well intentioned affordable housing programs; especially when creating affordable for-sale housing, many of the most qualified buyers are going to be white-collar folks who would have bought homes anyways, albeit on less favorable terms.

(The reported statistics certainly should give affordable housing advocates some pause; in some cases, policies like inclusionary zoning may not be an effective way to spend political capital on their largely low-income base’s behalf — and, in some cases, may even exacerbate gentrification if off-site inclusionary units sited in currently affordable neighborhoods end up with yuppie tenants. On the other hand, these programs potentially expand the political constituency for affordable housing programs to capture more of the powerful middle class.)

[A Des Plaines real estate agent] handled some transactions recently where couples downsizing from houses bought brand-new suburban condos only to discover that they felt cramped. Yes, they liked not having to mow the lawn, but to not have a lawn was, well, too much too soon. So, they sold the condo and moved to a home in Sun City in Huntley. (reported by Wayne Faulkner)

The article makes ample note of the suburban condo boom’s many upsides: more vibrant downtown retail, better utilization of existing transportation infrastructure, and an enhanced sense of community for seniors and for the whole town. Yet I’m sure that someone’s missing a market opportunity here: dense infill housing somewhere between single-family and high-rise. Rowhouses, courtyard houses, stacked rowhouses, and low-rise flats have historically appealed to young families (if they were built at all) due to the number of steps involved, but if Sun City can do ’em, so can downtowns. Cheaper residential elevators might also make these building types more practical for empty nesters.

(Elsewhere in the paper on the same day, another real estate industry source indicated that attached housing this year will account for more than half of all new home sales in the Chicago region. I know that the same is now true of most West Coast metro areas, where denser sprawl has long been the norm, but this is potent ammunition against those “lawn = American Dream” propagandists.)

[items picked up from the Campaign for Sensible Growth mailing this week.]

Oh, and I have 100+ photos to sort through from recent travels. They will get posted eventually.

This is what passes for shock and awe in the northwest suburbs: extending the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway, which currently goes to neither Elgin nor O’Hare, towards, well, Elgin and O’Hare:

The plan involves extending the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway from the west to the airport and linking it with the Northwest and Tri-State Tollways…
“We have found, for the first time, the smoking gun the city [Chicago] has been hiding and IDOT has been hiding,” said Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson.

Dearborn street outside my office window is closed due to a construction accident: a crane at One South Dearborn, now under construction, brushed Bank One Plaza. One window was knocked out and a bit of the crane fell onto the street below, apparently hitting a car.

The classical hubris here is that One South’s anchor tenant-to-be is Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, which is moving its offices from… Bank One Plaza. Further, Bank One provided the primary mortgage for One South Dearborn. What an ingrateful building!